Dialogue in Climate Engineering with Youth

Context

DICEY builds upon existing research on dialogue in climate interventions, and is set against the context in which young people report feelings of betrayal and anxiety associated with beliefs about inadequate government response to climate change (Hickman et al., 2021).

In the context of climate interventions, the dominant approach to researching public engagement to date has been to ask participants to appraise the acceptability of different proposals, often involving presentations by researchers ‘close to the science’. This presents a particular challenge for new technologies because public awareness tends to be low (Scheer & Renn, 2014), and so there has been a move towards deliberative approaches which introduce new ideas to various publics. Challenges associated with these approaches include deferral to scientific authority, even on non-scientific questions, and problematic framings (Corner & Pidgeon, 2015), for example natural framings (such as comparisons with volcanic eruptions) or those which favour fast-acting and impactful climate interventions (Mahajan, Tingley & Wagner, 2019). Dialogue is often structured around specific techniques with little consideration of alternative (social, political, economic) responses to climate change. Attempts have been made to respond to these challenges (cf. Bellamy et al., 2014) through a reduced role for scientists and the use of tentative language to design interventions.

DICEY will fully involve scientists and policy-makers in a different capacity - as accountable to youth questions and concerns - through public switching - and will build youth capacity to participate in dialogue. DICEY asks youth to identify their priorities, articulate their concerns and create questions for those who are in positions of influence - and engaging scientists and policy-makers directly with these questions. This mitigates impacts of issue framing and the presence of scientific authorities, and allows youth to frame issues in ways relevant to them.

Aims and Objectives

The aims of DICEY are:

1. To create evidence on what works in [online] dialogue, to better understand the challenges and opportunities of ‘upstream’ intergenerational public dialogue on emerging science and technology between scientists, policy-makers and youth.
2. To increase youth capacity to initiate and sustain constructive dialogue on climate interventions between peers, policy-makers and scientists and understand youth perspectives on big questions about climate interventions.