Environmental Communications Assessment: A Framework of Analysis for the Environmental Governance

Written for presentation at the 7Th Biennial Conference on Communication and the Environment (COCE 2003), this 19-page document addresses the preliminary development of environmental communication planning through an assessment and analysis framework.


From the abstract:


"This paper describes an environmental communications analysis framework to address environmental governance issues and collect the preliminary information towards the development of a communication strategy. The framework has been developed by the Development Communications Division at the World Bank over years of applied social marketing and strategic communications in the field of environment, and is result of one year of research on the topic of environmental governance and communications. This framework consists of two components: 1) the situation and stakeholder analysis; 2) core communications analysis. The latter looks at (i) the socio-political context; (ii) the possible “sender” of the communication program; (iii) the receiver(s), intended as the group(s) in need of information and whose awareness, attitude or behavior may need to be changed for the environmental initiative to succeed; and finally the (iv) the channels of communications which are most effective in to reach the above groups...."


As stated here, communication is essential to provide the needed information to empower and motivate people for horizontal discourse on environmental solutions, with the active participation of all stakeholders. The document proposes a framework to understand stakeholder incentives, attitudes, and knowledge, and build their consensus. The document describes environmental governance as including institutionalised arrangements for participatory formulation, development, and implementation of policies. Such institutionalisation should recognise the existence and the consideration of policy principles, set of rules, social norms, values, conventions, and practices of different stakeholders.

Because of the communication challenge of stakeholder inclusion in decision-making, there may be a need to fill a comprehension gap between the technical expertise and the understanding of the public, as well as a need to relate environmental solutions to socio-cultural norms and beliefs. This includes planned and strategic use of communication processes and media products to support effective policy making, public participation, and project implementation geared towards environmental sustainability. The result may be mass mobilisation of environmental concern to leverage policy decisions, particularly in countries where government officials take into consideration public opinion.

The environmental communication assessment proposed in this presentation considers the stakeholders’ cultural values, social norms, interests, and socio-economic conditions, as well as the physical, administrative, legal and political contexts surrounding a project. It does this through a two-step process: a situation and stakeholders analysis and a core communication analysis. The document provides questions to be asked at each phase of these analyses and offers case studies to illustrate the processes involved.