Public opinion, blah, blah, blah?
According to the very few men and women who have seen planet Earth from space, the view creates a cognitive shift — exposing the planet’s vulnerability and eliminating the national boundaries we see on maps. In the words of Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, “you develop an instant global consciousness…international politics look so petty”. This has been called the Overview effect.
It would be an exaggeration of cosmic proportions to say that international social researchers experience anything like the Overview effect, but we do get to see the big picture, what unites and divides people across the globe. Surveys show that the climate emergency is not just a real and present danger, it’s recognised as such by most people in most countries.
This matters because sentiment contributes to action — movements start when people are moved. It’s been said that the defining feature of COP26 compared to the previous conferences has been “externalities” and in particular the weight of public pressure and interest.
Despite the still-present Covid crisis, concern about climate change has now returned to pre-pandemic levels according to Ipsos’ What Worries the World survey. Another global study recently identified protecting the environment and natural resources as the issue that people most want to see addressed on the world stage. The Ipsos Global Trends Survey, conducted across 30 countries, found ‘climate emergency’ to be the strongest common value uniting people across the world. The 2021 edition shows that this position has strengthened.
The imperative to respond to public pressure and stabilise the climate has driven political leaders to put climate front and centre of policy and publicity. This was described witheringly by Greta Thunberg in Glasgow as “Build back better blah, blah, blah, Green economy blah, blah, blah, Net Zero by 2050 blah, blah, blah…” The implication was that there are too many soundbites, too much greenwashing.
There is perhaps a tendency to see public opinion on climate change in very binary terms. On the one hand, campaigners portray political leaders as laggards, dragging their feet and failing to keep up with strong public appetite for action. On the other, an altogether different narrative suggests that the public aren’t ready for necessary change, don’t care as much as they say they do, or will be resistant to change particularly if prices start to bite.
There are probably inconvenient truths in all of this. But it does seem that ‘people’ are stuck in the middle; their attitudes and behaviours aren’t really understood and diversity is under-appreciated. It’s a bit parent-child. Nicky Hawkins put it like this in a tweet:
When I make choices about how I live my life I never, ever think or talk about my ‘behaviour.’ Behaviour = children. Being told off. Someone else’s judgement imposed on me. To inspire behaviour change, we probably need to stop talking about behaviour.
As colleagues Jessica Long and Pippa Bailey said at COP26, the ‘say-do’ gap is reductive. In fact, attitudes and behaviours are invariably multi-faceted and complex (and sometimes surprising) — for example, research by Ipsos for the Futerra Solutions Union found substantial levels of fatalism, especially among young people, but the majority-held view is optimistic. This comes despite 62% saying they hear more about the negative impacts of climate change than progress towards reducing it.
Positioning people as a problem runs the risk of alienating them, feeding eco-anxiety and failing to prepare them for future changes. Similarly, ignoring political realities and the need for messy compromise and caution in politics, risks reducing the traction of climate stabilisation with political leaders. At present, we’re not talking enough about shared responsibility and action, and about success when it happens.
While we need something akin to an Overview effect to see the bigger picture, moving forwards will require us to tackle the fine print of interventions and their impacts. This need for granularity extends to what the global public thinks and does and why, and what we all need to do next.
There is usually more subtlety than is portrayed. We need to bring ‘governed’ and ‘governing’ together and, as always, ought to be wary of the weaponization of public opinion and the pursuit of ‘followship’ at the expense of leadership.
