Climate change discourses and citizen participation: A case study of the discursive construction of citizenship in two public events

Citizen participation is a recurrent and democratically important issue in the ongoing debate about climate change. However, different meanings are ascribed to citizen participation in different contexts and discourses, ranging from top-down involvement to bottom-up engagement. This article investigates citizen participation as it emerges in two discussion fora, viz. a global forum represented by the international conference Beyond Kyoto, including a vast selection of international actors, and a local forum represented by the municipal project Energy Town Frederikshavn in the northern periphery of Denmark. We analyze how central actors are called upon to act, and how citizens are addressed in the call for action in the two sets of data. Paving the way for the empirical analysis, the first part of the article gives a review of contemporary literature on climate change typologies and discourses within different research fields, assessing how citizen participation is articulated within these discourses. Finally, we address some needs for increased citizen participation in the climate change debate.