Public engagement as a field of tension between bottom-up and top-down strategies: Critical Discourse Moments in an 'Energy Town'

In the ongoing debate about climate change, public engagement is given increasing prominence as a possible solution to a general lack of citizen participation in climate change mitigation efforts. Recent years have seen a surge in public engagement initiatives in many countries in the Western world. These initiatives often have to deal with dilemmas between participatory aspects and other considerations such as planning efficiency, dilemmas that potentially bring about tension between bottom-up and top-down strategies. Literature on climate change issues has addressed the failure of public response, which has been variably explained with reference to ‘lack of information’, ‘media distortion’ or ‘lack of concern’, implying that ‘if people only knew’ they would act (Norgaard, 2011: 1). However, these explanations, subsumed under the umbrella term ‘the knowledge deficit gap’ have failed, seeing that more knowledge and information about climate change has not significantly changed people’s behaviour towards higher involvement.