Chapter 5: Step Into the World of Your Community
By Annie Neimand, Ph.D., Ann Christiano, and Lauren Parater
One of the mistakes people make when they develop a strategy to communicate on an issue they care about is to frame their arguments using their own values and worldviews (Feinberg and Willer, 2015). Presenting information in ways that threaten people’s worldviews, values and interests, makes them likely to deny or avoid that information (Haidt, 2012; Kahan et al., 2012; Sweeny et al.,2010).
Instead, step into the world of the people you are trying to reach and connect to what they care about most. People seek out information that is connected to their interests and identities. If information challenges how people see themselves, is not interesting to them or does not help them solve a problem or be a better version of themselves, they are less likely to engage with the information (Christiano and Neimand, 2018). Simply giving people information and hoping they will take action doesn’t work (Christiano and Neimand, 2017).
Strategic communication requires us to identify where our interests and values intersect with those of our target community. Researchers have found that people are more likely to support policies when they are framed in a way that aligns with their personal and group values.
For example, researchers have found that people are more likely to engage with and support climate change actions when climate change is framed in the context of public health (Maibach et al., 2010; Scannell and Gifford, 2013).
Climate change communication scholars Edward Maibach and his colleagues write, “We believe that the public health community has an important perspective to share about climate change, a perspective that makes the problem more personally relevant, significant, and understandable to members of the public.”
The UN Foundation stepped into the world of their target community by leveraging social media influencers to engage untapped audiences in climate action. #EyeOnClimate — its first-ever user-generated content campaign — had just one objective: inspire users around the world to share their climate stories.” As stated in their submission for the Shorty Awards “Media portrayals of climate change as a contentious, faraway, and insurmountable issue hinders the crucial global action needed. As evidenced by climate communications scholarship, personal storytelling offers a powerful way to change the narrative on climate change.”
These posts reached millions of people who may not otherwise engage with issues of climate change or see it as something that affects them. The posts came from trusted messengers who people connect with through shared interests, and so the people who saw them are more likely to be open to the information shared. The UN Foundation is following up with a second campaign that asks people to post pictures of climate change solutions. This will be a powerful way for influencers to introduce new norms to their followers and may lead to behavior change among people who might not otherwise connect with stories about climate change or think about what they can do to address it.
Hannah Entwisle Chapuisat, an independent researcher and former research and partnerships officer for the Nansen Initiative, identified the process for building the Nansen Initiative Protection Agenda as another example of stepping into the world of a target community to build consensus on displacement in this context.
As stated on the project’s website, “Launched in October 2012 by the Governments of Norway and Switzerland, the Nansen Initiative is a state-led, bottom-up consultative process intended to build consensus on the development of an Agenda for the Protection of Cross-Border Displaced Persons in the Context of Disasters and Climate Change. Over three years, the Nansen Initiative held regional consultations with governments as well as the civil society from the Pacific, Central America, South America, the Horn of Africa, Southern Africa, Southeast Asia and South Asia to build a thorough knowledge base on disaster displacement.”
After years of meetings to build support and consensus among participating states and regional organizations, on October 2015, 109 government representatives endorsed the ‘Agenda for the Protection of Cross-Border Displaced People’, which assist states and other actors as they seek to improve their preparedness and response capacity to address cross-border disaster- displacement.
Jane McAdam, professor of law at the University of New South Wales, Australia, and director of the International Refugee and Migration Law project, writes in a report published in the journal Refuge,“Even though the Nansen Initiative is state-led, there is a strong emphasis on its being an ‘open, dynamic, and inclusive process’ that will actively involve non-state stakeholders. Otherwise, there is a risk that it would ‘suffer from lack of relevance.”
Entwisle Chapuisat believes this initiative had some success because of the open process in how it came together. By stepping into the world of critical stakeholders and working collaboratively to include their needs and interests, the initiative was able to get buy-in and build consensus.
Ultimately, to step into the world of a community, zero in on your goals, identify the individuals critical to achieving those goals; map out their existing values, beliefs, and interests; and talk about your work in a way that connects and resonates with what they care about in places where they are.
As you build support for climate change to be treated as a critical factor in protection for displaced people, identify the needs, challenges and interests of your target community and show how they align with your mission. What are their values and responsibilities? How can adopting this approach help them solve a challenge or be a better version of themselves? Approaching communication from this position will likely increase their willingness to include climate change into their understanding of their work.
To move the international community to treat the complexity of climate change as a critical factor in displacement and migration policy, adopt a holistic and intersectional view of protection that is not climate-blind. To do so, we recommend using the strategic communication framework shared in this report here to build support for this approach.
This special publication is part of a partnership between the UN Refugee Agency and the University of Florida Center for Public Interest Communications. In an effort to move past communication strategies that simply “raise awareness” of an issue, this partnership aims to connect those working in the humanitarian sector with applicable insights from behavioral, cognitive and social science to make a lasting difference on the issues that matter most.
Thank you to Alex Randall, Erica Bower and Hannah Entwisle Chapuisat for their time and insight for this project.
This special report shares how we can apply behavioral, cognitive and social science to build understanding and support for complex issues. We focused on climate change displacement as it is one of the critical and most complex areas of work facing the humanitarian sector — and the entire global community. The special report is divided into five chapters:
Introduction: Communicating the Complexity of Displacement in a Changing Climate
Chapter One: Make Room for the Most Affected
Chapter Two: Use Visual Language
References
Christiano, A., & Neimand, A. (2017). Stop raising awareness already. Stanford Social Innovation Review, 15(2), 34–41.
Christiano, A., & Neimand, A. (2018). The science of what makes us care. Stanford Social
Innovation Review, 16(4), 26–33.
Feinberg, Matthew, and Robb Willer. “From gulf to bridge: when do moral arguments facilitate political influence?.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 41.12 (2015): 1665–1681
Kahan, D. M., Peters, E., Wittlin, M., Slovic, P., Ouellette, L. L., Braman, D., & Mandel, G. (2012). The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks. Nature climate change, 2(10), 732.
Maibach, E. W., Nisbet, M., Baldwin, P., Akerlof, K., & Diao, G. (2010). Reframing climate change as a public health issue: an exploratory study of public reactions. BMC public health, 10(1), 299.
Scannell, L., & Gifford, R. (2013). Personally relevant climate change: The role of place attachment and local versus global message framing in engagement. Environment and Behavior, 45(1), 60–85.
Sweeny, Kate, et al. “Information avoidance: Who, what, when, and why.” Review of general psychology 14.4 (2010): 340.
