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Conference abstract2008Peer reviewed

Environmental Communication - Perspectives from Sweden

Sriskandarajah, Nadarajah

Abstract

Environmental Communication (EC) has been established as a study area at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences for close to a decade now, with its own education, research and outreach activities. We believe that as society continues to make new environmental policies and add ever more environmental goals to be achieved at the local level, the task of the professional who has to deal with the complexity, uncertainty and competing interests in the public sphere becomes harder and harder. So, our work in Environmental Communication includes the education and competence building of these professionals on the one hand and developing new knowledge and appropriate processes through research and practice in the field. We see EC as a new field emerging at the very interface of nature and society, and as a way of working not only with society’s ‘constructing’ of environmental problems but also negotiating society’s responses to those problems. This paper will present the major themes and issues discussed at two recent conferences held in Sweden, and in particular the 2007 conference with its focus on the global-local linkages. The two day conference held last year in Uppsala, Sweden had the title ‘Connecting Global Challenges and Collective Local Action: A Conference in Environmental Communication’. Being the second in an evolving series of conferences, the event brought together some 65 researchers, educators, practitioners and students in Sweden, working or studying in this field of EC. Our stated goals for the conference included setting the scope of EC as a subject, recognition of a broad research agenda within it and the expansion of the EC network in Sweden into the European and international arena. The conference concluded with a strong affirmation of the need for developing our EC network further. We at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences see it as our task to continue building platforms to enable internal conversation among network members at the same time as broadening the horizon for the network through internationalizing it. When we realize more and more that the main environmental issues that concern us all at the local and national levels had clear links to what needed to be discussed, learned and acted upon at the international and global levels, the importance of scientific and professional collaboration under the auspices of an international association becomes clearer. ECREA is an eminent forum to test the validity of this idea and the Swedish delegation supports this idea strongly

Published in

ISBN: 9788449025706

Conference

2nd European Communication Conference