ABSTRACT
With a second instalment of U.S. WWViews on 15 September 2012, this time an event on biodiversity, media coverage at the local and national level was once again negligible, as it had been at the first WWViews on climate change three years earlier. The day-long deliberation involving approximately 100 non-expert participants at four sites (Boston, Washington, DC, Denver, Phoenix) generated policy recommendations regarding biodiversity that were tabulated, along with similar results from around the world, and presented at the October 2012 CBD. Schneider and Delborne (2012) highlight several contextual factors that may have contributed to this failure to receive media coverage in 2009, among them a history of conflict driven news about climate change, which tends to ignore ‘uneventful’ deliberative processes, and a lack of visual appeal. The authors conclude that seeking out media coverage may be incompatible with the contradictory goals of WWViews to mount a democratic deliberation event that subsequently informs policy discussions on climate change. In their words, ‘the two stated purposes of WWViews – citizen deliberation on the one hand and policy intervention on the other – may exist at cross purposes, particularly when it comes to understanding the role of media coverage in the U.S. context’ (Schneider and Delborne, 2012: 256). The reference here is to the contradictory way in which deliberation participants are told they will be heard in policy circles, while in practice policy impacts are not fully realized due to challenges associated with navigating the limited ‘policy pathways’ to enact substantial policy changes, at least in the case of WWViews on Global Warming in 2009. 1 Indeed, Delborne et al. (2013: 383) note that ‘we would not expect a project like WWViews to have much success in the U.S. political context, which does not provide regularized pathways for incorporating deliberative results into policy deliberations’. While Schneider and Delborne (2012) suggest ways to attract media coverage, they point out that a more productive strategy might be to focus on social media and forms of institutional communication and public outreach that build on the participatory deliberation at the core of this initiative.
