ABSTRACT
This chapter provides insight into climate change advocacy based on a wicked systems approach in order to address the complexity behind climate change and the communicative, social, and cognitive structures of human behavior causing it. Based on an overview of the current literature on both climate change advocacy and wicked systems, this chapter develops the basic epistemological, ontological, and methodological notions necessary to create a systems-based model for advocacy in climate change. Using network and discourse analysis, this model yields an eco-symbolic systems matrix that depicts the interrelation of dynamic worldviews, hence providing a complex conceptual mapping of advocacy perspectives, discourse structures, and their underlying implications to engage in effective climate action. This perspective is built on – and allows for – further understanding of the theory, ethical underpinnings, and methodological configuration of currents of thought, fields, and movements, developed in both the Global South and the Global North, to understand their influence and potentiality in relation to climate change advocacy.
