Constructive disagreement and harmful hope in environmental communication for sustainability transition
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: We investigate how disagreeing is performed in conversations about circular economy futures, and how it is disturbed by discursive norms of hope. Disagreement is recognised as an interactive process essential for knowledge development and democracy. However, conducting democratic investigations of differences becomes difficult when interaction norms prioritise hopeful expressions. Drawing on 11 h of recorded meetings on the circular economy, we analyse how disagreement is interactively performed and link these observations about the constraining effects of ‘harmful hope’ to ideas of radical democracy and expectations surrounding hopeful environmental communication. We identify four discursive procedures of hope— community , appreciative coordination , concept innovation , and underlying disagreements , and demonstrate how these regulate and limit processes of agreeing and disagreeing, thereby influencing the conditions for constructive disagreement essential for democracy. Ultimately, we demonstrate how conversations about futures become dominated by norms of hope, which come at the expense of communicative capacity to constructively examine disagreements necessary for advancing sustainable transitions. This dynamic is evident even when the desired future involves radical transformations of production and consumption systems, as in the circular economy. Our study offers insights into what and how these discursive structures should be challenged in conversations about sustainability futures.
Source: Futures
Authors: Lars Hallgren, Hanna Bergeå, Daniela Kreber
Institution: Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,370
Award: G8226254137
OpenAlex ID: W4417178386