Reflecting on Care within an African Relational Framework for Environmental Communication

ABSTRACT

In the face of threatening ecological crises, the imperative of reorienting the field of environmental communication toward a crisis and care orientation has gained prominence. Although notable progress has been achieved in this endeavor since the publication of Cox’s influential work on the “crisis discipline” in 2007, the field has seen limited contributions from non-Anglo-American perspectives. This commentary addresses this gap by articulating the potential of African relational perspectives in framing environmental communication as both a crisis and care discipline. African relationality espouses a social paradigm that prioritizes other-regarding values, advocating for a more compassionate, context-sensitive, and relationship-centered approach to environmental discourse. Within this commentary, I discuss how African relationality complements the contributions of care theory, fostering a shift from a detached, observer-centric stance in environmental communication to one that actively engages within the interconnected ecological network we collectively inhabit. This brief synthesis invites a more inclusive, empathetic, and action-oriented environmental communication research and practice to confront the pressing ecological challenges of our time.

KEYWORDS:

• Crisis communication
• environmental communication
• care theory
• relational perspective
• ecological crises

Introduction

Environmental communication resides within the communication discipline, where historically, impartiality, abstraction and objectivity have been held as gold standard.¹ This traditional understanding emphasizes that the ideal communicator should remain detached from the issues being conveyed. It also plays into the linear transmission model of communication which, although, long discredited (Nisbet & Scheufele, 2009), continues to influence practice, exacerbated by the current emphasis on fast news. In the face of threatening ecological crises, however, an increasing number of environmental communication scholars are questioning whether dispassionate engagement has contributed to protracted inaction or a constrained space for collective sense-making (Brüggemann et al., 2023; Cox, 2007; Cram et al., 2022; Peterson et al., 2007; Schwarze, 2007).

The emerging consensus is that addressing the triple ecological crises of climate disruption, pollution, and biodiversity loss on the scale we now face requires an interventionist approach to communication. Care theory offers promise in this direction because its fundamental principles contrast with the traditional model. It privileges “affective and cognitive orientations, such as attentiveness to context and specificity, receptivity, reciprocity, and responsiveness to others” (Hanes, 2020, p. 525). This understanding has implications for researching and practicing environmental communication, including the orientation toward ecological crises, and fostering collective sense-making through care. In this essay, I reflect on how my inquiry into African philosophical and political texts enunciating relational perspectives yield similar concepts that orient communicative space around relationships of care.

I begin this commentary by summarizing the key issues raised in framing communication as a crisis discipline, – including recent eco-critical studies’ critiques, which bear relevance to rethinking environmental communication. Next, I outline how current ecological crises can be approached from African relational perspectives and concluded with elements that elevate care ideals for environmental communication as a complementary approach to interventionist crisis discipline arguments. Throughout, my contribution should be viewed as an extension of the discussion on environmental communication as a crisis and care discipline beyond the dominant Anglo-American viewpoints within a field broadly recognized as diverse and interdisciplinary (Brevini, 2016).

Environmental communication in crises era

Cox’s inquiring into the purpose of environmental communication has provided valuable insights that continue to stimulate discussion in the field. Reflecting on development in the related field of conservation biology, Cox (2007) concluded that environmental communication is a crisis discipline. A crisis discipline characteristically involves eclectic professionals responding to signals of danger. In the case of environmental communication, these signals are diverse and multifaceted, impacting ecological and social systems. Adding to this is the continuing failure to sufficiently mobilize institutions and resources to address these challenges, with the Emission Gap Report indicating that the path to limiting global warming to 1.5°C remains unclear (UNEP, 2022). Noting that in conservation biology, practitioners and researchers position themselves as responders to danger signals, Cox (2007, p. 5) concludes, environmental communication has “the obligation to enhance the ability of society to respond appropriately to environmental signals relevant to the well-being of both human communities and natural biological systems” [emphasis added].

Implicit in Cox’s proposition is the realization that environmental communication, beholden to mainstream communication where objective positionality is central, is problematic. This is evident in media coverage of climate change, where adherence to the norm of balance contributed to political polarization by giving undue coverage to climate change deniers (Boykoff & Boykoff, 2004; Painter & Ashe, 2012). In this case, reporters, who remain faithful to objective reporting, simply convey the information provided by their sources. While more recent work suggests a shift in climate journalism toward a more interpretive pattern of reporting (Brüggemann & Engesser, 2017), this shift highlights the existence of the problem and demonstrates the significance of considering the unique niche of environmental communication.

Critical studies in ecomedia further shed light on the stakes of environmental communication, emphasizing the need for a critical focus on media’s role in shaping public deliberation and response (Cozen et al., 2018; Kumpu, 2022).² Some scholars have critiqued the ecological implications of media, including the disregard for the materiality of media and the violence associated with its extraction (Cubitt, 2014). Related to representation, others have questioned how the media downplays or commodifies ecological crises, driven by the idea that disasters attract more attention (López, 2020). Additionally, it has been noted that representation often promotes lifestyle changes rather than structural transformation, reinforcing causal cultures (Rust et al., 2016). Concerns also arise regarding the dominance of elite-led and top-down deliberation, which tends to diminish the public sphere, transforming it into a “technical sphere” that exacerbates social divisions (Schwarze, 2007).

At the core of these issues are dissociations manifesting as a media-materiality split, a cause appraisal-solution split, and societal bifurcation, in which certain individuals receive more attention in media representation. This dissociation is rooted in the belief that the media exists outside of society and the ecological systems that support it. Elsewhere, my colleague and I argue that this encourages one-way transmission, with information flowing from privileged sources (e.g. governments and experts) to passive recipients (Okoliko & de Wit, 2021). Furthermore, this perspective views individuals as isolated recipients of messages, not as part of a broader community (Brulle, 2010).

In rethinking the media to accommodate a vision that supports associations rather than dissociation, our works draw upon relational perspectives associated with African worldviews. This shift is motivated by two factors. First, there is a growing recognition of the interdisciplinarity and diversity of environmental communication, but scholarship in the field is often biased against non-Anglo-American contexts both in terms of research locations and ways of knowing (Comfort & Park, 2018; Olausson & Berglez, 2014). The second factor relates to the nature of the triple ecological crises, which demand collective efforts due to their multi-level, multi-layer, and multi-scale manifestations. Co-creative deliberation is required, which can be nurtured and supported by communicative spaces. Crises governance literature emphasizes the need to invert the top-down approach, giving recognition to perspectives and agencies traditionally considered peripheral (David & Okoliko, 2020). The challenge is to make Ecomedia accommodate voices that are typically silenced in conventional mediated communication.

African relational framework and care

The insights advanced in Okoliko and de Wit (2021) draw from the concept of personhood prevalent in traditional African communities, as studied in various philosophical, anthropological, and political texts (Chimakonam, 2019; Gade, 2011; Horsthemke, 2018; Mbiti, 1970; Metz, 2012). The view, expressed through various African relational perspectives (e.g. Ubuntu, Ibuanyidanda, Ujama, etc.), highlights a commitment to a relational social ontology based on the belief that “anything that exists serves a missing link of reality” (Asouzu, 2007, p. 378). This understanding leads to a conception of the self as interconnected with other humans and non-humans, with each serving as a link in the web of reality (Okoliko, 2018).

Ubuntu, as a normative variant of African relationality, conveys a sense of “human excellence” or “humanness” (Metz, 2016). Molefe's (2019, p. 83) account underscores character building in which “own perfection [of humanness] … is the goal of morality”, but one which is attained through other-regarding, displaying generosity, kindness, empathy, love, and care. Metz (2012) describes this other-regarding as identifying and exhibiting solidarity with others. Similar to Care ethic (Little, 1998) thus, personhood in African tradition is non-essentialist, rooted in character states. Also, like Care ethic, African relationality contrasts with accounts of liberal normativity salient in Western tradition, which lay emphasis on the individual autonomy and universal inherent features like soul, rationality, will and memory.³ Concerning the agency of human action, the moral view in the African tradition strictly focuses on embedded relationships (Metz, 2020).

Therefore, both care (as articulated in Cram et al., 2022; Pezzullo, n.d.) and African relationality are foundationally responsibility-based and particularistic. Onazi (2020) alternative conceptualization of disability justice for example, problematizes rights and capability-based approaches for this reason. He argues that rights-claims are fundamentally “against others” and in the interest of one’s given attributes or capabilities. This becomes problematic when certain individuals are unable to make such demands or when others cannot reasonably make demands on certain individuals due to their state (e.g. disabled or immigrants). This also applies to non-humans, including animals, rivers, mountains, plains, etc. Proponents of relational justice argue that care for the other provides a more plausible motivation for extending due advantages to such entities (Horsthemke, 2018; Metz, 2020; Okoliko, 2018; Onazi, 2020).

The focus on the concept of personhood is important because communication is fundamentally a human function. Environmental communication’s obligation is to encourage positive human action in support of ecological well-being. Deepening our understanding of the agents involved is crucial. A relational account of communicative agents envisions mediated space as embedded within a networked ecology (Okoliko & de Wit, 2021). This perspective recognizes the materiality of the media, which often goes unnoticed. The media landscape becomes a space for co-creative deliberation, accommodating diverse subjectivities (Metz, 2015; Tavernaro-Haidarian, 2017; Ward & Wasserman, 2015). Privileging certain voices at the expense of others based on an essentialist view of personhood tied to factors like class, race, gender, and ability is problematic in this space.

This point is particularly significant given the dominance of elite sources in environmental journalism. Numerous studies suggest a hierarchy of influence regarding claims-makers’ representation in environmental coverage, with politicians and scientists having greater definitional power (Chetty et al., 2015; Garcia & Proffitt, 2021; Kukkonen et al., 2021). This trend extends to the Global South, where globalization has spread a nearly monocultural media landscape (Freeman, 2017; Yun et al., 2012).

With reference to Africa, our application of African relational framework to examine perspectives of climate journalists across South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya on sourcing practices regarding climate change coverage is telling (Okoliko & de Wit, 2023). The study suggests that the journalists’ role orientation and commitment to journalistic norms that are rooted in liberal journalism, as well as contextual influences interact to skew coverage toward elites and away from other subjectivities and place-based knowledge. The implication for such lopsided mediated deliberation is also captured in Evans and Teer-tomaselli (2023) analysis of climate solution in four weekly newspapers in South Africa from 2011 to 2018. Confirming elite dominance (government and business), they decried how this constrains discussions on green growth to a “one-dimensional discourse” where climate solutions are presented “through the neoliberal market-led lenses” of techno-optimism (Evans & Teer-tomaselli, 2023). This is unsurprising, as a study of the Russian press suggests, elite sources tend to be less critical of the status quo and offer less robust commentary on environmental issues (Poberezhskaya, 2015).

Conclusion

The contribution in this essay essentially (re)focus attention on the fundamentals of environmental communication. Building on Cox’s proposal for the field to embrace its mandate as first responders to ecological danger signals, the aim here is to respond to Pezzullo’s call by outlining what may constitute care from African relational worldviews. The dominant social ontology in Africa emphasizes caring for the other, who is interconnected with oneself in a networked ecology, encompassing humans and non-humans. Within this web of relationships, it is implausible to ignore the call: “We should not stand by and watch ecological disaster from the sidelines” (Brüggemann et al., 2023: 539). As highlighted in this essay, this is because neither the materiality of the media nor environmental communication researchers and practitioners enjoy a unique separation from the impacted ecosystem. Care, therefore, complements crisis as critical to our work in environmental communication today. Embracing interconnectedness will orient these first responders to ecological crises with a more compassionate, context-sensitive, and relationship-centered approach.

African relationality’s emphasis on personhood as “persons-in-community” (Okoliko & de Wit, 2021) delineates the mediated space for environmental communication as a space for co-creative deliberation that accommodates diverse voices, enriching our understanding of ecological issues and potential solutions. This contrasts with the transmission model, which, though discredited, remains influential and leads to a restricted space that perpetuates agent exclusion based on classism (including, ableism, technological expertise, rationality, and gender). The hope is that this turn to care in environmental communication will encourage further reflection on how the field can foster collective sense-making to bolster comprehensive action on today’s ecological challenges.

Some directions for future research, inspired by this reflection, include a deeper exploration of the political dimensions of media representation concerning environmental issues. It is crucial to shed light on representational inequalities and how they impact the quality of environmental discourse across various media platforms and contexts. Progress is already underway in this area (e.g. Evans & Teer-tomaselli, 2023), but there is a need for further inquiry into how frame-building practices, often rooted in mainstream communication, contribute to the exclusion of environmental stakeholders on the margins of society. Embracing more interpretative approaches and applying similar relational and Care theoretical lenses in this direction will advance our understanding of the political dynamics that underlie (dis)engagement of various agents.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Phaedra C. Pezzullo for the invitation to contribute to the special issue on Care and Environmental Communication and for providing valuable feedback on the earlier version of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The author received funding as a postdoctoral fellow from the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science, and Technology (CREST) at Stellenbosch University.

Notes

1 This could be linked to the dominance of journalism and media studies within environmental communication field, although, the field extends to other areas, including public participation, advocacy and risk communication (Akerlof et al., 2021).

2 I use Estok's (2017:, p. 17) broader definition of Ecomedia which include “any media that deals with environmental issues”.

3 Examples can be found in the works of scholars like John Locke, René Descartes, John Rawls, and Richard Hull. One illustrative example to consider is Hull's (1978) definition, in which he states that “to be a person means to be an individual with the capacity for autonomy, understood as either the ability to engage in rational self-control or at least the potential to develop that ability”.