Conceptualising Nonviolent Environmental Communication : Examining NVEC features in an Environmental Social Change Campaign

The dominant approach of communicating climate change and environmental issues is through threats, shock and fear. However, several studies have examined the effects of threatening communication and found that the expected behaviour change only occurs in rare cases. As an alternative to threatening communication, I suggest using nonviolent communication for communicating sustainability threats. Conceptualising nonviolent environmental communication (NVEC) suggests that people are more likely to adopt and perform pro-environmental behaviour when messages about environmental issues are transferred via nonviolent communication. A meta-analysis is conducted to create the intersection between nonviolent forms of communication and environmental communication, which creates the theoretical framework of NVEC. Afterwards an analytical framework is created, which is used in the explorative content analysis. For this pilot experiment, the Eat Planet Based campaign of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has been chosen. The results show the characteristics of nonviolent environmental communication in theory and in practice, and highlight questions about the underlying power relations, contrasting threats and the denial of responsibility in the climate change discourse