Welcome, everyone, to 100 Climate Conversations Thank you for joining us. First, I’d like to acknowledge that we are speaking on Gadigal Country. I’d like to pay my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging. I’ve learnt a lot from Wiradjuri Elders at home. And so, I think it’s really important to acknowledge that.

Today is number 57 of 100 conversations happening every Friday. The series represents 100 visionary Australians that are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, climate change. We are recording live today in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse museum. Before it was home to the museum, it was the Ultimo Power Station. Built in 1899. It supplied coal fired power electricity to Sydney’s tram system into the 1960s. In the context of this architectural artefact, we shift our focus forward to the innovations of the net zero revolution.

My name is Gabrielle Chan. I am the rural editor of Guardian Australia. Bec Colvin is a social scientist studying communities in high tension debates over environment and climate issues. She’s examined the polarisation of debates over energy, including groups navigating conflict over coal, wind energy and coal seam gas. Bec is a co-convenor of the Master of Climate Change and a senior lecturer at the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy. So, we’re so thrilled to have her join us here today. Please join me in welcoming Bec Colvin.

Now Bec, your journey to social science. You completed your undergraduate Degree in environmental management Honours, in exploring human values, and then a PhD shifting from examining values to identity as a key factor in the way people respond to contentious issues. Tell me about that PhD project, because I think it was really instructive in what you do and how your research has moved forward.

Thanks so much, Gabby. So, the PhD project, or one of the parts of the PhD was going to a place called King Island, which is an island halfway in between Victoria and Tasmania, and talking to people in the community to understand why this large scale wind energy development project – which at the time was described as being good practice community engagement – still led to such division and hurt in the community. And that was quite a transformative experience, both in terms of how I engaged with the research, but also my own perspective on these complex issues.

So, people in the island became divided. We had the Yes camp, the people who wanted the proposal to go ahead. On the other hand, we had the No camp. These were, as you would expect, the people who opposed the project. And some of those people in the so-called No camp formed an incorporated community group. Now the way that the conflict played out was it the people in the Yes camp and the people in the No camp over time started seeing each other as being in deeper and deeper hostilities, social distance formed between these two groups. They formed different understandings about what it is that they were in a dispute about. They appealed to different experts. They understood different narratives about who was right and what was the right thing to do, who was going to win, who was going to lose, who was being harmed. And by the end of this process – it went for two years – the project was cancelled, it didn’t go ahead. But the community was left with the social impacts of everything that went on.

How does social science intersect? Is it the study of people? And can you replace an issue like climate change with any issue? Like what are the intersections that you see between climate change and social science?

So, I think there are often insights that we gain from social science that we can take out of the bucket, and we can apply to different issues and they will help us find our way. But social science really isn’t about having the answers or knowing how to fix the world. What levers do we pull? As if there are levers that can be pulled and have some sort of predictable outcome. But it’s about knowing the right questions to ask. And I think that’s the power that we get from social science or as social scientists. Or anyone who moves through the world with the mind of a social scientist is knowing how to ask the right questions in any given situation.

So, social science equips us with good tools to take into a complex issue like climate change. These are questions about issues like power. Who benefits, who’s set to lose? What has happened before that shapes the way things are playing out now and the questions that I often ask are who do people understand themselves to be? Who do they see as being like them? And critically, who do they see as being different from them? Because these group divides can really shape the way that we approach an issue that is seen to be connected with some groups in society and not others.

Would you say voting intention for the last decade has been a good indicator of in-groups with climate change and out-groups? Is that fair?

Yes, absolutely. So, quite a large amount of research that we have, Australian research as well as other countries that have similar cultures, similar political systems to Australia, find that the alignment between voting intentions and attitudes on climate change is quite strong. We do find some other relationships, some work that I’ve done with Professor Frank Jotzo and Professor Kelly Fielding – which we haven’t yet submitted to a journal, but I hope we will soon – also found quite a strong relationship that tracked alongside political affiliation of patterns in media consumption.

So, people who consume more rather than less ABC News tended to have views that were more engaged with climate change. People who consumed more rather than less Sky News tended to have views that were a little bit more, shall I say, hesitant on climate change. So, we can see that there’s these clustering or bundling of social attributes that often go together, and we’ll often find within those attributes they’ll be the same types of patterns or same types of impacts that we observe on climate attitudes.

So, after such a bruising debate around climate change now, are you noticing an increased awareness and tendency of, I don’t know, governments or corporations or just NGOs coming to you to say, like, ‘How can we not muck this up? How can we talk to people in a way that is going to have beneficial results rather than set people on edge?’

Yes, definitely. And I think that’s been quite a notable shift in the last few years, and that’s also coincided with some changes that we’ve seen in patterns of public opinion in Australia where since about 2018 or so, public opinion in Australia has kind of levelled off at a stable majority of Australians across the political divide who want to see action on climate change. We still do see differences on those political cleavages that you mentioned, but they tend to be differences in terms of degree of support, not categorical support or not support and also sense of urgency, willingness to sacrifice or willingness to pay if that seemed relevant.

So, I think there’s a recognition that there is this social readiness to a certain degree. We’ve got this fairly strong cross partisan basis of social support and the people who are navigating through what we do now to deal with climate change are looking at, how can we take that momentum but not make missteps so that we fragment it or shatter it or take us back to where we were a decade ago?

So just for context, are those communities you’re studying metropolitan, are they rural based, are they a mixture of both right across the country? How do you choose the communities you seek to study?

So, most of my work has been in rural and regional Australia, and that wasn’t a choice at the outset like, I’m going to go and study the regions, but that’s where the interesting case studies were. That’s where I see some of the most interesting dynamics, where I see that we’ve got the greatest need to probably tread carefully and tread with respect and open up some of these co-operative social spaces where we can make progress on dealing with climate change so, we all have a safer future together.

We can have a great handle on some of the political debates, the importance of setting targets, making sure that our mechanisms for dealing with climate change have integrity. A very important question at the moment. But it’s often in the regions where you actually see that tangible change to the landscape. And so, there’s something special that goes on there that brings in those social and political dynamics that we can have everywhere that are kind of disembodied from any place. But then the very specific localised place-based dynamics. So, going back to the King Island example, it’s questions of do people who live in a place see that the changes that are being proposed to the landscape belong there. Do they make sense with what people understand the landscape to be for? Is it seen to be a transformation that’s much more than the material change, like building powerlines or building infrastructure. But does it carry a deeper symbolic change to the meaning of the landscape? And so that stuff is what I find so interesting. What I see as being critical for researchers, for social scientists to engage on, and that tends to happen in the regions.

So, just drilling down into your work more, I just want to get some of these areas defined. How do you define social identity?

Social identity is a concept that comes from social psychology, and it has decades upon decades of theorising and empirical work. And basically, what this tells us is that a lot of the ways that we human creatures make sense of the world is by observing our group belonging. And this is group belonging that is generally governed by identification with the group. And that identification with a group is a process of psychological identification. So, just because someone who ticks a box in some demographic form might put us into a group doesn’t mean that it’s psychologically meaningful.

Once we identify with the group, we become a member of an in-group. And that in-group is a group where we see people are like us on some sort of important measure. It might be values, it might be where we live, it might be what we do, might be what we think, what we eat, how we dress, and then we see other types of groups as being out-groups, so groups that we don’t belong to. And most of my research has looked at conflict. And in settings of conflict, these in-group out-group divides become pretty pronounced. We end up in what I tend to think of and describe as a group-ish situation where decision making, and interactions are often guided by the in-group out-group dynamics. So, within an in-group, ideas and practices spread really easily. We see people like us doing something and we want to do it too. But ideas and practices aren’t very good at crossing those intergroup boundaries.

So, when we think about the diffusion of behaviours, of the diffusion of ideas, you can often assume that these things spread in kind of a random way, like the way a virus would spread through a shopping mall. But actually ideas, practices, thoughts, beliefs get either accelerated within in-groups or they can be slowed by trying to move from an in-group to an out-group. So, this really applies to things like social norms. So again, these are the unwritten, often unspoken rules about how we behave in a given setting. The social norms that we see within in-groups will become the guideposts for how we behave if we see that in-group is relevant to us.

So, if we identify with a social group and we hear a lot of people within that social group expressing a certain view on climate change, that becomes a cue for us that that perspective would be sensible for us to hold as well. But on the other hand, if we see a lot of people who we identify as being in an out-group as being different from us sharing a particular view on climate change, then that cues us to think that maybe we shouldn’t hold that view, that we should be different from that. So, these group-ish dynamics can often form around issues like land use change, like being part of the Yes camp or the No camp around wind energy development. They can also form around opinions, like are you someone who’s a climate change crusader? Or are you a climate change sceptic?

How far can you push your membership of the in-group until you’re on the other side and you’re on the out-group?

That is such a good question and that is the question that I am hoping some colleagues and I might have some answers to over the next few years with some research that we’re doing at the moment. But it’s delicate and you can only really know by being part of the group and sometimes by testing what those boundaries are. Something that we know about effective communication on climate change is that if you’re sharing a message and saying, ‘The world needs to change or people need to change,’ people will take you more seriously if you have changed yourself. What we also know is that messengers from within an in-group more effective than out-group messengers. So, that means for effective communicators, you have to find that line where you can do as much as is possible to show you are doing your bit without crossing some sort of invisible threshold that makes you an outsider.

One of the things that the social identity perspective tells us is the importance of multiple group memberships that mean that we don’t have a single or even a handful of identities that have all the same people in the same in-groups. That’s the sort of space that really gets us thinking in a somewhat bounded way about how the world is. That makes it very easy to see people that we don’t mix as being others, as being threats of stereotyping them.

When we have social identities that take us into different spaces and mix with people that in a different identity-based setting, we may not see those people as being in-groupers. That’s when we really start to be able to see that people who can be different from us in one case can be just like us in another. It brings that humanity. And I think that is critical to climate change, especially where we see some of these social cleavages along lines of education, where people live, who people vote for. These are the types of lines that often divide us geographically as well. So, really looking at how we can keep our social networks diverse and form relationships with people across social divides is incredibly powerful.

The rise of identity politics would say that those in-groups are getting more and more concrete in their setting. Is that a fair assumption or is it messy? And is it fracturing? Is it possible to say whether the trend towards more set in-groups is happening or not?

I’ve seen research in the US that points toward this mass partisan sorting, and that is a tendency for the lines of division to be grouping people much more cleanly than they had been grouped in the past. From the Australian literature, we tend to be often showing similar patterns to the US, but not to the same magnitude.

So, for instance, quite a bit of research has shown that Australia is the second most polarised country on climate change along left-right political lines, with the US being the most polarised country. So, in Australia you have to go further to the political extremes to get the same degree of polarisation that you get more in mainstream politics in the US. But what is challenging is that we now have a lot of ways that we build understandings about other people and about other social groups without actually interacting with them directly. Social media is a great example. The fact that we carry devices in our pockets that feed us information about what other people are doing, what other people think, gives us the perception that we understand without having that direct interaction.

How aware are we of our bias?

Often we’re very good at saying we need to be aware of our biases and that we are. But in my view, we can still be quite bounded in recognising our own biases. I think we see that a lot in some of the offhand comments about out-groups, some of the things you and I have talked about before, the urban regional dialogue about who’s deserving of moral care and who’s not, for instance, who’s legitimate, who’s illegitimate. And these things can seem kind of benign, or they might seem harmless, they’re just words, but they do create narratives that are used to divide people, that can be used by more powerful actors who seek to divide people for political gains or personal gains. So, I think we can all do a lot to try to withhold our judgement.

In the classroom I ask the students to practice the principle of charity, which is basically where you withhold judgement on an idea that’s new and give it the benefit of the doubt until you find reasons to cut it down after you’ve gone through that positive process. I think we could apply that often in the way that we interact with other people. Use the principle of charity as a way to check some of those biases or the stereotypes that we might take, and they’ll end up clouding the way that we have that interaction.

You once said talking about climate change is like walking into a saloon where the conversation stops, and everyone gets uncomfortable. I was very interested to read your Stop Adani Convoy paper and the coalition of people who got together in that moving protest and whether or not it was successful. So, why were you interested in that example in particular?

So as background, the Stop Adani Convoy was a protest movement shortly before the 2019 federal election, and this convoy saw people who were concerned about climate change getting together, driving their cars from the south of the eastern coast of Australia, and eventually over, I think was multiple weeks, converging on the Queensland town of Claremont. Now Claremont was the town nearest to – well is nearest to the Adani Mining, Bravus Mining’s Carmichael coal mine.

So, the participants in the convoy were clearly bounded to an in-group. You could see that they were an ‘us’ that had clearly the same mission and they used the same iconography. So, for me, observing this from the social identity perspective, thinking about conflict and climate change, thinking about how it is that we can move past social division in the past that has limited the ability for Australia to come together and take action that will help everybody. My alarm bells are just going off right away.

So, looking at the way the convoy played out, all of those factors that made the convoy participants so clearly an in-group was effectively an invitation for an out-group. So, if we’re an us, who’s going to be the them? And what I observed, like, I wasn’t there. I wasn’t participating in any of these activities, but I was looking at the media coverage. So, recognising that the news media is a very important site of the creation of social and cultural meaning, it’s where most of us don’t have that direct connection to events in the world come to think or at least have some sort of understanding of what’s going on.

The in-group out-group dynamics were quite central to the way this convoy movement was represented. So, where the in-group was described as being the convoy participants, these were either city elites or dole bludgeons who were protesting. They certainly weren’t from Queensland, and they weren’t from regional areas. They became markers of belonging. So, if you were those things, you are the sort of person who might be a participant in the convoy. If you hold attributes that a different like being a hard worker in contrast to the elites and the dole bludgers. Being a regional person and particularly being a Queenslander, then they become cues for thinking, Well, maybe the values are the message of the convoy aren’t so much for me.

So, as this protest movement played out over time in the media, these markers of belonging became really central to the reporting. And from the social identity perspective, we know that the social dynamics that play in one event, in one setting are not confined to that one point in time. It’s not like the conflict episode is completed one way or another, and then all the social knowledge gets erased, and everyone moves on to the next thing. But they become points of reference for how we make sense of future debates, or future controversies.

So, when one of the greatest challenges for Australia is looking at how our regional communities can maintain their ability to thrive into the future, to have diverse economies and sustainable livelihoods for people and I mean sustainable in the sense that they can be sustained over time. The ability to have levelheaded, honest conversations about what does the world’s shift in response to climate change mean for these communities is paramount. But in my view and from my analysis, the Stop Adani Convoy went some way toward taking us away from that place. It’s also not really quite right to talk about everything that went on there without acknowledging the very active role that was played by the Queensland Resources Council in making sure that the countermovement was resourced and had their own iconography that was kind of like a direct answer to that in the Stop Adani Convoy.

How did climate become so political from your vantage point?

So, there’s a lot of research that is very compelling, that speaks to the active role of people and organisations who saw they had something to lose if the status quo of the fossil fuel economy was disrupted and seeding, misinformation, disinformation and really undermining the public trust in experts and public trust in science. And that created a very complicated political space that just invited the polarisation that we’ve seen. We can look at political capture and political donations as a big part of the story.

But that’s happening in the space of high-power actors, people with power, people with resources. But we’ve also seen polarisation among everyday people, you know, folks that don’t necessarily have the ability to pull a lever and change the investment portfolio of a massive organisation. And so, some of what we’ve seen in that everyday people type space has been that climate change became wrapped up in our social identity and especially our political social identity. So, it’s almost like it’s part of the repertoire. If you’re – certainly if you were a conservative voter a decade ago, then it would make sense that you would be a little bit more resistant to climate policy than if you were a progressive voter. Now, those dynamics have shifted, as I mentioned in the last few years, and we are seeing much more of that cross-partisan majority support for action on climate change. But once again, just like with the King Island and the Stop Adani Convoy example, the legacy remains. It leaves its thumbprint on where we are now.

So, when climate change becomes wrapped up in people’s identities, we tend to assert our views on policy issues, not necessarily because we’ve sat down and reviewed the policy in detail, but because by asserting a perspective, we get to indicate are we part of an in-group that we wish to be seen as part of, or are we part of an out-group that we don’t wish to be seen as part of? We know, especially from the political psychologists, that policy positions are very plastic based on how the association between that policy position and political parties is presented. So, you can take a policy issue that’s not already clearly associated with one side of politics or the other and measure support for it. And you’ll find that you’ll get a fairly non-partisan response. But then if you attach a political party to that policy issue, you end up with quite a polarised response. So, we use these in-groups and out-groups as ways to make sense of issues where we might have the assumption that there are other factors that are more prominent, like thinking about the costs and benefits or the values that are embedded in different policy approaches. We know that the same thing goes for appraisal of science as well.

Tell me about an unconventional advocate. What is one of those?

So, the term unconventional advocates is a concept that some colleagues and I are exploring. So, this is Professor Winnifred Louis, Professor Kelly Fielding, Dr Robyn Gulliver, Sarah Boddington and Ajay Adhikari. We’re all doing some work together, looking at what potential do people who are unconventionally advocating for climate change have to reach audiences. We don’t mean unconventional in the things that they do like, I don’t know, blowing up novelty balloons into the shape of climate messages, but who they are from an identity perspective.

So, some of the groups were particularly interested in Farmers for Climate Action, the Blueprint Institute, which is a Liberal Party aligned think tank, and the Investor Group on Climate Change who are mobilising in the business and finance sector, the Australian Religious Response for Climate Change, Front Runners which is working with elite sportspeople to activate on climate change. So, we’re really interested in, does the fact that these messengers come from an in-group perspective with the group that isn’t your stereotypical or prototypical environmentalist mean that they can reach those constituencies in a way that is different from the way they could be reached by who we think of as being the usual suspects for action on climate change?

We don’t have the answers yet because we’ve just started the project. But the theory gives us reason to expect a few different outcomes. So, the social identity theory perspective would say, well, in-group messengers are more likely to be effective. We know that because trust is quite prominent within in-groups. Ideas spread well within in-groups. But then we have the risk of the issue that you mentioned earlier where if you breach the norms of an in-group, instead of shifting those norms accordingly, you can be kind of cast out because you’ve done something that makes you an outsider. You’re no longer a true in-group member. So, we’re really interested in the way that the people who are activating in these spaces, who are holding onto their identities that aren’t traditional environmentalist or climate activist identities, but still calling for action on climate change, how they navigate that invisible line. We know the line is there somewhere, but we don’t know where it is.

So, bearing in mind all that you’ve said, how do we move forward?

So if I can, I’ll talk at two levels, one at the policy level and one at the individual level. So, at the policy level, I think it’s really critical with these large-scale changes, particularly in regional areas that you mentioned, that paramount are social impacts, social values and fairness. There have been mistakes made in the past where the benefit sharing or I guess the main issue was the lack of sharing, but the way the benefits were distributed from these projects didn’t sufficiently show to the people who live in the proximity of these projects that they have something to benefit. It was all lost in the local area for benefit somewhere else. So, one is shifting that, making sure that fairness and benefit sharing is top of the agenda with any change that’s happening to the landscape.

Then on the individual level, we have a lot of power within ourselves as communicators, within our social networks, and I don’t really mean out Facebook things, but like our actual networks of other human beings. We’ve had research from the US that shows that conversation within friendship and family networks can be quite transformative for the social norms associated with climate change. Because the more you talk about an issue, the more you come to understand it, more you understand an issue, the more you desire to speak about it. So, it creates this pro climate social feedback loop.

We can think about our mindset in conversation as instead of being one of debate where we’re butting up against someone trying to persuade them that they’re wrong and we are right to instead think about cooperation, how can we pivot to stand shoulder to shoulder and explore the complexity of an issue together? A really great way to do that is to tell stories, talk about our own journey with complex issues of climate change. We are all constantly learning new things, so being able to speak about the way that maybe we learn something new, we updated our attitudes or our understandings. We changed our practices in response, not only shares the view that it’s okay to change, but it takes away this idea that you’ve got the people who are right looking down on the people who are wrong wiggling fingers at them. And that’s been a dynamic that we’ve had on climate change for a long time.

We can also think about how we can equip ourselves to be effective messengers by doing everything that we can that’s in our power without breaching our ability to be familiar and be seen as having similar values and interests to other people. And whether you want to make that decision strategically or just do what makes sense to you, I think is a choice for each person. But being authentic at all times is also critical for climate change. So, what we don’t want to do is go to the family lunch over a holiday where people are getting together for the first time, start an argument with the person we disagree with the most and try to swat away each fact that they say. That’s never going to be effective. And part of it is that no one’s an encyclopaedia of knowledge. So, if we set ourselves up as being the holder of the truth as soon as we can’t answer a question or we can’t defend a claim then we lose that credibility. So, we’re much more powerful to go into these conversations and basically say, let’s puzzle through this together.

Well, thank you very much Bec. That’s an amazing conversation. And I could keep going for another hour. I think you’re going to make my Christmas lunch a lot easier, having had your advice, so would you please thank Bec Colvin and join me in a round of applause. To follow the program online you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or join us for a live recording, go to 100climateconversations.com.

This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time. It is particularly important to First Nations peoples to preserve conversations like this, building on the oral histories and traditions of passing down our knowledges, sciences and innovations which we know allowed our Countries to thrive for tens of thousands of years.