Communicating the Future

Communicating the Future: Solutions for Environment, Economy and Democracy

Communicating the Future (Polity) provides a simple model of how ideas flow in society, along with an application of the model to develop more spreadable ideas at the intersection of environment, economy and democracy. Moving beyond movement concepts such as framing and agenda setting, the book offers a framework for understanding how ideas are produced, packaged, networked, and taken up politically. This framework is applied to a comparison of two movements that are critical for understanding the current crisis: the fragmented global environmental movement and the elite-driven movement to spread neoliberal economics in the last half of the 20th century.

Communicating the Future also has a message that should appeal to students: more effective responses to the environmental crisis require changing how we think about the relationships between environment, economy and democracy. The result is a positive approach that citizens, practitioners and scholars can use to evaluate  movement strategies that block more effective ways to define and approach problems. Understanding how to communicate at the intersection of environment, economy and democracy goes beyond thinking about communication as an exchange of messages, and shows how it is central to effective social and political organization.

The book is available here: https://amzn.to/3bGktoy