Keywords

1 Introduction

On August 28, 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Monument in Washington, DC, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered an important and deeply moving speech in which he used the phrase “I have a dream” repeatedly. That speech was a defining moment in the American civil rights movement. The phrase became an emotionally powerful symbol of the aspiration for justice and equality for blacks in the United States. The phrase itself became the kernel of a narrative that was repeated, explained, and retold in many forms as lessons, songs, and images that helped motivate, unite, and animate people to act collectively to urge the passage of civil rights legislation and change patterns of societal behavior. This suggests the following question: What visionary narratives – expressed as words, videos, paintings, dances, sculptures, or songs – will inspire and motivate us to act collectively to address the most urgent and critical issues facing humanity today?

The scope and magnitude of the highly complex and interrelated challenges are the most critical issues currently facing humanity living in the midst of rapid and accelerating change in physical, biological, and societal conditions on multiple spatial and temporal levels (see, e.g., ICSU Earth System Science for Global Sustainability: The Grand Challenges 2010 and Future Earth 2025 Vision). Owing to the vital importance and urgency of the global change issues, global, as well as temporally and spatially specific, responses are needed from humanity. Anticipating, characterizing, understanding, and learning how to avoid, mitigate, or adapt to these changes requires approaches that fit the complex conditions and issues. While we certainly need existing and new knowledge and a deeper understanding of the complexities, it is important to note that knowledge alone is not sufficient to guide and catalyze the necessary transformation of the global society. We also need scientifically sound and culturally relevant visionary narratives for action to inspire us and motivate collective decisions on policy and action at all scales and levels.

In this article, we will consider what role narratives – especially in the sense of affective communication – can and do play in motivating transformative steps toward sustainability, why substantive collaborations between those engaged in science, art, technology, and humanities are needed to create new visions for and reflections on sustainability, and how the impacts and outcomes of different forms of narrative expression can be assessed to improve our understanding of how knowledge, learning, and societal change are linked (Blackmore et al. 2011).

2 Complexity, Models, and Uncertainty

The Earth system is highly complex, as many of the component systems are multiply connected and non-linearly coupled to one another. This includes the human social, technical, and economic systems, which are not only complex components in themselves, but also interact with components in the biophysical sphere. Component systems, such as the cryosphere or atmosphere, are often studied and modeled as dynamic systems with static, non-interacting input from other components, such as anthropogenic effects. This is normal in the reductionist scientific tradition, but a holistic, systems approach is essential when addressing the global system (Liu et al. 2015), even when it is examined on a more localized spatial and temporal scale. Our total accumulated knowledge of the global system and its local aspects is vast, but it is also fragmented, incomplete, constantly developing, and changing, as insights, methods, and conditions change. In many important respects, our knowledge is, to varying degrees, ambiguous, uncertain, and contested and will remain so.

This complexity and inherent uncertainty cannot be dismissed or denied by simplistic thinking. However, complexity can be managed to some degree through the use of models and scenarios. As forms of approximation that limit the degree of complexity considered in order to categorize, explain, and predict the behavior of physical, biological, social, and economic phenomena and systems, models can provide both a range of options in scenarios for decision making and insights into the potential consequences of making certain choices and tradeoffs (Morgan and Morrison 1999). Analytical and computational models are increasingly used in attempts to understand complex issues pertaining to global change and sustainability on a range of temporal and spatial scales and to develop scenarios for decision making and action (see, e.g., Pidgeon and Fischoff 2011). Models used for decision making for governance at different levels and over a range of spatial and temporal scales include global system dynamics models (e.g., of atmospheric circulation with chemical interactions, see Seinfeld et al. 1998) and agent-based models (e.g., of the interaction between ecological systems and governance processes, as in Janssen and Ostrom 2006). Such models constitute an essential set of tools with which scientists can systematically analyze complex issues in order to generate insights into and to develop scenarios for specific conditions and purposes.

As important as the tools, methods, and knowledge are to researchers, the latter are only one of the various categories of stakeholders – private citizens, members of corporations, businesses, governmental and non-governmental organizations, and professional and trade organizations – that have to make meaningful use of the knowledge if it is to help move society toward sustainability. Stakeholders at all levels who make decisions and take action need to understand that the output of model calculations indicates options within the limitations of the models and data, rather than providing a singular answer or solution. Thus, stakeholders are faced with the cognitive demand of having to understand the output of the model, while keeping the limitations of the model and data in mind. Equally important, but hitherto usually neglected, is that scientists and other stakeholders need to jointly consider the questions, concerns, and priorities of the stakeholders impacted by the research, and have to choose which to incorporate in what form into models and scenarios.

In most instances, decision making is further complicated by the conflicts surrounding the tradeoffs between options for action due to stakeholders’ divergent beliefs and values. Stakeholders are only able, and perhaps willing, to make informed decisions and undertake related collective actions if they can make sense of information from within their own context of cultural, beliefs, and values. They should be able to trust the “messenger” conveying the narrative through a form of direct or indirect relationship (Siegrist et al. 2005). The knowledge about global issues has to be salient, credible, and legitimate in the eyes of local stakeholders (Webler and Tuler 2001). That is, the knowledge in itself is not sufficient to be accepted and acted upon – the context and culture in each locality or stakeholder community are crucial and are indeed a knowledge resource that should be part of the larger knowledge system (Tàbara and Chabay 2012). The connections to closely held and culturally specific values and beliefs are key to stakeholders’ engagement in and commitment to action on the issues.

Therefore, it is essential not only to generate and communicate information content, i.e. the knowledge itself, but also to identify, acknowledge, and address – either explicitly or implicitly – stakeholders’ beliefs and values. In doing so, diverse groups of stakeholders at different levels may be inspired and motivated to join in collective decisions on policy and action that move humanity toward a sustainable future. Narratives are essential for this.

3 Narratives, Identities, and Ideologies

Narrative kernels that convey messages and visions of sustainability can be expressed and elaborated upon in many forms and can be crafted to fit different media, cultures, and local contexts. Narratives that, in addition to content, either implicitly or overtly convey their values and identity are central to communication (Wynne 1992). Effective narratives primarily establish links to recipients’ sense of identity and ideology through affective rather than cognitive means, and, thus, play a crucial role in what is accepted, internalized, and remembered. While different conditions and locations affect the manifestation of global challenges, responses to those challenges reflect not only the differences in biophysical conditions, but, importantly, also derive from other dynamic contexts, such as cultural perspectives, political processes, power relationships, and economic realities (Van Kerkhoff and Lebel 2006). The latter aspects are generally reflected in the ideologies and identities of different sections of communities and are thus at least partial determinants of accepted and reinforced narrative kernels.

In this article, the term “narrative” or “narrative kernel” is considered a fundamental element of expression shaped by critical links to personal, social, and political identity. Thus, the use of the word (according to Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (Gutenberg project edition 2013) “means just what I choose it to mean”), does not refer to stories themselves in the Aristotelian sense – with a beginning, middle, and end – but to kernels of ideas that underlie the many ways in which they are expressed. The “I have a dream” phrase mentioned at the beginning of this article illustrates this. Stories, games, visual art, social media, dance, and music embellish narrative kernels and clothe them in accordance with particular contexts and cultures. The narratives of most interest in this article are those that manifest in different forms to express visions of socially innovative trajectories toward a sustainable future and the landscapes of that future. In this sense, the narrative kernels that humanity uses are compact, emotionally communicative messages for mobilizing collective action toward sustainable practices in accordance with current knowledge. In addition, these narrative kernels are based on an ethical foundation that fosters equity across economic, cultural, spatial, and temporal domains. They may also reflect the current or past practices in a way that stimulates awareness of the need for change and highlight perspectives on societal transformations.

Compelling narrative expressions, in which knowledge has been selected, distilled, and framed in culturally recognizable ways, can be used to establish or strengthen links between stakeholders and facilitate a process leading to meaningful decisions and collective action toward sustainability. For example, a central narrative in sustainability is the concept of the “Anthropocene” (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000) which was derived from the interpretation of observational data on and sophisticated models of atmospheric chemistry and physics. The idea itself represents a tremendous change in how we perceive human “agency” vis-à-vis the Earth system. Recognition (or rejection) of the scale of human intervention’s impacts on the Earth system has strong emotional resonances for many people. Governing, managing, engineering, stewarding, navigating, or denying the Anthropocene are profoundly different views of the issues and challenges, and may thus open up or restrict policy measures and personal decisions accordingly. Individuals’ positive engagement in finding a sense of purpose and agency for actions in response to the critical challenges they perceive involves issues of agency and responsibility for action on both the individual and collective scales.

While it is important to focus on positive narratives for sustainability, it is also worthwhile acknowledging, and learning from, the nature of negative or oppositional narratives. Narratives that are intentionally, or sometimes inadvertently, attached to an idea or vision often obscure or directly oppose it (discussed more broadly in Oreskes and Conway 2010). The recent passage of laws in Kansas, New Hampshire, and Tennessee, USA that oppose any measures meeting the voluntary guidelines of Agenda 21 (originally adopted by the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992) is a striking example of the power of ideological narratives that oppose sustainability. Tea-party and libertarian activists in the USA have vigorously promoted the anti-Agenda 21 efforts in several states on the grounds that it is an “attack on private property rights, individual liberty, and national sovereignty” (Newman 2012) and is part of an “insidious, covert” UN effort to ensure its global governance. The ad shown above was posted on a libertarian blog and illustrates the link between the American sense of individual freedom and ownership of a car, home, and even a teddy bear, which Agenda 21 is presumed to imperil (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Example of an anti-Agenda 21 campaign in the U.S. (Newman 2012)

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The key point is that the anti-Agenda 21 campaign does not address the scientific evidence of urgent global change issues and their local impacts, but uses a narrative of individual freedom and rights of ownership to oppose voluntary adaptive measures, ostensibly because they stem from an “outside” organization. This closes the door on addressing issues that affect the future of the particular state (not to mention other states and nations) regarding global change, including, for example, the agricultural and commercial sectors (as well as the global export of crops) that have helped build and sustain Kansas.

This narrative completely lacks evidence and arguments against the urgent need to act in order to mitigate and adapt in the face of global changes, at which Agenda 21 is directed. Direct challenges of the narrative by means of evidence of the need for action on sustainability are not likely to influence those who adhere to the anti-Agenda 21 view. A paper pointedly entitled “I will see it when I believe it” (Yariv 2002) incorporates the problem of existing beliefs that oppose new or belief-challenging information in a model of an agent utility function.

We need to understand the forms and nature of positive and negative narratives to learn which narratives influence which stakeholders at any given time. This can catalyze the creation of effective narratives and allow assessment of their outcomes, which will allow us to foster more sustainable practices and policies. Moreover, we need to determine the dynamics of narratives in different communities and what causes them to change in impact and importance. The field of marketing has developed great expertise in crafting messages to appeal to specific groups and cultures, including making use of traditional and emerging social media, from which lessons can be learned to gain an understanding of customers and tailoring messages to suit them (e.g., Rewerts and Hanf 2006). However, the lessons we learn should pay careful attention to ethical issues to ensure that when we craft messages and narratives they represent diverse voices with different values, economics, and power, and are based on clear and accessible information. If constructive, collective action on sustainability is to emerge, it is of the utmost importance that the relevant stakeholders also consider these narratives trustworthy, credible, and legitimate within their own context. The point is not that one narrative should suffice for all stakeholders and all issues, but that multiple narratives can each have an impact on some of the local or regional stakeholder groups with regard to specific practices or policies.

4 Creating New Narratives of Sustainability

Many artists and groups have expressed their views of sustainability and related issues (Grant 2012). Some use natural and social sciences’ interpretations as the impetus for artistic expression, while others reflect on their personal concerns and aspirations. Owing to the complexity of the issues and the cultural diversity of the stakeholders, a multiplicity of narratives and expressions are needed to engage with and represent different segments of society. This suggests a process of developing new collaborations and on-going workshops that, in various ways, bring together different people whose experiences and expertise lie in diverse endeavors and fields, including art, design, engineering, information and communications technology (ICT), law, journalism, philosophy, natural and social sciences, marketing, and history. The key to making this productive for the participants and for outcomes in society is to realize that it is a mutual learning process to which many can contribute their expertise and learn from it. In most instances, careful selection and preparation of the participants prior to the workshops, as well as facilitation of the group process, are necessary to ensure that everybody derives value from the workshops. The purpose of the workshops is not necessarily to create new narratives in order to “sell” the science, but to first form working relationships through face-to-face contact, which helps build the trust needed for effective collaboration, brainstorming ideas, and discussing common challenges. The diverse participants can then start collaborating – the actual hard work – by means of electronic forms via ICT, as well as in face-to-face meetings. Clearly, ICT can also play an important dual role as a medium to express the collaboration’s narrative output, and as the means of recording the collaborators’ processes.

A significant challenge in developing effective collaborations across such diverse domains is to allow each person to contribute the most critical knowledge from their domain of expertise without favoring one domain over another. Since the urgency and identification of sustainability and global change issues are still largely based on natural science, as articulated in the planetary boundary concept (Rockström et al. 2009), the content of many natural scientists’, engineers’, and technologists’ dialogues focus on natural science or technology. The social sciences, humanities, and the arts have been underrepresented in research and dialogues, although that is changing toward greater inclusion in addressing global change challenges through, for example, the establishment of Future Earth (http://www.futureearth.org/) to coordinate solution-focused transdisciplinary research on global challenges. The collaborative process and relationships need to be facilitated and nurtured in order to keep the focus on creating effective narratives that draw on diverse perspectives and insights from all field. Simultaneously, if there is no process to select those with relatively similar styles and a propensity for collaboration across unusual boundaries, and the process is not actively facilitated, the wealth of knowledge available from multiple sources and the complexity of the issues could easily overwhelm the collaborators and overburden the effort, resulting in frustration or uninspiring didactic expositions.

Both live and digital expressions of narratives can contribute to the process of engaging stakeholders. The immediacy of live performances and the heightened sense of engagement due to social feedback during an event, as well as the impact of real objects, are very powerful influences on people’s emotional states and memory. Moreover, the memorable quality of the narratives and the ease with which they are communicated can inspire the persistence of their visions. The electronic capture of live events and real objects, as well as native electronic expressions, is essential because this can help reach a much wider audience and can be structured to actively engage people, including in game formats. The increasing pervasiveness of ICT, including cell phone access to most places in the world, offers the opportunity to adapt and compare narratives appropriate in one cultural and contextual form to another. For example, images with a strong regional, local, or cultural focus might convey the urgency and saliency of climate change by highlighting social impacts of open, nearly ice-free seas on people living in the Arctic regions, or barren, dried former grasslands on those living in sub-Saharan Africa.

Another endogenous approach to generating narratives in stakeholder communities is to develop narratives from citizen science and ICT experiments by using the real-time monitoring of individual exposure to pollutants and conditions – such as noise and CO2 – in daily living via sensors and GPS-equipped cellphones (e.g., the European Commission EveryAware project http://www.everyaware.eu/). Each participant’s spatially-resolved exposure over time can be collected and the aggregate input from all the participants can be mapped and displayed. Such a display of near real-time exposure can then be complemented by the participants’ feedback on their circumstances when monitoring and reactions to the aggregate or individual information. Common responses and shared perceptions may evolve into or trigger the expression of new narratives of reflection or future visions.

5 Assessing the Impact and Outcomes of Narratives for (and Against) Sustainability

It is not only necessary to develop narratives that reflect our current concerns about and visions of a sustainable future, but also ones that help people understand what works, under which conditions, and for whom. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are needed to better assess the outcomes of existing and new narratives on stakeholders’ attitudes, decisions, and actions, as well on the dynamics regarding the diffusion and evolution of narratives.

Methods for assessment include interviews and surveys before and after individuals’ exposure to particular narrative expressions, for example, before and after a performance, a dialogue, or a visit to an exhibition. Protocols for interviews and surveys will need to be adapted or developed to gain information on the immediate responses to narratives in whatever form they are expressed, as well as on longer-term changes in attitudes and practices related to sustainability. With the participants’ explicit permission video and audio recordings can also be used to gain insight into the verbal, socially mediated, and non-verbal responses (e.g., facial and gestural reactions recorded when specific images or words are presented) during events or exhibitions. For example, in unpublished video-recorded studies of science café sessions that took place in Stockholm, Sweden in 2007, the author observed frequent reactions to a particular point in a presentation that resulted in brief whispered conversations with neighbors, often before an individual raised a question. In the videos, more questions were raised during the event than were self-reported in post-event surveys; the video thus provided evidence of the extent and frequency with which social interactions modulated the dialogues between the participants.

Monitoring participants’ Twitter feeds during events may also provide insight into their immediate responses to specific images, narrative framings, and information in presentations and dialogues. More elaborate methods, such as eye-tracking and brain-imaging techniques, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), and near-infrared (NIR) optical tomography, could be used to observe responses to images, sounds, and words in video narrative presentations. That data could then be used to investigate the correlation between the responses and emotional state, the immediate and long-term memory (recall) of the input and response, and the relationship between the subjects’ retained memory and their expressed attitudes towards and practices regarding sustainability.

It is generally very difficult to track down and follow up on individuals after a particular event in order to assess changes in attitudes and practice. However, depending on cost, time, and sampling limitations due to permission and privacy, this can still be done. ICT can be very helpful both in actively following up on and questioning those who have access to an electronic form of narrative expression, as well as in “passively” collecting information on clicks on and specific forms of response to web sites.

A variety of ICT methods have been developed and employed that can be used to analyze the impact and outcomes of exposure to narratives. These include semantic analysis to uncover implicit and explicit narratives, and data mining with dynamic and geo-specific network analysis (e.g., Chavalarias et al. 2011). Computer and mobile app games are being designed to challenge players regarding the decisions and tradeoffs of sustainability challenges in a variety of contexts, while recording and analyzing players’ choices. These games can be used as research tools by examining the correlations between the players’ game input and their self-reported attitudes, community, or cultural identities. The objective is to bring qualitative and quantitative lenses into play to understand the immediate and long-term socially mediated (social learning and diffusion) impact of sustainability narratives.

6 Conclusion

Humanity in its myriad communities and contexts needs the inspiration and motivation that comes from new narrative visions of sustainable futures. Humanity needs to share dreams of a more sustainable future, as well as feel and be able to contribute to it in locally appropriate forms. This can be catalyzed through an open and continual process of collaboration between stakeholders with a wide range of expertise and experience, which can result in powerful expressions in different cultures and contexts. These collaborations are a mutual learning process between disciplines that will be informed by careful analysis of the impact and outcomes of the wide range of narrative expressions. Developing and deploying scientific tools and methods when examining the impacts and outcomes of affective discourse, as well as of knowledge and cognitive discourse, will create avenues for research to examine critical aspects of our development as a species, which is essential to our survival on Earth.