Abstract
Public perceptions of climatic events have changed dramatically over the past two decades. Once, climate change (or weather) was widely thought of as a natural source of calamities to which humans can only try to adapt. Moreover, the climate in one world region appeared more or less unconnected to other regions’ climates. However, in the 1990s a new perception emerged and became dominant. Now, the world climate is perceived as one interconnected global system. And, most importantly, it appears to be a system with which humans have interfered dangerously, which humans have actively put at risk and the evolution of which is dependent on human activity. What once was perceived as a natural source of good and bad has now changed into a man-made ecological risk. Accordingly, global environmental management is a new guiding principle for international politics. It was the institutionalisation of the new risk perception that enabled societies to react to this ecological risk. This chapter analyses the process through which this new perception was institutionalised in Germany between 1975 and 1995. It discusses this process as an example of social learning. The main finding is that this institutionalisation made possible the adoption of strict targets for a national climate protection policy. However, this refers to the national context only. It will also be argued that this risk perception may not be appropriate anymore for the rapidly changing world of international environmental politics.
This chapter summarises the results of a project by Peter Weingart, Petra Pansegrau and Anita Engels at the Institute for Science and Technology Studies (IWT), University of Bielefeld, Germany. The project on “Climate communications between science, politics and the mass media” was funded by the German Research Council (DFG) as part of the German section of the International Human Dimensions Programme (IHDP) (see Weingart et al. 2000; 2002).
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Engels, A. (2003). Institutionalisation of Ecological Risk Perceptions: The Role of Climate Change Discourses in Germany. In: Breit, H., Engels, A., Moss, T., Troja, M. (eds) How Institutions Change. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-322-80936-0_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-322-80936-0_10
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