Its a fascinating conversation starter: everyone seems to have a view on how technology is changing their engagement in shopping, and by extension, influencing the nature of the places they live and work. But its often futile to predict in advance how new technology will find its most effective application. 14 years ago Wired predicted that we’d be grazing from an “internet fridge” which would monitor and automatically re-order our groceries. One 2008 study futures images of robots patrolling shop floors with tablet computers in hand.

Online shopping – food shopping in particular – is booming (and it’s clear that blu-taking your iPad to your fridge door would be cheaper and more effective than buying a device which tries to integrate the two.). But convenience food chains, independent cafes and delis are also booming. Changes on the High Street are driven by numerous factors and technology is just one of them. The newspaper headlines – “online shopping is killing the High Street” – are too simplistic. A fairer assessment might consider:

• Retail is only one element of business on the High Street. Hairdressers, cafes and nurseries are taking up units across the country. The vacancy rate for shops has stabilised in recent months in part because shop units are already being converted to other uses.
• Independents are doing better than multiples. Among chains, a total of 12,511 stores closed in 2011 and 2012, while 10,652 opened. However, over 31,000 independents stores opened in the same period: a net gain of over 3,000 (sources here and here) – though the last few months have been less positive.
• The fortunes of shopping streets are becoming increasingly divergent, in part following widening inequality nationally and locally. Although every region had fewer shops in 2012, DCLG’s own analysis of ONS data (Slide 15) shows that each household in London have on average £190 more to spend each week than households in the North East and neighbouring streets feel increasingly distant from one another: one classic example in London being Chapel Market and Upper Street in Islington.

Yes, access to technology such as smartphones will change the way we shop. Yes, these changes will have profound impacts on physical retail environments. But these conditions represent opportunities for our villages, towns and cities, not just threats. This week Bill Grimsey’s argument made headlines: in the online age, let’s stop pretending we can save a High Street model which relies on attracting struggling chains and belt-tightening shoppers.

To critically analyse the changes that technology is supposed to be unleashing on retail we need a definition of technology. Most dictionaries agree it involves the practical application of knowledge to solve a problem; Wikipedia’s entertaining summary starts with a picture of an astronaut and ends with a gorilla using a stick to cross a river.

High-tech

Low-tech

So if technology could be anything from a system to a device, a spaceship to a stick, then of course technology will drive change in retail. (Indeed…what isn’t technology?). Ultimately, technology is only possible through collaboration, and our ability to collaborate sets us apart as a species (language being our primary innovation). As Michael Tomasello put it in the New Yorker recently, you’ll never see two chimps carrying a log together at the zoo.

In the broadest sense, to remain an innovative and civil society, we need to have places where we live and learn together, developing skills to navigate neighbourhoods and cities, becoming comfortable and competent in the presence of strangers. Shopping has the potential to connect us: to places, to memories, to each other. Many people had their first memory, first kiss and first job on the High Street. All are social rather than individual experiences. The Portas Review realised this; ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi and consultancy Flamingo have recently echoed this. Connectedness will never go out of fashion.

2020 Retail will need to ensure technology doesn’t alienate people. Socially productive retail spaces, whether malls or High Streets, would enable and inspire visitors to  share experiences, engage in and build their social network, and contribute to society in ways which aren’t possible online. As Manuel Castells argued 20 years ago: face-to-face interaction will likely become ever more valuable, the more ubiquitous digital connectedness becomes. The future of retail will therefore be low-tech, as well as high-tech.

Jonathan works on the 2020 Retail project at the RSA’s Action and Research Centre – @jschifferes

At the focus group we spent the half-day learning about and discussing practical examples of perception biases, cognitive quirks, and what role the self-perception of students and teachers, as well as mutual perceptions, play. The group was highly curious, and the quality of debate remained high until the very end.

While I do not want to give away too much, here are three takeaways from the day:

• Thinking into action

Teachers agreed that the discussed concepts certainly were of importance, and some said they had learned about biases and other behavioural concepts at university. However, interestingly, many hadn’t been applying them directly to their own classroom teaching.

• Intuition versus evidence

Evidence-based, yet counter-intuitive mechanisms like loss aversion were controversial. By and large, related ideas for behavioural applications were accepted intellectually, but rejected intuitively – and practically. This poses an interesting dilemma in the context of best-practise and evidence-led approaches to teaching.

• Collaboration

Teachers perceived themselves as individual fighters; at the same time they longed for more collaboration, but felt they do not get enough support from the system. This highlights that the challenge of more collaboration within, but also across schools transcends national borders. The RSA Education team has recently published an excellent report on this topic, ‘No school an island’, and with its RSA Family of Academies has already gained some important insights how to make it work.

To learn more about the project, please keep an eye on future posts on the Social Brain or Education Matters blogs, or contact my colleague Nathalie Spencer at the RSA Social Brain Centre.

Josef Lentsch is Director of RSA International – follow him on Twitter: @joseflentsch

“The RSA’s recent report Disrupt Inc. aims to plug the gap in knowledge about young people and entrepreneurship. The report is based on accounts of young entrepreneurs and challenges what it suggests are widely held assumptions about how young people start and run businesses. Whilst I am prepared to support the challenge to the entrepreneurial stereotype perpetuated by the media in the form of the Sugars, Bransons and Jones’ I would argue that we do know a lot about young people’s entrepreneurial journeys and what is missing is a policy framework that builds on the experience of organisations like Enterprise UK, Young Enterprise and Princes Trust.

I have been working with potential entrepreneurs in Yorkshire for the past 13 years and have always recognised that they come in many different guises. My mentees have included DJs, chimney sweeps, inventors, accountants and stand up comediennes to name a few. I have also worked with young people who want to change the world or improve the communities they live in. In most cases they have not been introduced to the idea of self-employment as part of careers guidance and have not been introduced to the many  examples of entrepreneurs in their own communities.

What all these young people have had in common is the need for information and inspiration which appears sadly lacking in most education institutions. The RSA had a huge opportunity to both challenge this gap and promote the need for a curriculum which builds on students ideas and enables them to be realised. RSA Fellows are a great resource as speakers, mentors, role models and community members who can offer both encouragement and challenge to the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Where next? I would ask all Fellows to consider what they could do to promote entrepreneurism in all its guises, how they could support young people and how we can make the case that enterprise education is crucial to economic and social well-being not an add on activity at the end of term.”

Jane is part of our active Fellowship in Yorkshire.  If you want to know more about what is happening across Yorkshire please get in touch @juliadavis111, Regional Programme Manager

The task of creating a more entrepreneurial society therefore naturally starts here. Indeed, it’s the reason why so many enterprise support organisations operate in the education sector. MyBnk, Enabling Enterprise, Gazelle, Young Enterprise – all of these plough serious efforts into promoting entrepreneurship in schools up and down the country.

I was surprised then to hear at an event I recently attended that nobody at all in the Department for Education has a remit to work on this issue. I had already heard from a civil servant at BIS that DfE had other priorities, yet still this is very surprising. Not least because No 10 has worked so hard to put business and enterprise at the centre of its policy agenda. It’s no coincidence that David Cameron chose the theme of ‘aspiration nation’ for his speech at this year’s Conservative Party spring conference.

This is all for good reason. Though some may dispute it, entrepreneurship is an important vehicle for change. It creates employment where none else is available, and drives innovation where markets are stagnant. Much more than this, it gives meaning to people’s lives and allows them the freedom to do as they wish. For this reason alone we should be promoting it among young people.

Currently, however, too few are being exposed to high quality enterprise education.  According to research by RBS and the Prince’s Trust, nearly three quarters of NEET young people say they received no business training whatsoever while in school. Recent research by the Carnegie Foundation reveals much the same result. Only half of the FE students they surveyed said they’d been exposed to enterprise education while studying.

These responses may exaggerate the facts. No doubt most schools would say they provide some form of enterprise activity for their students. But they do reveal something about the content of what is available. Indeed, there are numerous questions over the quality, not just the quantity, of enterprise education in schools. There are concerns, for instance, that too much effort is spent on teaching entrepreneurial skills via ‘chalk and talk’ methods, at the expense of ‘learning by doing’ approaches that give young people direct experience of working in a business. Likewise, there are complaints that enterprise teaching can be too mechanical and overly directed, leaving no time for reflection.

Although it is not hard to understand why head teachers might direct shrinking resources into other activities, it does not mean poor or non existent enterprise education should be condoned. High quality enterprise education should be a right for every child, no matter what school they go to. Not least because the skills derived from it – networking, creativity and acting on opportunities – will be essential for every career, not just for starting a business. As an OFSTED report put it, “… only a small proportion of the working population will become entrepreneurs [but] all adults need to be enterprising both in their work and their personal lives.”

There are numerous ways to encourage and support schools to do more around entrepreneurship, but they are all undermined if the Department for Education doesn’t even bother promoting it. So come on Michael Gove, recruit someone to work on enterprise education. It could be the cheapest, most simplest thing to help more young people in the UK start and run successful businesses.

Actually I quite fancy a banana, I thought, while hearing this pitch at Waterloo station this morning. Why not?

As with lunches, of course, it’s never quite that simple. I was given the banana by a man about thirty holding a donation box, and wearing a t-shirt for the hospice service for children and young adults, Naomi House. He didn’t ask for any money, but my sense of reciprocity kicked in instinctively, and I found myself putting 50p in the box. I also noticed that another commuter put £1 just after me. It turns out the guy was a company director, doing some voluntary work, and he told me his task was to give away a thousand bananas that morning, while several others working for the same charity did the same thing nearby.

Now there is an excellent idea. While ‘chuggers‘, are often charismatic, creative and charming individuals working for worthy causes, they nonetheless have a mixed reputation because their modus operandi is to hijack our time and attention as a way of seeking out our money. Personally I have twice succumbed to this approach, and have given two small direct debits a month for several years to Action Aid and Shelter, as a result, so it’s not as though it never works, but the free bananas felt altogether less strenuous and more insightful.

This approach felt like a win-win. I felt lucky to have a timely and nutritious piece of fruit ‘for free’ and since the charity box was just there, it felt entirely natural that I should give something back. It didn’t occur to me to think of the wholesale cost of a single banana, or what I might pay in the nearest supermarket, because the part of me that is automatically reciprocal eats the part of me that is consciously rational for breakfast. So before I knew what had happened, my hand had reached into my pocket, found a coin that felt right, and hey ho, everybody seemed happy.

So well done Naomi House for some innovative use of behavioural insight for voluntary giving, and I hope other charities find similar ways to tap into our reciprocity, and no doubt raise significant sums as a result!

The simple version of this complex truth –the idea that a school system is only as good as the quality of its teachers – has become ubiquitous, being routinely voiced by politicians on all sides of the debate. Michael Gove was so keen to emphasise the Importance of Teaching that he made it the title and dominant theme of the 2010 Schools White Paper, which pledged to recruit more ‘high calibre’ graduates and increase the proportion of time that trainee teachers spend in the classroom.

The theme of teaching quality has also been taken up by the Shadow Education Secretary, Stephen Twigg.  Speaking at the RSA this morning, he stressed the importance of driving up the quality of teaching – and not undermining it by allowing unqualified teachers into the classroom, as the Government’s policy on Free Schools and Academies currently allows.

But while it is a relatively simple matter to define a problem of ‘educational failure’ – often accompanied by some selective statistics from international comparative surveys – and then attribute it to poor quality teachers, what is more difficult is to offer a sophisticated account of the problem and solution which does justice to the complex nature of teaching as a profession, and offers a convincing account of what it takes to improve the quality of teaching.

This urgent but complex question is the focus of a new inquiry which the British Educational Research Association (BERA) is undertaking in partnership with the RSA.  Focusing on the relationship between research, teacher education and school improvement, the inquiry will investigate the role that research plays in improving the quality of programmes of teacher education and hence in enhancing the quality of teaching and learning outcomes for students.

At a time when teachers are regularly urged to pay more attention to the evidence of ‘what works’ in the classroom, but policy-makers are themselves often selective in their use of research findings, the Inquiry will clearly need to be rigorous in its approach and explicit in both stating and testing its assumptions against a thorough-going review of the research evidence.

For example, one of the starting points for the Inquiry is the assumption that teacher education is strengthened by the contribution of academic expertise and the accumulated knowledge and professional experience located in university departments of education.  Rather than simply asserting or assuming the superiority of a university-led model, however, the Inquiry is committed to testing the assumptions against the available evidence and filling gaps in the knowledge base where possible.

As part of this process, the Inquiry has commissioned a number of papers from external experts to review policy and practice on teacher education in different parts of the UK and internationally, and to consider the contribution that different models of teacher education can make to developing teachers’ professional learning and expertise at each stage of their career.

This formal review of the established literature is being accompanied by a general Call for Submissions, open to all organisations and individuals with an interest in research and education, based upon a set of key questions:

1. What do you see as the MAIN strengths and areas for improvement within teacher education as a whole in your part of the UK today, and why?
2. When thinking about initial teacher education (ITE) in your part of the UK today, what contribution do you think that research currently makes to ITE, and what role do you think that it should play?
3. When thinking about continuous professional development (CPD) in your part of the UK today, what contribution do you think that research currently makes to the professional learning and development of teachers, and what role do you think it should play?
4. What do you think are the main barriers faced by teachers when it comes to (a) engaging with research evidence and (b) undertaking their own research?  What support do you think schools or others (such as colleges and universities) could provide to help to overcome those barriers?
5. What impact do you think that research can make to improving the quality of teaching and learning outcomes for students?

As a third strand, we are also exploring options for consulting more widely with teachers from across the UK, through a dedicated survey of teachers’ views and experiences of the strengths and weaknesses of different models of teacher education, which may be accompanied by detailed focus group discussion (for example, of the barriers teachers’ encounter in accessing and engaging in research).

Ultimately, the Inquiry’s research and analysis may produce the evidence to justify a campaign in defence of particular models of teacher education and lifelong professional learning.  But the first step is to review the evidence – and learn from the experiences, good and bad, of expert practitioners, in schools and classrooms throughout the UK.  Influencing what teachers do and think is not a simple task, but by better understanding the complex nature of the question, the Inquiry may provide some more profound insights and possible solutions to the problem of patchy teacher quality.

Louise Bamfield is Associate Director, Education at the RSA and secretariat to the BERA-RSA Inquiry on Research and Teacher Education.

RSA Animates have proven irresistible intellectual nuggets for many “grown ups”, and evidence suggests they help us learn about topics better. But what about their potential for little ‘uns and teens at school?

RSA Animates can undoubtedly provide rich stimulus for learning, and the visual representation of abstract or complex ideas has become increasingly admired by educators all over the world. However, harnessing these clips successfully is not necessarily obvious or easy for educators who’ve not tried before.

What’s WatchDrawThink?
WatchDrawThink is a new RSA Catalyst-supported project launched by Ewan McIntosh FRSA and colleagues Peter Ford and Tom Barrett FRSA at education firm NoTosh. The collaborative site aims to provide a space for teachers to share ideas, example lessons or projects where students use RSA Animates for their learning. The idea is that teachers will get inspiration on how they might use a whole or part of an RSA Animate video as an initial stimulus or part of an immersive discovery session on a given topic.

Why use RSA Animates in school?
RSA Animates have tended not to be used widely in school, perhaps because they handle genuinely complex cross-curricular knowledge. But it’s the very visualisation that is so tantalising, that also makes the comprehension of these complex areas of knowledge easier, and the viewer’s chances of retaining the message so much better. Professor Richard Wiseman’s own research study of RSA Animates showed that the visualisation used could help viewers retain up to 22% more information than had they just listened to the audio alone.  You can watch Richard Wiseman and Andrew Park, the illustrator, talk about this at an RSA Event.

Support from Catalyst helped deliver an initial session with RSA Academies teachers in March, where the potential for their use within the English curriculum was confirmed. Teachers spotted relevance to the curriculum in areas as diverse as physical education (Dan Pink: The SurprisingTruth of What Motivates Us) and mathematics (Renata Saleci on The Paradox of Choice), as well as a blanket appreciation of their potential use in language arts, design and primary education.

WatchDrawThink’s first prototype
Launching as a prototype platform in time for teachers to get engaged in the last term of this school session, WatchDrawThink is crowdsourcing as many light-touch – or involved – ways as possible to harness three particularly rich RSA Animate clips in the classroom. Anyone, student, teacher or parent, can jump onto the site and add their innovative, short, sharp idea for handling a segment or whole clip to achieve a specific curricular goal or to create an engaging task with the clip.

Over time, based on how people use the site in the first couple of months, the website will also provide support from the NoTosh Team and RSA Academies with specific ideas and advice on:

• How to plan a competence-based unit of work or set of lessons that encourages student-led research on the back of an RSA Animate stimulus
• Different ways to use visualisation to express knowledge and understanding on a topic, à la RSA Animate.

How you can get involved

Teachers and students can get involved this term and see which of the RSA Animates might help you explain a new, complex topic in a simple way. Use the WatchDrawThink website, Twitter hashtag #watchdrawthink or Facebook page to share your own lesson outcomes (videos, images, texts, comments, blog posts) and share further ideas.

If you’re a parent or Governor, share the site with your child’s teacher.

You can visit the WatchDrawThink website, follow Ewan on Twitter @ewanmcintosh or email him at ewan@notosh.com.

To get help from RSA Catalyst for your social venture visit www.thersa.org/catalyst

Actually, it was for myself that I wanted the ale – preferably a pale ale of some description but none was to be found. A few days later I went into a random off license in Hackney. It was a completely different story. They was an array of ales, porters, bitters, lagers, whatever you would care to mention. There were large breweries, independents, and even beers from three or four small local brewers. There was everything from German Hefe Weiss to West Coast American Pale Ale to Hackney Rye IPA. I cross-referenced it with a couple more vendors (we’re talking local shops here not some sort of specialist seller). Same story – a comprehensive selection.

So why is Clapham a beer mono-culture and Hackney hyper-diverse? The answer could actually say a lot about business and culture.

Median income is slightly higher in Wandsworth (where Clapham is located) than Hackney. Yet independent brands tend to be pricier than popular lagers. The age profiles are not radically different – Wandsworth has 1.7 percent more 65+ residents. Hackney is a more ethnically diverse Borough but would this really impact the range of available beer? Difficult to see how.

When it comes to the flourishing establishment of micro-breweries, Clapham has the same access to the progressive beer duty, introduced by Gordon Brown to give small breweries a tax break. It just that it is in Hackney (and Camden and Bermondsey) where the micro-brewing movement has taken hold.

But other factors do hint at something different happening in Hackney compared with Clapham. Let’s takes a look at the map of tech start-ups.

This is map is from Techbritain.com. The big radioactive ‘207’ is Hackney. Clapham is in the bottom left hand corner of the map. There is quite some difference.

Now, let’s take a look at independent coffee houses – something else that tends to accompany economic and cultural effervescence. It should be noted the City of London – from Lloyd’s of London to the London Stock Exchange – grew out of coffee houses. Here is the spread of independent (ie good) coffee houses from the London Coffee Guide.

Again, you can see the skew away from Clapham’s direction. It’s not clear what came first, the new tech businesses, the independent coffee houses, the independent brewers, or the ale hyper-diversity of the off licenses – they all seemed to happen together. There are other measures of course. For example, the proportion of shops independently owned on Columbia Road (Tower Hamlets), Broadway Market or Kingsland Road compared to Clapham High Street or Clapham Junction.

What does all this mean other than if you want access to the best beers don’t live in Clapham? There is an obvious point about tipping points and the networked factor of firms, individuals, finance, institutions needed to sustain a growth of innovative culture and business. That’s not the most interesting aspect of this, however. The real question is whether Hackney is a special case or the vanguard. If it’s a special case then there are many special cases that seem to be popping up around London and elsewhere – London Bridge/Borough/Bermondsey, Brixton, Birmingham Digbeth, Salford Quays, Ropewalks Liverpool and elsewhere. Much of the same cultural change and business venturing is seen time and time again.

It might be that the real (ale) green shoots are in these cultural tech economies. They are local, personal, and networked. They match lifestyle, entrepreneurship and consumption. They disrupt the norm and big chained business with its global brands. The businesses are ultra-innovative. The growth of Etsy reported on elsewhere on the ARC enterprise blog is part of this movement too.

Two critical questions remain: how can this movement be inclusive? And, from a policy perspective, how can we accelerate the process of me being able to buy decent beer when I go to visit my brother-in-law? Both are important cultural and economic questions.

Anthony Painter is Director, Independent review of the Police Federation. His twitter feed is @anthonypainter.

I am posting it below with very minor edits and Ian’s permission because Ian’s response helped to pinpoint the slight feeling of unease I had in response to COIN’s report. In essence, while the first round of the challenge of engaging the right on climate change may indeed come down to the framing the message, the real battle feels like it’s in the framing not so much of the message, but of the issue itself.

As context and further reading to make sense of the issue, the two key questions (with indicative quotes) are:

1) Is Climate Change best approached as an environmental issue?

“Simply stated, as long as we think of climate change as an environmental issue we allow it to be something outside of our lives. When we realise it is not an environmental issue, it is harder to carry on as we have been before”

2) Is the continued pursuit of economic growth on a physically finite planet possible?

“A no-growth economy is a curious creature to think about, but as Sherlock Holmes once put it: once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Guest Post by Ian Christie FRSA

The point you make about growth is important. I think there are broadly three positions on global ecological risks and the economy, and they don’t fall that neatly into the existing political spectrum, as you note:

1) Business as usual growth – is desirable and achievable, and we can either disregard climate change etc or adapt to it.

2) A new model capitalism – Business as Usual can’t be restored but we can have a new model capitalism (cf the B Team, Plan A, Unilever etc) that generates economic growth while respecting planetary boundaries.

3) An economic model that eschews growth: 1) is suicidal, 2) is well-meaning but delusional; we need to rethink economic systems entirely and pursue wellbeing and go beyond growth, which cannot continue indefinitely and is in any case not generating the benefits we tell ourselves it is.

1) has incumbent power on its side, makes immediate ‘common sense’ (we don’t feel at risk from the environment) but has pretty well every climate scientist and ecologist against it;

2) has at least a chance of winning more adherents in business and politics, but is still very marginal;

3) has ecological and thermodynamic logic on its side, but almost no adherents in business and government.

Each view is pretty accurate about the others’ weaknesses. The problem for 3) is that there is no political and economic narrative of transition that makes sense (so far). Approach 2) is attractive as a transitional model but still falls foul of the objections from 3).

The centre-right was left out of the climate change script in the USA when Al Gore became the face of climate concern, and things have never recovered from that and from the subsequent integration of climate into the culture wars, in which evidence is assessed on the basis of ideology and motives.

I suspect the situation will only change when there is a critical mass of ‘defectors’ breaking ranks in the authoritative core groups of centre-right thinking and practice – from concerned CEOs, influential media commentators to elected members of the Republican Party and Conservatives. And that seems likely to happen only if they can frame climate action as an economic opportunity and national security issue.

Which raises your key point: is climate change an environmental issue? No – it’s a major risk to economic and social order as well as to ecosystem integrity. There are people from the centre-right who get this, and who in consequence are embracing 2) above – growing numbers of food industry leaders, for example, whose businesses are in direct jeopardy from climate disruption. But they have not got a political constituency yet with Republicans and Conservatives.

I just came back from the lively launch event at the think tank, Policy Exchange, with Adam Corner, Zac Goldsmith MP, Head of Environment and Energy at Policy Exchange Guy Newey  and Claire Jakobsson of Conservative Environment Network, chaired by James Murray.

Alas, the who, where and when questions are relatively easy, compared with the what and the why, while the question of what follows is altogether more challenging.

According the executive summary: “The central argument of this report is that there is no necessary contradiction between the values of the centre-right and the challenge of responding to climate change. But until now the issue has not been framed in a way that resonates with centre-right citizens.”

That premise sounds about right to me. The claim is that the left has a relatively coherent position on climate change(it’s by no means clear cut) and that many of the potentially effective forms of action(subsidies, regulation, taxation) fall out of their worldview with less strain than they do on the right. This is somewhat problematic for those who hold centre-right political views, but more deeply problematic for addressing the climate change challenge at hand with the requisite shared sense of purpose.

The report goes on to argue for four main narratives to connect with the centre-right; localism, energy security, the green economy and the good life; and key values including: pragmatism, scepticism and stewardship – all of course unpacked in detail in the report.

I enjoyed the event. There were a few nice moments, including Zac Goldsmith saying he recently sent David Cameron back his famous speech on climate change from 2008, asking him to read it again (because he seems to have forgotten about it…). I also liked Guy Newey’s emphasis on the idea that “motives matter” – when talking about climate change the key question is always what lies behind this, what do you really want? On a related point, he highlighted the tendency to confuse and conflate climate scepticism(it’s not happening) with policy scepticism (here’s what we should do about it). I also appreciated that one of the questioners asked how we can, in the context of the financial crisis, stop action on climate change being “a fair weather issue” or “a nice to have”.

A final comment from one of Adam Corner’s colleagues, George Marshall made a deep impression: that when they work on climate change communication it is not difficult to make a connection at the level of diagnosis – people respond to the reality of the problem- but when you move to the level of prescription – what we should do about it- people become very sensitive to motives and messenger effects- fearing hidden agendas.

I am intrigued by what I have read of the report so far and keen to return to the issue, perhaps with some of Jonathan Haidt’s work in mind and in connection to our own research on climate change that will be published soon. However, for now, a few meta-questions about the report and event are loitering in my mind.

1. Is the political spectrum a useful lens for an issue like climate change at all? The report is aware that this is not self-evident, and perhaps it is semantic to get hung up on this question given the underlying desire to reach millions of people, whichever category they belong to. Still, every time we use the political spectrum in this way it becomes more entrenched as some sort of social fact and less like a relatively old-fashioned cultural heuristic that may no longer be fit for purpose.

2. The link between environmentalism in general and climate change in particular needs to be challenged. I had the sense that it suits those on the right to place them together, while it generally suits the left to pull them apart. We need to at least reflect on the question: What if Climate Change is not an environmental issue?

3. More profoundly, given the fairly central but my no means exclusive emphasis on the green economy as a way to reach the right, What if green growth is just an illusion? i.e. has anybody developed a convincing macroeconomic model of continued economic growth that factors in population growth and the material basis of the economy that keeps us within environmental limits? Perhaps the main challenge to the centre-right on climate change is not from the centre-left, who broadly share the view that such green growth is possible. The deeper challenge is the radical but in my view profoundly sane view that argues that the continued pursuit of economic growth is a kind of madness, albeit a forgivable and understandable one.

My first impression is that the report represents an invaluable introduction to a critical communication challenge. However, I feel the goal of reaching the centre-right, while relatively challenging, arises in the context of a communication challenge that is anyhow so deep and multifaceted that this issue is merely a case in point, rather than a critical end in itself.

And yet, given that we are in this together, it’s really important to be reminded that the end point cannot be universal agreement, but a growing capacity to disagree constructively and precisely, so that we are not waiting for an impossible consensus on a problem that will not wait for us.

As I wrote in a previous post on the same theme: Climate Change: Left, Right and Wrong

“Let’s stop pretending that those who share an understanding of the problem are natural allies, and start thinking more deeply about the values we share and the values that separate us. We will continue to disagree, but it would be great if we could begin to understand the nature and depth of the disagreement well enough to help each other deal intelligently with the shared problem at hand.”

Today’s report is a good step in that direction.