Citizen deliberation at South Carolina’s ‘Our Coastal Future Forum’: Talking through risk related to climate change

Deliberative democracy has increasingly been used as a form of citizen engagement and involvement in risk-related and environmental domains. However, there is much to learn about how citizens talk about and understand risks related to climate change in the context of community deliberative forums, and how deliberation might contribute to productive climate policy solutions. To contribute to this growing body of work, we use the lens of Construal Level Theory (CLT) to analyze transcripts from a large community forum held in the US state of South Carolina. Our analysis reveals a broad range of risk construal from deliberative participants, with many people discussing climate risks as psychologically near despite the longer horizon often associated with climate change. The results suggest that deliberative forums can be useful venues for helping citizens grapple with the myriad risks and construal levels associated with climate change. Rather than simply helping move climate risks ‘closer’ to people, deliberation might be more useful in allowing people to understand climate risks at multiple levels of psychological distance and leveraging this nuanced understanding to develop potential solutions and mitigation strategies.