Iain Stewart | Steering Science Communication towards Sustainability

Scientists can play a critical role in communicating to lay audiences what they know about future planetary threats and geo-environmental challenges, and so are increasingly being encouraged by universities to ‘go public’ with their science. In that regard, they are becoming the communications interface between universities, which produce knowledge, and the multiple publics who could use that knowledge. In that rapidly evolving science communication landscape, there are three dominant approaches of this marketing-led science communication: ‘make-and-sell’; ‘sense-and-respond’; and ‘guide-and-co-create’. The short-term focus of the first two mean they are incompatible with tackling long-term sustainability concerns, but the long-sighted, interdisciplinary, participatory, and reflexive mode of ‘guide and co-create’ appears better suited, combining both an explicit wellbeing-focused ‘purpose’ and co-creating the path to achieving it. Implementing a ‘guide-and-co-create’ approach to science communications, however, will require institutions to re-think their communication training and practice as they radically shift towards becoming purpose-driven organisations.