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Public Communication and Sustainability in a Post-Truth Era

On September 24, 2015, the 193 member states of the UN signed an extensive intergovernmental agreement in New York. Titled Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UN 2015b), the initiative pursues comprehensive sustainability. It sets seventeen goals in areas as diverse as health, education, urban development, natural resources, technological development, the labor market, and institutional quality.

This agreement fits within the agenda advanced by the UN since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed in 1948. The text emphasizes states’ responsibility to respect, protect, and promote the human rights and fundamental freedoms of all, and it includes the approaches, planning mechanisms, indicators, and monitoring devices that the UN has been deploying to ensure compliance with the declaration’s provisions.

The 2030 Agenda is, the agreement says at its beginning, “a plan of action for people, planet and prosperity. It also seeks to strengthen universal peace in larger freedom. We recognize that eradicating poverty in all its forms and dimensions, including extreme poverty, is the greatest global challenge and an indispensable requirement for sustainable development” (UN 2015, 1).
Is such a global movement of states toward sustainability credible, and can we trust that it will take place?

This chapter aims to answer this question with a coincidence in timing pointed out by Lockie (2017, 1) in mind: 2016 is the year when the implementation of this sustainability agenda began, but it is also the year when dictionaries (for example, those of Oxford Dictionaries) added the term post-truth. This word threatens to shake up the common benchmarks for interpreting concepts that are at the heart of the UN agreement— for example, human dignity, prosperity, progress, peace, and freedom.
The coincidence in timing is also relevant because a significant part of the debate on post-truth revolves around denialist discourse on climate change. This discourse, according to critics, downplays scientific evidence in order to advance a specific ideological position (Ihlen, Gregory, Luoma-aho, and Buhmann 2019; Lockie 2017; Murphy 2016). Post-truth ignores the science developed in relation to sustainability.

But this chapter focuses not so much on the relationship between post-truth and science but on that between post-truth and communication, since it is based on the assumption that within this relationship may lie one of the critical factors when it comes to making the advances in sustainable development that states have set for themselves. For as Lockie states, “If 2016 is to be known as the year in which the world turned a corner on sustainable development and the mitigation of climate change, it will require more than blind optimism or luck” (2017 4). It requires, I would venture to say by way of an introduction to this chapter, there to be true knowledge of the situation and the problem, and also the determination of states to make progress to be authentic. In this chapter, I adopt the assumption that communication is one of the critical factors for this truthfulness and authenticity, as well as, ultimately, for the success of the 2030 Agenda. This is a highly relevant perspective to this volume’s focus on communication rights and ethics.

The issue of post-truth has become especially critical in the context of the global crisis caused by COVID-19, the recovery from which, as initial assessments assert, will not involve a straightforward return to normality. Even if the spread of the virus can be contained soon, “there will be vast political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental consequences which will last many decades” (Nesta 2020). A true and authentic motivation on states’ part to jointly advance towards the comprehensive sustainability described in the 2030 Agenda will also be decisively important for dealing with the post-COVID-19 world.

This chapter is structured as follows. After considering the features of a post-truth context, I will explore the challenge of communicating the intangible value of the 2030 Agenda. In the final part of the chapter, I describe the risks facing a true sustainability agenda and propose streams of work aiming for one.

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