This qualitative study examines how trust and communication shape stakeholder engagement during the energy transition in Longyearbyen, Svalbard. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and reflexive thematic analysis informed by Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT), the study explores how stakeholders perceive institutional communication in a multilingual Arctic community undergoing rapid climate and governance change. Findings suggest that top-down decision-making, limited communication channels and unclear explanations were perceived as communicative divergence, thereby weakening institutional trust and procedural legitimacy. Later efforts, including public forums, research collaboration and expanded opportunities for input, were viewed by some stakeholders as signs of communicative convergence and institutional responsiveness. These measures, however, may only partially influence trust repair, as earlier perceptions of exclusion remained influential. The study suggests that trust repair depends not simply on more communication but on accessible, responsive, respectful and consequential participation. It contributes to the climate-governance literature by explaining how communicative convergence and divergence shape legitimacy, trust repair and participatory resilience.
The article examines the discursive politics of flooding in Lagos, Nigeria, showing how language and power intersect within climate vulnerability. Building on Achille Mbembe's necropolitics and using insights from Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis, the study explores the role public discourse serves as a site where decisions about whose lives are protected, and whose are effectively cast aside, are meted out and legitimized. It reveals how sovereign power is expressed in infrastructural neglect and selective protection. Drawing on 10 articles in The Punch (2017-2025), the study exposes how flood is constructed as a natural and fated act in government discourse, shifting blame and demanding that "urban poor relocate" and thus transforming vulnerability into an issue of individual blame. Conversely, public commentators and community voices mobilize counter-narratives, such as the viral slogan "China no be Lagos," which counters the state's comparison of characterizations between Lagos and more developed societies. These frames of resistance repoliticize the floods as manifestations of structural injustice rather than natural disasters. The findings illustrate that Lagos's floods are not merely meteorological events, but profoundly rhetorical ones, wherein language becomes a technology of power that can either reproduce inequality or function as a tool for justice-centered change.
Amid the surge of youth climate activism, youth have been invited to speak in international political forums as representations of the human dimension of climate impacts. Expanding scholarship on rhetorical constellations, or patterns of meaning-making across texts, I turn to youth political forum speeches and analyze how youth foreground intergenerational justice through crisis and emergency temporal, spatial, and felt constellations. Through grappling with these different constellations and the way they conceptualize vulnerability, responsibility, privilege, and solidarity underlying just climate action, I consider how youth navigate political spaces and how emergency and crisis are particularized by youth to emphasize the temporal, spatial, and felt dimensions of climate justice. I contend rhetorical constellations offer a valuable lens for environmental communication scholars to interrogate temporality, spatiality, and feeling as important sites of struggle for climate justice.
