Moving deliberation online : how stakeholders express disagreements in physical and digital environmental governance meetings

Sammanfattning

When stakeholders discuss environmental issues, they need to be able to express constructive disagreements. Meetings of environmental governance processes are increasingly held digitally, driven by technical and societal developments. While experimental studies have directly analysed the expression of disagreement in negotiations related to the meeting medium, the impacts on real-world processes have mostly been studied by measuring outcomes and perceptions. Therefore, this thesis explores how stakeholders express disagreements in digital and physical environmental governance meetings. The material for this thesis consists of recordings from environmental governance meetings in Sweden and includes both digital and physical meetings. I use conversation analysis to identify differences in the naturally-occurring interactions selected from five meetings. I interpret these results, guided by theories about the expression of disagreement in environmental governance. Differences between digital and physical meetings become visible in a range of speech phenomena: While participants manage to initiate disagreements regardless of the medium, turn coordination differs. For instance, unstable connections make it harder to coordinate turn-taking in digital meetings. By talking simultaneously, participants complement each other in physical interactions. In contrast, the same phenomenon could embody dominance in digital interactions. In addition to these observations, some features of videoconferencing restrict communication in general and particularly the voicing of disagreement. Videoconference software streamlines communication and reduces meta-comments and additional interventions, supported by strict moderation. While disagreements are expressed in both digital and face-to-face meetings, these differences may affect the quality of the deliberation.