Lydia Milly Certa

Grand Challenges (from now on GCs) such as climate change, hunger, water scarcity poverty, inequality (Ferraro et al 2015; George et al. 2016; Scherer and Voegtlin, 2020), human rights (Schwoon et al 2022), Covid19 pandemic (Bertello et al. 2021, Schwoon et al 2022) just to name a few, are global and societal unresolved problems that, because of their complexity, demand for collective actions to be addressed. As George et al. (2016) put it “GCs, by their very nature, require coordinated and sustained effort from multiple and diverse stakeholders toward a clearly articulated problem or goal” (George et al., 2016: 1881). Due to GCs very nature as complex, whose consequences are difficult to predict, and carrying a multi-layered set of interests and concerns (what Ferraro et al. 2015 name the three Analytic Facets of Grand Challenges: Complex, Uncertain and Evaluative), GCs do not have a single, predetermined solution, they need multistakeholder and multidisciplinary approaches to generate fresh unconventional ideas able to unhinge these issues (Eisenhardt et al., 2016).

Climate Change which has been argued to be a problem that has to be solved through collective efforts, is one of the GCs of our time. It is no longer possible to deny its impacts as human beings are increasingly experiencing the dramatic effects of Climate Change.

The formal discourse of Climate Change is articulated by institutions, such as the United Nations (UN), that aim at articulating the problem and finding potential solutions through annual meetings: in the context of Climate Change, these are called Conferences of Parties (abbr. COP). COPs are 2 weeks yearly events bringing together different stakeholders such as country delegates, civil society, NGOs, private companies, and media to define multilateral agreements. 

The project aims at investigating how Climate Change discourses are articulated by different stakeholders, what role emotions play in this process and how emotions can influence engagement.