Sustainable development narratives for Wales: a framework for communications

The Welsh Government (WG) has committed to working with organisations, communities and individuals to motivate and enable sustainable action on climate change. One of the barriers to engaging the public with sustainability identified by WG is the ‘lack of a compelling and clear narrative’. It was felt that without a narrative, the diverse range of actions being taken by WG on sustainability issues may appear disjointed or not inspire the public to play an active part. To address this, WG commissioned a consortium led by the Climate Outreach & Information Network (COIN) to develop and test narratives and language about sustainability and climate change with the Welsh public. This project builds on and develops previous WG work to develop a segmentation model of public attitudes to sustainability. The current project uses and develops this segmentation work to provide a more detailed understanding of segment motivations, values and lifestyles, and explore how different segments understand and talk about sustainability and respond to different SD-related narratives and images.