Environmental communication and campaigning: The case of Greenpeace's Alternative Futures campaign

This research focuses on the campaign strategies of one of the most prominent international environmental organisations: Greenpeace. It pays specific attention to the communication and online/offline media strategies used by Greenpeace International's Alternative Futures campaign. This campaign 'aims to build counter power to the monolithic Western development model (infinite growth and extraction) through influencing allies and building counter narratives (solidarity, equity, justice, cooperation, mutual-aid, legacy, and intersectionality), as well as building internal capacity and a community of practice across the organisation'. This research examines the internal decision-making practices behind the formation and development of the Alternative Futures campaign. It analyses how the Alternative Futures campaign team identify, frame, and develop campaign messages and tactics. It traces how the campaign's frames are subject to continual reframing, counter framing from other actors, and the mediatization of these frames through 'on the ground protests', the traditional news media, and newer online media systems. It considers Greenpeace's use of multimodal forms of communication and the importance afforded to visual representations, performance art, social disruption, memes, advertising, emotional appeals and so on.

Through the research access granted by Greenpeace International, this project explores developments within Greenpeace's organisational structure and internal decision-making practices, through conducting interviews, observations, and the analysis of campaign documents. This research navigates how key campaign decisions are made, such as establishing timeframes, tactics, and the framing of information. Furthermore, it considers how these decisions are then packaged and publicly framed and reframed through campaign outputs, including social media posts, and images/videos from on the ground protests. Primarily this research draws upon the analytical methods of a frame analysis, corpus linguistics, and multimodal analysis. Overall, this research provides insights into the everyday workings and communication strategies of an internationally coordinated campaign, whilst shedding light on innovative and new ways of environmental campaigning.