Misinformed participation: The role of greenwash in excluding consumers from environmental decision-making

With the growing importance of environmental issues in policy debates, access to complete, reliable and appropriately-designed information about environmental impacts is essential for social participation. Even strategies seeking to avoid the need for explicit political deliberation (e.g., market-based) have high informational needs.  Policy instruments such as pollution charges or carbon trading schemes, for example, require universal perfect information to operate efficiently.

This need is even more pressing given the difficulties faced by the public in interpreting complex, probabilistic and highly technical environmental information. Supporting informed participation requires processes that integrate information with the prior knowledge and skills of the various participants. However, the disclosure of environmental information is still barely regulated.  Unlike other social domains, where instruments have been designed to guarantee the public's right-to-know ---e.g., patient information leaflets, or financial reports--- the selection, design and distribution of information about the environmental impact of business activities and consumer goods is largely discretionary.  Green marketing claims, for example, are unregulated in most countries, as well as the content of environmental and sustainability reports.

This has led to an acute concern about greenwash, the deceptive use of environmental information to promote a company or its products.  Various NGOs have sought to devise tools and metrics to help the public identify such misleading claims, but, despite the academic interest in environmental communication, no systematic effort has been made to turn discourse- and communication-analytic methods to this purpose, and a scientific approach to greenwash is still in its infancy.

This paper seeks to provide a blueprint for thisproject.  Drawing on popular and scholarly literature about greenwash, it discusses the difficulties in operationalising the concept; reviews techniques useful for this purpose, such as the analysis of categorisation, labelling, agency mystification and framing; and outlines the interdisciplinary partnerships that would be required to attain this goal.