Global governance, civil society awareness, mobilization and the information communication technology: The convention on biological diversity through Brazilian community voices

Tools for social mobilization and participation through the use of information and communications technology (ICT) in order to promote public awareness and education are advocated in the Chapter 36 of Agenda 21 and in the Article 13 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which deal with Education and Public Awareness by promoting the use of vehicles and methods of formal and informal networking to increase public awareness about environmental discussion.

Empirical research about the use of social networks and online communication can reveal interesting aspects related to the interactional dynamics of global, national and local stakeholders and actors related to environmental governance. It is noteworthy that the environmental discussion originated in the 1960s from transnational activist groups that contributed to attitude and perception change of public opinion on the environmental impacts of human activities (Wapner, 1995).

This research maps the dynamics of both global and national CBD governance accountability online communication (www.cbd.int, www.cdb.gov.br ) - the global and national institutional platforms levels – among it selves and with respect to civil society online communities, identifying how information is produced, transmitted and disseminated within the communities, including the ability of these platforms to receive positive and negative feedback from local up to global levels.

The methodology of the study encompasses online ethnography of websites in the environmental public sphere debate in Brazil, assisted by Pearltrees add-on in order to gather, visualize, organize and browse studied sites; as well as ethnographic content analysis regarding the Convention on Biological Diversity global and national platforms by means of computer assisted qualitative data analysis software AtlasTi, as a tool to organize and analyze collected data related to their communication patterns.

We intend to point out some empirical opportunities and challenges in this yet asymmetric online participatory framework.