RE-PURPOSING GEOSCIENCE COMMUNICATIONS FOR SUSTAINABLE HUMAN PROGRESS: MOVING FROM 'MAKE AND SELL' AND 'SENSE AND RESPOND' TO 'GUIDE AND CO-CREATE'

Geoscientists have a huge potential to engage people about the pressing socio-ecological challenges that threaten sustainable human progress. But whilst geoscientists are being encouraged - and, increasingly, trained - to ‘go public’ with our science, it is less clear to what extent our current geo-communications are 'fit for purpose' in addressing the increasingly acute planetary concerns that face our society. In the business world, this challenge has led to the emrgence of purpose-driven organisations, in which 'purpose' can be regarded as the pursuit of ambitious, clear, enduring and overarching social and environmental goals which are motivating. Although universities increasingly see themselves as business organisations, and while they have an overt social mission, few are explicitly purpose-driven. Nevertheless, their academics play a critical role as the interface between an organisation that produces knowledge and a wider public who could use that knowledge. In that sense they are akin to marketers in the business world, and borrowing from business marketing, there are three dominant communication approaches: ‘make-and-sell’; ‘sense-and-respond’; and ‘guide-and-co-create’. Make-and-sell communications are 'inside out' - using journalistic skills and popular media to make internal academic-driven knowledge more digestible for external public consumption. Sense-and-respond communications are 'outside in' - drawing on empirical human science understanding of public values, norms and needs to more effectively convey scientific information to target audiences. Both approaches are central to conventional science communication training but both primarily promote academic interests rather than serving public needs. In contrast, the newly emergent guide-and-co-create marketing mode, designed to allow organisations to meet the long-term wellbeing of their end users, provides an alternative template for purpose-driven, interdisciplinary, participatory, and reflexive science communications. A guide-and co-create communications framework would seem better placed to tackle society's 'grand challenges' through its twin pairing of a clear wellbeing-focused objective and a co-created path to achieving it. However, adopting a guide-and-co-create approach to science communications will require not only re-thinking communication practice within universities but also radical institutional regime change towards universities themselves becoming purpose-driven organisations.