Seduction,caution,fight: Media framing of research-based expertise in Norwegian print media coverage of low energy buildings (2005–2012)

1. Introduction

In times of urgent crises, modern societies turn to experts who study causes, likely developments and possible remedies. Recently a global pandemic has forced virologists and epidemiologists to give advice that they knew would – if followed by politicians – fundamentally transform the daily lives of whole populations and in many countries in fact have. The scientific community has risen to this challenge, and it has provided not only advice but also effective vaccines to save as many lives as possible. Environmental activists have compared the environmental crises of our time, above all climate change, to the pandemic: They argue that to implement scientifically sound measures, the declaration of a state of emergency is needed, which would give decisive powers to those who know how to deal with climate change.

In this article, we take a closer look at how the authority of research-based expertise can be performed without the declaration of a state of emergency, and within the due process of democratic societies. This means above all that scientists do not enjoy direct access to decision making, but have to rely on mediating institutions that are democratically legitimised. In history, sometimes, scientific expertise has prevailed, most prominently when emissions that threatened the ozone layer were phased out following the Montreal protocol. In other cases, experts have consistently been ignored. In the moment when solutions proposed by experts affect daily lives of powerful groups in the electorate, research-based expertise is likely to be disregarded silently – often after politicians have paid lip service to their environmental responsibilities. Unfortunately, in the case of climate change mitigation, after the low hanging fruits have been harvested, this kind of resistance against further measures can be expected. It is these instances, in which scientific advice is put aside or action is delayed, which motivate environmental activists to demand more action that is radical. Indeed, in the current situation – in which we can expect the proliferation of public controversies around sustainability transformations – we may no longer assume that framing advice as scientifically sound alone is enough to lead to sustainable policies (as was the case in relation to the Montreal protocol, see Albrecht and Parker, 2019) – no matter how much general trust a society places in its experts. Instead, it is necessary to ask how the authority of an expert consensus can and should be framed in public conversations.

In this article, we present results of a study of how experts were represented in print media during a societal controversy around a consequential sustainability policy in Norway: the introduction of mandatory, highly energy efficient building technologies in building regulations. Against widespread resistance, and without having to refer to the kind of state of emergency that is promoted by environmental activists, expert advice has prevailed in this case and has become binding national law.

Based on our observations, we answer two questions: First and most immediately, we analyse the ways scientific environmental expertise was framed when it came under pressure of public controversy. We answer this question empirically describing three bundles of representations that created very different images of research-based expertise: seduction, cautious engagement and fight. Second, we analyse how these three representations complemented each other forming a combined image of research-based expertise that was able to contribute to a fundamental legal change in support of climate change mitigation.

In relation to the comprehensive literature on media framing and debates on the meaningfulness of framing analyses (e.g. D’Angelo et al., 2019), in this article, we argue that an analysis of the framing of expert expertise allows us to shed light on the tensions between the authority of science and increasing demands to apply science to solve societal problems. The contribution of this article, thus, is a description of possible societal roles for research-based expertise in relation to questions that mobilise significant societal interest. Particularly in reaction to environmental crises, experts face expectations towards their readiness and ability to not only propose solutions but – if necessary – also participate in overcoming resistance against their implementation. At the same time, the experts’ claim to be listened to is rooted in Mertonian ideals of disinterestedness and impartiality (Merton, 1938), which is threatened by experts’ direct involvement in politics.

In the next two parts of the article, we describe in more depth the situation in which environmental experts with ambitions to avert environmental crises find themselves, first in more general terms related to experts’ engagements with mediated publics and then in relation to the question of expert authority. The presentation of the empirical material is then introduced by a description of background and method. After a discussion of the dominant forms of successful performance of expert authority encountered in the material, we conclude the article by describing promising options for experts that find themselves engulfed in controversial expert-driven sustainability policies.

2. From science distorted by media to routine engagement with media

It is not at all a new phenomenon that the authority of scientific expertise is contested. Gieryn (1983), in his classic study of boundary work performed by scientists, shows how much effort is invested by experts themselves in distinguishing between what should and should not be within the sphere of their autonomous power. Under boundary work, Gieryn (1983) subsumes the scientists’ ‘attribution of selected characteristics to the institution of science (i.e., to its practitioners, methods, stock of knowledge, values and work organization) for purposes of constructing a social boundary that distinguishes some intellectual activities as “non-science”’ (p. 782). With science being a powerful force in modern societies, however, the boundary between science and non-science is constantly crossed – hence the need for explicit and declarative attributions. In what follows, we discuss science communication’s role in the destabilisation of boundaries around research-based expertise, before we move on to the question of possible framings of expert authority and legitimacy in the next part.

Boundary crossings that are related to science communication have been described using different theoretical tools, which themselves engage in boundary work. First, there is an approach in which the underlying assumption is that forces from the outside distort science and technology. In its purest form in relation to science communication, this perspective was theorised by Weingart and his colleagues. Modern societies, they argue with Luhmann (1995), are differentiated in distinct social systems that are ‘autonomous in the sense that they are defined by their respective operating codes, in the case of science it is truth’ (Weingart, 2012: 25). Media is a system with a different operating code, which according to Luhmann (2000) is ‘information/noninformation’. Once this fundamental difference is stated – the boundary is established – the ‘resonances’ and ‘irritations’ between the different ‘codes’ can be studied. Put into a historical frame, this perspective expects more resonance and irritation when media’s impact on other ‘subsystems’ grows. Consequently, Rödder and Schäfer (2010: 251) refer to Weingart’s (2012) diagnosis of a ‘loss of distance’ between science and society that is visible in the degree of scientists’ work being mediatised. Studying particle physics and genome research, they found that especially during phases of routine operation, the formative influence of the media on science was weak and restricted to very few highly visible scientists.

A very different perspective on the crossings between expertise and what lies outside it in relation to science communication follows from a perspective on science in which an a priori boundary between science and society is rejected. Such a stance is for instance represented by Esa Väliverronnen (2001) – who based on his empirical study of scientists’ various engagements with media – argues against the view that places media-related activities outside the ‘actual’ scientific work. Instead, he found different media-related roles for scientists, namely as populariser, interpreter, adviser/advocate, promoter/manager and critic. These roles, he maintains, are not to be understood as media trespassing into the domain of actual science but rather as part of science as social activity: an activity that is diverse and enacted using a wide array of media technologies.

One obvious difference between Rödder and Schäfer (2010), on one side, and Väliverronnen (2001), on the other side, is which kind of research-based expertise they study. Väliverronnen has interviewed environmental researchers that have already performed their expertise in ‘hybrid fora’ where concerned groups meet science (Callon et al., 2011; Yearley, 1991). Here, boundaries between science and non-science have been porous from the start and empirical evidence suggests that scientists feel a personal responsibility towards contributing to mitigating measures, such as in the case of climate science (Getson et al., 2021). Rödder and Schäfer’s physicists and genome researchers and their doings are traditionally hidden away in heavily guarded laboratories not only from journalists’ eyes but also from everyone – at least during routine phases of scientific work. Environmental research has elevated the ‘resonances’ from something being outside routine science into an integrated part of research-based expertise, which poses completely different demands on experts’ ability to perform their expertise. Väliverronnen found that scientists themselves draw a line between those communication activities in which they first represent their scientific expertise, for example, as popularisers and instances in which they perform media work as advocates. Thus, Gieryn’s observations regarding the importance of boundary work for scientific expertise apply also here. At the same time, when asked about which roles the scientists in Väliverronnen’s study preferred, they usually mentioned combinations. Thus, they embrace the need to draw boundaries between different roles as experts themselves on a case-by-case basis.

3. Media frames of the authority of research-based expertise

Despite their differences regarding assumptions about boundary work between expertise and non-expertise, Rödder and Schäfer (2010) and Väliverronnen (2001) share the perspective that engagement with media is related to a crisis of legitimacy of scientific expertise. Väliverronnen’s environmental researchers are presented as being under heightened public scrutiny for receiving large sums of funding to solve a specific environmental problem. This underlying need to justify their work in front of the public corresponds to the shorter periods in which Rödder and Schäfer’s particle physicists and genome researchers were forced to engage in ‘crisis communication’ to counter criticisms of their work.

Increased engagement with media as response to societal demands for justification – which is one of the six motivations for science communication gathered among scientists by Davies (2021) – introduces the topic of media framings into the larger question of the societal role of expert authority.

Classic science communication a la Bodmer report (The Royal Society 1985) assigned TV and radio central roles as channels that reaffirmed science’s authority and benevolent influence on society. Tellingly, expert authority in these cases was more implicated than explicitly framed through academic title or institutional affiliation. Experts were framed as source of truth by the mere attribution of being a scientist.

Fast forward to the present, where media channels have proliferated, it is much more obvious that characteristics of the channels used will affect the authority of research-based expertise, and can both increase and decrease trust in science (Hmielowski et al., 2014). Drawing on the literature on media framing, we can distinguish among issue specific frames, that can only be found in specific controversies, for instance, framings that confirm or dispute climate scientists’ credibility, and generic frames that present scientific expertise as more or less trustworthy (De Vreese, 2005). Research points to the existence of such generic framings on national levels, for example, related to general scientific literacy in the population (Noy and O’Brien, 2019). Indeed, a group of media recipients that was completely dismissive of the scientific evidence for climate change identified for the United States was not found in Germany (Metag et al., 2017). In addition to national contexts, Lachapelle et al. (2014) have found a connection between general world-views and how media messages on expert authority are received.

Given the reasonable assumption that scientists know their engagement in decision-making is risky, be it because of the existence of negative issue specific framings of their expertise or because of more generic framings, we could assume that they do not engage in situations of high potential conflict, which is exactly what Besley et al. (2018) have found. While this is also in line with how Rödder and Schäfer interpret their scientists’ engagements, with the scientists described by Väliverronnen we meet another kind of expert who sees the skilful engagement also in highly polarised settings as part of their role as researcher. Correspondingly, Sharman and Howarth’s (2017) climate scientists engaged in debates because of intrinsic motives such as a deeply felt desire to protect nature. These motivations were stronger than the fear of losing scientific legitimacy by engaging in public debate with non-experts who attack their scientific authority. This option, in which public engagement becomes one of the services scientists deliver to society as part of their academic citizenship (Macfarlane, 2007) is largely uncontroversial as long as it is understood as knowledge dissemination. It becomes much more demanding, the more polarised the debate around an issue is and can in the ‘porous and fluid’ spaces of current media landscapes (Bucchi, 2017) quickly turn against the scientist as person. Media framings of expertise and scientific authority in this context become a major problem for the individual scientist as well as for science as institution in society, and can – if sound solutions to problems are ignored – aggravate societal and environmental crises.

Summing up this and the previous part, we have seen that boundary work that establishes what accounts as scientific expertise is as old as scientific expertise itself. Scientific authority in this sense is always contested and precarious. Particularly in science that engages with environmental questions, this boundary work has from early on involved engagement with media as part of their routine work. This engagement, however, risks being subject to framings that are about the core of scientific practice: its claims of authority based on its superiority over other forms of knowledge production. Both in general political polarisation and in specific situations of societal controversy, this risk is particularly high leaving scientific expertise in a weak position. The question arising from this line of reasoning is: How can scientific expertise engage productively in controversies without weakening its very base?

Based on the assumption that trends described here will rather gain in strength than subside, in this article, we have analysed a specific example that presents options of the framing of expert authority asking:

Which print media representations of research-based expertise were present in the expert-led, controversial and ultimately successful introduction of a strict energy standard in Norwegian building regulations?

Based on this case, in which research-based expertise has engaged in a public controversy without obvious damage to expert authority, we pursue two aims. First, we contribute to the discussion of the relation between science communication and the authority of research-based expertise. Second, we add a specific media frame of expertise, which we call ‘home-story’, to the toolbox of scientists who wish to perform their academic citizenship in relation to environmental solutions.

4. Background and method

In 2005, the first Passive House building – a building that in principle was so well insulated that it did not need active heating or cooling, hence ‘passive’ – was built in Norway. Soon after, the principles of Passive House construction caught the attention of building researchers and policy makers, as a cost-efficient solution to achieve greenhouse gas emission reductions (Müller and Berker, 2013). Already in January 2008, the so-called ‘climate agreement’ – a white paper put forward by the government – proposed to make the Passive House standard the technical requirement for new dwellings by 2020, and in June 2009, the government’s Low Energy Committee suggested an even earlier date. However, the focus on Passive Houses, that excluded different approaches from the table of negotiations, ended up in a heated debate targeting the robustness of the Passive House concept. In April 2012, a new white paper ‘Norwegian Climate Policy’ promised that the technical requirements attached to the building code would be sharpened to Passive House level by 2015 and to nearly zero energy building by 2020. The white paper encouraged in this way the early introduction of Passive House as technical requirement, but at the same time concessions were made to the opponents of the Passive House as preferred solution, by specifying that a Passive House ‘level’ should be reached, and not the Passive House ‘standard’. In this way, alternative energy efficient solutions that achieve equal energy performance were still possible. In 2016, new energy demands for new buildings were made mandatory (after a grace period of 12 months) which translated the Passive House ‘level’ into the requirement of not surpassing the annual energy demand of a Passive House.

In 2005, Norway’s political and scientific efforts to reduce building energy consumption through advanced building technologies and concepts trailed other countries, such as Sweden, Germany and Austria. At this time, energy efficiency in Norwegian homes was mainly a matter of water saving shower heads (‘sparedusj’) heavily promoted by the Norwegian state – without lasting effect, and of subsidies for (mostly air-to-air) heat pumps whose track record is doubtful (Halvorsen and Larsen, 2013). That a very ambitious building energy efficiency standard went from zero to law in 11 years is remarkable and is due to a large number of initiatives, both of individuals, environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and public authorities. This transition is even more impressive if one knows that some of the first projects with high energy ambitions in Norway were not exactly successful – which is to be expected when solutions are implemented for the first time. Moreover, a public controversy around making Passive House levels mandatory erupted around 2010, after the plans to do so were published. The 5 years around this controversy are also the main time period where media coverage of low energy and Passive House buildings increased dramatically and which we have studied empirically.

The articles used in our analysis were published in Norwegian newspapers between 2005 and 2012 and collected through the online database Retriever. We selected the services provided by Retriever, which indexes the major Norwegian daily newspapers, regional newspapers and most magazines, journals and periodicals. It contains both online newspapers and printed issues as scans and in full text. We used the online archive to search the articles that address concepts of low energy building in all Norwegian publications indexed by Retriever.

Our search terms were ‘lavenergi bygning’ (‘low energy building’), ‘passivhus’ (‘passive house’), ‘aktivhus’ (‘active house’, which was presented as alternative to passive houses), ‘plussenergihus’ (‘plus energy house’), ‘nullenergihus’ (‘zero energy building’), ‘nullutslippshus’ (‘zero emission building’), and ‘BREEAM’. ¹ These terms were extracted from experts’ reports, policy makers’ strategic plans and political programmes. They cover not only the Norwegian innovation strategy towards more sustainable buildings but also the European trend within the time period analysed. We left out other concepts, such as ‘green building’ or ‘ecological building’ that did not enjoy equally broad political support in Norway and were, thus, not part of the success story analysed here.

For our analysis of the concepts’ treatment in online and printed media, we did not select specific newspapers as we lacked data on actual user engagement with the individual publications that could have been used to weight or select. In the resulting corpus, we found three kinds of publications: large general audience newspapers (such as Dagbladet), specialised publications (such as the publications circulated among professional organisations, e.g. Teknisk Ukeblad) and regional newspapers (e.g. Adresseavisen). In the analysis, we did not differentiate between these types of publications even though they have different reach and audiences. Looking for different options for how expert authority can be framed in situations of societal controversy, we were less interested in distinguishing between different framings in specific media channels or in what they each do to Norwegian society, than in detecting the existence of different salient exemplars of framing and their relation to different images of scientific authority. In this sense, we address framings as networked (Borah, 2018) across the boundaries of specific media channels, which in one case even included a long-running semi-public email exchange between experts that entered the analysed material through a series of articles in different newspapers.

From the initial 2,338 articles, we deleted the articles that were obviously irrelevant and duplicates – which were also found across different newspapers, for example, marginally altered texts from news agencies and press releases. We then manually coded the remaining 1774 articles employing an open coding strategy and grouped the codes in larger categories. The codes developed during the analysis, in this way identifying the topics and actors as they appeared in the articles, but our focus was on ‘the presence or absence of certain keywords, stock phrases, stereotyped images, sources of information and sentences that provide thematically reinforcing clusters of facts or judgments’, which according to Entman’s (1993: 52) frequently quoted description characterises media framings. Coding was conducted by the second author as part of her PhD thesis on sustainable buildings in Norway, who discussed the coding strategy extensively with the first author, who also acted as her PhD supervisor. While the material was in Norwegian, we used codes in English language, and when we present the findings below, we use our own translations.

In a first step, we analysed which actors were featured in the articles, which confirmed the paramount significance of scientific expertise in the media reporting. We then analysed the material through close readings that were aided by our codes using the tool QDA Miner. In this way, the link between the code and the actual text was kept intact at all times so that both authors could go back and forth between these two levels, confirming or adjusting the codes according to our discussions.

5. Findings

Following the research question, we focus in our presentation of observations on the ways that scientific expertise is framed in relation to the new technology and its potential benefits and problems.

6. Discussion

The terms associated with low energy buildings in the time period studied here were in all instances framed by research-based expertise that referred to the future, that involved itself in public controversies, that spoke on behalf of specific projects and that sought the controlled space of ‘kronikk’ to argue for research-based solutions. Based on the material, we do not know how the experts experienced these exposures. However, we are now able to describe the dominant ways in which research-based expertise was framed, answering this article’s research question. In what follows, we discuss what we have learned about the different ways of framing expert authority on behalf of an environmentally friendly solution.

A first role for research-based expertise emerged in the cases of actual implementations of low energy buildings in building projects. The preference particularly among university researchers to choose a specific genre – the ‘kronikk’ – shows that in these cases the wish for control was particularly high, which is in line with Besley et al.’s (2018) findings. Of the three distinct forms of representation that were found, reasoning in the safe space of ‘kronikker’ was the one that was closest to traditional forms of expert-led dissemination of scientific findings. In terms of support for environmental technologies in polarised settings, however, the well-tempered reasoning of experts is in danger of being read as partisan intervention, which in turn would weaken expert authority.

The second group of representations of research-based expertise that was found was closest to the ‘resonances’ and ‘irritations’ described by Rödder and Schäfer (2010): some highly visible low energy building experts engaged actively in a public controversy. We have described the trajectory of this involvement, which started supported by the new porous and fluid media landscapes (Bucchi, 2017) in a semi-public email exchange between experts. It is notable that the experts who were most visible in this controversy and followed its trajectory from its semi-public start to national publicity were associated with applied forms of research. Later, that is, after the period reported on here, these experts moved from applied research to working for industry actors that benefitted from stricter mandatory energy demands in new buildings. This shows how close applied research in the cases described here was to industrial research, in which Mertonian norms are abandoned in favour of specific and proprietary problem solving (Ziman, 1987: 128, 2000: 78). It is a common sentiment in the ‘close community’ of Norwegian building research (Guy and Shove, 2000) that applied researchers like Tor Helge Dokka have performed a key role in the success story of radically reduced energy consumption levels in Norwegian buildings.

Finally, there was what could be called a ‘fictive implementation’ in ‘home stories’ in which experts featured as pioneering users. Here, we encountered experts from both applied and university research as popularisers and interpreters, very much in the sense of Väliverronnen (2001). Experts and their expertise played a key role in almost all newspaper representations of low energy buildings. When they were presented as users, however, they acquired framings that were not related to their primary expertise, which sometimes not even was mentioned. Media representations in these cases transformed them into peers of the audience. They were not presented as experts with distinct knowledge, but as ‘one of us’ transforming low energy buildings from the unknown to the known and familiar. The literature on domestication of technology (Berker et al., 2005; Silverstone and Haddon, 1996) has described how new technologies are embedded in everyday life through a gradual removal of their ‘foreignness’. The ‘home stories’ found here clearly participate in such a domestication of a technology that initially threatens to transform people’s homes. Representing an alternative to cautious engagement and fight, the seductive performance of research-based expertise in ‘home stories’ weakened boundaries between research-based expertise and non-expertise in a distinct way: It enrolled the evidence of an example (the home of the expert) to create common ground between experts and audience around the topic of the good domestic life of the future. In this way, not only the building became something to aspire to but also the life of the experts. Obviously, a carefully crafted home story hides as much as it reveals. As a form of framing of research-based expertise, however, this surprising appropriation of a genre, which is usually reserved for celebrities, was the ideal vehicle to convey that experts trust research to a degree that they are happy to expose themselves and their family to its outcomes.

This study has two important limitations. First, we only studied print media and their online media offers, and second, we did not follow the call for analysing production and reception of media frames (e.g. Hansen, 2011), for instance, by interviewing audience, experts or journalists.

The first limitation introduces a bias towards textual and publicly accessible representation in one-to-many publications. This bias is somewhat moderated by the part of our analysis in which we conducted close readings of articles which included the interpretation of images. Still, like in other instances of studies of public representation of science (e.g. Schäfer, 2012), the bias exists and is reinforced by our mode of analysis.

The second limitation – the focus on the representation instead of the processes that lead to the representation and are influenced by it – does not introduce a bias, but it restricts the scope of our account to leave out what scientists do when they navigate polarised issues. We have no information about how the texts came to be, nor do we have information on how they are read and what they then ‘do’. What remains is a focus on the representations themselves – the low energy buildings and their experts that exist as stories, descriptions, images or conspicuous absences in Norwegian print media between 2005 and 2012. It is reasonable to assume that the frequent use of scientific experts as source of the articles – which in itself represents a framing by frequency – allows journalists to cover a topic that they themselves know little about but which they assume is relevant for their audiences. Such constraints and mechanisms of daily text production, which it has been argued are important drivers for media framing (Gitlin, 1980), are outside the scope of the analysis. Instead, the framings as such are made relevant by the fact that they were part of an instance where environmental expert advice despite considerable societal controversy in fact led to strict and binding laws affecting virtually every Norwegian.

7. Conclusion

The success of Passive House energy performance levels becoming the law for new buildings in Norway depended on many factors. Norway scores consistently high in measures of trust in government (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2022), and regularly comes out at the top in the UNDP (2020) human development index, which includes among many others indicators relating to literacy and education. Measures like these describe an environment which can be expected to provide support for research and its contribution to society. In the specific case of strict energy demands in a new building code, research-based expertise was involved on many levels. Researchers and scientists wrote standards, developed and tested solutions, and tried actively to convince stakeholders and decision makers of the feasibility of radically reduced energy consumption. Based on the newspaper reporting, we found no single, skilful reassertion of expertise when Passive House buildings became object of a societal controversy. However, in the combination of cautious reasoning, fighting and seduction with a division of labour between different kinds of research-based expertise, an array of media framings was present in the material that arguably contributed to this sustainable change. Of these three options, the ‘home story’ kind of seduction stands out as a representation of research-based expertise that has not been described in research on science communication so far. Presentation of hero-scientists in media is by no means new, as for example the annual rituals around the Nobel Prize show (Fahy, 2018). In the instances encountered here, building experts were part of a more humble but still attractive package. This indirect framing of expert authority, which complemented the other forms of representation, should also be possible in other areas of expert-led environmental policy, particularly if it involves changes to everyday practices. It presupposes that experts not only are ready to present themselves as living what they preach but also that they are recognisable as ‘one of us’, that is, the distance between the carriers of research-based expertise and the rest of society does not become impossible to bridge. The potential of this form of representation, thus, is that it presents not only environmental solutions as feasible and trustworthy but also the experts themselves who produce research that leads to these solutions.