Reimagining community and communication as transformative capacities for climate and environmental action: The role of talanoa for enabling change

ABSTRACT Much attention has been placed on generating transformative capacities to manage the environmental and climate crisis. At the local level, this is often about empowering communities with the capacity and knowledge to become more sustainable. Yet achieving this transformation has been challenging. Drawing on Byung-Chul Han's critique on late modernity and employing a self-experiential methodology grounded in an Indigenous form of cultural dialogue known as talanoa, this perspective argues that reimagining how we communicate can contribute to recreating an enduring sense of community to animate effective climate and environmental action. Highlighting these links between community and communication provide an important contribution to the ecological turn in intercultural communication studies and has the potential to influence how we ought to live with today's complex polycrises. This requires moving from empowering communities to community empowerment.