Chenchen Wang

Public understanding is essential to advancing energy transitions. Yet less is known about how energy transition is understood and communicated at the local level in Global South contexts, what barriers emerge in communication practices, and how local actors respond to these constraints. To address these questions, this study focuses on local climate communicators who are actively engaged in frontline energy transition communication. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 28 local climate advocates from 14 Global South countries, the findings show that energy transition is rarely understood as a technocratic pathway toward decarbonization. Instead, it is commonly framed around survival needs, local control, justice concerns, and gendered energy labor. In practice, energy transition communication is shaped by four challenges: linguistic and cognitive barriers; technological breakdowns and project discontinuities that erode trust; deeply embedded cultural meanings associated with energy use; and the systemic exclusion of women from communication and decision-making processes. In response to these constraints, local advocates develop a set of context-specific communication practices, including the use of local languages and visual tools, narrative storytelling, participatory dialogue, the mobilization of trusted community communicators, and the integration of communication with visible and tangible energy actions. While these practices emerge under comparable structural constraints, the meanings and communicative pathways of energy transition diverge across socio-cultural contexts. This study demonstrates how energy transition is continuously negotiated and reconstituted through concerns of survival, trust, and participation, thereby offering empirically grounded insights from the Global South to energy transition and energy communication research.

This autoethnographic paper explores how I, as a woman of color from the Global South, construct, challenge, and reshape my environmental identity. Drawing on personal experiences, the paper traces my journey from an initial gender-neutral understanding of climate action to a gradual realization of the gender and regional inequalities embedded in global climate governance systems, ultimately seeking pathways for self-expression in academic research, policy engagement, and climate communication. This study reveals the dynamic shaping process of environmental identity within discourse structures. The paper not only reflects on the realities faced by women from the Global South in climate action, but also critically examines how the global climate communication system defines the roles of Southern women through a ‘victim-savior’ binary narrative. It explores the transition from being ‘defined’ by others to ‘self-defined’ within this system. In this process, I came to understand that environmental identity is not a static accumulation of individual experiences, but something continuously constructed through dialogue, negotiation, and resistance.

As climate variability intensifies, effective climate risk communication has become a central element of crisis prevention and adaptive governance. However, existing studies on the climate crisis and risk communication remain predominantly informed by Global North perspectives, with limited attention to how Global South countries communicate climate risks. This study addresses this gap through in-depth interviews with 25 climate leaders across 18 Global South countries. Findings reveal three key factors shaping climate risk communication: epistemic disjuncture, discursive inequality, and material constraints. By centering communicators rather than audiences, this study contributes to rethinking climate communication infrastructures toward more equitable, actor-centered perspectives.