Communicative Action

Communicative action refers to a type of interaction between individual or collective actors (e.g., governments and nongovernmental organizations), characterized by a deliberative or argumentative exchange. Communicative action has entered governance debates as a means to explain dynamics and outcomes that contradict expectations of actors, who are commonly assumed to be predominantly oriented toward maximizing their egocentric interests. A core hypothesis is that communicative action can foster collective learning processes that can ultimately transform conflicting interpretations of an issue into areas of mutual understanding. Thus, research on this subject may determine whether the problem-solving capacity and legitimacy of governance systems may be increased.

Communication action refers to communication oriented toward establishing a consensual understanding, which does not imply that actors must be altruistically motivated to achieve consensus. Instead, communicative acts are seen as inherently consensus oriented because they entail validity claims that essentially call on others to confirm or challenge them. Such validity claims are generally of three kinds: objective truth (e.g., evidence proves global warming threat), the appropriateness of normative criteria (e.g., something should be done to address global warming), and a communicator's truthfulness (e.g., I am not disguising my real motives). Moreover, actors are thought to intuitively know what would invalidate their (often implicit) claims. This feature of communicative action is critical because it allows claims to be challenged on a speaker's own implicit terms. Not all communication falls into this category. For example, a state ceasing diplomatic relations with another does not call for deliberation. However, publicly communicating that a country risks invasion because it has secret weapons banned by international law raises the three kinds of validity claims previously mentioned (i.e., weapons exist, legal norm applies, speaker's statement is truthful).

The communicative action concept is generally linked, or even merged, with the concept of communicative rationality. While communicative acts may be ignored, increasing communicative action among actors is thought to evince a collective learning dynamic that follows the logic of communicative rationality, which acts to filter out flawed reasoning and expand the pool of shared beliefs.

The inherently noncoercive nature of this communicative logic does not require strategic goals and tactics to be entirely absent. For example, certain firms or governments may enter a discussion only in response to outside legal pressure. Even if they merely begin by denying the existence of a problem (e.g., corruption), either out of a genuine conviction or because they want to conceal something, their denial includes an implicit suggestion that certain evidence could potentially invalidate their denial. If strong evidence is produced, then they may or may not be persuaded. But pressure likely exists for them to appear at least concerned that their previous denial has been seriously challenged.

This example highlights some lingering questions about the relationship between governance and this hypothesized communicative logic. Which factors encourage communicative action or pressure actors to care if their claims are discredited? How can governance systems tap into this deliberative potential without becoming flooded by input or dominated by the best-funded perspectives?