Depoliticizing adaptation: a critical analysis of EU climate adaptation policy

The ways in which climate adaptation is understood in the European Union is examined via three key policy documents: the Strategy on adaptation and the Green and White Papers that preceded it. Drawing on Poststructuralist Discourse Theory, light is shed on the implicit values and assumptions that underpin this recent policy initiative. The findings demonstrate a tension between the declared ambition to act on adaptation and implicit suggestions that nothing really has to change, and the challenge can be addressed by market and technological innovations, and by mainstreaming adaptation into existing sectoral policies. The policy discourse effectively serves to depoliticize choices societies make in response to climate change, presenting adaptation as a non-political issue. Insight into European adaptation discourse enables deeper understanding of recent policy developments and opens up possible entry points for critique.     

No Longer “Bullying the Rhine:” Giving Narrative a Place in Flood Management

In this paper we explore whether today multiple sources of reasoning are being considered in the discourse of flood management. We examine whether stakeholders are considered and served as an audience of partners in managing rivers. To this end, we reviewed sources of reasoning that people living in river basins use for handling floods and mitigating flood risk. We focus on texts dealing with lowland flooding, taking as an example the Rhine River in historical times and in the present. Our review of river management documentation revealed that the scheme that guides engineers', policy makers', and administrators' actions toward rivers is shifting from correcting rivers toward accommodating their needs for flood plains—while still controlling the rivers. In current European river management reports we found elements of narrative side by side with formal scientific fact reporting.     

Reframing Ecotage as Ecoterrorism: News and the Discourse of Fear

This study examines how certain Western institutional discourses reproduce particular human relationships with nature. The analysis focuses upon the institutional setting of the zoo, examining long-standing multi-voiced debates about zoos and exploring the contemporary zoo's conservation discourses and cultural, lexical, and spatial elements of gaze and power. The author contextualizes zoo discourses within Western ideological environmental dialectics, including those of Mastery–Harmony, Othering–Connection, and Exploitation–Idealism. The author relates these discussions to her empirical observations of how certain discursive themes are reproduced and complicated within a leading American zoo. In the tradition of critical research that advocates for social change, the essay concludes with analysis-driven discussion about possibilities for zoos to transform their core configurations to more progressively work as agents for systemic cultural and environmental change.     

Climatic design of vernacular housing in different provinces of China

For 2000 years, the inter-connexion between the specific structure of the Chinese eastern climates and the cultural background have produced remarkable vernacular housing types, both well adapted to the local conditions, and reflecting consistent values and knowledge. Stemming from a similar archetypal form, each house plan is translated through the specificity of the climate and resources of its site. One can think that the value and the diversity of this housing stock is due to the combination of the specific structure of the Chinese eastern climates, which creates the contrast of cold-dry winters and hot-humid summers, with the structure of the Ming t'ang, which contains the opposition of the yin and the yang. These two strong factors imprint a substantial cultural and conceptual unity upon all these housing types. Moreover, on the one hand, the geographical variations and, on the other hand, the local building materials generate a large diversity of housing types, of building techniques and of climatic devices which can be observed all around the country. These lessons could be valuable design guidelines from the past for the future.     

The discursive framework of sustainability in UK food policy: the marginalised environmental dimension

ABSTRACT

In the context of food policy, sustainability functions as a normative principle but also constitutes a highly contested arena. The study presented in this paper establishes how discursive dynamics amongst professionals involved in matters of food distribution, retail, consumption and waste lead to food policy themes being framed as issues of sustainability. Analysing varied UK-based data (trade magazine articles, policy documents and interviews with retail, non-profit and consultancy representatives), three interpretative frames of sustainability are identified: consumer sovereignty, economic rationality and stewardship. Focusing on three themes of food sustainability – organic consumption, protein diversity and waste reduction – it is shown how these interpretative frames constitute the discursive framework relevant to food policy. Based on these findings, it is shown how in the analysed debates environmental concerns are sidelined.     

Policy, personal dispositions and the evaluation of aircraft noise

In this paper, we hypothesize and test the ideas that (1) people’s subjectivity in relation to aircraft noise is shaped by the policy discourse, (2) this results in a limited number of frames towards aircraft noise, (3) the frames inform people how to think and feel about aircraft noise and (4) the distribution of the frames in the population is dependent on structural variables related to the individual. To reveal subjects’ frames of aircraft noise a latent class model is estimated based on survey data gathered among a sample of 250 residents living near Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, a major international airport in the Netherlands. In line with expectations, the results show that there are four evaluative frames of aircraft noise, three of which are strongly linked to the policy discourse. The frames are associated with fitting levels of annoyance response. In turn, frame membership is influenced by two structural variables, namely aircraft noise exposure and noise sensitivity. The results indicate that social factors operate discursively in the explanation of subjective reaction to noise, while psychological factors operate within a traditional cause-and-effect model. The paper concludes with several policy implications.     

Muting the Voice of the Local in the Age of the Global: How Communication Practices Compromised Public Participation in India's Allain Dunhangan Environmental Impact Assessment

Public participation is widely lauded as a way to make environmental decisions more democratic, to improve their quality, and to enhance their legitimacy. Scholars and citizens around the world repeatedly complain, however, that public participation frequently serves primarily as a pro forma exercise to defend predetermined decisions rather than as a meaningful opportunity for the affected public to influence decision-making. These critiques persist despite considerable research suggesting ways to improve the quality of public participation. This essay explores this problem by analyzing citizen involvement in the environmental impact assessment (EIA) processes for the Allain Duhangan hydropower project in northern India. It describes how meaningful public involvement was compromised—despite repeated objections by citizens and independent consultants—by four communication practices: (1) failing to provide adequate access to information; (2) predetermining EIA outcomes by controlling the definition of issues (“definitional hegemony”); (3) privileging scientific/technical discourse; (4) utilizing “consultative” forms of communication that promote one-way flows of information rather than more interactive forms that encourage the joint construction of information and values. This study further argues that these practices persist because they serve as acts of power that privilege dominant actors and interests in the larger socio-political context. This analysis thus suggests that altering communication practices that compromise the quality of public participation may require attending to the interaction between communication practices, relations of power, and the larger socio-political context in which public participation takes place.     

Global environmental assessments: Impact mechanisms

Many impacts of Global Environmental Assessment (GEA) processes on policy processes, and the mechanisms underlying these impacts, remain underappreciated. In this research, we focus on the 5th Global Environment Outlook and the Working Group III contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Based on the perception of GEA process participants, we describe the mechanisms through which assessments create or alter interpersonal interactions which can affect the dissemination of ideas. In particular, we find that GEAs can contribute to framing international coordinative discourses in intergovernmental negotiations. This can be achieved by widening, improving and/or maintaining the active participation of policy actors in the discussions of global environmental risks and by creating the scientific foundations for intergovernmental negotiations. GEAs can also contribute to national coordinative discourses by facilitating reflexive learning amongst participants, empowering them to diffuse and translate global information, and by providing methodological guidance. They can contribute to national communicative discourses by reviving interest and awareness of the urgency to address environmental problems. In this way they provide powerful arguments for governmental societal actors to challenge or strengthen existing national coordinative discourses. Finally, GEAs can improve scientific discourses worldwide by enhancing the capacity of individual researchers to produce and communicate relevant research insights. This is achieved by participating in a learning exercise with an extended community of peers and policy actors. This article is part of a special issue on solution-oriented global environmental assessments.     

Race,Coloniality, and Geo-Body Politics: The Garden as Latin@ Vernacular Discourse

This essay focuses critical attention on one way that The Garden (2008) functions as a Latin@ vernacular discourse that serves to articulate the South Central Farmers to a decolonial politics operating through a kind of “border thinking.” Delinking themselves from the modern-colonial imaginary, I argue, the South Central Farmers enact a geo-body politics of knowledge that is consistently subverted, even by supporters, vis-à-vis modern-colonial rationality. Despite their apparent instrumental failure, the South Central Farmers succeeded in enacting a decolonial challenge, which compels us as scholars to rethink our approach to the Farmers’ specific activism and Latin@ vernacular discourse generally.