Climatic Change (2013) 118:417–430 DOI 10.1007/s10584-012-0654-7
Arguing for climate policy through the linguistic construction of narratives and voices: the case of the South-African green paper “National Climate Change Response” Kjersti Fløttum & Øyvind Gjerstad
Received: 16 December 2011 / Accepted: 25 November 2012 / Published online: 12 December 2012 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012
Abstract The purpose of the present paper is to examine a selection of macro- and microlinguistic features (at text and sentence/word level respectively) of the South-African Green Paper “National Climate Change Response” from 2010. Our overarching assumption is that the Green Paper needs to handle competing interests, beliefs and voices in a narrative structure favouring specific courses of action. How does the government portray the complex natural and societal phenomenon of climate change, and how does it take into account the many and often competing national and international views and interests which come into play? Our hypothesis is that the Green Paper constructs a narrative and that it relates to a number of voices other than that of the authors, through linguistic markers of polyphony, such as negation, sentence connectives, adverbs and reported speech. Thus we propose a narrative and polyphonic analysis of the Green Paper, at the level of the text as a whole (macro-level) but also with attention to linguistic constructions of polyphony or “multi-voicedness” (micro-level). We find that the narrative-polyphonic properties of the Green Paper contribute to a strategy for building consensus on climate change policy. The South African government assumes the role of main hero in its own climate change “story”, and there are subtle forms of interaction with different and typically non-identified voices, such as concessive constructions and presuppositions. These results support our overarching interpretation of the whole document as striving to impose a South African consensus on the issue of climate change. Abbreviations CC Climate change SA The Republic of South Africa
K. Fløttum (*) : Ø. Gjerstad University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway e-mail:
[email protected] URL: http://www.uib.no/persons/Kjersti.Flottum Ø. Gjerstad e-mail:
[email protected]
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Climatic Change (2013) 118:417–430
1 Introduction Issues related to the communication of climate change (CC) are hotly debated in numerous settings, where priorities may be very different according to interests and geographical, political, economic, social and cultural contexts.1 The topic has so far given rise to little linguistically oriented research, even though it is obvious that language use is at the heart of this debate,2 characterised by the mixing of scientific, political and all kinds of value-laden voices.3 To better understand this communication, we believe it is crucial to go beyond traditional content analysis and undertake a linguistically based investigation which can identify the different voices and actors that are intertwined in CC discourse. Furthermore CC is a scientifically complex and long-term phenomenon, global in nature, but experienced locally. Thus, to understand how local initiatives take into account scientific knowledge4 and how understandings are influenced by the overarching international debate,5 it is necessary to consider national responses to the global challenges. With this as a backdrop, the purpose of the present paper is to examine a selection of macro- and micro-linguistic features (at text level and sentence/word level respectively) of