How discourses influence environmental science, policy and practice
Discourses shape oft -contested interactions across space and time, and articulate knowledge and power. In terms of high-stakes arenas of environmental science, policy and practice, certain 'ways of knowing' can become entrenched or solidified, and consequently institutional activities and actors get tethered to storylines that surround them. These can manifest in a number of ways, such as policy-relevant research statements and decisions.
A number of research projects by JM researchers examine these interactions. For instance:
- Goodman, M., Boykoff, M. and Evered, K. (eds) 'Contentious Geographies: Environment, Meaning, Scale' Ashgate Publishing (in press 2007) (and particularly Chapter 3: Boykoff, M. 'Fight Semantic Drift?! U.S. Mass Media Coverage of Anthropogenic Climate Change')
- Boykoff, M., Frame, D. and Randalls, S. 'Stabilize This! How the discourse of 'climate stabilization' became and remains entrenched in climate science-policy/practice interactions' under review
Lead researchers:
Research partners:
- Sam Randalls, Department of Geography, University College London
- Michael K. Goodman, Department of Geography, Kings College London
- Kyle Evered, Department of Geography, Michigan State University
Contentious Geographies Book
This edited volume is concerned with 'subtle' contestations over not just resources but the very environments and landscapes that sustain people's livelihoods and lifestyles. While controversial spaces and geographies have manifested over time through pressing human-environment challenges, this book explores the intimate relationships, both actively material and discursive, that comprise 'hotspots' around the globe.
The chapters—from conceptual approaches to empirical cases—work to capture the nuanced processes that shape discursive representations and material manifestations of pressing environmental concerns of the current historical moment. Specifically under interrogation are the multiple ways that knowledge and epistemic framings shape and are shaped by environmental conflicts and environments in the making, embody power through discursive and technological regimes, and translate into political economic and ecological outcomes.
Chapters examine spaces of conflict-ridden environments and governance—and of its contested social and material constructions—through media, science, policy and technology. Key is how these forms of environmental governance perform 'enclosures' of the material and discursive kind that bound environments, landscapes and resources for some and open them up for others. Winners and losers, of the natural and human variety, can be created with the stroke of a pen (and now keyboard) as much as through the blade of a bulldozer or the barrel of a gun.
Stabilize this! Project
The dominant framing of climate science and policy today revolves around the concept of 'climate stabilization'. This has been described as the alteration of emissions profiles to adjust future concentrations of greenhouse gases and temperature at some specified point. While many factors contributed to the entrenchment of this concept in the 1980s, this project reasons that this 'stabilization' discourse is problematic.
Drawing upon emerging climate science, this project suggests that stabilization and its connected partner climate sensitivity have led to insufficient policy inferences relating to the range of uncertainties, the weak relevance of equilibrium for today's policy and the idea that there is a magical threshold of 'dangerous anthropogenic interference'. However, we point out that stabilization developed as an economic policy as much as a climate science policy, with its roots in natural resource economics, population limits to growth and equilibrium ecology.
That this discourse is situated in debates from that era is unsurprising; but that it has remained relatively free of critical scrutiny can be associated with fears of unsettling often-tenuous political processes taking place at multiple scales. Nonetheless, with this historical trajectory in mind, we argue that it is time to re-assess the concept of stabilization and to explicitly move to more productive ways of framing action to address anthropogenic climate change. The implications of this historical analysis is that stabilization is a problematic way of conceptualizing climate policy and that new approaches need to be found that focus on short to medium term decarbonization goals.