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Arguing for climate policy through the linguistic construction of narratives and voices: the case of the South-African green paper “National Climate Change Response”

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Abstract

The purpose of the present paper is to examine a selection of macro- and micro-linguistic 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.

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Notes

  1. Gasper et al. 2011; Giddens 2009; Hulme 2009; Malone 2009; Philander 2009; Zehr 2000.

  2. Bowman et al. 2009; Budescu et al. 2009; Nerlich et al. 2010; Patt and Schrag 2003. See also Climatic Change, issue 108, 2011.

  3. Fløttum 2010; Fløttum and Dahl 2011; Fløttum and Dahl 2012.

  4. Gross 1994.

  5. For relevant media studies, see Boykoff 2011; Eide et al. 2010.

  6. For similar approaches undertaken on other political documents, see Fløttum 2010; Fløttum and Dahl 2011, 2012; Gjerstad 2011.

  7. The Green Paper also comprises the following sections: Section 2, “The South African Climate Change Response Objective”, briefly lays out the dual priority of mitigation and adaptation, while section 3 enumerates six principles which guide the SA effort. Section 4 presents the CC “response strategy” in twelve bullet points. Section 5, “Policy Approaches and Actions”, is by far the most extensive, and covers roughly half of the document’s 41 pages. Section 7 concerns the “Institutional Framework for Coordination”, at different levels, while section 8 discusses “Inputs and resources mobilisation”, i.e. financial, human, technological and information resources. Finally, section 9 examines how the implementation of adaptation and mitigation measures will be monitored, evaluated and reviewed.

  8. For a profound study of the narrative in political contexts, see Jones 2010. For the use of the narrative perspective on political voices in media contexts, see Eide et al. 2010. For a new volume on the narrative in various genres, including climate change discourse, see Gotti (In press).

  9. This theory seeks to describe in detail the semantic complexity of linguistic polyphony. Its analytical apparatus therefore does not lend itself easily to the analysis of larger text segments. However, the ScaPoline also aims to build a bridge to the textual level and thus be complementary to the more discourse- or dialogically-oriented approaches (see Gjerstad 2011). Our analysis is situated within this framework, which leads us to choose a simplified approach, in terms of both the notions involved, and the level of linguistic details that we take into account.

  10. Bres and Nowakowska (2008) show that such virtual question-answer interactions between author and reader can appear through phenomena such as exemplification (which is the case in (13)), reformulation and retroactive argumentation.

Abbreviations

CC:

Climate change

SA:

The Republic of South Africa

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  1. University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Kjersti Fløttum & Øyvind Gjerstad

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  1. Kjersti Fløttum
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  2. Øyvind Gjerstad
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Correspondence to Kjersti Fløttum.

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Fløttum, K., Gjerstad, Ø. Arguing for climate policy through the linguistic construction of narratives and voices: the case of the South-African green paper “National Climate Change Response”. Climatic Change 118, 417–430 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-012-0654-7

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