Abstract
Climate change is a major issue for agricultural sustainability, and changes in farming practices will be necessary both to reduce emissions and to adapt to a changing climate and to new social expectations. A complicating factor is that the processes of behaviour change are complex and can be slow to occur. Discourse analysis is useful in understanding how the discourses farmers are embedded in contribute to resistance to change. Discourses are particular ways of using language in particular situations. They have wide ranging effects on beliefs, values and behaviours. Interviews were conducted in 2008 with 63 respondents, including 22 apple growers, 29 dairy farmers and 12 agricultural consultants in Tasmania, Australia. In undertaking a discourse analysis of the transcripts of these interviews utilising N-Vivo, four specific discourses were identified as being important in shaping farmers’ perspectives of climate change and sustainability: Money, Earth, Human responsibility and Questioning. Each discourse contributes to resistance to changing behaviour in particular ways. An understanding of these discourses offers a new approach to facilitating behaviour change.
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Acknowledgements
Aysha Fleming is supported by a Top-Up Scholarship from CSIRO’s Climate Adaptation Flagship and from the Climate Futures for Tasmania project. Ethics approval for the project was granted by Tasmanian Social Sciences Human Research Ethics Committee (H10168). Sincere thanks to the many farmers and agricultural industry spokespersons who agreed to be interviewed, to Claire Hiller for help with the analysis and to Shaun Lisson for commenting on drafts.
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Fleming, A., Vanclay, F. (2011). Farmer Responses to Climate Change and Sustainable Agriculture. In: Lichtfouse, E., Hamelin, M., Navarrete, M., Debaeke, P. (eds) Sustainable Agriculture Volume 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0394-0_15
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