Narratives in climate change discourse

Abstract

‘Stories’ used to communicate climate change knowledge shape opinions and preferences, and analyzing such narratives can help explain how they are constructed and how they influence us on personal and societal scales. The narrative perspective makes it possible to identify the presence or absence of typical components in a ‘story,’ such as initial situation, complication, reaction(s), resolution, and final situation, and to identify different actors or narrative characters (heroes, villains, victims). This article reviews the notions of narratives and frames, describes narrative analysis generally and more specifically how a text linguistic perspective can benefit from and contribute to the Narrative Policy Framework in narrative analysis. It illustrates how different approaches can be applied as analytical tools to explore the effects of conflicting narratives (frames) on public opinion of and attitudes towards climate change. Applied to various text genres, the analysis identifies different components of the ‘stories,’ at overarching levels of the text as a whole and at microlevels such as sentences. This may have rhetorical implications, as controversial points of view can be hidden from critical assessment through the condensation of narrative components into short expressions. When exposed to conflicting ‘stories,’ people get a diverse picture of climate change, a diversity which may, however, also lead to confusion about how to react. Concerning the narrative characters, recent research indicates that a clear hero role has a large persuasive impact. More experiments testing how people interpret various narratives should be undertaken in an interdisciplinary perspective, combining social science, and linguistic approaches. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e429. doi: 10.1002/wcc.429 This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Communication

Changing the record: Narrative policy analysis and the politics of emissions trading in New Zealand

“…The evidence indicates that NPA offers considerable promise in illuminating the causes of conflict and opportunities for reducing policy polarisation by distinguishing the components of competing arguments, how narrative elements interrelate and use anchoring narratives to cohere storylines, the presence or absence of themes in narratives, and how combatants position themselves in relation to narrative components (Fløttum & Gjerstad, 2017). The evidence indicates that NPA offers considerable promise in illuminating the causes of conflict and opportunities for reducing policy polarisation by distinguishing the components of competing arguments, how narrative elements interrelate and use anchoring narratives to cohere storylines, the presence or absence of themes in narratives, and how combatants position themselves in relation to narrative components (Fløttum & Gjerstad, 2017).…”

“…This article contributes to addressing these concerns by examining how narrative policy analysis can be utilised to understand and mediate climate-policy disputes based on analysis of the New Zealand emissions trading scheme. The evidence indicates that NPA offers considerable promise in illuminating the causes of conflict and opportunities for reducing policy polarisation by distinguishing the components of competing arguments, how narrative elements interrelate and use anchoring narratives to cohere storylines, the presence or absence of themes in narratives, and how combatants position themselves in relation to narrative components (Fløttum & Gjerstad, 2017).…”

“…NPA has been applied to climate adaptation (Paschen & Ison, 2014), landscape change (Thiha, Webb, & Honda, 2007), conservation (Lawton & Rudd, 2014), pesticides (Hirsch, Baxter, & Brown, 2010), sustainable consumption (Berg & Hukkinen, 2011), transportation (van Eeten, 2006, public involvement in environmental decision-making (Hampton, 2009), and fracking (Heikkila, Weible, & Pierce, 2014). However, aside from Roe (1994) and Fløttum and Gjerstad (2017), NPA of climate mitigation policy remains sparse, despite long-running controversies over climate policy in many countries, and the challenges of meeting national emissions reduction commitments agreed under the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.…”

Representation(s) of Developed and Developing Countries in Newspapers’ Coverage of Climate Conferences: A Critical Discourse Analysis

“…The content analyses by McComas & Shanahan (1999), Dispensa & Brulle (2003); the frame analyses by Trumbo (1996), Weingart, Engels, & Pansgrau (2000, Carvalho & Burgess (2005), Carvalho (2007, Boykoff (2008); the discourse analyses by Dryzek (2005), Gillard (2016); the narrative analysis by Fløttum & Gjerstad (2017); the representation analyses by Boykoff (2008), Carvalho & Pereira (2008), Wodak & Meyer (2012); the metaphor analyses by Moser & Dilling (2007), Nerlich, Evans, & Koteyko (2011); the quantitative studies by Boykoff & Boykoff (2004), the corpus-assisted CDA studies by Caillaud, Kalampalikis, & Flick (2012), Grundmann & Krishnamurthy (2010), Wang (2009), to name but a few, have advanced our knowledge about the diversity in research approaches as well as the variety of issues related to climate change. However, to our best knowledge, there is hardly any research into how the ideologies about developed and developing countries' responsibilities for climate change are constructed in the media coverage of the international climate conferences.…”

“…Despite the body of existing literature focusing on the rhetorical devices, discourse strategies, metaphors, and other aspects of discourse on climate change (e.g., Boykoff & Boykoff, 2004;Boykoff & Robers, 2007;Carvalho, 2005Carvalho, , 2007Fløttum & Gjerstad, 2017;Grundmann & Krishnamurthy, 2010;Moser & Dilling, 2007;Nerlich & Koteyko, 2011;Ukonu, Akpan, & Anorue, 2013;Wodak & Meyer, 2012), almost no research has analysed the linguistic realisations of the ideologies of developed and developing countries' responsibilities for climate change as they were (re)constructed in the media's coverage of the COPs. This study, therefore, aimed to (1) analyse the linguistic features in the media discourse and decode the ideologies of developed and developing countries' responsibilities for climate change conveyed via the discourse; and (2) interpret and explain the ideologies of these responsibilities in light of the social, political, and historical context embedding the discourse.…”