A Discourse Analytical Study of Collective Argumentation in the Climate-change Debate: Asian and North American Perspectives

As public and policy debates over global climate-change have intensified in recent years, researchers in a number of academic disciplines have turned to discourse analysis in the Foucauldian tradition (Pennycook, 1994; Sharp & Richardson, 2001; Waitt, 2005) to investigate how arguments are produced collectively within social groups implicated in these debates (Livesey, 2002; Rydin, 2003; Carvalho & Burgess, 2005). To contribute to this line of scholarship, the authors of this proposal have designed a study to examine the broad and complex body of discourse jointly created by public-sector, business, and civic organizations—for example, environmental activist groups, government agencies, and policy think-tanks—as these organizations construct and publicly disseminate arguments regarding the reality, impacts, and remediation of global climate-change. The study is both comparative and longitudinal in design: the research will analyze climate-change arguments produced by a selection of key players in the public-sector, business, and civic organizations in Asia and North America from the year leading up to the United Nations Climate-Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP15) in December 2009, to the proceeding developments in the debate in the following 12 months.In the project, for which this proposal seeks funding, the researchers will examine the arguments on climate-change advanced by the governments of China, Hong Kong, India, Canada, and the U.S. as they seek to position themselves strategically in international negotiations. On one level, the researchers will look at how each of these governments draw on different types of discourse and knowledge—scientific, economic, legal, political, and ethical (Hajer, 2003; Scollon, 2007; Hulme, 2009)—in collectively constructing climate-change arguments. Here Maarten Hajer’s (1995, 2003) 'argumentative discourse analysis' approach, with its concept of the 'discourse coalition', will be a primary theoretical and methodological resource. On a second level, the researchers will employ Bhatia's (2007) concept of 'repositories of experience' to explore the particular constellation of the underlying historical, socio-cultural, and ideological factors that underlie and shape the climate-change argumentation produced by each of the five governments mentioned above.Given the various dimensions of the climate-change argumentation—discursive, socio-political, scientific, legal, technological, and economic—and the investigators' goal of examining and comparing as comprehensively as possible the climate-change debate in the five countries under study, the researchers will employ a multi-perspective framework that draws on a range of disciplinary and international expertise from four sources: City University of Hong Kong's Department of English, School of Energy and Environment, and Department of Public and Social Administration, and the School of Linguistics and Language Studies from Carleton University, Canada.