The Politic of Climate Change: The Issue of Ecological Crisis as a Discursive Construct

Theme: Climate Change: Issues and Challenges for Christian Witness

Topic: The Politic Of Climate Change: The Issue of Ecological Crisis as a Discursive Construct.

Introduction: In the last decade or two there has been increasing concern with the threat to the environment caused by economic growth and its more undesirable side-effects. We can say that this ‘concern' has come full circle in this decade. The general consensus seems to be that ecological crisis/environmental crisis has to be faced. At the same time, it also brought to surface the differences in viewpoints of developed and developing countries in their ranking of the two objectives (i.e., Environment versus Development). Having said that, it is not the intention of this paper to deal with ‘development' per se but to look into the political interests that surround this ‘development' and at the same time, to analyse environmental politics.

In this paper an attempt is made to present the present ecological crisis as taking place within social interaction and the politics of which is also evolve from social interaction through conversation. This also implies that ecological crises are often located in a specific place and situation. The paper also briefly touches on the emergence of modern ecological politics in addition the main topic as well as the ideology behind modern economic development.

1. Methodology: In order to analyse the process of environmental politics, the Positioning Theory advanced by Bronwyn Davies and Rom Harre is employed. ‘Positioning' can be understood as the discursive construction of personal narrations. These are used to construct the actions of an individual in a way which is intelligible to himself/herself and others. The view of language in which positioning is to be understood is the immanentist view in which language exists only as concrete occasion of language in use. The contention of the theorists is that the concept helps focus attention on the dynamic aspects of encounters. This aspect of the theory makes it suitable for use in environmental politics as rules, distinctions, or legitimate modes of expression, only have meaning to the extent to which they are taken up. This makes it imperative to examine the specific idea or of the status quo upheld by key actor through discourse. They take conversation (discursive practice) to be a form of social interaction the products of which are also social, such as interpersonal relations. They conceptualises human interaction as exchange of arguments, of contradictory suggestion of how one is to make sense of reality. They argue for an argumentative turn in discourse. In them our daily