Technical reform or radical justice? Environmental discourse in non-governmental organizations

Abstract

Discourses integrate facts, frames, metaphors, and narratives to produce shared understandings of environmental problems, and these shared understandings structure environmental policy and outcomes. Recent scholarship uses new data and quantitative content analysis to identify Environmental Management, Climate Politics, Ecological Modernization, and Environmental Justice as the major discourses among global environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs). Such discourse classification can be intellectually and politically useful, but typologies elide variation. Understanding environmental discourse involves not only classifying major discourses, but also identifying nuances, tensions, and absences behind any typology. This study builds on recent quantitative research with a qualitative, small-N design. We selected two ENGOs identified as extreme representatives of each of the four major discourses, for a total of eight ENGOs, and we conducted qualitative content analysis of ENGO documents as the basis for critical discourse analysis (CDA), examining the principal ideas, frames, and narratives of each discourse and the relations between discourses. Our analysis identifies tensions in Climate Politics between climate justice and multi-stakeholder governance subdiscourses, and divergence in Environmental Management discourse between protection-based and market-based approaches. Linking discourse with organizational structure, we trace tensions in these categories to broader webs of power that transcend typological classifications. Qualitative case studies both deepen and challenge quantitative analyses, underlining the importance of multimethod research and enhancing our understanding of environmental discourse as a key sphere of environmental politics.