Page 47 - Governing Congo Basin Forests in a Changing Climate • Olufunso Somorin

General Introduction and Research Setting
matters (Schön and Rein, 1994, p. xiii). Conceptually, frame and discourse differ
in their ontological and epistemological assumptions (van der Brink and Metze, 1 2006), hence combining them is not popular. In this thesis, we combine the agency-focus framing with structure-focus discourses. Predominantly, ideas,
frames and discourses often find their way into policy programs and, often
implicitly, underpin concrete policy measures. Consequently, discourses
eventually translate into budgets and responsibilities, and into competencies
and rules and they can impact institutions and policy making (Wallace, 2000;
Hajer, 2006).
Many studies on the development of environmental policy (global or national) have revealed how the ‘naming and framing’ of environmental problems and solution options are the result of discursive processes (Jasanoff, 1990; Hajer, 1995; Arts and Leroy, 2006; Humphreys, 2008; Den Besten, 2014). The appreciation of discourse analysis (DA) as an approach for understanding environmental governance is growing within the scientific community. This thesis considers a few justifications for promoting discursive approaches in environmental governance and policymaking. First, Hajer (1995) argues that discourse analysis investigates how a particular framing of issues by actors makes certain elements appear fixed or appropriate while other elements appear problematic. Along the same line of argument, Hajer and Versteeg (2005) report that discourse analysis allows one to see how actors actively make efforts to influence the definition of an issue’s problem and solutions. Second, DA offers an analytical framework to understanding how environmental norms are articulated and contested, and how they shape practices (Behagel, 2012). How environmental norms and values are articulated across scales, and how these norms shape practices, also at various scales, could be argued to be constitutive of the institutional component of environmental governance. Third, Phillips et al. (2004) assert that through interactions, actors exchange discourses, merge into discursive coalitions or even split up into discursive oppositions, depending upon shared or conflicting definitions. It is instructive to see that DA recognizes the importance of actor coalitions in deliberative framing of issues. Environmental governance also recognizes the distinct roles of actors and their networks in promoting certain steering ideologies or instruments over others (Betsill and Bulkeley, 2006; Dellas et al., 2011).
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