The Institutionalisation of Environmentalism: Ecological Discourse and the Second Transformation of the Public Sphere

From Environmentalism to Ecological Discourse

The environmental movement no longer dominates the discourse on the environment. While it was responsible for putting the environment on the public agenda during the 1980s, since then environmentalism has also been appropriated by the movement's opponents.1 Environmental movements no longer have to struggle for a voice in this discourse: the issue has actually become topical. But there are now so many voices that, ironically, it is difficult to be heard. Can environmental movements now survive this marketplace of communication on the environment? What are the conditions for survival in the emerging discourse on the environment? In the discourse on the environment, I will suggest, a new ideology is developing, in competition with the liberalism, socialism and conservatism inherited from the nineteenth century. This new ideology has become a new discursive medium for political conflicts and public debate. Such claims are linked to two further questions. Does this change the public space as the central political institution of modern societies? Does this lead to more democracy or to a new technocracy in the name of environmental protection?

[Page 204]To support such claims and answer such questions an analysis of the logic and dynamic of public discourse on the environment is needed, for public discourse is the focal point around which communication about the environment is tested for its power and legitimacy. Environmental protest actors are forced by this situation to defend their part in the public discourse on the environment they themselves once launched. In order to survive the public discourse marketplace, they must defend their public image. This image is no longer anchored by their role as the only ones to have sensitised the public to environmental concerns. This ‘monopoly’ position is increasingly being replaced by a situation in which competitors emerge in the market of producing and communicating ‘green’ images. Maintaining a public image is bonded to a discourse where interactive strategic moves by competing actors begin to define the discursive field. This is changing the environmental movement's image and forcing it to become a ‘cultural pressure group’ (Statham, 1995). This term defines a new type of collective actor which has to stabilise its social position within the discourse on the environment. Public discourse is therefore a key to understanding and analysing the rise and fall of environmentalism, taking into account the special role protest actors play in it. Public discourse analysis is therefore what is needed to legitimate such claims and give some answers to the questions raised above.

In order to analyse the effects of environmentalism on public discourse and the public sphere it is necessary to use methods such as frame analysis and discourse analysis.2 This is justified on the grounds that the symbolic representation of the environment is the focus of analysis and can be theoretically treated as the specific medium for the reorganisation of the public sphere in advanced modern societies. The key concepts of such a discourse analysis are the concepts of ‘frames’ and ‘symbolic packages’ (Snow et al., 1986; Snow and Benford, 1988, 1992; Gamson and Modigliani, 1989). The basic analytical distinction is between framing devices which are cognitive rule systems, and symbolic packages which organise such framing devices into coherent and consistent frames. The social process transforming framing devices into frames is conceptualised as involving framing strategies; this allows us to construct conceptually the field of symbolic struggle over an issue. This leads us to the idea of a discourse which extends beyond the context of a specific actor and situates framing strategies in the interaction context of collective actors. Within this context the role of protest actors in environmental discourses can be reassessed. This context will be called public space, whereas public discourse is seen as the medium for the reproduction of this public space.

...