Climate change and the socio-ecological crisis

Abstract

Discourse-analytical research on climate change is not only fully justified, but badly needed. Proposing and deciding what this wicked issue is about and what ought to be done about it involve discursive struggles between a range of social actors in science, politics, business, civil society and other domains. Humanity has never been faced with an environmental crisis of the type and scale of climate change. The development of the climate change issue initially took place in the scientific arena as understanding of the greenhouse problem improved. Climate change is also a prime example of what has been termed post-normal science, in which facts are uncertain, values are disputed, stakes are high and decisions are urgent. While climate change raises fundamental social, ethical and value-related matters, the techno-managerial discourses that have come to be hegemonic have transformed it into a narrow and exclusionary language of numbers, models and legal jargon.