Thinking outside the neoliberal box? The discursive potential of national climate legislation for the local governance of climate change

ABSTRACT

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in subnational levels of governance as sites of potential and renewed ambition on climate change. One recent challenge to dominant neoliberal discourses of climate governance is legislation enacted in Wales, which places sustainable development as the central organising principle of local government. Through a Critical Discourse Analysis, supplemented by stakeholder interviews, this research analyses the discursive potential of this legislation in reshaping local governance of climate change. The findings show that the introduction of new legislation can foster the emergence of collaborative structures and collective language, but is limited in its ability to broaden climate governance discourses. This research highlights how seemingly progressive legislation is hampered in its potential through its hybridisation with already-existing neoliberal climate governance discourses and structures. It also demonstrates the importance of discourse analysis in identifying subtle narratives at work in the governance of climate change.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• climate governance
• local governance
• discourse analysis
• neoliberalism

Introduction

While the discourse on climate change is fraught with contestation, its governance is predominantly affected by hegemonic discourses which influence policy-making from the local to the global (Bulkeley and Newell 2010; Fleming et al. 2014). Since the 1980s, climate governance has been dominated by the discourse of neoliberalism, witnessing the relegation of environmental matters to peripheral government concerns, and the techno-managerial treatment of the environment (climate change included) and its subjection to economic objectives (Lohmann 2016a). Despite climate protests around the world, and recent calls for more progressive initiatives such as a Green New Deal in various countries, there is still a long way ahead if we want to implement the urgent and far-reaching changes required to meet the objectives of Paris Agreement. At the same time, initiatives that seek to address climate change are often appropriated by neoliberal discourse under various auspices. This includes – but is not limited to – the labelling of nature as an asset (MacLeod and Emejulu 2014), the reduction of climate action to cost–benefit analyses (Oliver 2012), and the meaning-stretching of phrases such as sustainable development to accommodate economic priorities, in particular endless material growth and consumption (Hajer and Fischer 1999). Consequently, while new discourses of climate governance, such as a more radical discourse of climate justice, have emerged in particular places (e.g. Bäckstrand and Lövbrand 2019), none are currently institutionalised to the same extent as neoliberalism.

One recent challenge to current ways of thinking was enacted in Wales in April 2015 – a new piece of legislation that places sustainable development as the central organising principle of local government. The Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act (hereafter, WBFGA) is the first of its kind: no other government has passed an act that binds the country to a central environmental objective (Davies 2016). The WBFGA has tremendous potential to change the climate change governance discourse and practice in Wales, through its assurance that future generations’ needs should not be compromised by the actions of current generations. The Act’s progressive nature is also recognised by the United Nations, who stated “What Wales is doing today, the world will do tomorrow” (Welsh Government 2015b).

Yet, despite the promise of new narratives that challenge the status quo, the WBFGA does not operate in a vacuum. While novel initiatives have often emerged at subnational levels of governance (Amundsen et al. 2018), they have often been constrained by discourses emanating from other, higher, levels of government (Kythreotis et al. 2020), potentially limiting their transformational potential. To explore the extent to which the WBFGA offers an opportunity to radically reshape governance, we conducted a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of the 19 Well-being Assessments published by local Public Service Boards (PSBs) as part of the Act, tracing evidence of new discourses, alongside elements of pre-existing ones. This is supplemented by interviews with relevant stakeholders, to gain an understanding of how the Act is perceived to challenge dominant discourses and create space for more climate-friendly discourses to emerge. This research thus offers a novel exploration of the extent to which emerging local discourses on climate change are influenced by different manifestations of neoliberal climate governance discourse, and the degree to which these discourses are shaped by the discursive environment in which they are formed. It highlights the difficulties with identifying individual discourses at work in a hybridised discursive environment, and the importance of discourse analysis in developing a critical awareness of subtle narratives at work in the governance of climate change.

The neoliberalisation of climate governance

Despite its very real and visible effects, climate change as a physical phenomenon cannot be abstracted from the way humans construct the society around them (Goodbody 2011). The multiple possible representations of climate change leaves it subject to conflict over appropriate solutions and vulnerable to political exploitation (Janković and Bowman 2014). Emergent policy approaches are a result of discursive negotiations which “favour certain descriptions of reality” (Bäckstrand and Lövbrand 2006) but are made to appear as “common sense” (Holborow 2015). This continual struggle for whose version of “reality” is dominant has been of great significance in framing the climate change debate (Hajer and Versteeg 2005). When they become institutionalised or hegemonic, discourses determine the linguistic frame of reference within which political debate takes place (Fleming et al. 2014), and heavily impact the ways in which climate change is presently governed (Sum 2009). It is therefore important to understand which discourses currently set this frame of reference.

One of the most influential discourses of the last 30 years has been neoliberalism (Chandler and Richmond 2015). How best to understand neoliberalism has, of course, been a major point of discussion in the social sciences for more than two decades. Our goals in this paper lie elsewhere, so rather than develop new understandings, we will review the features identified by others that are most relevant for our purposes. Particularly relevant for our purposes are a set of Foucauldian conceptualisations of neoliberalism, centred around the market imperative as a priority of governance, with deregulation and voluntarism encouraged as methods for freeing up the market and economic growth pursued at all costs (McCarthy 2012; Holborow 2015; Humphreys 2009; Castree 2010; Lohmann 2016b). As a result, social and environmental realms are, as McCarthy (2012, 184) writes, reconfigured

according to economic logics, criteria, and techniques of rule; and a shaping of individuals and institutions in accord with these logics, via both the external imposition and internal cultivation of particular forms of market-referenced rationality in individuals and in politics and culture more generally.

In particular, such a Foucauldian perspective is relevant to our purposes, as it highlights the extent to which neoliberalism is not only an economic project but political rationality that operates throughout society (McCarthy 2012). In the UK, where our work is situated, this has been pursued as a “relatively coherent and mutually reinforcing set of policies” (Jessop 2017, 135). These policies are characterised by privileging monetary benefit over use-values that meet the needs of communities (particularly marginalised ones) and the environment (Jessop 2017).

Here, we are particularly interested in understanding neoliberalism as a discourse. We use the term discourse here to indicate a set of linked understandings that structure the way in which people interpret and interact with the world (Humphreys 2009). Discourses promote accepted practices, establishing the parameters within which politics is conducted. Conceptualising neoliberalism as discourse, thus encapsulates the analytical tension between the extralocal ideology that is represented at larger scales and its hybridisation with other ideas and practices, resulting in muddy and partial forms of neoliberalism found in specific contexts (Springer 2012; Peck 2013). One important aspect of neoliberalism as an ideology is the marketisation of language (Holborow 2015), through which words such as growth, efficiency, competition and consumer become institutionalised in governance storylines (Torfing 2011). This subtle naturalisation of markets in everyday language is essential to the establishment of neoliberalism as a dominant discourse (Massey 2013).

While the impacts of neoliberalism as discourse and practice have been wide-ranging (see, for example, Jessop (2017) for a fuller discussion), here we focus on in its intersection with climate change and climate governance. One of the most fundamental features of this process has been the compartmentalisation of climate change as a special interest (Gillard 2016). This means that environmental issues are often excluded from a frame of the debate centred on economics, granting growth the status of “high politics” while the environment remains relegated to the arena of “low politics” (Cox and Johnson 2010). The combination of cost–benefit perspectives and growth-as-priority rationalities have led to important decisions on climate change mitigation being ignored if they are at odds with liberal governance norms (Humphreys 2009). Such an imbalance has created areas of “climate ungovernance”, where important actions for mitigating climate change are simply not taken because of their effect on economic priorities (Bulkeley and Newell 2010).

Where they are addressed, environmental and climate change policies have often been subsumed by the neoliberal discourse of technical rationality and economic reasoning (Swyngedouw 2010; Gillard 2016), in what has been dubbed the “marketisation of climate governance” (Bulkeley and Newell 2010, 40). Here, climate change is considered an endogenous issue to be solved within the system, where the prospects for radical emissions reductions are quashed by incremental efforts to change individual behaviour stemming from theories of economic rationality (Capstick et al. 2014). The institutionalisation of efficiency and technological progress in climate change discourse has left little space for talk of human rights and justice-based considerations (Burkett 2010), shrinking the moral argument for climate action (Gillard 2016). Neoliberalism has significantly depoliticised the climate debate, relegating climate change to a non-voter issue (Gillard 2016). This means that “hegemonic climate change policies ultimately reinforce processes of de-politicisation and the socio-political status quo rather than … offering a wedge that might contribute to achieving socio-ecologically more egalitarian transformations” (Swyngedouw 2010,214), thus creating a vicious circle between neoliberal discourse and policy approaches.

Discursive complexities across scale

Seeking challenges to the dominance of neoliberal climate governance at the national and international level, many scholars have turned to the local level as a site of potential and renewed ambition on climate change (Strengers 2004; Otto-Zimmermann 2012; Amundsen et al. 2018). Early research from the United Kingdom found that local and regional scales of governance have this potential as they are less subject to the compartmentalisation of climate change that has occurred at the national level (Jenkins 2009) and, as the closest administrative level to the people, the local is also exposed to a greater diversity of perspectives (Strengers 2004). Greater policy diversity can hence emerge from local governments (Mah and Hills 2016), with collective energy-purchasing and car-sharing schemes seen as examples of local governments demonstrating the potential to go beyond expectations and traditional perspectives on climate action (Curran 2010; Khan et al. 2014).

Nonetheless, despite these pockets of action, local authorities are still constrained by the national frameworks and agendas under which they preside (Strengers 2004; Mah and Hills 2016), and there is little evidence to indicate whether local governments can radically and fundamentally challenge dominant discourses. Local authorities are often used as mere vehicles for the implementation of government policy, where weak national commitments to climate action risk undermining local initiatives, and national priorities for growth and prosperity impinge on the local (Hovden and Lindseth 2004). As a result of this downwards influence, neoliberal discourses have been witnessed at the local level, even within initiatives aimed at stepping up climate action. For example, Oliver (2012) found in her critical discourse analysis of local government climate action plans (CAPs) in the United States that the most dominant discourses adhered to the administrative and economic rationalism of neoliberal ideas, with most plans having to demonstrate cost-effectiveness to prove the value of acting on climate change. This study, and others (e.g. Sharp, Daley, and Lynch 2011; Kythreotis et al. 2020), highlight that top–down discursive pressures trump bottom–up transformations.

Going beyond a focus on the absence/presence of neoliberal discourses at sub-national levels, others have focused on how discourses travel between scales of governance. This approach has shown neoliberalism becomes distorted in hybrid forms (McCarthy 2005) through a process also known as recontextualisation (Sum 2009). Such a process is important to study across layers of governance to understand how neoliberalism is still present in areas of climate governance where it might seem to be absent (Castree 2010). For example, while neoliberal discourse is far more dominant and overt at global levels of governance, it is often more subtly embedded at smaller scales (Peck 2013). This is relevant to our purposes as discourse analyses of climate change and climate governance have often focused on the international level (e.g. Bäckstrand and Lövbrand 2019). However, those who have looked at sub-national arenas have shown how discourses might be inadvertently perpetuated by efforts that seem on the surface to run counter to it. For example, McCarthy (2005) has demonstrated that the advent of community forestry in the United States, while seemingly disparate from the discourse of neoliberalism, is enabled through a strong coherence between the language of an “interfering state”, neoliberal attempts at downwards responsibilisation and a faith in civil society.

For those critical of the current, dominant, neoliberal discourse, widening the debate to include alternatives is the first step towards ultimately replacing it (e.g. Springer 2012). As Badiou (2005b cited in Swyngedouw 2010, 614) argues, “a new radical politics must evolve around the construction of great new fictions that create real possibilities for constructing different socio-environmental futures”. For those advocating an alternative path, the aim is thus to prevent the “discursive closure” of marketisation through critical thinking, and to decouple “market” from “society” (Mautner 2010 cited in Holborow 2015). For this to happen, there is a need for new perspectives (Lohmann 2016b), and an awareness of the plurality of interests at play (Fleming et al. 2014). This paper seeks to contribute to this literature by analysing the discursive potential of a seemingly progressive form of sub-national legislation to articulate new ways of thinking around local climate change governance and resist, amongst other discursive barriers, neoliberalisation. The research aims to contribute to the discourse analytical literature by exploring the extent to which local governments can form alternative climate governance discourses while also part of existing national and international governance relations.

The Well-being of future generations (Wales) act

The empirical focus of this research is the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act (WBFGA), passed by the Welsh Assembly in 2015. The Welsh Assembly was established in 1999 and holds devolved powers to govern in a limited number of areas, including health, transport and the environment. Other powers, such as energy policy and fiscal measures, remain reserved to the UK Government.

The WBFGA is a flagship piece of legislation that enshrines sustainable development as the central organising principle of the Welsh Government (Davies 2016). The Act sets out seven well-being goals that must be considered altogether to enhance the well-being of Wales (Table 1). It places a duty on Welsh ministers and public bodies to improve well-being in consideration of the seven well-being goals and in accordance with sustainable development. The WBFGA definition of sustainable development is that proposed by the Brundtland Commission, in that it seeks to ensure that the needs of the present are met without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (Welsh Government 2015a). While the Act is not solely focused on climate change, climate change is integral to its conceptualisation of future well-being, as it “represents the greatest threat to future generations of all” (Welsh National Assembly 2014).

Table 1. The seven well-being goals set out by the WBFGA. Adapted from: Welsh Government (2015a).

Goal	Description of goal
A prosperous Wales	An innovative, productive and low carbon society which recognises the limits of the global environment and therefore uses resources efficiently and proportionally (including acting on climate change); and which develops a skilled and well-educated population in an economy which generates wealth and provides employment opportunities, allowing people to take advantage of the wealth generated through securing decent work.
A resilient Wales	A nation which maintains and enhances a biodiverse natural environment with healthy functioning ecosystems that support social, economic and ecological resilience and the capacity to adapt to change (for example climate change).
A healthier Wales	A society in which people's physical and mental well-being is maximised and in which choices and behaviours that benefit future health are understood.
A more equal Wales	A society that enables people to fulfil their potential no matter what their background or circumstances (including their socio economic background and circumstances).
A Wales of cohesive communities	Attractive, viable, safe and well-connected communities.
A Wales of vibrant culture and thriving Welsh language	A society that promotes and protects culture, heritage and the Welsh language, and which encourages people to participate in the arts, and sports and recreation.
A globally responsible Wales	A nation which, when doing anything to improve the economic, social, environmental and cultural well-being of Wales, takes account of whether doing such a thing may make a positive contribution to global well-being and the capacity to adapt to change (for example climate change).

What is particularly relevant to our purposes here is the multi-scalar nature of the Act. While the legislation was passed by the Welsh Assembly, it is to be implemented at the local level. The Act establishes a Public Service Board for each of the local authorities in Wales, tasked with undertaking a Well-being Assessment (WBA) of their local area. Subsequently, they are required to develop a well-being plan, which aims to improve economic, social, cultural, and environmental wellbeing based on the findings of the WBA.

From a discursive perspective, the Act holds both tremendous potential and cause for hesitation. In enshrining sustainable development and well-being as central organising principles of local government, the WBFGA takes several steps to ensuring climate change and sustainability are more integrated in decision-making and rejecting the principle of growth-as-priority. Indeed, previous studies point out that, in theory, the WBFGA is “a unique piece of legislation” that should have the potential to enable new forms of autonomous and anticipatory climate governance from local and devolved authorities “in a bottom-up way” (Kythreotis et al. 2020, 11). However, there are reasons to be sceptical. In the previous section, we discussed previous research which found that top–down neoliberal discursive pressures often trump regional and local efforts for transformation, a process which has also been observed in Wales. For example, Jenkins (2009) points out that pre-existing local government discourse in Wales has tended towards equating sustainable development with jobs and employment, and concepts of well-being have struggled to expand beyond the health agenda (Jenkins 2009). Given the risk of narrow conceptions of well-being, short-term priorities and economic goals (Davies 2017; Kythreotis et al. 2020). We therefore seek to explore whether this (perceived) unique piece of legislation can to live up to its disruptive potential.

Methodology

Our research methodology consists of two steps: a Critical Discourse Analysis applied to key documents related to the WBFGA to identify the ways in which neoliberal discourses are reinforced or challenged in these documents, and interviews with officials involved in implementing the Act to explore their understandings of these emergent discourses. We will explain these two steps in more detail below.

First, we conducted a Critical Discourse Analysis of the Well-being Assessments (WBAs) that each of the 19 PSBs produced (these can be found at Welsh Government 2018). Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a particularly useful methodology to study neoliberalism, as it focuses the gaze on the link between discourse and action or the legitimation of actions through selective language (Cruickshank 2012). Additionally, CDA can reveal how neoliberal discourse has led to the appearance of economic terminology within non-economic texts through an ambivalent recontextualisation of dominant ideas (Fairclough 2009, 2013). For example, in the environmental field, CDA has been employed to explore how economic narratives permeate local climate action plans (Oliver 2012), and how environmental issues at national, regional and local scales are reframed by neoliberal narratives (Colombo and Porcu 2014).

With regards to the WBFGA’s effect on local climate discourse, CDA can help show how national and international frameworks enable and prevent new discourses from being created (see also Fairclough 2009). In analysing the texts relating to the Act, a CDA does not focus on the implementation of these new laws but of the discourses behind them (Oliver 2012). The focus is thus on how they problematise existing situations and construe desirable futures premised upon certain values and concerns (Fairclough 2013).

The goal of this CDA was thus to explore the extent to which the WBFGA, by reframing wellbeing (of future generations) as the goal of both national and local public bodies, has and can shift the discursive landscape around climate governance and problematise the neoliberal assumptions that often subtly underpin the frameworks and choices of local governments. We applied this approach to the Well-being Assessment as they provide a comparable set of local documents that express how the PSBs consider well-being, what it means to them, and how they measure it. Due to the observation that texts often draw on more than one discourse (Janks 1997), the analysis includes several government documents relating to the WBFGA to assist in tracing the development of any hybrid discourses that emerged in the WBAs. The coding schedule for this part of our analysis can be found in Table 2.

Table 2. Coding schedule used for identifying discourses in Well-being assessments.

Coding schedule (Well-being assessments)
	Identification of neoliberal characteristics	Discursive potential
Ideas	Naturalisation of economic growth	Awareness of plurality
	Climate managerialism	Other ways of seeing the environment (e.g. focus on transcendental qualities)
	Compartmentalism
	Emphasis on private sector participation	Environment seen as a necessity
	Inter-local competition and branding	Connecting climate change & well-being
	Climate change as just one of many issues	Recognition of trade-offs
Language	Investment	Collective language, for example: future generations, young people, community, wider world, collaboration and involvement
	Assets
	Capital
	Consumer	Holistic & integrated language, for example: environment integral to society, at the heart of well-being and underpinning life
	Efficiency
	Innovation
	Entrepreneur(ial)

This CDA subsequently informed our second step, during which we conducted 15 interviews to explore the feelings of officials involved in the Act in their resistance to, and understanding of, particular discourses (see also Cruickshank 2012). The subjects of the interviews were, broadly speaking, individuals who had experience in operating at the local government level and/or had relation to the new governance structures under the WBFGA (Table 3).

Table 3. Interviewee codes.

Number	PSB	Details of involvement
I1	National Involvement	Involved in development of act
I2	Pembrokeshire	Brought in to serve on PSB
I3	Swansea	Brought in to serve on PSB
I4	Torfaen	Local Authority
I5	Ceredigion	Brought in to serve on PSB
I6	Monmouthshire	Local Authority
I7	Ceredigion	Local Authority
I8	Cwm Taf	Local Authority
I9	National Involvement	Involved in development of act
I10	Newport	Local Authority
I11	Bridgend	Local Authority
I12	Pembrokeshire	Local Authority
I13	Merthyr Tydfil	Local Authority
I14	Bridgend	Brought in to serve on PSB
I15	Pembrokeshire	Brought in to serve on PSB

It is important to note here that the data from the interviews and the data from the documents tell two related but separate stories, both of equal and complementary worth. The documents chosen, as naturally occurring data, were analysed for traces and patterns of discourses within them. The data from the interviews, in contrast, were not explored for underlying discourses but as sources of deliberate conversation on the opinions of the interviewees towards the discourses in question. This subtle but important difference is a clarification that while the documents were analysed through CDA as empirical data, the interviews were treated as purposive and analysed through thematic analysis. This is not to deny data arising from interviews as somehow more reflective of reality but that the purpose behind them on this occasion is to gain an understanding of how the subject in question (i.e. the discursive potential of the WBFGA) was interpreted by the interviewee (Cruickshank 2012), and not to gain insight into interviewees’ own ways of articulating reality.

Our analysis of the data reflects this two-step approach. First, as explained above, we developed a coding manual, primarily based on the academic literature, in order to conduct the CDA of key documents. As the interviews were conducted with the purpose of exploring interviewees' experiences and perceptions of the Act and its future potential, we developed a new set of codes corresponding to emerging patterns in the data explicitly regarding the interviewees' experiences with the Act (i.e. a thematic approach).

The discursive potential of the well-being of future generations act

The Act’s discursive potential

The data collected shows an initial indication that the WBFGA has already had an effect on the discourse of climate change in Welsh local governance. When assessing the Act’s discursive potential. Through our analysis of the WBAs, we found that several had now begun to frame the environment as a critical function for a healthy society and, consequently a central focus of government. For example, the Ceredigion WBA referred to “the fundamental role played by the environment in supporting society”, while Monmouthshire argued that “natural resources and ecosystems are at the heart of everything we do”. Many were stronger, arguing that climate change is “at the heart of the Act and integral to all the well-being goals” (Torfaen) and “the most important issue on the social, economic and political agenda” (Vale of Glamorgan). When asked, most interviewees agreed that the WBFGA had brought climate change and the environment significantly further up the local government agenda, with PSBs required to reprioritise and deliver (I9 and I13). They argued that this reprioritisation was a direct result of the discursive framing of the Act, which had shifted the environment from a “nice to have” to a vital factor of well-being (I10). From a discursive perspective, this meant that climate change was now seen with more frequency and urgency than beforehand, reversing a compartmentalisation that had led to the environment featuring little among board priorities (I3; I5; I6; and I12).

Texts from many of the WBAs demonstrated a broadened understanding of the different ways the environment can be seen and perceived by PSBs, challenging previously narrow conceptions. Neath Port Talbot wrote of “the sheer range of what we receive from the environment – food, recreation and spiritual well-being”, while Cwm Taf stated that environmental wellbeing “includes the home we live in, the street we live on and the people around us”. Some PSBs explored more unconventional approaches to viewing the environment, such as deep place and the Oxfam donut model (Torfaen). In turn, our interviews indicated that this recognition of the broader value of the environment ensured many PSBs found it easier to connect the risks climate change poses to it, assisted by the interconnectedness of each of the well-being goals. With the Act requiring PSBs to maximise their contribution to each of the goals, interviewees mentioned that the usual short-termism of local government was now being challenged, with the “jobs-at-any-cost” mentality being shifted to what jobs are healthy for the environment (I9 and I15). One interviewee stated that “if the Act does what it’s meant to then most of the measures that are GDP focussed will not be fit for purpose” (I9). These challenges to conventional thinking demonstrate the ability of a more holistic discourse to draw connections, understand trade-offs and recognise singular ways of understanding well-being as outdated.

Ultimately, with a focus on well-being, and on future generations, the Act – both in the language of the WBAs and in the perceptions of the interviewees – seemed to be driving a more collective and collaborative approach to safeguarding the environment. Interviewees argued this change in discourse was reinforced by new collaborative and holistic structures emerging at the local government level. The equal partnership nature of the PSBs meant that traditional periphery issues such as the environment could be brought up and treated with the same level of attention as core services (I11), while traditional senior roles were increasingly being taken up by non-traditional partners (I2). The requirement for PSBs to look to the long-term over the short-term and the shift towards being collaborative and preventative would embed the environment into almost all local government decisions (I7 and I9). One interviewee articulated that “when you think about it in those terms, climate change obviously trickles up to the surface” (I5). In addition, many aspects of the process had been challenged for being not in line with the Act, demonstrating its usefulness as a tool for accountability (I8). From this angle, the structures put in place by the WBFGA were more conducive to centralising climate change in local government discourse, and addressing it with a holistic perspective that sees tackling climate change as essential to improving well-being.

Limitations to the discursive potential

Despite encouraging words from both the WBAs and the interviewees, there was also evidence of limitations to the discursive change brought about by the WBFGA. Our reading of the WBAs indicates that uncertainty around what the “well-being of future generations” implied to public services meant that ideas often coalesced around traditional discourses, for example with WBA references to future generations speaking more about Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) than environmental threats such as climate change. Meanwhile, words like resilience (WBFGA Goal 2) were often used out of context in the WBAs, from references to economic growth (Cwm Taf) to communities resisting extremism (Blaenau Gwent). Sections on environmental wellbeing predominantly related to traditional, immediate and visible environmental problems such as dog fouling, fly tipping, littering and other typical focus areas of local government (Pembrokeshire; Bridgend). This is indicative of the challenge expressed by many of our interviewees, in translating high-level goals meaningfully and with clarity at a local level. Furthermore, these challenges in understanding how to measure wellbeing led to many PSBs reverting to default economics-dominated discourses to demonstrate the environment’s worth (I6; I12; and I14), and the conceptual broadness of goals such as being “resilient” or “globally responsible” resulted in them being redefined to fit existing practices or simply ignored. As a result, it was argued that the way wellbeing was framed in the final assessments was quite narrow (limited to a small set of subject areas) and shallow (still largely siloed) (I1).

When asked why the discourse on climate change was perhaps not as strong as it could be, interviewees suggested psychological barriers as a possible answer. Due to the way benefits are perceived, the inability to put an economic cost on environmental wellbeing was seen to be a difficulty in getting people to make the connection (I2). In particular, humans struggle to think in the long term, with problems too big for them deemed disempowering (I3). This was particularly the case with climate change, which PSBs tended to find overwhelming and complex, and perceived themselves to have very little control over (I8). Indeed, one interviewee observed that it had been very difficult to get people to care about an issue they are not necessarily affected by (I12), and another argued that only after people’s critical needs are met, they can start thinking more collectively (I13).

Interviewees also identified bureaucratic restraints such as political cycles and austerity on councils as physical limits to discursive change. One interviewee claimed that information was still siloed into departments, preventing the most basic connections from being made (I1). Another referred to the short-term focus of the current political administration as being counterproductive to the long term environmental goals of the WBFGA – “it’s a five year system and it’s always going to be about what happens now … climate change and the environment are always going to suffer as a result of that” (I2). In addition, many saw this period of austerity as a difficult time to implement the Act’s requirements (I3 and I12), as it was observed that as the council shrinks in size, climate change won’t actually be higher up the agenda at all (I11). Ceredigion wrote that “with austerity the state will have to retreat to just delivering expenditure on core services”, while Flintshire made this explicit when stating that the “Westminster government wants to see a move away from the presumption that the state is the default provider of services”. These statements were some of the clearest in acceptance of neoliberal discourse, whose role in creating these barriers will be discussed in the next section.

What are the most prevalent forms of neoliberal discourse?

Further exploration of the data collected revealed that neoliberal discourse may have played a significant role in constructing these barriers to discursive change. One of the most transparent influences of neoliberal discourse was the economic focus still present in both the WBAs and the reflections of the interviewees. Firstly, this is evident in the WBAs through the reduction of the climate to an object to be managed and sustained for economic benefit. The environment as a net contributor to the economy was often referred to in the WBAs as a reason for its maintenance and enhancement, and cost–benefit language was frequently employed to justify environmental protection. For example, Torfaen stated that the cost of keeping the natural environment attractive is low compared to the money coming from businesses and visitors attracted to it, and acting now to protect the environment will be cheaper than in the future. Elsewhere, Cwm Taf state that “developing a low carbon economy can enable sustainable economic growth”, whereas Swansea’s WBA speaks of how the “Swansea bay city region deal has the potential to realise our investment plans and accelerate economic growth”.

Secondly, in line with the neoliberal characteristics of inter-local competition, many WBAs referred to the need to be attractive to investors and visitors. This came associated with an identifiable brand – “how do we position Wrexham as the centre, more attractive to companies and prospective investors, as a sub-regional economy giving it great potential for growth, an environment that is identifiable as being ‘Wrexham’” (Wrexham). Local areas expressed concern about being uncompetitive – “Cardiff’s total economic output (Gross Value Added) compares poorly to other major British cities”, and Caerphilly being “one of the least competitive authorities in the UK”. This language led to a need to focus on “growth opportunities” (Newport) and “opportunities to compete in a new global market” (Blaenau Gwent). As identified by the literature, these are characteristic of neoliberal discourse that can result in the reduction of the environment as an asset to be utilised in the pursuit of greater competitiveness and economic growth.

Interviewees reflected that this discursive focus on economic growth is not surprising, considering that the traditional focus of local government has revolved around economic regeneration, local development, infrastructure investment and GDP as a central measure of economic prosperity. Here, they indicated that national level discourses that sideline climate change at the national level in the name of economic growth have been translated down into local level, with authorities were constantly under pressure to build new infrastructure to provide short term economic benefits (I3).

In conclusion, there is evidence within the results that, while the WBFGA presents significant opportunities to open up the discourse around climate change governance, a number of barriers limit this potential. The next section will explore the implications of this.

Discussion – de/re-neoliberalising climate discourse?

From analysing the data collected by the CDA, it is clear that there is evidence the WBFGA played a role in re-opening the previously narrow discourse on climate change in Welsh local governance. One of the most significant achievements of the Act from a discursive perspective was that people have begun to ask questions about traditionally conceived notions of well-being, being critical of jobs-at-any-cost mentalities and recognising the fundamental role the environment plays in a narrative of well-being. Given that the power of common sense discourses is in their ability to obscure debate with a singular narrative, merely reopening such debate for discussion is value in itself for the purpose of re-democratising environmental discourse (Feindt and Oels 2005; Fairclough 2013). These observations strengthen the argument that a much more reflexive type of governance – characterised by joined-up structures and an ability to be self-critical, flexible, and adaptable – is more able to broaden the discourse around long-term issues such as climate change (Meadowcroft and Steurer 2013; Netherwood, Flynn, and Lang 2017).

Despite these positive developments, there was also strong evidence of structural barriers that weakened the language on climate change in the WBAs and lowered the expectations of interviewees involved in implementing the Act. Many interviewees expressed concerns that the effects of climate change are neglected in the WBAs due to a rigid short-term perspective, and were clear about the resistance a broadened climate discourse faces from existing silos and departmental structures in their own authority. This is not the only study to find that local authorities frequently suffer from departmental fragmentation (Mah and Hills 2016), and are limited by political will, allocation of resources and tight regulation, which often restrains their solutions from being outside of the status quo (Berthou and Ebbesen 2016). The observations support previous research, which found that sustainable development – and particularly its intergenerational element – is a concept often hindered by bureaucracy and short-term politics (Meadowcroft and Steurer 2013; Williams 2006; Feindt and Netherwood 2011).

The presence of neoliberal discourse in supporting and recreating these structural barriers was far subtler. It can be difficult to know where neoliberalism is present and where it is not, as the process of neoliberalisation is open-ended (Peck 2013). This is particularly the case at the local level, where the diffusion of neoliberal ideas has been messy and uneven (Castree 2010). Subtle forms range from labelling anything from people to forests as assets (MacLeod and Emejulu 2014), to the local government argument for streamlining and focussing on core services – an approach that aligns with neoliberal trends towards deregulation (Colombo and Porcu 2014). These discriminate yet pervasive characteristics of neoliberal discourse exemplify Pierre Bordieu’s reference to neoliberalism as a “strong discourse” for its particular linguistic influence over political arenas to areas of social life (Peck 2006).

Indeed, the WBFGA has shown to be no exception to this. Despite no overt reference to neoliberalism within the WBAs, neoliberal doctrine – however obscure – has been prominent within its discourse. Of the elements making up neoliberal discourse, perhaps the most overt in the WBAs was the language of competitiveness, which was often used to justify environmental protection. This use of the environment to contribute to other local economic objectives has also been documented in Danish municipality climate plans, where climate mitigation has been seen, amongst other things, as a branding opportunity (Berthou and Ebbesen 2016). Such competitive language is significantly reflective of Springer’s “state form” of neoliberalism at a subnational scale (Springer 2012), supporting the idea that neoliberalism also encourages towns and cities to compete with one another (Massey 2013).

Slightly more hidden within the WBAs were elements of “eco-managerialism”, a key aspect of neoliberal discourse (Luke 1999). Discursively, this is an inhibiting factor to the development of alternatives because eco-managerialism is largely about “seeking to disassemble, recombine and subject the natural environment to the needs of contemporary economic strategies” (Hajer and Fischer 1999, 11). While the presence of this language was not overtly stated in the WBAs, the environment was frequently referred to in terms of “maximising the gains”, and “enhancing, restoring and maintaining the services it provides” (Caerphilly; Blaneau Gwent; Vale of Glamorgan). Furthermore, the national government’s “Taking Wales Forwards” objectives under the WBFGA involved a goal to “manage, use and enhance Wales’ natural resources to support long-term wellbeing” (Welsh Government 2016). As referred to before, not only does this diminish the social aspects of the climate debate but it also renders the ideologies of capitalist institutions as abstract, technical laws of governing (Holborow 2015). That this language was partially evident in the WBAs demonstrates that the PSBs have not yet been able to mark a clean break from traditional discursive frames.

The final way in which neoliberal doctrine pervades the WBFGA is through the unquestioned assumption in many WBAs that environmental and economic objectives will always be mutually compatible, and that growth must continually be pursued so long as it is “green”. Under this discourse, growth becomes unquestioned even within environmental policy, a fundamental oxymoron due to the biophysical limits in place on the planet (Castree 2010). The lack of attention to these contradictions has largely been the result of an absence of open debate over what the causes of climate change are (Feindt and Oels 2005), with current meanings of sustainable development giving the illusion that everything is achievable (Dryzek 1997 cited in Hajer and Fischer 1999). Indeed, such “discursive closure”, as Hajer (1995) has called it, is arguably the result of a culture of progress with “an insistent reliance on the idea that problems, once recognised and publicly acknowledged, can be handled by the institutions of science, technology, and management. Lost to this approach is the deeper cultural critique of modern society itself” (Hajer and Fischer 1999, 4). While the inability to be self-critical cannot just be attributable to neoliberal discourse, the oxymoronic language of “sustainable growth” within the WBAs – for the city regions in particular – is a clear example of the strength of neoliberal discourse in turning the focus away from the causes of social and environmental problems, and towards addressing their effects (Charkiewicz 2004).

Combining the findings of both the bureaucratic limitations to the discursive potential of the WBFGA and the potential role that neoliberal discourse played in contributing to these barriers, it is possible to stipulate that a hybrid discourse has emerged through the blending of neoliberal ideas, the novel language of the WBFGA and the pre-existing discourse in local government. A hybrid discourse is a result of the “inextricable interweaving in practice of analytically separable policy trends” (McCarthy 2005, 998). The case for discursive hybridity rests on the assumption that nowhere in the world does a blank slate exist, so any new discourse must hybridise with whatever discourses are already in place (Castree 2010). Indeed, priorities for sustainable development in Wales have always revolved around jobs and employment (Jenkins 2009), and even in the drafting process of the WBFGA, these remained priorities due to the perceived unpopularity of top lining the environment in a climate of austerity (Stech 2013). As a result, when the WBFGA was brought into law, the more holistic, future-oriented discourse of the Act inevitably hybridised with the pre-existing discourse of bureaucracy, economic prioritisation and narrow conceptions of the meaning of well-being.

Furthermore, any policy initiative that is formed is also done so in a broader neoliberal environment of governance, and thus there is a need to be careful about “the ways in which neoliberalism is constituted in and through reconfigurations of environmental governance” (McCarthy 2005, 1007). This is not a matter of putting every instance of local neoliberalism in the broader category of neoliberalism but about understanding how neoliberal discourse is jointly constituted with established and unestablished ideas such as technocratic expertise and policy norms (Peck 2013). In the case of the WBFGA, its discourse has been hybridised with the neoliberalised discursive context it has been introduced into, which itself is already a hybrid of neoliberal discourse and the local government discourse of bureaucracy that was present beforehand. This might go some way to explaining the susceptibility of the WBFGA’s discourse to neoliberalisation, and to the pre-existing (though not in any way separate) discourse of bureaucracy, short-termism and political prioritisation. Such a finding highlights the importance of discourse analysis in exposing the hybridity of discourses that co-constitute one another but may not be apparent to those using it on the surface (Hajer and Versteeg 2005).

Conclusion

In this research, we have analysed the discursive potential of the Well-being for Future Generations (Wales) Act. The WBFGA offers an interesting case because it is the first act of its kind to bind a country to the central objective of sustainable development, consequently placing the environment and climate change much higher up the governance agenda and referring to them as integral to the well-being of current and future generations. We have shown that despite the ambitious promise of new forms of legislation, their interaction with existing systems of governance and hegemonic discourses limits the discursive broadening of climate governance and is preventing such legislation from achieving its full discursive potential.

The findings show that the introduction of new policies – in this case, the WBFGA – can foster the emergence of collaborative structures and collective language at the local level. In turn, the resulting local narratives can indeed challenge dominant discourses, both neoliberal assumptions and the traditional notions of climate change governance in local government. However, there is also a considerable presence of neoliberal discourse in the language of the WBAs and in the processes so far. While it is difficult to argue against practical and fiscal discipline, the implications for the local governance of climate change are that it has again been unwittingly relegated to the semantic sphere of the economy through the seemingly official language of cost–benefit analysis and techno-managerial solutions. This argument goes some way towards explaining why the climate change discourse in the findings largely reflected neoliberal ideas and yet the phrase was barely mentioned by either the WBAs or the interviewees. It reinforces the suggestion that hegemonic discourses operate at an almost unconscious level in governance storylines (Torfing 2011), and can easily be normalised and rendered invisible (Fleming et al. 2014).

Through the empirical lens of the WBFGA, this research brought together two (often) disparate pieces of literature – the social constructivist literature on discourses and the more empirically-centred literature on local climate change governance. This has not been without difficulties, however. The exploration for neoliberal discourse as apparent within the WBFGA using CDA was a challenge. Within both the WBAs and the interviews, it was challenging to untangle the material realities of bureaucracy and austerity and the extent to which they were “neoliberal”, however much these material practices had been associated with neoliberal discourse in the literature (Colombo and Porcu 2014; Fairclough 2013). One of the primary issues this eludes to is the difficulties faced when attempting to deduce the contribution a particular discourse has made to a certain practice, such as neoliberalism’s impact on the practice of conducting the WBAs.

What is interesting for future research is to identify how this process of hybridisation and recontextualisation takes place across space and time. Countries including Hungary, Finland, Germany, Scotland and New Zealand already have their own initiatives focussing on future generations, while NGOs and academics in other countries such as the UK and Sri Lanka are having discussions around introducing such initiatives. Furthermore, at the time this research was conducted, the implementation of the WBFGA was still in the early stages. A longitudinal study would be able to highlight how neoliberal discourses are increasingly integrated or challenged, how and by whom. It would also enable further insights into how these discourses are translated into policies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).