Does discourse matter? Discourse analysis in environmental policy making

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Acknowledgement

Five of the six contributions to this Special Issue were originally conceived as keynote speeches at the conference ‘Does Discourse Matter? Power, Discourse and Institutions in the Sustainability Transition’, which brought together 80 international participants from 11–13 July 2003 in Hamburg, Germany. The Editors would like to express their gratitude to the German Federal Ministry of Education and Science which financially supported the conference under the Program “Social-Ecological Research”, FKZ 07NGS08. The Editors would also like to thank Sabine Weiland and Sabine Hoehler for thoughtful discussions on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. In this context, the environmental justice perspective might be regarded as one attempt to drive the environmental discourse reflective on its own pre-assumptions and distributive consequences.

2. That is both explicit linguistic terms and concepts as well as the structure of tacit background knowledge.