![Sample our Geography journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5937/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Geography.jpg"})
Abstract
This article examines the continuities and changes in newspaper coverage of urban flood governance in Tabasco, southeastern Mexico, where highly destructive floods have made flood risks a socially sensitive and politically contested public issue. The analysis draws upon post-Foucauldian critical discourse analysis, paying special attention to different actors’ discursive strategies to further their agendas amid the shifting forms of environmental governance. We argue that in recent years, discourses that promote integrated flood governance, based on cultural adaptation and social resilience instead of technological control, have become prominent in the media presentation of flood governance. These discourses endorse neoliberal views of flood governance as an issue of public–private co-governance and civil self-responsibility while being reluctant to consider flood risk from the perspective of the uneven distribution of vulnerabilities or as an issue of human rights.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the residents of Villahermosa and to the representatives of the media, government institutes, private companies and NGOs in Tabasco that co-operated with our research. The editor and the anonymous referees of the Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning provided highly important comments on the previous versions of this article. We would also like to thank Eeva Berglund, Johanna Sumiala and Esa Väliverronen for their valuable comments in different phases of the research. An earlier version of this essay was presented in the Nordic Conference for Environmental Social Science 2013 in Copenhagen. We are grateful for valuable comments from the participants in our working group.
Funding
This article draws on research funded by the Academy of Finland.
Notes
1. There is huge variation in the way the term ‘neoliberalism’ is used in contemporary scholarship. As Ferguson Citation2010, pp. 170–172) points out, it is important to make an analytical distinction between the usage of neoliberalism as arts of governing and neoliberalism as a macroeconomic doctrine and a class-based ideology.
2. The PRI also dominated Mexican national politics from 1929 to 2000. Tabasco has traditionally been a stronghold of the PRI, but in 2013 the left-of-centre Partido de Revolución Democrática (PRD) came to power. It remains to be seen if this political shift will affect flood discourses and policies in Tabasco.
3. All the media excerpts have been translated from Spanish to English by the authors.
4. For similar demands in other emerging economies of the global South, see Caldeira (Citation2008), Didier, Peyroux and Morange (Citation2012) and Harms (Citation2012).