Voices of Vulnerability: The Reconfiguration of Policy Discourses

Discourse analysis is a way to make sense of the process of solidifying, or of the biases in the way public problems are addressed. This article aims to make sense of the reconfigurations of discourses by relating the way in which climate change is conceived to the institutional practices by means of which meaning is given, illuminating the way in which discursive dominance is produced. It traces the reconfiguration of climate change discourse paying particular attention to the influence of the institutional molds in which this discourse was produced. Examining the period of intensive climate change discourse from the 1980s to 2010, this article distinguishes three phases: the phase in which climate rose to the political agenda, the classical-modernist response to 'first get the facts right', the mature years of the IPCC and UNFCCC as fully-fledged global science-policy interface producing successive policy results.