Environmental Engineering Reference
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which policy is contingent on social constructions of reality and the way
the expression of policy issues will both be the result of power relations,
ideological contestations and political conl ict, and actively shape such
relations, contestations and conl icts. Advocates of discourse analysis
claim that it is crucial to examine and explain how language is used in
such contexts in order to reveal aspects of social and political processes
that were previously obscured or misunderstood. Furthermore, discourse
analysis can serve to illuminate the way in which entrenched policy posi-
tions are to some extent sustained by the way in which policy problems are
linguistically framed (Scrase and Ockwell, 2009).
More specii cally, three distinct benei ts of policy discourse analysis can
be identii ed (Rydin, 2005). First, it enables one to understand dif erent
policy actors' perspectives and their self-presentation within the policy
process. These will be expressed through the language that policy actors
use and can help explain how dif erent actors operate within policy con-
texts. An actor may use specii c forms of language that are particularly
appropriate and ef ective in a given policy context; by contrast, the weak
situation of community representatives at formal hearings and inquiries
is often at least partly due to their lack of command of the appropri-
ate formal language. There are also strong links between the identity of
actors and their use of language; identity is constructed through linguistic
means. This has implications for how actors are categorized and treated
in policy contexts; what it is to be actor X in a certain policy situation is
discursively constructed. The argument here is that language is not just
a medium of interaction but is also constitutive of actors, their identities
and their values. Actors' values, therefore, cannot be seen in terms of their
hard-wired preferences but rather as generated through debate, discus-
sion and enunciation of those values (DeLuca, 1999). Furthermore, this is
not an individual undertaking but is inherently social, occurring through
interactions between actors.
Second, the attention to language allows consideration of how actors'
power is at least in part discursive. Interaction between actors then becomes
not just a series of encounters in which interests are balanced against or
do battle with each other on the basis of their material resources. Rather
it points to how the language that actors actively or unconsciously use in
their communications with others is involved in persuasion and ration-
alization and inl uences the dynamics of policy debates. This is not just a
matter of individual actors' capacity in using language. Linkages with pre-
vailing societal discourses will also be important in supporting a particular
actor's case. The reliance on various forms of economic rationality are a
case in point, where the discursive reliance on a widely used and referenced
argument about the importance of economic growth carries weight quite
