Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
with a strong emphasis on social constructivism running throughout
(Dryzek, 1995; Hajer, 1995; Bakker, 1999; Keeley and Scoones, 2000;
Richardson and Jensen, 2000). In this view discourses are produced both
through individual activities and institutional practices that rel ect par-
ticular types of knowledge. Discourses are therefore actively produced
through human agencies that undertake certain practices and describe
the world in certain ways. Actors are not, however, seen as acting within
a vacuum. Discourses simultaneously have structuring capabilities. They
provide parameters within which people act and mould the way actors
inl uence the world around them (Hajer, 1995; Keeley and Scoones,
2000).
In Hajer's view, politics is a struggle for discursive hegemony in which
actors struggle to achieve 'discursive closure' by securing support for their
dei nition of reality. There is a signii cant Foucauldian inl uence within
Hajer's work in terms of the regulatory power of discourses as they act to
select appropriate and meaningful utterances and actions within a strug-
gle for hegemony in the policy-making process (Foucault, 1979, 1990;
Buttel, 1997; Rydin, 1998; Richardson and Jensen, 2000). The notion of
'story-lines' is brought in to describe the common adoption of narratives
through which elements from many dif erent spheres are combined to
provide actors with symbolic references that imply a common understand-
ing (Hajer, 1995; Rydin, 1999). Essentially, the assumption is that actors
don't draw on a comprehensive discursive system, instead this is evoked
through story-lines. By uttering a specii c word or phrase, for example,
'global warming', a whole story-line is in ef ect reinvoked. Story-lines can,
in this way, therefore act to dei ne policy problems.
The widespread adoption of a story-line results in the formation of
'discourse coalitions' where groups of actors are drawn to particular
story-lines as they represent common interests (Hajer, 1995; Bakker, 1999;
Rydin, 1999). These actors might not have ever met and might apply dif-
ferent meanings to a story-line, but in the struggle for discursive hegemony
that is assumed to play out within the policy-making process, story-lines
form the 'discursive cement' that keeps the discourse coalition together
by producing 'discursive ai nities'. Particularly strong discursive ai n-
ity is referred to as 'discursive contamination'. The Foucauldian basis of
Hajer's approach views story-lines as playing an essential role in position-
ing actors. They add credence to the claims of certain groups and render
those of other groups less credible. Story-lines therefore act to create social
and moral order within a given domain by serving as devices through
which actors are positioned and ideas of blame, responsibility and urgency
are ascribed.
The social constructivist approach emphasizes the role of institutional
