Session G5 (speed talks) 16:30 - 17:30 Wednesday, 13th June, 2018 Room 4.204 Track Track 5 - Civil society, culture and social movements

16:30 - 16:40

23 Exploring fertile discoursive spaces. A corpus-based study of transition discourses in four civil society’s proposals

Giuseppe Feola1,2, Sylvia Jaworska2 1Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands. 2University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom

Abstract

The civil society has emerged as an important actor in sustainability transitions. Although grassroots movements increasingly make ‘transition’ their label, it cannot be assumed that grassroots movements necessarily share the same or even compatible discourses. Differences, similarities and complementarities among discourses influence the ability of the civil society to come together in effective manners, to establish discourse coalitions, and thus to partake, or even lead sustainability transitions. Therefore, it is important to understand their discourses with the aim to make complementarities among different transformation discourses fertile towards a global socio-ecological transition to sustainability. This study uses a novel corpus-based methodology to comparatively analyse the discourses in four civil society sustainability transition proposals developed by four grassroots organizations: Great Transition Initiative, New Economics Foundation, Common Transition Network and Transition Towns Network. In contrast to previous mostly qualitative research, the corpus-based discourse study approach utilized in this study combines quantitative corpus-linguistic procedures with qualitative discourse-analytical techniques. While this approach is increasingly used to explore discourse in large collections of textual data, to our knowledge, this approach has not yet been used to study transition discourses. The main questions which this research addresses are:

1. To what extent and in what ways do these sustainability transition discourses converge or diverge? 2. Which discourses could possibly act as fertile discursive bridges that could be used to build collaboration and/or co-learning in the civil society?

We find that there is substantial discursive convergence among the four proposals in mainly three ways, namely (i) the identification of the economy as an object and an entry point for transition, (ii) the framing of the economy as embedded in the socio-ecological system, and (iii) the attribution of agency to grassroots movements for transitions from the bottom-up. Such convergence defines a common discursive space for the four civil society organizations, and possibly for others not considered in this study. This study suggests that there are also crucial differences among the discourses, which include the emphasis on the environmental crisis, the global versus local framing, and the varying emphasis on capitalism and the economic system, Differences should not be blurred or underplayed, but explored in the effort to establish collaboration, crosspollination and/or co-learning across civil society organizations. This study also proposes that the divergences can be ascribed to either differences in paradigm, or to the function of the proposal for a specific organization, particularly whether the proposal is mostly devoted to analysis and critique, or is oriented to motivate concrete actions. This distinction, which has been overlooked in earlier studies, implies that the efforts of collaboration, cross-pollination and/or co-learning need to consider, but can also build upon, not only the convergence or complementarity of paradigms but also on the divergences and strategic uses of discourse in sustainability transitions. Finally, this study suggests a set of questions around three potentially fertile, but also problematic discursive bridges, namely politics, emotions, and place. These three themes are critical in that they reveal political barriers, diverse subjectivities and epistemologies of sustainability tran