The joint discourse ‘reflexive sustainable development’ — From weak towards strong sustainable development

The power of environmental indifference. A critical discourse analysis of a collaboration of tourism firms

“…In the normal science phase, as described by Kuhn, it is a necessity for scientific development not to acknowledge what does not fit in; moreover, there is no obligation to justify or clarify the ideology or methodology as it is implicit in the paradigm. This is a good description of a finding in our study, an implicit constraint on considering opposing theories (Neumayer, 2003;Nilsen, 2010). Could it be that conveying the behaviour of neoclassical economic firms as a ruling paradigm, instead of using the more flexible concept discourse, would bring national policy closer to making it compulsory to include issues of environmental sustainability?…”

Competing discourses of energy development: The implications of the Medupi coal-fired power plant in South Africa

“…However, these works frequently focus on the rhetoric of climate science within scientific communities (Porter, 1995;Beck, 2009;Gross, 2006;Koteyko et al, 2010;Nerlich and Koteyko, 2009;more generally Latour, 1987;Collins, 1985;Litfin, 1994), common lines of argument within alternative energy policy discussions (Barry et al, 2008) or sustainable development (Peterson, 1997;Killingsworth and Palmer, 1992;Eastin et al, 2011;Nilsen, 2010;Haque, 2000;Peterson, 1997), political commentary on climate change (Baty et al, 2008), and media representations of climate change (Hamblyn, 2009;Antilla, 2005;Trumbo, 1996;Corfee-Morlot et al, 2007;Doulton and Brown, 2009). They rarely look at how discourses become institutionalized within particular stakeholders or groups of actors, almost always study newspaper or television coverage but not deeper policy briefs and reports, tend to restrict their focus to ''the public'' or ''scientists,'' and predominately look at case studies in Europe or North America.…”

The Three Gorges Project: How sustainable?

“…Buckley (1992) states that an activity is ecologically unsustainable if it creates impacts that (a) interfere with ecosystem processes; and (b) are irreversible for technological or social reasons. At the extreme, there would be no need for an economy if there was no society, and there would be no society if there was no ecosystem (Daily, 1997;Nilsen, 2010). The Venn diagram of humanity's fundamental dependence on the ecosystem, is the economy as a subset of society, which is a subset of the ecosystem.…”