Discourse and Democracy: The Language of Local Government in Addressing Climate Change
This paper presents a sociolinguistic project that aims to increase societal awareness of the relationship between language and democratic policy-making at a local level. It will focus on climate change policies and investigate how national discourses on these are adapted in local politics in Germany and the UK. As COP26 has shown, broad goals on climate change are largely set at international and national level, whereas the tangible action required to tackle the challenge of climate change is essentially implemented at a local and individual level. We therefore seek to understand how this gap is bridged by actors in local politics by addressing three key problems:
- We need to learn how local climate change discourses are shaped, so that we can develop clear, effective and inclusive communication strategies between local/national governments.
- We need to understand the role of language in local politics better, as essential democratic deliberations and decisions are made at this important, subsidiary level.
- We need to explore how national political discourses are altered when entering local debates, so that we can understand whether local government acts as a mere branch of national government or as an autonomous local self-government.
On a practical level, the project will investigate how national political discourses on climate change are adapted at local government level in different political systems by combining methods of linguistic ethnography and critical discourse analysis. We will analyse textual trajectories of climate change discourses between national and local government in Germany and the UK to gain an understanding of how these discourses are adapted locally.
A comparison of the climate change discourses in local government institutions in Germany and the UK will help to understand the influence of institutional and socio-cultural contexts on the language of local politics.