A framing analysis of the debate about waste imports in Albania

Abstract

This paper focuses on an essentially environmental and recurrent debate about foreign waste imports in Albania. The aim of this paper is to examine the frames that are used by parties in this debate in order to persuade the public in favour of or against importing foreign waste. The representative actors of the foreign waste debate are politicians and environmental activists. Salient fragments of their speeches were collected and divided into two groups (in favour vs. against). Framing analysis is a widely used methodological approach in social sciences, with various conceptualizations in different research fields, such as in communication studies (Entman 1993), linguistics (Fillmore’s semantic frames; critical discourse analysis frames or schemata), psychology (frames in thought), sociology (frames in communication). The theoretical background section of the paper provides an overview of these main approaches in defining, detecting and extracting frames. In the present paper a linguistic approach is employed to detect and reconstruct frames of the debate. Following the methodological technique applied by Touri and Koteyko (2015), the frame packages extracted are: (a) environmental threat/ damage, (b) Albania’s existing problem with its own waste, (c) the Mafia, (d) the European Union, and (e) economic development. The analysis shows that frames are crucial in understanding how an issue is characterized in persuasive discourse when speakers draw attention to certain aspects of reality by dismissing others.