Abstract
Forest issues are widely discussed in Bangladeshi print media. Different policy actors (both central and peripheral) participate in the media discussion to express their opinions on and interests in forest issues. The media play an important role in the construction of the social, environmental and economic context of the Bangladeshi forest sector where forest policies are formulated and modified. Nevertheless, while extensive research has been carried out to explain the formation of the environmental discourse, very little research has been done on the specific relationship between the policy outcomes and media discourses. This study tries to determine the influence of media discourse on forest policy changes in Bangladesh. It analyses the media discourse from 1989 to 2009 in the “The Daily Ittefaq”, a reputed Bangladeshi print medium of Bangladesh, along with Bangladeshi forest policy documents from 1989 to 2010. A quantitative, qualitative content analysis, followed by expert interviews of forest policy decision makers was the chosen methodology. The empirical findings of the study reveal that media discourses do not drive the forest policy change in Bangladesh; rather the international concurrent forest discourses trigger symbolic forest policy changes in Bangladesh.
Highlights
Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated developing countries in the world, with only 2.52 million ha of forest
Based on theoretical concepts by Fairclough (1995), Dijk (1985), Real (2009), and Keller (1997) this study considers forest media discourse to be the communication about topics and actors relevant to forest issues present in print media
Expert interviews were carried out with Bangladeshi forest sector policy decision-makers concerning the reasons for change in policy programmes, regarding the changes that occurred in parallel with the media peaks
Summary
Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated developing countries in the world, with only 2.52 million ha of forest. The crisis of forest conservation and management are widely discussed in the national print media discourse (Sadath et al, 2012). This media coverage on forest issues may have some influence over forest policies. “New” digital media is characterized by its openness for discussion on the one hand and by its fragmented information on the other (Kleinschmit, 2010) in comparison it is the strength of the “old media” like newspapers, television or radio aggregating and channelizing information For this reason these media types are still the ones opinion leaders and in particular political decision makers rely on when searching for indicators of the public opinion (Kleinschmit & Krott, 2008). The following chapter will specify the ways in which the research question leads to hypotheses that guide the empirical analysis
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