The Discourse of Environmental Conflicts: How Stakeholders Construct Their Claims, Their Opponents and Themselves

Abstract

Using a discourse approach to framing, we investigate the extent to which stakeholder groups cohere or differ in their framing of three environmental disputes. The results help us to better understand the nature of homogeneous or heterogeneous stakeholder groups and how their sensemaking patterns facilitate effective conflict management. Our approach offers a more fine-grained analysis of stakeholder framing than scholars have previously used. Our results reveal four distinct discourses at play in these conflicts: the traditional business discourse, an oppositional discourse expressed by environmentalists, a balance discourse espoused primarily by government agency officials, and a fourth, freedom discourse, espoused by other stakeholders. We show how stakeholders that espouse these different discourses construct their interactions to preserve their group identities, which, in turn, perpetuates the conflict. We consider how shifts in what constitutes the dominant discourse for a given dispute can move the disputes toward resolution. Finally, the results suggest that scholars can receive greater insights into environmental conflicts through examining the patterns of frames held by disputants rather than concentrating solely on interests or positions that stakeholders share. By analyzing environmental disputes from a framing perspective, we illuminate how framing contributes to the intractability of inter-organizational conflict. Overall, we conclude that discourse analysis of framing provides an instructive approach to management research and contributes to the ongoing discussion of discursive struggle and change within and among organizations.