The role of popular discourse about climate change in disaster preparedness: A critical discourse analysis

Abstract

This paper aims to make a discursive analysis of major climate change issues to show how language framing distorts the knowledge production and ideology construction that can affect the risk perception capacity of the disaster-affected people and their associated roles and actions in disaster preparedness. Utilizing the three main streams of the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) method, the study expands on existing literature and examines twelve face to face ‘information-rich’ interviews from eight disaster-affected coastal villages of Bangladesh. The results show that disaster-affected coastal people lack a clear understanding of the concepts such as ‘climate change’, ‘global warming’, and ‘sea-level rise’ that seem purely scientific and atmospheric to them, and thereby hinder their risk perception capacity. Also, the misconception of ‘disaster’ as an ‘act of God’, ‘resilience’ as ‘financial security only’, and ‘migration’ as the ‘last resort’ restraints their capacity in selecting appropriate strategies related to disaster preparedness. Besides, the representation of coastal people by development workers as ‘helpless’, ‘beneficiary’, or ‘vulnerable’, contributes to constructing a generally accepted ideology that distorts the positive self-concept of coastal people. The distorted self-concept often makes the study population effortless in taking an active role in disaster preparedness. By highlighting the power of language in ideology construction, the study, finally, expects to keep a significant note on appropriate language representation in textual and verbal forms both at the policy and execution level for clear knowledge production about climate change-related issues and perfect characterization of each stakeholder's roles and actions in disaster preparedness.