Vulnerability portrayals across climate risk discourses in Bhubaneswar: an evolutionary perspective

Abstract

ABSTRACT Climate governance studies suggest that the way climate risk and vulnerability are conceptualized, defined, and managed has consequences for people and places. In this paper, we analyze how different climate risk discourses and their vulnerability portrayals are constructed and have evolved in Bhubaneswar city in India. We conduct a Critical Discourse Analysis of various climate action plans and policy documents, as well as a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews to interpret their discursive positions on climate issues. Based on our findings, we highlight three main discourses through which risk is constructed – discourses of inevitability, collocation, and intrinsic necessity. The vulnerability portrayals across these discourses are undergoing a transition from a pure outcome vulnerability approach toward a context-based approach, while their framings range from vulnerability to events, places, and social groups. The intertwining of discursive constructions of risk and vulnerability contributes toward constantly forming and re-forming risk and governance objects (and subjects), and the reproduction and resistance to certain forms of knowledge that limit and enable governance responses to climate change at the same time.