Government Discourse Research Articles

Economy or ecology: metaphor use over time in China’s Government Work Reports

Abstract Government attention selectively distributed to various issues in policy-making processes is usually reflected in language, such as metaphors in political discourse. In addition, metaphor change may reveal how conceptualizations of major topics such as economy and ecology evolve over time. After self-building a corpus of China’s 45-year Government Work Reports, this study explores whether there is a difference in attention to topics of economy and ecology over time and investigates the diachronic change of metaphor use on them based on a modified framework for diachronic metaphor change analysis. Results show that attention to economy has been steadily decreasing while attention to ecology has been growing, and that there is an increasing tendency of using more economy and ecology metaphors. Metaphor change on the use of source domains is arranged on a continuum, ranging from constant use (war for economy and ecology, and journey and object for economy), incremental change (living organism and building for economy and ecology, and object for ecology) to fundamental change (building and living organism for ecology). This study may enrich the understanding of diachronic metaphor change by providing a Chinese perspective on the metaphor use in government discourse over time.

Governance Discourses and Image Management Strategies in Large-Scale Urban Development Projects—How a Shifting Context and Actor Relations Influence Planning

Governance processes and image management strategies in large-scale urban development projects are exposed to a range of contextual and internal actor-network-related influences. These relations are complex and, due the long realization time of these projects, cannot be entirely anticipated by management strategies. This research investigates how organizations manage these complexities and uncertainties, what strategies they employ, and how these strategies adapt over time. The research analyzes the empirical case of the Amsterdam Zuidas development through a series of interviews conducted with key stakeholder group representatives and an extensive study of the development visions at different milestones of the development. The study relates these findings to the theoretical framework of Henry Mintzberg on strategy formation and finds that large-scale urban development projects need to employ overlapping strategies and engage in adaptive learning to balance development ambitions with the internal and external influences affecting the strategies.

Representation of History of Ancient Iran in First Pahlavi King Discourse (1925- 1941) to Build a Territorial Identity in the Framework of Governmentality Concept

Within the framework of the governmentality idea, the territorial identity consists of a group of symbols and procedures that are expressed in a particular period of history and given precedence over other symbols. According to this perspective, the national identity is not just a natural phenomenon but rather something that the political establishment builds over time and stabilizes as a communal memory, with the possibility that it will be rebuilt in the future. The goal of the current research is to examine how Iranian territorial identity developed during the First Pahlavi era, from 1925 to 1941, using the theoretical framework of the discourse of governmentality. The findings indicate that the construction of the national identity in the First Pahlavi era has been based on the unifying interpretation of the history of ancient Iran in the direction of solidarity of ethnic groups and social classes. According to this supposition, charismatic leadership was the only thing that could ensure spatial justice between the various ethnic and social groups. Through the nation’s and the territory’s adaptation to space, this element could also stabilize the Iranian people’s territorial identity.

What if? A short commentary on the philosophical bedrock of open government discourse

What if? A short commentary on the philosophical bedrock of open government discourse

Población adulta mayor en la agenda de políticas de Ecuador: Una aproximación desde el neoinstitucionalismo

The challenges of the demographic transition require urgent State actions that meet the needs and demands of the population aged 65 and over. This article addresses the insertion of the problems of the older adult population in the policy agenda of the Ecuadorian State. For this purpose, a qualitative orientation is followed, under the theoretical framework of neoinstitutionalism. For the analysis, a review was made of the trajectory of state action in the recent history of the nation, in which three major facets of the agenda were identified: minimal early insertion, neoliberal opening and recognition of rights. The main conclusion is that it is a symbolic agenda, affected by a sort of institutional ageism, which places the problems of the elderly in a peripheral position in Ecuadorian politics, despite the great normative platform that the country has and a governmental discourse of broad recognition of this group.

The Rising China is Not a ‘Sick Man’ Anymore: Cultural Nationalism in the Xi Jinping Era

ABSTRACT This study explores Chinese cultural nationalism since Xi Jinping became the President, that is, the ways that Xi constructs and politicises culture to serve his nationalist interests. It first situates cultural nationalism in the global context and clarifies its usage in China. Then the article explains how national humiliation, the ‘sick man’ metaphor, the ‘great power’ narrative, and national rejuvenation provide a broader context of understanding Chinese cultural nationalism. Applying summative content analysis to examine the government discourse on its website since Xi Jinping became the president in 2012, this article shows that Xi downplays national humiliation and the ‘sick man’ metaphor while emphasising the ‘great power’ narrative and national rejuvenation. The author argues that this politisation of culture has a strong personal feature of Xi and serves his nationalist purposes in many ways. Finally, this article discusses the rationales and risks of his promotion of such cultural nationalism and the implications of the study.

Epistemic silences in settler‐colonial infrastructure governance literature

AbstractThe existing landscape of infrastructure governance discourses tends to focus on closing “governance gaps” commonly based on fractured and opaque neoliberal planning and delivery processes, privatisation and financialisation issues, and inequitable distribution and undemocratic decision‐making processes. These gaps represent a deeply troubling erosion of infrastructure’s capacity to serve public interests or confront crises of climate injustice. However, the literature rarely confronts the uncomfortable politics of decolonising infrastructure or acknowledges ongoing permutations of settler‐coloniality, implicating infrastructural framings of land, development, property, ownership, and decision‐making power. This paper reflects on the current state of infrastructure governance literature about ongoing settler‐colonial legacies in urban planning and development. Explaining some of the ways unceded Indigenous land has been exploited to facilitate settler state infrastructure development in major Australian cities, we then draw a line to the complicities of contemporary infrastructure governance. This foundation is considered using a systematic method to review infrastructure governance literature and reveal stark gaps in engagement with settler‐coloniality and the politics of decolonisation. In light of these silences, we reflect on disciplinary responsibilities to redress research practices and suggest two reflexive approaches centred on to truth‐telling and deep listening.

The Conflict Between Public Health And Civil Liberties: The Initial UK Government Policy Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic

This paper aims to illustrate the tension between public health and civil liberties through the case study of the UK government’s emergency response to the Covid-19 pandemic. In the area of public health, this tension is predominantly approached by reference to two theories: liberalism and communitarianism. This paper studies these positions and how they are manifested in evidence-based policymaking by combining a study of public health policy with a study of public health ethics. The studies help demonstrate the UK government’s framing of health policy relating to Covid-19 in terms of liberalism and communitarianism. The paper concludes that in the initial UK government response to Covid-19, the government discourse evoked communitarian values and framed its policies as being evidence-led and as prioritising public health. However, the policy measures themselves manifested liberal values: they had the underlying concern of not infringing excessively on civil liberties, and individuals were given autonomy of decision making within the measures that were taken. The article concluded that emergency times require a communitarian response based on preventative action. This article is the first to combine public health policy with public health ethics to demonstrate how values form a key part of decision making.

The language of vaccination campaigns during COVID-19

Understanding what makes communication effective when designing public health messages is of key importance. This applies in particular to vaccination campaigns, which aim to encourage vaccine uptake and respond to...

Fluid-Bonding and Feelings Condoms: Ambivalent Technologies of Queer Safer Sex

There is an abundance of scholarship on knowledge, behaviors, and attitudes related to safer sex technologies and practices, including a growing body of work that analyses the politics of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). However, there is comparatively little research that applies a queer feminist science and technology studies lens to safer sex technologies and practices other than condoms and PrEP. This paper draws on archival research and thirty-two in-depth interviews with queer- and trans-identified adults about how they make sense of safer sex practices and technologies, in particular gloves and dams as barriers. I argue that the social world of queer safer sex is marked by ambivalent technologies. For users and non-users, the main affective investment in using gloves and dams is one of ambivalence as they attempt to make sense of their own bodies, relationships, and communities while navigating discourses around risk and sexual health. Ambivalent technologies are also entangled with discourses of risk, governmentality, and community care. Attending to the social worlds of queer safer sex technologies provides insights that are not attainable through behavioral or epidemiological research.

‘A constant battle’: the interaction of government discourse, poverty and child and family social work practice

ABSTRACT This 2017 study explores social workers’ perspectives on the interaction of UK government discourse, poverty, and social work practice with families since the 2007–08 economic crash. This has continued relevance in today’s economic climate when the number of families in poverty is increasing. This small-scale qualitative study used interviews with social workers undertaking assessments in statutory children and young people’s service in one inner-London borough, analysed using thematic analysis. Conducted for a Social Work Masters dissertation, the study finds social workers hold structural explanations for poverty, and feel themselves to be in conflict with the prevailing individualising poverty discourse. Approaches to financial talk with families risk foreclosing the possibility of open discussion and unintentionally reinforce stigma. The sense of conflict in working within the austerity climate bears an emotional toll on participants.

PERANCANGAN MUSEUM KOTA PONTIANAK

A museum with artistic value and function is a building created to maintain and retell a silent evidence relating to the history of a field, place and nation. This design is intended as an effort to meet the needs of the Pontianak City museum which is also the discourse of the city government in the near future. The design of the Pontianak City Museum was deemed necessary, because as the provincial capital, Pontianak City is a city that has a variety of cultures. Heritage objects that need to be maintained and preserved need a place such as the city museum. The steps taken in designing the Pontianak City Museum were using the 5-step analysis design method by J.C Jones: Idea, Analysis, Synthesis, Evaluation, and Optimization. Data collection techniques in the design of the Pontianak City Museum used primary data obtained from observations and field interviews regarding visiting data and arrangements at the West Kalimantan Provincial Museum as well as secondary additional data collected from books and articles. The result of this design is the building design of the Pontianak City Museum which is included in the landscape of the riverside area with the adaptation of the iconic city monument. Consists of permanent and non-permanent showrooms, auditorium, storage and conservation rooms.

INTERPRETING CHINA’s STRATEGIC DISCOURSE: STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES AND APPROACHES OF THE SILK ROAD ECONOMIC BELT (SREB)

China’s SREB is a geo-strategic program that has been initiated based on Beijing’s judgment on its international and domestic environment. Building the SREB program servers the China grand strategy and satisfies the national demands. The Chinese government declared the ‘community with a shared future for Mankind’ is a national grand strategy and the guiding slogan of its foreign policy. This article interprets China’s governmental discourse on the guiding slogan and Chinese academic efforts to justify the grand strategy. From the Chinese perspective, the construction of the SREB needs to adopt omnidirectional diplomacy, which includes dealing with its relations with great powers, with neighboring nations, and building regional regimes and mechanisms. China’s grand strategy and three approaches sound ideal to some extent, but they demonstrate Chinese real concerns and ideas. In the long-term future, Russia will become more and more significant for China’s SREB program and the grand strategy as a whole.

Unleashing or domesticating the vitality of citizens' initiatives? The paradoxical relationship between governments and citizens' initiatives in the energy transition

In their quest to create vital cities, West European city governments stimulate citizens to self-organize in citizens' initiatives. This trend it accompanied by conflicting scientific and governmental discourses: on the one hand, citizens' initiatives are praised for giving ‘power to the people’, on the other hand, citizens' initiatives are understood as mere ‘tools’ to roll-out government policies. By adopting a critical-constructive perspective, this study sets out to better understand the paradoxical attitudes of local governments toward the potential of CIs for stimulating urban vitality. We do so by uncovering patterns that explain the opening and closing of spaces for citizens to develop their initiatives. To this end, we conducted an in-depth case study into the relation between the local government and citizens initiatives in the energy transition in Rotterdam (the Netherlands). Our findings reveal that a configuration of different explanatory mechanisms leads to the ‘domestication’ of initiatives, which jeopardizes their unique transformative potential that can contribute to the vitality of cities.

Transformative Vision Assessment and 3-D Printing Futures: A New Approach of Technology Assessment to Address Grand Societal Challenges

Grand societal challenges (GSCs) are complex phenomena. With technological innovation being often seen as a solution to them, technology assessment (TA) as problem-oriented research practice is challenged to reflexively address the relationship between GSC and technologies. The complexity involved requires that research and innovation are reflexively embedded into societal dynamics from early on. This is an aspect that contemporary innovation governance discourses in TA, “responsible research and innovation” and “anticipatory governance” highlight. This article elaborates the new TA approach of “transformative vision assessment.” It aims to enhance anticipatory competences, reflexivity, and responsibility of actors in science and society through modulating the visions that influence technological development. The approach responds to the dominant visions in public and scientific discourse that promise a technology-driven reorganization of society, e.g., a fourth industrial revolution, and fail to meet the complexity of GSC. Thus, transformative vision assessment analyses technological visions and modulates visionary discourse through adding sociotechnical complexity and fostering dialogue between science and society. This article uses a case study on scalable three-dimensional (3-D) printing to exemplify how visionary communication can be transformed to better address the complexity of GSC, with the focus of the case on 3-D printing and inclusion and sustainability.

A Literature Review: Cross-Sector Collaboration Arrangements to Deliver Public Services and Goods

Cross-sector collaboration is a growing topic in the discourse of new public governance. This topic is the importance of public managers collaborating with other actors outside the government, such as the private sector and non-profit organizations, in producing and delivering public goods and services. This journal uses a qualitative approach with a literature review method from books and journals that explains the concepts and approaches of cross-sector collaboration. The results of this study show a continuum of cross-sector collaboration approaches. Public managers can choose the approaches such as Government Provision, Contracting-out, Public Private Partnership (PPP), Network, and Independent Public Services Provider (IPSP). Each approach has its character, from the provision, financing, production process, relationship with society, and trust between actors.

How justice shapes transition governance – a discourse analysis of Swedish policy debates

In both policy-making and academia, the realisation is growing that transitions striving for sustainability have to be just to be socially accepted. This insight has given rise to institutionalised approaches to a “just transition” – but also beyond these, justice is a key challenge in the governance of sustainability transitions. In this paper, we examine how justice arguments are being used in national-level discourses of transition governance in Sweden. Analysing 121 policy-related documents from 2019 to 2021, we found that justice was discursively treated in a way that essentially stifled change. Political actors attempted to trump each other’s justice claims rather than to genuinely engage with them. Justice concerns that would not serve re-election, such as solidarity across social boundaries, were almost absent from the material. Based on these findings, we critically explore how justice arguments contribute to politicizing transition governance in particular ways, rendering some policy options impossible.

Categorising anti-asylum Seeker Sentiment through a Regime of Securitisation

ABSTRACT In this paper, we reveal three classes of asylum seeker sentiment in the Australian population. The first group are pro-asylum seekers who think Australians should help refugees, that government agencies should not be turning back boats carrying people seeking asylum, that immigration levels are low, and that current government policy is too tough. The second group are anti-asylum seekers who strongly disagree with helping refugees and people seeking asylum, and support a tough border policy. A third group are pro-government policy but largely sympathetic to refugees and people seeking asylum. We explain the demography and attitudes of these three groups using the theory on border securitisation. The securitisation actions and discourse position people seeking asylum as a threat. This has received widespread public endorsement. This is an empirical reflection of over two decades of influential Australian government discourse of antipathy towards refugees and asylum seekers. Successive Australian governments have tied those seeking asylum who arrive by boat with strict border enforcement policies that target people seeking asylum as a security threat to be repelled from the Australian mainland. This largely negative discourse has supported the merits of tough border controls. However, this discursive campaign has not entirely eradicated sympathy towards refugees and asylum seekers.

Exploring the affective dimension of climate adaptation discourse: Political fantasies in German adaptation policy

Critical adaptation research has documented how climate change adaptation responses largely tend to maintain rather than change the status quo. Building and expanding on these literatures, this article draws on poststructuralist discourse theory, specifically its notion of political fantasy, to explore further how these prevalent techno-managerial approaches to adaptation operate and what it might be that makes them seem appealing. Based on an exploratory, qualitative analysis of how affect (emotions) and fantasy are at play in the German government discourse on adaptation, the article discerns four specific forms that fantasy takes in official documents: (1) fantasies of control and preparedness, (2) fantasies of objectivity and reason, (3) fantasies of a shared sense of place, and (4) fantasies about ‘the good life’. These support the common narrative for how to adapt to climate change in the German context – primarily in a way that does not challenge or change the social order. The findings show that German adaptation policy is sustained and legitimised by fantasmatic elements that seek to speak to a-rational desires and provide important affective anchor points for collective identification, especially those evoking a shared sense of place. In other words, the German adaptation policy discourse is not constructed only at the level of rational argumentation, but very much so on the level of affect. In demonstrating this, the article makes the case for placing political fantasy into the analytical and theoretical vocabulary within critical adaptation research.

Internalisasi Sifat Wara’ dalam Konsumsi Makanan Halal (Telaah Teori Konstruksi Sosial Peter L. Berger)

This paper will reveal the Sufistic dimensions implicit in the government's discourse in enforcing the obligation of halal certification for food products, beverages, slaughtered animals, and slaughter services in 2024. To analyze this paper, the author uses a critical discourse analysis approach by utilizing the theory of Peter L. Berger. The results of the discussion, it can be concluded that in order to create sustainability in the existence of the government discourse, it is necessary to apply three points of Berger's thinking (Externalization, Objectivity, and Internalization) in order to reveal the implied meaning in the discourse. So that the obedience of each individual is not just obeying the rules of the state but is able to absorb the philosophy behind the discourse and make it the subjective consciousness of the individual.