Methodological Promises of Discourse Analysis in Philippine Environmental Research

Two situations characterize the state of environmental investigations in the Philippines: (i) the epistemic dominance of the ‘natural sciences’ perspective and (ii) the paucity of local resources (which advocate the use of) or which actually employed qualitative methodologies in framing environmental issues and challenges. As to the latter, the few that are available either have utilized the traditional social sciences methodologies e.g., survey and interviews as used in Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and similar endeavors or innovated by attempting to hybrid several approaches. More disconcerting is the observation that this dearth of literature has had very little understanding as to the epistemological underpinnings of qualitative approaches in general. Thus, the main objective of this paper is to address these situations by demonstrating that environmental issues are, in fact, socially constructed issues and to highlight the utility and relevance of a qualitative approachdiscourse analysis (DA) in making sense of this genre of social issues. Discourse Analysis as a Research Paradigm Discourse analysis (DA) as a research paradigm is both a theoretical framework and a methodological approach (Phillips and Hardy, 2002). It cannot be used as a standalone method detached from its theoretical foundations. In other words, researchers must accept the basic epistemological premises of DA in order to use it as their method of empirical study (Phillips and Jorgensen, 2006). As a theoretical paradigm, DA emphasizes the importance of the use of language as discourse in knowledge production. Such epistemic affordance of language forms part of the central interests of discourse analysis vis-à-vis power (Lehtonen 2000; Carabine, 2001; Hall 1992; Jaworski and Coupland 1999; Lemke 1995). As a methodological approach DA problematizes the relationships of texts– from individually innocent and isolated texts to a collectively powerful discourse (i.e. intertextuality). Text, in this context is no longer defined in limited parameters. DA’s notion of textuality extended the modalities of texts to include gestures, interaction, conversation and anything that can be read and interpreted (Erasga 2010). As such, the variety of discourse analytic approaches depends on which mode of text is used as the unit of analysis. Taken together, DA can be a powerful research tool to analyze social interaction, their intermediaries and contexts. As a theory it assumes that “our knowledge of the world should not be treated as objective knowledge. Reality is only accessible to us through categories, so our knowledge and representations of the world are not reflections of the reality ‘out there,’ but are products of our categorizing the world, or, in discursive analytical terms, products of discourse” (Phillips and Jorgensen 2006; 5; see also Burr 1955: 3; Gergen 1985: 266-7). As a method, it unpacks the discourses in order to reveal the constructed nature of knowledge, which determines power relations amongst social actors engaged in a social interaction. Within the context of political ecology, environmental challenges are power issues. Determinations of what elements of the natural environment are valuable (hence they are referred to as resources) and who are allowed or have been allowed to access these resources are Pacific Asia Inquiry, Volume 3, Number 1, Fall 2012 117 power-based decisions that are discursive in nature (Contreras 2002, Lemke 1995). Logging, waste management, mining, urban planning and the likes are political decisions based on laws and legislations, which are clearly products of discursive processes (negotiations and debates among influential personalities and institutions). Hence, DA can be a powerful tool in analyzing environmental issues as social issues. Notwithstanding, social scientists who are into environmental research still have limited interest in and often hostile reaction to DA. This disdain is understandable for various reasons. First, in the past DA had been a methodology employed almost exclusively in literature, philosophy, english, communications, cultural and critical studies. Only recently that it has gained currency in the social sciences and intimated into their research praxis. Second, as a theory and methodology DA is not easy to understand and “aggravated by the level of abstraction of much academic work on discourse which can be off-putting and seen as not worth the intellectual effort” (Brand and Thomas, 2005: 83). Lastly, the epistemological assumptions of DA run in sharp contrast with the positivistic and physicalist rendition of environmental problems as a purely objective and quantifiable phenomenon (Bird 1997). Phillips and Hardy (2002) suggest that a gamut of topic could be studied from a DA perspective including issues related to the environment. Unfortunately, this cannot be said as the case in the Philippines. The relevance and appreciation of discourse analysis in environmental research could only be demonstrated if there is sufficient and readily available literature that lay down the basics of DA assumptions and methodology vis-à-vis the Philippine context. Ideally, these literature must identify the relevant epistemological assumptions of DA which must be translated into a set of operable research techniques and strategies and to specify the parameters with which such methodological techniques and procedures are most applicable. In order to address the above concerns, the present article identified some basic epistemological assumptions and corresponding theoretical concepts that are peculiar to a type of discourse analysis-textual discourse type. It then translates these epistemological assumptions and theoretical concepts into a set of methodological procedures useful in doing discourse analysis using environmental texts. To achieve the objectives, two research texts are used to concretize the application of the methodological procedures. Cases and Their Approaches Two types of research texts (representing two cases of analysis) were used to demonstrate(i) a research text that employed a genre of discourse analysis as its methodology and (ii) a text to be analyzed using a textual discourse analytic method. In both instances, the relevance of DA as a qualitative research approach is highlighted. For case 1, I selected a research on the interpretation of the social history of rice as the history of environmental awareness in the Philippines (Erasga 2006). In other words, this work highlighted how genealogy was used in constructing a history of environmental consciousness in the Philippine via the biography of rice. Using DA, Erasga read the social history of rice as a parallel history of environmental articulations in the Philippines. This was accomplished by juxtaposing selected texts (i.e. canonical texts) from different historical periods from 1946 to 2005. Although divergent in their content, these canonical texts, taken together (and read as a continuum), inspired the conceptualization of an ideal rice plantthe modern ricea crop that required a package of farming practices and petrochemical inputs which were later blamed for the rapid deterioration of the environment. Methodological Promises of Discourse Analysis 118 For Case 2, I picked the research text on the social construction of solid waste written by Arlen Ancheta (2006). Ancheta conducted a study on the discursive struggle over a component of the built environment by examining the construction of the concept of solid waste. By analyzing written (and verbal accounts) from documents concerning solid waste management, she identified a variety of claims as to how to deal with solid waste articulated by three local claims-makers namely (i) a government agency, (ii) a school-based NGO and (iii) a communitybased NGO. By doing so, solid waste became a socially constructed reality made possible by the claims made about it. For my intents and purposes, I used textual discourse analysis to show that claims made by people are linguistic tactics that could be unpacked to reveal discursive strategies. Within the context of environment, I interpreted their claims as discursive repertoires that reflect their particular conception of the environment and their relations with it. The techniques vary from case to case given their different methodological orientations (see Table 1). In Case 1, for instance, the text selected was archival research that used a discourse analytic methodology called genealogy (hereinafter referred to as genealogy text). Hence the methodological techniques discussed were the actual procedures employed by the researcher himself. Case 2 text was an empirical research on an environmental issue but did not employ a discourse analysis approach (hereinafter referred to as claims-making text). The techniques suggested are designed to read the entire text as an environmental discourse. Pacific Asia Inquiry, Volume 3, Number 1, Fall 2012 119 As to the claims making text, I performed a two-tiered interpretation-that of the author herself (Ancheta) and that of the organizations she studied. In the 1 tier, I assumed that Ancheta was, by focusing on claims as institutional discourses, doing a form of discourse analysis. In the 2 tier, I read Ancheta’s text as object to be analyzed using discourse analysis. The approach is based on the assumption that in interpreting organizational claims as environmental statements, Ancheta was simultaneously offering her own interpretation of what the environment is using her Methodological Promises of Discourse Analysis 120 own reading of the different solid waste claims. In this sense, I was interpreting an interpretation of an interpretation, which is an application of what philosophers describe as mimetic processes. Interestingly, there was an overlapped in the analytical treatment of the cases. It can be noticed that the techniques used in the writing of the genealogy text were of the same types as those employed in reading the claims-making text (i.e., claims as narratives and embed interpretive repertoires). The techniques, notwithstanding, were used to answer different sets of questions as the thrusts of each research were disparate. Let me illustrate. The genealogy text aimed to trace the development of environmental awareness in the Philippines using non-environment texts, hence sought to answer questions regarding origin namely: (i) How do unrelated historical events from 1946-2005 coalesce in such as way that gives birth to environmental articulations? (ii) What are the series of issues debated during each discursive episode and what are the linguistic shifts that helped shaped the construction/framing of these issues into environmental issues? (iii) What are the productive and material effects of the issues identified in each discursive episode? The claims-making text, on the other hand, focused on how an environmental issue (i.e. solid waste) has been claimed, debated and negotiated, hence aimed in providing answers on questions related to divergent accounts of solid waste such as: (i) How is “solid waste” talked out by the different stakeholders including Ancheta herself? (ii) How were these talks (or “claims” in Ancheta’s narrative) assembled in such a way as to create a particular frame of understanding the environment (in general) and the human-environment nexus (in particular)? (iii) What are in the claims, institutional interest and resources that legitimated the reckoning of these environmental accounts as environmental problems? In both cases though, the constitutive and consequential features of discoursehow discourses work to achieve particular effectswere given emphasis, i.e., the construction of environmental consciousness in the genealogy text and the legitimation of a concern as an environmental issue (a discursive effect in the claims-making text). Case 1: The Genealogy Text Synopsis of the Work Although the study suggested an interest on environmental articulation, Erasga’s research was neither focused on any specific environmental problems nor interested in their historical documentation. In this research, the author attempted to retell an “alternative version” of how the environment evolved to become a discursive (or textual) phenomenon in the Philippines. He gazed into the social history of the rice crop and used it as prism to reconstruct the story. Using textual analysis, the research investigated how key documents (i.e. canonical texts) in different historical periods from 1946 to 2005 produced different depictions (or “discourse” in his methodological jargon) of rice. These evolving depictions of rice, translated into a three-fold Pacific Asia Inquiry, Volume 3, Number 1, Fall 2012 121 imagefrom a political grain to a scientific seed to a powerful metaphor of naturewere explored as a parallel history of the problematization of the environment in the Philippines (Fig 1). Epistemological Underpinnings of Interpretive Genealogy The word genealogy refers to origin and evolution. It was so named because its main assumption highlights the importance of historical analysis in understanding the present. However, more than historical analysis, genealogy does not portray the past as a series of events unfolding into the present. It aims at the construction of intelligible trajectories of events, discourses, and practices with neither a determinative source nor an unfolding toward finality (Dean, 1992, p. 217). A Foucauldian genealogy emphasizes a reconceptualization of the current order, rejecting what is tacitly accepted but known to be flawed, and problematizing it in terms of its historical production. Genealogy is a descriptive exercise rather than a search for origins and essences. Hence, Foucault reiterated that genealogy seeks to analyze present systems in the light of their history. The method was based, quite simply, on the historical behavior and thought of humankind to look at a single concept, and to wonder, how would it look to different individuals across different times in the existence of humans, to be an objective examiner studying a particular Methodological Promises of Discourse Analysis 122 phenomena's evolution, to "interview" people of different times via texts and records left by them about an issue. Given the above theoretical nuances, genealogy largely deals with materials that are (i) textual in form, (ii) historical in orientation, and (iii) issue-based. Table 2 presents the analytic concepts that can be used to analyze such materials in terms of data operationalization (i.e. analytic concepts) juxtaposed with the analytic tools intended to capture such data. These tools are not designed to trace the evolution of meaning of an issue. Rather, they are meant to capture the specific change(s) in social definition of a concept. They are sensitive to the movement of the changing definitions and detain the changes in terms of thematic episodes. The discussion was situated within the rice topic of Erasga. Pacific Asia Inquiry, Volume 3, Number 1, Fall 2012