Social Constructionism and Environmental Discourses

While climate change issues have serious impacts over objective reality, they have to be socially constructed for raising public awareness. The way of socially constructing climate change issues substantially determines the trajectory of climate policies and governance. Thus, this research is developed on the theoretical basis of social constructionism. Following ontological and epistemological discussions, this work focuses on climate change discourses and borrows key elements of discourse coalition approach. Empirically, it maps the climate discourses and discourse networks in the newspapers in China.