Abstract:
This study examines the role of environmental movement organisations in New Zealand during the early years of the 1970s. The study takes a comparative case study approach that examines the way competing discourses were used by these organisations to oppose construction of two hydroelectric power schemes and a nuclear power proposal. Based in frame analysis, the aim of the study is to examine the mobilisation of discourse as an indicator of the ability of environmental concern to politicise the energy policy domain. Research is performed in three areas: identification of the interpretive packages and discursive frames that delineate environmental discourse up to 1976, measurement of these discourses mobilised by environmental movement organisations, and an assessment of the influence this mobilisation had on the politicisation of the energy policy agenda.
The study uses both qualitative and empirical methods. Qualitative research is performed to identify the discursive interpretive packages and frames through a hermeneutic analysis of the literature on the history of the environmental movement. This analysis shows that three historically distinct environmental movements can be identified up to the mid-1970s. These are the conservation, preservation, and political ecology movements whose discourses can be analysed in terms of three culturally resonant frames. The study finds that these interpretive frames - the rational, the moral and the aesthetic - offer similar but competing understandings of the environment. The empirical research is based on three data sets - the submission records presented to three commissions of inquiry held between 1970 and 1976. These samples are used to estimate and compare the mobilisation of positions taken by a diverse range of environmental movement organisations. The results of this analysis suggest that, to varying degrees, these competing discourses help to politicise the energy policy domain. Conservationism was found to be the least mobilised environmental discourse by environmental organisations. Nevertheless, it provided institutional energy policy actors with a rhetorical strategy in an interpretive arena in which resource development claims could be presented and defended.
Environmental organisations were found to be important political actors not just because of their ability to mobilise organisational resources, or take advantage of political opportunities, but as engaged in discursive attempts to set the frames in which public discussion about energy policy issues took place. The study concludes that this political role may ensure the environmental movement remains an effective and non-transitory new political actor able to compete politically with, rather than for, party attention. It is the discursive ability of environmental movement organisations that allows them to compete in an increasingly politicised discursive sphere.