Discourse Pre-figuring Policy Failure and Policy Success? Applying Critical Policy Discourse Analysis to UK Policies on Environmental Sustainability

Analysis of how policy makers and legislators represent social actors in texts can give valuable insight into their conceptualisation of objects of governance. Shifts in models of governance have been closely theorised in cultural political economy; Jessop and Sum (2013), for example, suggest that governance change is achieved - in part - through the adoption of economic ‘imaginaries’ - simplified discourses (patterns of language use) which re-describe and re-conceptualise objects of governance. However, methods of critically analysing these discourses has been underdeveloped; this paper contributes to the development of such an analytical method. Drawing on analytical methods of critical discourse policy analysis (Mulderrig, Montessori and Farrelly, 2019, Farrelly, 2019), critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003, van Leeuwen, 2008) and the theoretical perspective of cultural political economy (Sum and Jessop, 2013), this paper presents a framework for analysing ‘concept formations’ in the shaping of policy and political imaginaries and objects of governance. It takes steps toward an interpretive framework for evaluating their adequacy. The paper presents a comparative analysis of several UK policies relating to environmental sustainability which, in some quarters, are seen as having been successful: - The Climate Change Act (2008) which set binding targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the UK - The Plastic Bag Charge (2015) - which introduced a 5p charge on single-use plastic bags in England - Feed-in Tariffs (FITs) (2010) - which provided financial incentives for households and businesses to generate renewable energy - The Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) (2011) - which provided financial incentives for households and businesses to switch to renewable heating systems The paper first demonstrates that these policies can only be seen as having been successful in their own terms - they set limit targets which become measures of success. The paper argues that only the plastic bag charge is more clearly a success in wider terms. In each case, though, the paper shows the extent to which the discursive conceptualisation of each policy is congruent with the stated aim of that policy. The paper concludes that analysis of ‘concept formations’ gives a powerful method for uncovering implicit conceptualisation of objects of governance and a potential route to diagnosing nascent policy problems and successes.