Dialogue of the Deaf? Discursive Struggle of “Rising Chinese Presence” in Africa’s Forests

In the context of environmental governance, policy discussions seen as discourses and discursive practices (Bacchi&Bonham, 2014) of actors can be instrumental for understanding policy process, outcome and underlying power dynamics in politics. These discussions serve as sites of argumentation, where actors justify and legitimize actions, policies, or authorities, thereby creating a sense of legitimacy among the public (Van Leeuwen, 2007; Steffek, 2009), often using specific strategies (Van Assche et al., 2020). This study examines a multilateral policy process that aims to govern global markets for forest commodities with particular attention to the role of China and Chinese actors in Africa’s forests. From timber to carbon, global markets have seen an emerged Chinese presence and continue to strive under abundant and continuously updated governance mechanisms such as EU’s Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs) and European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). Yet, the ever-evolving policy discussions have not seemed to be constructive on the historical patterns that resource extraction in Africa’s forests does not deliver for local communities. Through the lens of critical discourse analysis, this study conducts a Discourse Network Analysis using open-accessed meeting notes of key policy events. The events were collected through keyword searching, expert recommendation, and snowballing using English, Chinese, and French, which resulted in 21 events between 2006-2024. The final data corpus contains notes from 11 events that were assessable. After inductive coding in Atlas.ti, the identified arguments (discourse elements) and discursive strategies were used as codebook in DNA software (Leifeld, 2017) to construct networks. We construct two layers of discourse networks in our data. The first one focuses on how specific elements/issues of are constructed and represented (Benford & Snow, 2000; Leifeld, 2017) within specific aspects of problematization (Bacchi, 2012) such as problem, solution and future outlooks. Our results demonstrate that global extraction patterns persist due to the reinforcement of exploitative market practices through discursive legitimization and coalition building. The second layer focuses on how specific discursive strategies are utilized (Vaara, 2010) such as problem reframing, rationalization of future benefits, and sense of unquestionability. The resulted networks illustrate how different strategies are employed by who and for what, and coalitions of shared strategies among actors potentially rooted in interests, power, ideology or values. This paper hopes to contribute to literature in several ways. First, it identifies specific discourse elements and strategies used and provides nuanced understanding of the less-studied actors from Global South in environmental politics. Second, it explains the persisting pattern of global extraction through lens of legitimacy and coalition building. Third, following scholars from critical discourse analysis it shows the relationship between discourse/knowledge and power relations is manifested both in discourse components and in discursive strategies. This highlights the analytical potential of future work to combine “what is said” as well as “how it is said” in discourse analysis thereby influencing future policy discussions and governance mechanisms for forest commodities.