Depoliticizing And Humanizing Climate Change Through A Public Health Frame: A Case Study Of Ontario’s Climate Change Policy Discourse

The relevance of a public health frame in supporting the climate change impact awareness and consensus on actions is well recognized but largely underutilized. Overall, supporting public health’s capacity in climate change has focused on projecting and highlighting public health impacts due to climate change, identifying public health policy responses, and emphasizing public health role. The integration of the public health perspective in the discussion and communication of climate change ideas has remained elusive.<div>Climate change is also a complex social problem whose construction of meaning and actions is rooted in institutionalized language, discourse, and human interactions. Thus, understanding of the construction of the relevance of public health in climate change discourse is central to understanding the impediments of the public health frame application. Unfortunately, this has been a neglected area of research, and the dissertation responded to that gap. </div><div>To delineate the impediments of the public health frame, the study used the case study of the context of climate change policy discourse in the Province of Ontario (Canada) to examine the construction of public health relevance, the extent of public health frame application, and the systematic influences in the discourse.</div><div>The analysis of policy documents and key informant interviews revealed that the public health frame remained isolated from the primary focus of Ontario’s climate change policy discourse. Instead, Ontario’s historically and socially constructed climate change as an economic and political issue solved through market strategies and technological innovations forwarded by political, bureaucratic, and technological elites. The focus substantiated the types of structures and processes of policies and decisions, the relevant actors and knowledge, and the values supporting the discursive, normative, and strategic practices. Ontario’s focus also limited the utilization of the public health frame and the supporting capacities through the misalignment between public health and the provincial strategic actions, the lack of recognition and integration of public health roles, mandate and structures, and limited public health capacity building initiatives.</div><div>Therefore, public health framing as an endpoint of climate change discourse requires legitimation of public health in the underlying institutional structures for, and governance of, climate change. </div>

Depoliticizing And Humanizing Climate Change Through A Public Health Frame: A Case Study Of Ontario’s Climate Change Policy Discourse

The relevance of a public health frame in supporting the climate change impact awareness and consensus on actions is well recognized but largely underutilized. Overall, supporting public health’s capacity in climate change has focused on projecting and highlighting public health impacts due to climate change, identifying public health policy responses, and emphasizing public health role. The integration of the public health perspective in the discussion and communication of climate change ideas has remained elusive.<div>Climate change is also a complex social problem whose construction of meaning and actions is rooted in institutionalized language, discourse, and human interactions. Thus, understanding of the construction of the relevance of public health in climate change discourse is central to understanding the impediments of the public health frame application. Unfortunately, this has been a neglected area of research, and the dissertation responded to that gap. </div><div>To delineate the impediments of the public health frame, the study used the case study of the context of climate change policy discourse in the Province of Ontario (Canada) to examine the construction of public health relevance, the extent of public health frame application, and the systematic influences in the discourse.</div><div>The analysis of policy documents and key informant interviews revealed that the public health frame remained isolated from the primary focus of Ontario’s climate change policy discourse. Instead, Ontario’s historically and socially constructed climate change as an economic and political issue solved through market strategies and technological innovations forwarded by political, bureaucratic, and technological elites. The focus substantiated the types of structures and processes of policies and decisions, the relevant actors and knowledge, and the values supporting the discursive, normative, and strategic practices. Ontario’s focus also limited the utilization of the public health frame and the supporting capacities through the misalignment between public health and the provincial strategic actions, the lack of recognition and integration of public health roles, mandate and structures, and limited public health capacity building initiatives.</div><div>Therefore, public health framing as an endpoint of climate change discourse requires legitimation of public health in the underlying institutional structures for, and governance of, climate change. </div>

Tracing the Expression of Resident Quality of Life Policies in Canadian Long-Term Care Settings

Policies favouring safety, security, and order are expressed in preference to those oriented towards person-centred resident quality of life in Canadian long-term care settings. Factors impacting the expression of these latent (under-utilised) rules were uncovered through an analysis of long-term care related policies in four provinces. 84 policies relating to resident quality of life in long-term care were analysed in three sequences, incorporating jurisdictions, policy types, and quality of life domains, over time. The analysis revealed three policy levers: situations–providing explicit and implicit examples of resident oriented quality of life policy suppression in each jurisdiction; structures–identifying which types of policy and quality of life expressions are more vulnerable to dominance by others; and trajectories–confirming the cultural shift towards more person-centredness in Canadian long-term care related policies over time. Although these policies exist, their potentiality remains dormant in the dominant policy discourse, thereby signaling a positive post-pandemic possibility.

Intertextuality in Kenyan Policy Discourse on the Rights of Women

<p>The investigative aim of this thesis is to explore the recontextualization of the normative discourse of gender equality in Kenya’s policy discourse of women’s rights. Its purpose is threefold: Firstly, it attempts to examine the different ways in which policy makers use language in the course of interpreting and implementing gender equality policies. This includes a focus on both the linguistic and rhetorical/discursive strategies that these policy makers employ for such functions as endorsing, negotiating, legitimating, or even contesting given policy proposals. Secondly, the thesis endeavours to bring to light the different and changing conceptions of gender (in)equality espoused by the various policy actors involved in Kenya’s policy discourse of women’s rights over a critical ten-year period between 1995 and 2005. These policy actors include the Kenyan government; women’s non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who actively seek to influence government policy; and the United Nations’ organizations with responsibility for ensuring the implementation of women’s human rights. Thirdly, the thesis attempts to show the extent to which policy initiatives proposed by the human rights-based women’s NGOs in Kenya are taken up in the texts produced by the Kenyan government. In order to gain a better understanding of the discursive interactions between and amongst the policy actors in this study, an intertextual approach to Norman Fairclough’s model of critical discourse analysis (CDA) was used. The thesis drew discourse samples for analysis from the Kenyan government’s periodic reports detailing progress towards fully meeting the terms of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW); the documents produced by the Committee overseeing the Convention that provided assessment of the Kenyan government’s reports; the Kenyan government’s official texts on gender policy; and Kenyan women NGOs’ annual reports and other texts. Though many scholars and researchers of women’s rights praise the UN Committee’s imperatives for bringing about policy changes concerning women’s rights globally, the findings from this study confirm that the Committee for CEDAW has only textual power, and that it lacks enforcement powers to ensure the implementation of the universal rights of women within the local milieu. In a similar vein, this study demonstrates that though the women’s NGOs play a significant role both in terms of identifying important areas of concern for policy intervention, and in necessitating changes in the genres of the national government, their participation has largely failed to ensure the Kenyan government’s epistemological shift from its current state of recognizing the existence of women’s rights, to the phase of implementing them. This thesis also establishes that differing conceptions of gender (in)equality and ideological differences between the Committee for CEDAW and the Kenyan government tend to influence both the Committee’s and the Kenyan government’s use of varied discourses, genres, and styles, with the intent of manipulating to outmanoeuvre one another. This means that both the Kenyan government and the Committee live in different worlds, suggesting a continuing gap between the Committee’s normative knowledge of women’s rights to gender equality, and the Kenyan government’s cultural relativist perspectives concerning such rights. As a solution to these power struggles and political differences that derail policy making on gender equality, this study recommends the need both for the Committee and the Kenyan government to employ a reflexive and pragmatic mix of both the universalist and cultural relativist approaches to gender equality. This will bring forth shared areas of interest concerning women’s rights between the UN and the Kenyan government, based on their applicability within the local context. Moreover, such an approach will create a possibility for the Committee to understand the Kenyan government’s cultural relativist/competing discourse of women’s rights as another way of conceiving gender equality (i.e. productive power-knowledges), rather than viewing them as irrelevant cultural claims that stand in stark opposition to the universal understandings of women’s rights to gender equality. Likewise, the aforesaid reflexive and pragmatic mix of approaches will help the Kenyan policy makers to develop a more critical and nuanced view of the universal approaches to gender equality, thereby reducing their varied forms of resistance to gender equality via subtle evasive strategies. Methodologically, this thesis shows how a comparative intertextual approach to Fairclough’s model of critical discourse analysis can be used as a framework for establishing the relations between policy text and context. This framework includes the micro-level of textual/linguistic analysis, the meso level of discursive interactions, and the macro level of socio-cultural practice at the local, institutional, and societal levels. Theoretically, the thesis demonstrates the different ways in which particular philosophical arguments and emancipatory concepts from Foucault’s theory of governmentality and transnational feminist rhetorical theory can be combined and exploited by linguists to promote different ways of theorizing and thinking concerning the development of policies for promoting gender equality.</p>

Intertextuality in Kenyan Policy Discourse on the Rights of Women

<p>The investigative aim of this thesis is to explore the recontextualization of the normative discourse of gender equality in Kenya’s policy discourse of women’s rights. Its purpose is threefold: Firstly, it attempts to examine the different ways in which policy makers use language in the course of interpreting and implementing gender equality policies. This includes a focus on both the linguistic and rhetorical/discursive strategies that these policy makers employ for such functions as endorsing, negotiating, legitimating, or even contesting given policy proposals. Secondly, the thesis endeavours to bring to light the different and changing conceptions of gender (in)equality espoused by the various policy actors involved in Kenya’s policy discourse of women’s rights over a critical ten-year period between 1995 and 2005. These policy actors include the Kenyan government; women’s non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who actively seek to influence government policy; and the United Nations’ organizations with responsibility for ensuring the implementation of women’s human rights. Thirdly, the thesis attempts to show the extent to which policy initiatives proposed by the human rights-based women’s NGOs in Kenya are taken up in the texts produced by the Kenyan government. In order to gain a better understanding of the discursive interactions between and amongst the policy actors in this study, an intertextual approach to Norman Fairclough’s model of critical discourse analysis (CDA) was used. The thesis drew discourse samples for analysis from the Kenyan government’s periodic reports detailing progress towards fully meeting the terms of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW); the documents produced by the Committee overseeing the Convention that provided assessment of the Kenyan government’s reports; the Kenyan government’s official texts on gender policy; and Kenyan women NGOs’ annual reports and other texts. Though many scholars and researchers of women’s rights praise the UN Committee’s imperatives for bringing about policy changes concerning women’s rights globally, the findings from this study confirm that the Committee for CEDAW has only textual power, and that it lacks enforcement powers to ensure the implementation of the universal rights of women within the local milieu. In a similar vein, this study demonstrates that though the women’s NGOs play a significant role both in terms of identifying important areas of concern for policy intervention, and in necessitating changes in the genres of the national government, their participation has largely failed to ensure the Kenyan government’s epistemological shift from its current state of recognizing the existence of women’s rights, to the phase of implementing them. This thesis also establishes that differing conceptions of gender (in)equality and ideological differences between the Committee for CEDAW and the Kenyan government tend to influence both the Committee’s and the Kenyan government’s use of varied discourses, genres, and styles, with the intent of manipulating to outmanoeuvre one another. This means that both the Kenyan government and the Committee live in different worlds, suggesting a continuing gap between the Committee’s normative knowledge of women’s rights to gender equality, and the Kenyan government’s cultural relativist perspectives concerning such rights. As a solution to these power struggles and political differences that derail policy making on gender equality, this study recommends the need both for the Committee and the Kenyan government to employ a reflexive and pragmatic mix of both the universalist and cultural relativist approaches to gender equality. This will bring forth shared areas of interest concerning women’s rights between the UN and the Kenyan government, based on their applicability within the local context. Moreover, such an approach will create a possibility for the Committee to understand the Kenyan government’s cultural relativist/competing discourse of women’s rights as another way of conceiving gender equality (i.e. productive power-knowledges), rather than viewing them as irrelevant cultural claims that stand in stark opposition to the universal understandings of women’s rights to gender equality. Likewise, the aforesaid reflexive and pragmatic mix of approaches will help the Kenyan policy makers to develop a more critical and nuanced view of the universal approaches to gender equality, thereby reducing their varied forms of resistance to gender equality via subtle evasive strategies. Methodologically, this thesis shows how a comparative intertextual approach to Fairclough’s model of critical discourse analysis can be used as a framework for establishing the relations between policy text and context. This framework includes the micro-level of textual/linguistic analysis, the meso level of discursive interactions, and the macro level of socio-cultural practice at the local, institutional, and societal levels. Theoretically, the thesis demonstrates the different ways in which particular philosophical arguments and emancipatory concepts from Foucault’s theory of governmentality and transnational feminist rhetorical theory can be combined and exploited by linguists to promote different ways of theorizing and thinking concerning the development of policies for promoting gender equality.</p>

The Intermarium in Ukrainian and Polish Foreign Policy Discourse

The ongoing Russian-Ukrainian conflict, crises in the European Union (EU), and armed conflicts in the EU neighbourhood have influenced the prospects of future development in eastern and central Europe. A search for new security architecture on the margins of the EU and regional collaborations that prevail across formal EU borders have forced national elites in Poland and Ukraine to redefine their efforts regarding regional and security co-operation. Rationales for joining an Intermarium (a regional, transnational project involving successor states of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth countries) are based on the perception of a threat coming from Russia. This article analyzes the Intermarium concept, first, from the perspective of “geopolitical imaginary” with emphasis on periphery-centre relations and, second, in the light of regional “security dilemma” as it appears in attempt of “smaller” states to counteract Russian threats.