Compare methods

	Discourse Coalition Analysis	Chain of Explanation
Field	Environmental Sociology	Environmental Sociology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1995	1987
Originator	Maarten A. Hajer	Piers Blaikie & Harold Brookfield; Andrew P. Vayda
Type	Argumentative discourse-analysis pipeline	Multi-scale causal-tracing pipeline for environmental change
Seminal source	Hajer, M. A. (1995). The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780198279693	Blaikie, P., & Brookfield, H. (1987). Land Degradation and Society. Methuen. ISBN: 9780416401400
Aliases	Story-Line Analysis, Argumentative Discourse Analysis, Hajer Discourse Coalition Approach, Discourse-Coalition Framework	Regional Political Ecology Chain of Explanation, Progressive Contextualization, Blaikie-Brookfield Chain of Explanation, Place-Based Environmental Causation Chain
Related	3	3
Summary	Discourse coalition analysis is an approach to environmental politics that explains policy outcomes by examining the language through which problems are defined, focusing on the 'story-lines' that condense complex arguments and the coalitions of actors who rally around them. Maarten Hajer developed it in his 1995 book The Politics of Environmental Discourse, using the acid-rain controversies in Britain and the Netherlands to show how the rise of 'ecological modernization' reframed environmental protection as compatible with economic growth. In Hajer's argumentative approach, a discourse coalition is a group of actors — who need not share interests or even meet — bound together by the story-lines they use, the metaphors and condensed narratives that let diverse participants speak as if about the same thing. A discourse becomes dominant when it structures how people talk (structuration) and becomes embedded in institutions and practices (institutionalization). The method traces how such coalitions form, compete, and shift, treating environmental policy as a struggle over meaning rather than only over interests.	The chain of explanation is the core analytical device of regional political ecology, introduced by Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield in Land Degradation and Society (1987). It treats an environmental outcome such as soil erosion not as a technical accident but as the visible end of a causal chain that runs from the individual land manager outward through the household, the regional economy, the state, and ultimately the world economy. Rather than blaming the farmer or the rainfall, the analyst follows the chain link by link to show how decisions on the ground are shaped by pressures and constraints set at much wider scales. The method is closely allied to Andrew Vayda's progressive contextualization, which begins with a specific human-environment activity and explains it by placing it in progressively wider contexts. Together these give political ecology a disciplined, scale-spanning way to connect local degradation to its political-economic roots.