Discourse Coalition Analysis

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.