Advancing a political ecology of global environmental discourses

In the past decade international and national environmental policy and acti on have been dominated by issues generally defined as global environmental problems. In this article, we identify the major discourses associated with four global environmental issues: deforestation, desertification, biodiver sity use and climate change. These discourses are analysed in terms of thei r messages, narrative structures and policy prescriptions. We find striking parallels in the nature and structure of the discourses and in their illeg ibility at the local scale. In each of the four areas there is a global env ironmental management discourse representing a technocentric worldview by w hich blueprints based on external policy interventions can solve global env ironmental dilemmas. Each issue also has a contrasting populist discourse t hat portrays local actors as victims of external interventions bringing abo ut degradation and exploitation. The managerial discourses dominate in all four issues, but important inputs are also supplied to political decisions from populist discourses. There are, in addition, heterodox ideas and denia l claims in each of these areas, to a greater or lesser extent, in which th e existence or severity of the environmental problem are questioned. We pre sent evidence from location-specific research which does not fit easily wit h the dominant managerialist nor with the populist discourses. The research shows that policy-making institutions are distanced from the resource user s and that local scale environmental management moves with a distinct dynam ic and experiences alternative manifestations of environmental change and l ivelihood imperatives.