Browsing by Author "Kukkonen, Anna"

This Master’s thesis examines the moral and political claims presented in the climate change debate in the French public sphere. My research material includes newspaper coverage from United Nations Climate Change Summits in Copenhagen (2009) and Durban (2011) in the French daily Le Monde as well as interviews from local civil society actors. While media debates on climate change have been widely studied, the moral dimension of these debates has been largely neglected. The objective of this study is to fill this gap and emphasize the moral and cultural dimensions in tracing the problems related to global climate governance. Secondly, I will emphasize the growing role of civil society actors in the governance of climate change, the solutions they offer and the way in which they justify their arguments. France is chosen as the context for this study because of its strong commitment to environmental issues at the political level. The central role of nuclear power in its energy production as well as France’s active role in shaping EU’s climate policy makes it an interesting research context as well. The concepts and methods from political sociology, utilized in this study, will shed light on the cultural specificities of this debate in the French media and civil society. By the theoretical framework of justification theory, developed by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, my objective is to analyse climate change related disputes and serve as well as a contribution to this fairly new approach in sociology. With a method called Public Justifications Analysis (PJA), I aim to answer the following research questions: What are the specific features of the climate change debate in the French media and civil society? What kinds of solutions do different actors offer to tackle climate change and how do they justify them morally? What are actors’ conceptions of justice and worth, and in which sense do these conceptions differ and on the other hand converge? How is the French political culture visible in the public debate and in argumentation? With justification theory we can reach culturally sensitive results in relation to climate politics and thus make comparative research between different countries and their climate change debates. In this study, the results will be compared to the findings obtained from the U.S. The main results of the study can be summarized as follows: Firstly, civic values are at the heart of the French argumentation forming a bridge between the media debate and the interviews from civil society. French actors argued that democratic decision-making in the form of a global, legally binding agreement is the most effective way to tackle climate change. French actors also emphasized social justice and called for solidarity and burden sharing between the rich and poor countries. Secondly, civil society organisations offered alternative frames in the interviews to understand climate politics. In addition, their arguments were generally more radical than those presented in the media debate: they argued that market, civic and ecological values are not compatible and therefore suggested more profound changes to the societal system by stronger democratic regulation of global economy. Overall, the use of civic arguments seemed to be typical of French political culture on the basis of this study’s results. Thirdly, while the relationship between the French state and the civil society has traditionally been conflictual, in the case of climate politics it was more based on negotiation and mediation.