抄録
Discourse analysis has played an important role in environmental policy studies. This paper implemented a systematic literature review to identify developments and issues in the discourse analysis of environmental policy studies in Japanese journals. It used an analytical framework composed of “types of environmental problems and major discourses,” “theoretical trends of discourses,” “discursive effects,” and “structure/agency influencing discourses,” which have been derived from international review articles on discourse analysis of environmental policy studies. As a result, this paper identified these four points: (1) the most common discourse studies have been applied to the study of environmental issues arising domestically, (2) the definition of discourse is unclear with few studies using internationally mainstream discourse theories, (3) there is little analysis of discursive effects on policies, institutions and movements (compared to cognitive effects), (4) few studies focusing on social structures and agency (compared to linguistic structures). Based on these results, the paper identified two issues for the development of future environmental policy research: (1) clarifying the definitions and theoretical positions of discourses and (2) increasing the number of analyses using primary data.
