New Environmental Controversies: Towards a Typology of Green Conflicts

Mikkel Fugl Eskjær and Anders Horsbøl ()
Additional contact information
Mikkel Fugl Eskjær: Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, 9000 Aalborg, Denmark
Anders Horsbøl: Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, 9000 Aalborg, Denmark

Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 3, 1-15

Abstract: As the ecological crisis deepen, new environmental controversies emerge. Whereas traditional environmental conflicts mostly concern socio-economic interests clashing with environmental protection, recent conflicts are increasingly pitting different environmental considerations against each other. These green conflicts have received scattered attention in the scholarly literature, mostly in the form of case studies in relation to renewable energy plants, such as wind turbines and solar panels. However, there is a need for more systematic approaches to conceptualize the green conflicts. This article embarks on that task by developing a typology of green conflicts as they appear in public discourse and mediated communication. We test the model on public debates on four different topics: national parks, organic farming, wind turbines, and nuclear energy. Our data suggests that green conflicts can increasingly be found across a wide range of environmental and climate change issues. However, green conflicts are not simply replacing traditional environmental conflicts, but are rather adding new layers to environmental controversies by reconfiguring conflict lines, actor positions, spatial scales, and temporalities.

Keywords: environmental conflicts; climate change; ecological crisis; news media; public debate; environmental discoursed (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/3/1914/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/3/1914/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:15:y:2023:i:3:p:1914-:d:1041013

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().