Environment, Climate and Health at the Crossroads. A Critical Analysis of Public Policy and Political Communication Discourse in the EU

This chapter is concerned with theories and methodologies of critical discourse analysis and their contribution to climate change, environmental and health policy research in the European Union. The purpose of the chapter is to explore how the link between climate change, environment and health, perhaps some of the most urgent and crucial issues of today’s public space, is linguistically and discursively articulated in public policy discourse from a corpus-assisted critical discourse analytical perspective. Indeed, climate and environmental policy-making is “deeply and inevitably political” (Remling 2018: 478). By providing an overview of the nexus between climate change, environment and health in the public space, it will focus on an empirical case study of EU policy and its communication over the last decade. In this we move from the assumption that policy analysis “includes but extends beyond laws and legislation” (Bacchi 2009; 2016), covering not only binding documents (e.g. directives, regulations, recommendations, (also in the form of Green and White Papers) but also the bulk of text and talk that constitute institutional communication, which has acquired increasing importance in reinforcing linkages between institutions and citizens (Bee 2010; Cap and Okulska 2013).