A Discursive Analysis Of The Mau Forest Restoration Discourse In Kenya

Abstract

Climate change and global warming are challenges facing the world today. This problem is aggravated by the fast disappearance of forest cover in the world. This study sought to investigate how language shapes and maintains ideological forces on forest conservation in Kenya. The specific objectives of the study included examining the varied ways in which forest conservation is linguistically defined and constructed; exploring the language techniques used in the Mau Forest conservation discourse and the social implications; evaluating attitudes towards forest conservation in Kenya; and assessing the ideologies underlying the Mau Forest conservation discourse. This study was based on the assumption that political discourse informs people’s attitude towards environmental conservation. The study was guided by a combination of Corpus Linguistics and Norman Fairclough and Ruth Wodak’s (1997) Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework. The study adopted a qualitative research design. The study focused on a population of 35 speeches. Downsampling procedure was used to select 20 speeches by political leaders on the Mau Forest debate. These speeches were obtained from the media and national archives for transcription and analysis. CDA analysis was carried out on a sample of texts from the corpus and the data was analyzed using both qualitative and quantitative techniques. The Mutual Information (MI) and t-scores were employed as measures of strength and significance. The t-score rankings were used to measure the `certainty of the collocation while the MI-score tested the strength of the collocation in the corpus. Data analysis was based on the frequency and statistical observations of key words. The results indicated that the co-occurrence of the keywords and their collocations were strong, and that their frequency was significant in expressing speakers’ feelings and attitudes towards the Mau Forest conservation programme. The major findings of this study were as follows. Forest conservation was defined and described as oppression, ethnic provocation, distortion and blackmail. Various language techniques, such as pronominalization, lexicalization, three part lists, metaphors, rhetorical questions and repetition served to make the speeches persuasive. The speeches exhibited the speakers’ contempt and dislike for the forest conservation cause. The major ideologies underpinning the forest conservation discourse included power, identity, solidarity, impunity and economic opportunism. The findings of this study could be beneficial to the Government and policy makers by showing how language can help to achieve shifts in attitudes and behaviour on forest conservation issues. Moreover, the findings from this study are of significance to Ecolinguistics, because they reveal that there is a strong interrelationship between language and forest conservation.