Anthropocentrism in Water Governance: An Ecolinguistic Analysis of Pakistan’s National Climate Change Policy (2021)

Abstract

Pakistan is one of the most effected countries because of climate change-related issues. It leads to increased water scarcity in the country. Therefore, water management can be termed as the most important area of intervention in the climate policies of Pakistan. Despite of the fact that earlier studies focused on the management of water resources in Pakistan mainly dealing with technical issues related to water management in the country, very few efforts have been directed towards studying the role of the language used for the conception of water management in the climate policies of Pakistan. This has been dealt with in this study by the ecolinguistic approach that has been evaluated on the basis of the conceptual representation of the water resources management in the National Climate Change Policy 2021 of Pakistan on the basis of anthropocentrism.

On the one hand, drawing upon a set of ‘stories we live by’ developed by Arran Stibbe, and combined with knowledge developed through ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’—which is a qualitative method of text analysis—examples of policies are scrutinized concerning their water governance through this method. The major concepts of ecolinguistic studies are: ideological framing, erasure, and agency.

In the results, it may be seen that the main category relates to resource, security, and value. There is an emphasis on the technocratic and managerial worldview, alongside human development and security. Additionally, it may be seen that the non-human species and systems seem to be marginalized and disguised. Furthermore, the main actor is again the human system. The importance of the anthropocentric approach in management may be seen.

The result of the study verifies that though there is an acceptance of climate change as a concern in the policy, there is a limited climate vision in the language framework that hardly accommodates the view of the non-human. The importance of the theory of ecolinguistics has been made manifest in the study through the role of language in the policy of climate change, promoting the actual relevance of the theory to language evaluation in an environmental context in Pakistan.