Forms of talk in policy dialogue: distinguishing between adversarial and collaborative discourse

Many environmental and risk issues require decisions or agreements among competing stakeholders who argue, deliberate, and discuss about a variety of issues, including facts, values, substance, and process. Often such decisions or agreements remain elusive because the process of decision making becomes adversarial. Yet, while policy deliberations can be instrumental in character, they have also been viewed as potentially enabling new understandings and inclusive agreements to develop. But, just what exactly are these intended deliberations supposed to be? They have been described as, for example, 'reflexive', 'real debate', 'constructive', and 'generative'. These descriptors are in contrast to less preferred alternatives, such as 'rhetorical', 'adversarial', 'unreflexive', 'polarized', and the like. This paper describes a semiotic framework for distinguishing among different types of discourse in policy-making processes. Two ways of talking in policy deliberations are defined: monologic and dialogic forms of discourse, which can loosely be understood to parallel the distinction between adversarial and collaborative ways of talking, respectively. However, to define their use in practice is another matter. For example, how does one identify whether someone is 'understanding' or talking 'constructively'? Data from a forest policy dialogue are used to illustrate how the two forms of discourse are distinguished by participants in practice. These data suggest how collaboration may be improved by the shaping of the discourse among the participants. Implications for the design of deliberative policy-making processes and for the study of risk communication and risk controversies are discussed.