ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that Foucauldian-inspired discourse analysis – a theoretical framework and set of empirical research techniques – can develop critical environmental law scholarship. Foucauldian-inspired discourse analysis provides an opportunity to transcend essentialist conceptions of legal actors. Foucauldian-inspired discourse analysis can address a second core analytical issue in environmental regulation, the ambiguous status of scientific knowledge in environmental regulation. Michel Foucault suggests that in modernity law operates more and more as a norm and assumes regulatory functions that are exercised through administrative, bureaucratic apparatuses. Foucauldian-inspired discourse analysis can help to identify an interesting research puzzle in relation to the administrative authorisation of transgenic agricultural products in the European Union. It has been suggested that Foucault’s work hardly accounts for the role of law in modernity. The differential treatment of various emotion discourses may not be so much the result of a ranking of different types of knowledge claims, but rather a matter of distinguishing between ‘abnormal’ and ‘normal’ emotion discourses.
