Stakeholder discourse coalitions and polarisation in the hen harrier conservation debate in news media

Abstract Conservation conflicts are complex and can be deep‐rooted, with stakeholders holding entrenched policy positions. The actors involved producing verbal interconnected interactions that form policy debates. Thus, conservation debates can be viewed as network phenomena with stakeholders forming coalitions in support of, or opposition to, certain policies and practices. We used Discourse Network Analysis of print media to investigate the structure and dynamics of the stakeholder debate around the management of hen harriers Circus cyaneus, a bird of prey at the centre of a long‐standing conservation conflict in the United Kingdom. We aimed to determine whether the structure of discourse coalitions changed among the diverse aspects of the debate and whether the polarisation of the debate has changed through time. Our search and selection criteria led to the analysis of 737 statements within 131 newspaper articles published from August 1993 to December 2019. We show that, while the discourse network of the overall debate is quite unstructured, actors formed divergent coalitions when defining the conservation problem and its solutions. In contrast, discourses converged around reactions with positive or negative emotions in relation to events and issues of hen harrier conservation. Polarisation among actors has increased over time and peaked in the second half of the 2010s, concurrent with the release of the species recovery plan. Our study highlights the value of analysing discourse networks in conservation policy debates. Discourse networks reveal which aspects of any conservation problem cause stakeholders to converge or diverge and can identify periods of intensified debate that, ultimately, contribute to informing conflict mitigation and resolution processes. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.