Forest fires and climate change in Portugal an analysis of the narratives constructed by government communication

Abstract

The present study identifies the narratives constructed by the government of Portugal regarding forest fires in the country. The research relies on the framework proposed by Shanahan et al. (2018) - Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) - which uses the lenses of narrative studies to analyze the content of political and governmental messages. It is a qualitative, non-experimental approach that explores content analysis. The research question can be summarized as: 'What political narratives are disseminated by the government of Portugal to address forest fires?'. The analysis grid focuses on five narrative elements: plot, characters, moral of the story, master narrative, and causal relationship. The data collection period is from May to October 2022, from five official sources of government information, and the analysis corpus consists of 99 documents. The initial theoretical propositions suggest that the causes of forest fires are multiple, but essentially anthropogenic and associated with the phenomenon of climate change. In this work, the concept of narrative is assumed as a cognitive framework for the construction, communication, and reconstruction of mentally projected worlds. The results indicate that the narratives disseminated by the government of Portugal to address forest fires depict a storyline of progress and do not relate the fires to anthropogenic climate change. Overall, the government is portrayed as a hero, and the Portuguese people are simultaneously allies of the hero and victims.