The purpose of this paper is to undertake a comparative analysis of discourses on Climate Change found in two policy documents and the draft Climate Change Policy 2011 approved in June 2011 produced by the Ministry of Environment[1], Government of Pakistan in an effort to gauge their impact and determine if they have the potential to actually seep down from merely being a government-level agenda to grass root-level contextualization. Drawing upon the Initial National Communication on Climate Change (2003) as the first government document on Climate Change, the paper seeks to establish the progression route taken from this till the Climate Change report of the Task Force on CC (2010) and the 2011 policy.

Using key principles from Critical Discourse Analysis, the analysis is informed by adopting an ‘argumentative turn’ to the study of policy (Fischer and Forester 1993). The comparative analytical framework looks at four gaps in policy analysis: implementation; finances; administrative /capacity; and policy gaps. Given time constraints and because the paper looks at the similarities and differences within the identified challenges of the documents, a qualitative methodology has been used.

After comparison, it has been found that the implementation and policy gaps are a subset of the financial, administrative/capacity gaps, and that there is a critical need to investigate these gaps further at the local level and finding innovative ways of bridging them by understanding the nature of constraints in a more comprehensive manner.

In conclusion, the authors argue that given the lack of actual data, available data manipulations, lack of long term scenario building and well thought out implementation frameworks and baseline research, Pakistan has a long way to go in even understanding its climate change problems (if any) and its impacts on the lives of local communities and citizenry. A different way of targeting the Climate Change question should be done based on real time baseline field research and analysis, rather than just number crunching and rehashing statistics based on NGO and donor project reports and dated government documents.

References:
Fischer, Frank and Forester, John (eds.), 1993, The argumentative turn in policy analysis and planning, Duke University Press, Durham and London.

GoP 2003, ‘Pakistan’s initial national communication on climate change’, Ministry of Environment (MoE), Government of Pakistan,
<http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/natc/paknc1.pdf> accessed 22 Dec. 2003.

GoP 2010, ‘Final report of the task force on climate change’, Planning Commission, Government of Pakistan.