Green conflicts as discursive struggles over the common good

’Green’concerns about nature, the environment or the climate have traditionally been juxtaposed with concerns about economic growth or job creation, or efforts have been made to dissolve this opposition via conceptions like ‘sustainable growth’ or ‘ecological modernization’ (Hajer 1995). Recently, however, a new type of conflict has appeared, in which different green concerns collide. For instance, the construction of wind turbines, solar heating systems or biogas plants, established not at least to reduce carbon emission and mitigate climate change, has been opposed with reference to the protection of land‑ scape values, nature and the quality of life for local residents. This has given rise to heated conflicts where local inhabitants, media and municipalities are central players with national authorities, NGO’s and experts involved on both sides. This paper will address the new green conflicts as discursive struggles over how to represent the common good when it comes to the environment, i.e. whether concerns about natural environments and landscapes are asso‑ ciated with common or just particular interests, and how these interests are articulated discursively. An important aspect is the scales of time and space (Lemke 2000, Chilton 2004) invoked in the debate. As for temporality, concerns about the local environment may for instance invoke the idea of a natural heritage of a place which extends far back in time and calls for common responsibility many years ahead, or they may be limited to the particular needs of the present. Similarly, the range of interests can spatially be expanded to a matter of a wider community (ultimately to the whole world as in the case of UNESCO’s World Heritage List) or narrowed down to the particular economic interests or to the personal taste of a few stakeholders (cf. the infamous Not In My Backyard attitude). The paper will analyze these 'scalations' of time and space and the ways in which they contribute to conflicting representations of the common good in green conflicts. Moreover, central topoi (Wodak et al. 2009, Wengeler 2013) which are employed to weigh the opposing concerns in the conflict, will be analyzed. Empirically, the paper will present a case study from a green conflict in Western Denmark. Texts from local or regional media will form the empirical basis of the analysis, supplemented with material from social network sites, press releases and petitions.