The evolution of agricultural policy: The role of the changing rhetoric of conservation

This dissertation investigates the relationship between language and policy. It looks at what the accumulated research has found concerning the relationship and then utilizes the evolution of policy and language in a specific area of agriculture and conservation policy to add to the body of research. This research has four goals. It seeks understanding of the generic role of language in policy, how language and policy coevolve or change, the function of dominant rhetorics in policy communities, and the relationship between conservation goals and broader agriculture policy goals.;Policy and language changes occur simultaneously. Because of the difficulty in disentangling new meanings from existing ones, I introduce the idea of the dominant rhetoric. Rhetorics consist of cohesive sets of arguments and symbols strategically employed to convince audiences. The dominant rhetoric for agriculture appears as a set of arguments and symbols embedded in the language of existing policies. This policy language serves as the baseline for change because its acceptance by the policy community reveals a consensus of meaning gained through political struggle between competing interest groups. For example, I find that within agriculture policy the meaning of the term "conservation" changes over time to encompass the goal of limiting pollution from farm chemicals. At the same time, its meaning remains closely tied to its original use in the dominant rhetoric to describe the need to solve the problem of soil erosion. Such changes in meaning reflect the influence of the political environment on the relationship between politics and the dominant rhetoric.;To support my argument about the adaptive nature of the dominant rhetoric, I study texts produced by the agriculture policy community. These include primarily United States Department of Agriculture information bulletins and congressional hearings addressing conservation policies associated with the three most recent farm bills. Because dominant rhetorics develop over time, I also investigate language changes in congressional hearings dating from the 1930's. Through the study of the arguments and language that construct this range of texts, I explain the relationship between politics, policy, and language within USDA conservation programs.