“Israel is Drying, Again”: Constructing Resilience Discourses in Televised Water Conservation Campaigns

Abstract

ABSTRACT Water conservation campaigns (WCC) are a common tool for mitigating droughts and water scarcity by encouraging reductions in household consumption. This paper moves beyond examining the impact of WCCs on consumption to look at the ways in which these campaigns discursively construct notions of water resilience. By analyzing eight televised WCCs produced by the Israel Water Authority from 2008 to 2018 in response to recurring droughts, this paper shows how discourses of resilience are audio-visually and symbolically constructed and represented to the public. The results indicate that a variety of opposite and competing discursive strategies were used in these campaigns: motivational, instructive or informative, fear/hope, nationalistic/individualistic and eco-centric/anthropocentric. The longitudinal comparison reveals how the discourse of water resilience evolved over the years from resilience by resistance to transformation and adaptation, confined to depolitical ethical-individual behavioral change while ignoring government responsibility, systemic social-environmental causes of the problem, and climate change.