Who Defines Good Welfare? Identity, Legitimacy and Discourse in Positive Animal Welfare

ABSTRACT Positive animal welfare has gained prominence in discussions across animal welfare science, policy and industry. Yet debates surrounding the concept are often interpreted as disagreements about the concept itself. Drawing on insights from previous empirical research, this paper contends that the central tension concerns who gets to define positive animal welfare, whose language becomes legitimate and whose expertise is recognised. It offers a conceptual argument, illustrated through empirical examples from the Great Britain (GB) sheep sector, that positive animal welfare should be understood as a discursive space through which meanings of welfare, identities and claims to epistemic authority are constructed and negotiated. It uses discourse as a sensitising theoretical lens to analyse how actors mobilise different forms of knowledge, including scientific, institutional and experiential knowledge, to legitimise particular interpretations of positive animal welfare while contesting others. These negotiations revealed that disagreements arise not only from differing interpretations but also from struggles over language, legitimacy and the authority to define. Understanding positive animal welfare as a discursive space therefore helps explain why misalignment can persist even where there is broad agreement on the importance of positive animal welfare.