Sustainability and sustainable development are prominent themes in international policymaking, corporate PR, news-media and academic scholarship. Definitions remain contested, however sustainability is associated with a three-pillar focus on economic development, environmental conservation and social justice, most recently espoused in the adoption of the UN Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. In spite of its common usage, there is little research about how sustainability is represented and refracted in public discourse in different national contexts. We examine British national press coverage of sustainability and sustainable development in 2015 in a cross-market sample of national newspapers. Our findings show that key international policy events and environmental and social justice frames are peripheral, while neoliberalism and neoliberal environmentalism vis-à-vis the promotion of technocratic solutions, corporate social responsibility and 'sustainable' consumerism are the predominant frames through which the British news-media reports sustainability. This holds regardless of newspaper quality and ideological orientation.
This article explores the concept of sustainability in a postsocialist context through an analysis of official discourses relating to sustainability in more than 700 articles published in the Chinese‐language newspaper People's Daily in 2015. The Chinese conception of sustainability, which emerges as a top‐down model built upon traditional ideologies and Chinese socialist legacies, inclusive of economic growth, environmental sustainability, social justice and quality of life. This Chinese official discourse of sustainability places less emphasis on individuals' rights and more on the state's interests, and is encompassed in the Chinese concept of the “ecological civilization.” This article argues that if we are to build a full picture of the internationalized idea of sustainability we need to adopt a more international approach to thinking about the issue, drawing upon the sustainability‐related discourses constructed from different national contexts using local languages and rhetoric.
This article applies the techniques of critical discourse analysis (CDA) to an examination of the Chinese government-owned English-language newspaper the China Daily. The aim is to see whether there is evidence that over the last decade the newspaper, which describes itself as the overseas ‘Voice of China’, has attempted to adapt its style of reporting in response to China’s raised international profile, as well as to the increasing diversity and commercialization of its media industry. The study adopts a quantitative and qualitative approach to the analysis of two corpora of texts from the newspaper: one from 1998 and the other from 2010. The focus is on what Labov calls evaluation: an aspect of the narrative structure of a text that has to do with the way the narrator embellishes a narrative to make it more interesting. The results suggest that the China Daily has made its reporting more diverse and interesting, probably in response to the commercialization of China’s media industry and to China’s growing international profile.
This article critically reflects on the methodological approach developed for a recent project based in Jinja, Uganda, that sought to generate new forms of environmental knowledge and action utilizing diverse forms of creative intergenerational practice embedded within a broader framework of communitybased participatory research. This approach provided new opportunities for intergenerational dialogue in Jinja, generated increased civic environmental engagement, and resulted in a participant-led campaign to share knowledge regarding sustainable biomass consumption. We term this approach intergenerational community-based research and creative practice. We discuss the advantages of this model while also reflecting throughout on the challenges of the approach.
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