Voices for the common good: insights from critical discourse analysis of climate narratives in Chinese and Australian news discourses

This research explores the intersection of climate narratives and the concept of the common good through a critical discourse analysis of news discourses from China and Australia. Despite worsening material realities of the climate, discursive tensions between a need to popularize climate issue and an increasing politicization trend in climate change communication continue to unfold. Politicizing climate change as an ideological conflict may mislead the public to perceive it as essentially a topic about politics rather than science and health. It also creates discursive and real political space for local governments and intergovernmental organizations to defray responsibilities and delay action. To closely examine the ways popularization and politicization are localized, this talk focuses how the same issue was discursively constructed as different newsworthy events vis- à-vis news voices of different power status in People’s Daily and Sydney Morning Herald, the most read newspaper in China and Australia respectively. Findings demonstrate that while People’s Daily tends to globalize China’s local climate efforts and polarizes the climate issue as international conflicts between developed and developing countries in general, and between China and the US in particular, Australia’s media tends to localize global climate efforts and represents it as domestic conflicts between the Coalition government and the rest of domestic society. Findings were explained by recourse to different societal functions of news media and changing power dynamics. By examining the language, themes, and underlying ideologies present in climate coverage from both countries, this study sheds light on how these narratives shape societal understanding and collective action towards environmental sustainability.