Neoliberalism in the Glasgow Climate Pact: Interdiscursivity and Faux-Sustainability at COP26

With a stated purpose of “uniting the world to tackle climate change,” the 2021 UN COP26 conference in Glasgow, Scotland, resulted in the Glasgow Climate Pact, the largest international agreement on the topic of climate change since the 2015 Paris Agreement. By the conference’s own admission, “many believed [COP26] to be the world’s best last chance to get runaway climate change under control” (ukcop26.org). However, despite the lofty policy goals of the UN’s various climate-related bodies—including the UNFCCC and the widely-lauded IPCC—these entities routinely adopt, normalize, and habituate the fundamentally incompatible (cf. Ritchie et al. 2020; Wiedmann et al. 2020) discourses of capitalism and development economics into their own discourse surrounding climate activism. Using a critical discourse analytic framework largely influenced by CPDA (Montesano Montessori, Farrelly, & Mulderrig 2019), I conceptualize COP26 as a discursive, semiotic space encompassing a wide variety of texts (e.g. the Glasgow Climate Pact, the conference website, and various activities, speeches, and (in)tangible aspects of the conference itself). Despite embracing conspicuous features of sustainability discourse, these texts nevertheless betray a robust interdiscursivity with the climate-denying discourses of capitalism and fossil fuel interests, that, I argue, render the former ineffectual. Close discursive analysis reveals the simultaneous presence of these contradictory discourses along with a network of presupposition, metaphor, framing, and epistemic stance—among other linguistic features—inextricably linking them together. In particular, I show how the uncritical acceptance of mandatory growth ideology, a cornerstone of Western neoliberalism, permeates the GCP and other UN policy statements, undermining and delegitimizing any presumably well-intentioned sustainability goals of the conference and effecting complicity (Verschueren 2021) with reactionary discourses.