Positive discourse analysis of Aotearoa New Zealand Foreign Minister’s speeches: an ecolinguistic perspective

1 Introduction

Environmental communication intended as the production and dissemination of knowledge about the environment is central to shaping people’s attitude and behaviour towards nature. While it has inevitably come to be a part of different types of discourses, its incursion into the language of politics rises interest – if not concern – as to the kind of representations put forward by political leaders. Indeed, it is in their power to carry out actions that can either mitigate or aggravate environmental degradation. Because the current ecological crisis has its roots in the uncontrolled exploitation of the earth that is inherent in capitalist thinking, political debate especially in the West tends to reiterate unsustainable narratives that run counter to the supposed aims of environmental action. As an alternative to this, ecological values endemic to Indigenous^[1] knowledge systems can inspire renewed efforts towards the protection of the natural world (Berkes 2008; MacGregor 2018).

The present article is aimed at understanding whether instances of political discourse from geo-cultural contexts that are informed by Indigenous knowledge can in fact offer sustainable representations of nature and humans’ relationship with it. For this purpose, it analyses a corpus of public speeches delivered between 2020 and 2022 by Nanaia Mahuta, Minister of Foreign Affairs in the government of Aotearoa New Zealand from 2020 to 2023, and the first Māori woman to hold the portfolio.

The analysis collocates itself within the theoretical frameworks of ecolinguistics (Fill and Mühlhäusler 2001; Fill and Penz 2018; Penz and Fill 2022; Stibbe 2021) and Positive Discourse Analysis (PDA) (Bartlett 2012; Martin 2004; Stibbe 2018), and combines quantitative and qualitative approaches to linguistic data. Quantitative results demonstrate that the Minister’s speeches are consistently preoccupied with environmental issues. Furthermore, the qualitative examination – which focusses on lexical items, framings, metaphors, and intertextuality – reveals the presence of a broad adaptation framing. This conceptualises both response to environmental challenges and human disposition towards nature in terms of recognition and adaptation to nature’s own pace. Overall, it is suggested that Mahuta’s beneficial representation of the natural world specifically derives from the Māori worldview as integrated in her addresses.

2 Literature review

Despite the role played by politicians in influencing public opinion on matters of global interest, the intersection between political discourse and environmental communication has not received sustained attention from linguistic analysis. Authors such as Kuha (2018) have widened the scope of the language of politics to encompass the language of policy, and accordingly collect examples from environmental policy communication, as well, but these more properly belong to news discourse. Moreover, with the exception of Mansyur et al.’s (2021) investigation of Indonesian President Joko Widodo’s statement at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (also known as COP 21), previous studies are limited to the Western context (Willis 2017), especially North-America (Bevitori 2015; Bonnefille 2008; Peterson 2004).

While Peterson (2004) inaugurated research on American presidential “green talk”, Bonnefille (2008) and Bevitori (2015) complemented such efforts with the tools provided by cognitive and corpus linguistics, respectively. Bonnefille examined the environmental rhetoric of George W. Bush’s State of the Union Addresses (SOUAs) between 2001 and 2008, with specific reference to his conceptualisation of climate change. She found that the President consistently tackled the issue by using both a dependence and security frame that stressed America’s need to produce safe and clean energy domestically, instead of relying on the Middle East. Together, these framings contributed to the development of a narrative that presented the former country as a dependent character, and the latter as a villain. Ultimately, Bonnefille interpreted Bush’s rhetoric as an instance of greenwashing, given that the President’s insistence on the topic did not stem from genuine concerns over the state of the environment, but rather from fear of the economic recession that the country was facing during those years.

Epideictic or ceremonial discourse is at the core of Bevitori’s (2015) research, too. She expanded on previous work by carrying out a diachronic analysis of SOUAs, inaugural, and acceptance speeches across ten American presidencies (Johnson-Obama). Through corpus-assisted methods, she identified Nixon, Carter, and Clinton as those most frequently addressing environmental topics. In the case of the former two, this corresponded to the 1970s oil crisis, which equally marked a shift in the meaning attributed to environmental protection. Indeed, the early conservationist approach towards the preservation of America’s natural beauty, for example during Johnson’s administration, was at that time supplanted by issues related to technology and economy. Confirming Bonnefille’s results, Bevitori observed that from the 70s onward, Presidents would discuss the environment by mentioning the national and independent production of safe and clean energy.

Willis’s (2017) examination accounts for the representation of climate change in the British political setting. Specifically, she referred to a corpus of speeches by Members of Parliament (MPs) about the Climate Change Bill (2008). Through keyword and collocation analysis, and semantic tagging, Willis found out that the language used by politicians to discuss climate breakdown was essentially scientific and economic. Reference to science and scientists was aimed at justifying climate action by highlighting factual evidence, whereas the relevance of the economic framing proved that most of the measures suggested were concerned with leveraging the economic impacts of climate change. Conversely, potentially catastrophic events were not discussed, nor were implications for both people and non-human beings taken into account. Willis understood this as a general tendency to “taming the climate” (Willis 2017: 225), i.e. presenting climate change as a highly technical matter in order to downplay or conceal its most worrying effects.

Mansyur et al. (2021) explicitly adopted an ecolinguistic perspective in their analysis. As opposed to earlier studies, they considered a single speech, which is ultimately evaluated as a positive example of environmental communication within politics. They especially focussed on instances of transitivity patterns according to Halliday’s functional grammar, and found that material clauses were the most consistent in Joko Widodo’s statement. Material clauses are realised by verbs that express processes of doing and happening (Halliday and Matthiessen 2014), hence identifying an actor or doer who performs the action described. In Widodo’s speech, the syntactic position of material actors was more frequently taken up by the subjects developed countries and Indonesia. However, while the former were described as the doer of actions resulting in climate change, therefore being assigned responsibility towards it, Indonesia was represented as involved in carrying out actions that try to mitigate the impact of environmental issues.

In light of the existing research, this study strives to provide new perspectives on the relationship between political discourse and environmental communication by accounting for underrepresented subjects and contexts. For this reason, it directs its attention to Aotearoa New Zealand and Nanaia Mahuta’s speeches.

3 Theoretical foundation

The present article wishes to contribute to research within that strand of ecolinguistics that has been named “critical ecolinguistics” (Fill and Mühlhäusler 2001; Zhou 2021). In particular, it offers an instance of ecolinguistic PDA (Martin 2004; Stibbe 2018).

Ecolinguistics as a whole originally developed from the introduction of the ecological metaphor into linguistic studies (Haugen 2001 [1972]; Sapir 2001 [1912]). This prompted insights into the behaviour of languages within their ecosystems, i.e. how languages interact within the same environment. Following such initial endeavour – which however continues to spark interest (Bastardas-Boada 2018; Romaine 2018; Skutnabb-Kangas and Harmon 2018) – attention began to shift towards the relationship between language and the natural environment. Building from the tradition of discourse studies that recognises a link between language and ideologies (Fairclough 1996; van Dijk 2000), it was understood that particular linguistic uses can favour representations of nature that affect the way speakers think of and relate to it. As a result, ecolinguistics collected scholarly efforts aimed at the identification of the former.

The first significant contributions to critical ecolinguistics had the language system as their object of study. For instance, Halliday (2001 [1990]) saw in the English distinction between countable and uncountable nouns a tendency to represent natural elements as though they were unbounded and potentially inexhaustible resources – e.g. “a reservoir of water” (Halliday 2001 [1990]: 194). Similarly, and as a further application of his functional grammar, he noted that material and mental processes very rarely do take non-human beings as subjects, so that these are usually treated as passive or inanimate objects. Goatly (2001) recognised a similar disposition towards the portrayal of nature’s assumed fixity in English syntax, especially in the case of transitivity. At the same time, he offered instances of a “green grammar” that could overturn anthropocentric representations of nature, for example by means of grammatical metaphors and ergative verbs.

Parallel to this, ecolinguistics developed an interest in the study of language in use. As such, it took the form of a “text-critical” (Fill and Mühlhäusler 2001) or “discourse-focused” (Poole 2022) ecolinguistics. This consists in applying a various range of discourse analytical tools to authentic texts in order to assess the type of ideologies they promote, with respect to their implications on the treatment of the natural world. Stibbe’s (2021) most comprehensive and practical approach to the discipline defines it as “the study of the role of language in the life-sustaining interactions of humans, other species and the physical environment” (Stibbe 2021: 223). He distinguishes among “destructive”, “ambivalent”, and “beneficial” (Stibbe 2021: 22–30) discourses, based on whether they encourage destruction or support of natural ecosystems; accordingly, he understands ecolinguistic analysis as directed at contributing to this categorisation. Like most discourse analysis, ecolinguistic examination can be conducted at different linguistic levels. However, it is most often aimed at addressing framings, metaphors, appraisal, facticity, erasure, and salience patterns (Stibbe 2021). These indeed focus on language uses which contribute to the formation of “stories we live by” (Stibbe 2021: 6) that influence the way people think, talk, and act about and towards the environment.

Therefore, most of ecolinguistic research can be understood as an ecologically-informed type of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Bloor and Bloor 2007; Fairclough 2003) – or Ecological Discourse Analysis (EDA) (Cheng 2022; Poole 2016) – since it is often directed at identifying destructive discourses. Nevertheless, the need to expand the scope to virtuous examples has been acknowledged in recent years (Stibbe 2018). In this sense, ecolinguistics provides a useful theoretical framework for the performance of PDA. PDA was first devised by Martin (2004) in the attempt to complement CDA with a tool that would drive social change not only by exposing and criticising reproachable discourses, but more effectively by supplying alternatives to the former. Indeed, PDA seeks to single out and investigate “heartening accounts” of “social processes that make the world a better place” (Martin 2004: 184). When applied to the specific aims of ecolinguistics, PDA delineates a form of linguistic analysis that addresses “discourses which can inspire people to find well-being in ways that do not require over-consumption and treat the natural world with respect and care” (Stibbe 2018: 176).

One of the first – and unaware – instances of ecolinguistic PDA is Alexander’s (2009) analysis of Vandana Shiva’s lecture for the BBC Reith Lectures series. Alexander underlines Shiva’s “re-evaluation” of globalisation, which she frames as a war against nature, and observes how she develops a unique notion of sustainability that exceeds the idea of development to include such values as compassion, justice, and dignity. Goatly’s (2017) investigation of Wordsworth’s, Thomas’s, and Oswald’s poems similarly identifies a praiseworthy representation of nature, which emphasises nature’s role “as sayer and experiencer” (Goatly 2017: 48). Ponton’s (2022) recent example of ecolinguistic PDA focusses on environmental issues related to agriculture by analysing British naturalist Chris Skinner’s texts from the BBC radio programme The countryside hour. Specifically, he conducts an inferential analysis of extracts from two episodes where Skinner answers to a caller’s question concerning foxes and birds in Norwich. Results highlight both Skinner and his listeners’ positive ecological ideologies, including interest in and detailed knowledge of the habits of animals, who are talked about as intelligent beings.

Since its beginning, however, PDA has been concerned with discourses belonging to marginalized groups, particularly Indigenous communities. Martin himself understood it as a way to comprehend, among the others, “how Indigenous people overcome their colonial heritage” (Martin 2004: 184), and exemplified his aims by investigating discourses from Australia. Bartlett (2012) resorted to PDA for a similar purpose, although he accounted for the context of Guyana. With regard to ecolinguistics, Indigenous knowledge is indeed pinpointed by Stibbe (2018) as one of the targets of PDA, being “a useful potential source of beneficial discourses” (Stibbe 2018: 172). Whereas not all Indigenous groups necessarily live in harmony with nature, they have often been found to show a profound ecological understanding and to learn from ecological mistakes (Berkes and Turner 2006), especially in recognising the irreducible complexity of the ecosystems they live in (Berkes and Berkes 2009). As opposed to the Western positivist-reductionist paradigm tending towards simplification and ultimate separation, their worldviews acknowledge the interrelatedness of humans and non-humans, who are both seen as equal and active subjects within a relationship of mutual dependence (MacGregor 2018). Berkes (2008) labels Indigenous knowledge informed with ecological concerns as Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), defining it as “a cumulative body of knowledge, practice, and belief, evolving by adaptive processes and handed down through generations by cultural transmission about the relationships between living beings (including humans) with one another and their environment” (Berkes 2008: 7).

With this in mind, the present research conducted an ecolinguistic PDA of Minister of Foreign Affairs Nanaia Mahuta’s speeches. Given the peculiar context of Aotearoa New Zealand, it proposed to exemplify how the integration of Māori values into institutional addresses results in discursive realisations that can inspire new and more positive ways of framing the current debate about nature.

4 Research methodology

The analysis was built on a corpus containing all the public speeches given by Nanaia Mahuta between 2020 – the year marking her appointment as Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Labour Government led by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern – and 2022. This corresponds to a collection of 28 addresses in total. The linguistic examination was conducted on the official transcriptions provided on the website of the Aotearoa New Zealand Government.^[2]

The first part of the analysis was mainly quantitative and aimed at assessing the statistical relevance of environmental matters within the Minister’s speeches. Accordingly, all texts were first carefully and manually read in order to count how many of them contained at least one reference to issues concerning the state of the natural world. Secondly, the speeches thus identified were scanned further in order to gauge the space devoted to such matters with reference to the whole length of the address. In order to do so, the example set by Bonnefille (2008) was followed, and the texts were divided into segments with the purpose of distinguishing between “green segments” (Bonnefille 2008: 33) – i.e. those informed with issues related to nature and its wellbeing – and segments covering other topics. Segmentation was performed according to the paragraphs already laid out by the transcripts. These indeed provided with a sound thematic unit, as the speeches display a fairly predictable structure that facilitates the identification of their main points. Therefore, each segment generally corresponds to a paragraph, and consists of at least one or more sentences. Words from the green segments were also singled out to offer a picture of the type of environmental topics or natural elements considered in each speech (see Table 1).

In addition, as a tool for obtaining useful statistical information, an electronic version of the corpus was compiled and searched through the online software Sketch Engine.^[3] The former was employed to check frequency and retrieve a keyword list (see Table 3).^[4] Because all of Mahuta’s speeches contain opening and closing greetings in Māori, these were omitted from the texts included in the electronic corpus to avoid interference. However, all other Māori words and expressions occurring in the main body of the addresses were retained, as they are either translated or glossed by Mahuta herself. Results are summarised in Tables 1 and 2 and will be discussed in Section 5.

The second part of the investigation adopted a qualitative approach. This consisted in the recognition of language uses that testify to the Minister’s incorporation of Māori values and principles in her public addresses. The analysis focussed on lexical and figurative items, and all types of segments were taken into consideration. Particularly, it looked at framing patterns and metaphorical representations inspired by intertextual references to Māori traditions. Finally, these patterns were judged so as to assess if and how they can favour a positive representation of nature and humans’ relationship with it.

According to the guidelines of ecolinguistic PDA, the definition of an “ecosophy” (Naess 1973; Stibbe 2021) – the ecological philosophy that condenses the analyst’s ethical framework – is required. An ecosophy is both descriptive and prescriptive, as it includes both assumptions about the state of the world, drawn from available evidence, and value statements based on the analyst’s own principles (Stibbe 2021). First, my personal ecosophy recognises the irreversibility of the current ecological crisis, with particular reference to climate disruption and its global consequences (IPCC 2022). As such, it assumes the inherent fallacy of actions seeking a final solution to it instead of adaptive responses. Second, its norms are inspired by one of the core tenets of Deep Ecology (Naess 1973, 1995 [1986]; Sessions 1995), which states that “the well-being and flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth have value in themselves” (Naess 1995 [1986]: 68). Therefore, my ecosophy rejects any hierarchy that justifies human’s exploitation of ecosystems, since “these values are independent of the usefulness of the non-human world for human purposes” (Naess 1995 [1986]: 68). Nature’s bounty ought to be treated as gifts rather than just resources. The relationship between humans and non-humans is in fact understood in terms of interconnectedness and kinship. Because all beings and ecosystems have intrinsic value, humans need to relate to and respect them as kins. Finally, and building from Stibbe (2021), the temporal scope of my ecosophy can be summarised as Before, now and the future. The phrase suggests that not only does the ecosophy apply to present and future generations, but it also look backwards. It is intergenerational in that it values the integration and transmission of traditional knowledge from past communities showing deeper ecological awareness than many current societies. The results of the linguistic analysis were thus judged according to the ecosophy just outlined.

5 Analysis and discussion

6 Conclusions

The analysis of Nanaia Mahuta’s speeches reveals the discursive potential of culturally hybrid contexts like Aotearoa New Zealand. For one thing, this is shown, with the support of quantitative evidence, by the space that environmental matters take up in her public addresses. In spite of her portfolio not being directly linked with these, the Minister almost always refers to them, and she recognises that concerns like climate disruption are indeed of global interest. Moreover, questions linked with the natural world and its wellbeing are addressed by mediating Western and Māori Indigenous knowledge or TEK. The integration of both is a clearly-stated objective of the Minister’s, who openly lists the Māori values that inspire her agenda and calls for the increasing involvement of Māori into national politics. However, the result of a negotiation is, by definition, a compromise, and data confirm that Mahuta sometimes align with persistent ways of talking about the natural environment. For instance, speeches covering economic development register a drop in the number of green segments. Furthermore, as observed in the analysis, framings of climate change also include those that are fallacious in addressing adequate response to it, especially the problem framing. This may testify to the actual status of the latter as stories we live by, informing every type of discourse.

Nevertheless, Mahuta’s speeches display linguistic devices that resist or re-frame such conventional – or ideological – conceptualisations. As pointed out by the qualitative examination of the texts, the former result from the Minister’s incorporation of and intertextual references to Māori language and culture. This is mainly achieved by means of figuration, which Mahuta sources from traditional proverbs or metaphors. These compare foreign relations to traditional Māori practises that are performed in accordance with natural time (e.g. net-making). In addition, the use of Māori words – which Mahuta always glosses or contextualises – allows for the presence of lexical elements that support an alternative and more beneficial way of talking about the environment. This is the case of kaitiakitanga, leading to the representation of humans as guardians or stewards of nature.

To sum up, the analysis has tried to demonstrate how all these features converge in an adaptation framing that informs all of Mahuta’s addresses. Not only does the former describe response to climate breakdown in a way that most environmental communication does not; but it more broadly puts forward a favourable representation of how to relate to nature in order to sustain its health. To conclude, because the results of the present analysis can be seen to conform with my ecosophy, Mahuta’s addresses actually instantiate a positive discourse around nature. Moreover, in the hope of identifying further examples of beneficial ecological narratives within institutions responsible for environmental policies, the present investigation confirms the need to extend (eco)linguistic analysis to less uncharted political contexts and figures.