Securitizing the Environment? A discourse analysis of key United Nations documents on climate change

Sammanfattning: Over the course of the last few years climate change has been increasingly framed in terms of security, frequently featuring in discussions and publications of various security actors and institutions. This development generated a vigorous debate within academia as to whether a securitization of climate change in global politics has occurred. By drawing upon Copenhagen School’s Securitization Theory, this thesis aspires to further contribute to that debate by investigating to what extent institutions with a far-reaching role in global climate governance, but with no explicit ties to security, also advance a securitization of climate change through their specific discursive constructions of the issue. More specifically, this study is concerned with institutions within the United Nations system, which include bodies and agencies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations Environment Programme and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. In order to address the above question, the study employs the method of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and conducts a discursive analysis of selected influential documents published by the aforementioned bodies and agencies in the period between 2014 and 2019. Furthermore, through the utilization of the CDA three-dimensional analytical model, it scrutinizes the interplay between the diverse discourses of environmental security that feature in the texts’ framings of climate change and discusses the potential policy implications that those articulations encompass.