The EU Energy and Climate Package: a Showcase for European Environmental Leadership?

摘要

Climate change is one of the main contemporary challenges, and it has been argued that there is a need for strong environmental leadership to achieve global climate deals. Few studies, however, have questioned how 'environmental leadership' is demonstrated in political and media discourse. To fill this gap, this paper adopts a critical discourse analytical (CDA) perspective to explore how the EU and newspapers in six European countries discursively construct environmental leadership in relation to the EU climate package that was introduced and ratified in 2008. The findings suggest that environmental leadership is a struggle for meaning that shifts over time, from first, aiming at emissions reduction targets that are higher than others' versus targets that would be stringent enough to effectively fight climate change to second, the means used to reach the reduction targets versus the ends that are reached. This shift over the period of year 2008 seems largely due to significant changes in the social context.