Press discourses on ecological crises in the UK, Israel, and Hungary

Nira Yuval-Davis; Isabel Meier; Rolly Rosen; Viktor Varjú

doi:10.3389/fsoc.2023.1186410

Press discourses on ecological crises in the UK, Israel, and Hungary

Front Sociol. 2023 Jul 26:8:1186410. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2023.1186410. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Nira Yuval-Davis¹, Isabel Meier², Rolly Rosen³, Viktor Varjú^{4

5

6}

Affiliations

¹ Research Centre on Migration, Refugees and Belonging, University of East London, London, United Kingdom.
² Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle, United Kingdom.
³ Political Science Department, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
⁴ Transdanubian Research Department, Institute for Regional Studies, KRTK, Pécs, Hungary.
⁵ VFGI, Institute of Rural Development and Sustainable Economy (MATE), Kaposvár, Hungary.
⁶ Institute of Social Connections (TKI), Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Pécs, Pécs, Hungary.

Abstract

This article explores the relationships between political projects of belonging and approaches to environmental and climate ecological crises via comparing centre-right and centre-left newspapers in the UK, Israel and Hungary. Our theoretical framework draws on Nira Yuval-Davis's work on the politics of belonging as a way of understanding and framing the different political projects that accompany reporting on ecological issues. Focusing on selected national and international case studies on these issues at the centre of public debate during the last two decades, the paper explores and compares these relationships by examining the eco-relational, spatial, temporal and normative framing dimensions of the political projects of belonging as expressed in these articles. The findings of the analysis show that, despite different cultural and historical contexts, the most significant dividing line is not among countries but between the different political projects of belonging of the newspapers. This can be seen even when dealing with country-specific, rather than international, case studies. Overall, centre-right newspapers tend to focus on narrow nationalist interests concerning the climate crisis and do not produce discourses of urgency to resolve the crisis except when reporting on major international political agendas. They are also more inclined to focus on the economic aspects of such efforts and how they would affect the "people". The centre-left press, on the other hand, tends to prioritise ecological issues much more; it has wider global and planetary interdependent constructions of belonging and engages in the production of discourses of urgency in an attempt to solve the crisis and avoid future catastrophes. However, even in the centre-left press, especially in the UK, a tendency to remain within a western-centric perspective was observed.

Keywords: climate justice; eco-relationalities; ecological crisis; politics of belonging; press discourses; spatialities; temporalities.

Grants and funding

The research for this article has been supported by NY-D Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship EM-2020-069: Climate Change and the Politics of Belonging, VV's work was supported by the Hungarian National Fund OTKA 134903—Geopolitical Processes and Imaginaries in Central Europe: States, Borders, Integration and Regional Development, and VV's work was partly supported by the ELKH project The potential of national climate adaptation as well; grant number: SA-51/2021.