Mitigating or exacerbating climate change? an ecolinguistic analysis of the Indonesian government’s political discourse on platform X (2015-2023)

This article explores how the Indonesian government, represented by the Ministry of Environment and Forestry (Kementerian Lingkungan Hidup dan Kehutanan/KLHK) and their unit, the Directorate General of Climate Change Control (Direktorat Jenderal Pengendalian Perubahan Iklim/DJPPI), frame the issue of climate change in their official social media accounts on platform X (formerly Twitter). We qualitatively interpreted 38 tweets based on Entman’s (1993) framing analysis, spanning from December 2015 (marking the initial period of the Paris Climate Agreement) to December 2023 (marking the first-ever global stocktake). The results were assessed for their potential environmental consequences based on Stibbe’s (2015) ecolinguistic approach. Overall, we found that the Indonesian government’s political discourse on climate change tends to be ambiguous and ambivalent in the sense that it has the potential to both mitigate and exacerbate climate change. The Indonesian government seems to be trying to “bandage the wounds” of the climate crisis while, inadvertently, adding more wounds. For this reason, we categorize it as “eco-ambivalent discourse.” The study calls for a more nuanced and holistic approach to climate communication that aligns environmental goals with effective language strategies.