A Roadmap to Nowhere? A Critical Discourse Analysis of Australia’s ‘Technology-Led’ Emissions Reduction Strategy

Abstract

In response to mounting international pressure, the Australian Federal Government has recently announced a ‘Technology Investment Roadmap’ as its national climate strategy. This new policy seeks to enable the deployment of emerging “low emissions technologies” to spearhead the decarbonisation of Australia’s economy. Nevertheless, policies which promise future technical solutions to intractable global problems risk delaying effective action by obscuring the scope for other non-technical changes. Drawing primarily on the approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) developed by Fairclough, this research project aims to examine how dominant representations of technology in Australia’s ‘technology-led’ emissions reduction strategy are discursively constructed, and to what extent they influence the policy’s mitigation potential. The analysis identified three dominant socio-technical storylines within the examined texts, each linked by their optimistic representations of low emissions technologies. These storylines were constructed from a set of technological discourses which, when situated in a wider social context, were found to reproduce Australia’s political (and emissions) status quo. Since these dominant representations of technology are incompatible with the systemic changes required for substantial emissions reductions, this research project concludes that the Technology Investment Roadmap delays, rather than enhances, meaningful climate action in Australia.