Mid Sweden University

As environmental impacts manifest in tangible natural disasters, the actions of environmental activists are becoming more visible in news headlines globally. This thesis aims to examine the environmental advocacy discourses and collective identities constructed by two social movement organizations in different socio-political contexts. The totality of Fridays for Future-Sweden (FFF)’s Instagram posts and Mother Nature Cambodia (MNC)’s Facebook posts in 2023 were analyzed through a theoretical approach of Critical Discourse Analysis.

The inductive qualitative content analysis on the social media content revealed that FFF constructed the discourse of environmental issues on a global scale, while MNC’s environmental discourse concentrated on local issues. FFF constructed the combustion of fossil fuels and biofuels as the main contributors to emissions that lead to global warming, an urgent global climate issue that affects vulnerable groups. MNC constructed the privatization of public natural areas as the cause of natural resources and biodiversity destruction in Cambodia. Both SMOs shaped the environmental problems in their advocacy as relevant to politic. Both SMOs constructed public demonstrations as their collective action. FFF and MNC constructed their collective identities through the different groups they advocate for, which are vulnerable groups across the globe and Cambodian people respectively. The groups they advocate for also reflected the global scale (FFF) and national scale (MNC) of their salient environmental discourses.

This study also contributes to the understanding of how youth-led environmental movements construct and validate their advocacy on social media to build a resistance discourse against the dominating discourse constructed by the powerholders in different socio-political contexts. Especially, the analysis on MNC’s advocacy discourse contributes to the lack of studies on SMOs in the context of the Global South. More studies about activism in the Global South should be conducted since the socio-political context in the Global South is not homogeneous.