Document Type
Poster
Publication Date
Fall 2025
Abstract
This project applies the computational text analysis methods from Franco Moretti and Dominique Pestre's "Bankspeak" to examine how the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) language has evolved in its annual reports from 1975 to 2024. Founded in 1972 as the UN’s main environmental authority, the UNEP plays a vital role in global discourse surrounding climate change and environmental challenges. Using Python-based computational methods to track word frequencies, semantic clusters, and grammatical patterns across five decades of annual reports, this analysis reveals three distinct linguistic periods. These periods include an early period (1975-1989), which emphasizes nature and scientific terms, a middle period (1990-2009) showing a decline in scientific dialect and a rise in policy/governance terms, and the recent period (2010-2024) of increased emphasis on finance and a green economy. Grammatical analysis also reveals steady increases in nominalization and parataxis until 2021. The growth of these grammatical tactics suggests an “environmentspeak” in UNEP reports that reflect similar bureaucratic jargon as the World Bank’s “Bankspeak” language. The project’s findings are important for considering how the UNEP’s language shapes approaches to global environmental governance and implications for policymakers confronting environmental challenges.
Recommended Citation
Aiken, Elizabeth, "From Nature to Finance: The Language of Environmental Governance through UNEP Reports" (2025). IPHS 200: Programming Humanity. Paper 90.
https://digital.kenyon.edu/dh_iphs_prog/90
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.