Palm oil not polar bears: climate change and development in Malaysian media

Abstract

To date, debates about climate change reporting in national media focus largely on Western democracies. We aim to broaden the scope for cross-national comparison by looking at climate change reporting in Malaysia – an emerging economy in the global South facing developmental tensions common to many, specifically an ambitious national climate change agenda in the face of an economy largely reliant on the extraction and export of primary commodities. Our questions are: How is climate change framed in Malaysian media? How do Malaysian narratives compare with those found elsewhere? How do climate change and development narratives interact in a ‘second tier’ emerging economy? And lastly, what do these interacting narratives say about the salience of neoliberal and North–South perspectives on climate change and development? To answer these questions, we undertook a content analysis of climate action stories published over a three-year period (2009–2011) in five English-language news sources. In addition to a high proportion of environmental-framed articles across all the news sources, our findings show that climate change has been framed as both a multi-scalar responsibility and a positive opportunity for two key stakeholders in development, i.e. neoliberal market forces and geopolitical actors keenly interested in restructuring the international political economy along lines reminiscent of the new international economic order (NIEO) demands of the 1970s. We label the key themes emergent from our analysis as climate capitalism and green nationalism (neither of which are unique to Malaysia), while demonstrating that debates about palm oil are particularly illustrative of the interaction of these themes in the Malaysian context. In the final section we suggest thinking of the interacting elements as a singular, structuralist model of green development – one reminiscent of discourses at work in other emerging economies. The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).