The social representations of the Bali climate conference in the French and German media

Abstract

International audience ; Climate change is a major current affair for which recent United Nations climate conferences aim tobuild consensus and develop international solutions. The objective of this article is to compare,through the theoretical lens of social representations, the way in which French and German media,specifically newspapers, represent the Bali climate conference. We use the triangulation of dataanalysis to take both the pragmatic and the semantic aspects of media discourse into account.Results show that German media adopt both a local and a global vision of climate change andof the conference. Religious metaphors highlight a moral dimension of the conference, suggestinganchoring in human and political categories. In contrast, in French media, we identify that conflictsbetween countries render the stakes of climate change concrete by war metaphors. The Frenchdiscourses examined are shown to be organised through the anchoring of political and financialcategories. Results are discussed in relation to the history of green movements in the twocountries and in relation to practical implications.