Discursive Telecouplings

Abstract

Globalisation is causing unprecedented flows of people, resources, and goods across the world, accelerating interactions between distal land systems. The resulting overexploitation of the world’s natural resources has led to persistent calls for global environmental conservation efforts that reduce pressures on the natural environment requiring new tools to understand the material and immaterial flows that create and sustain these complex causal interactions. This chapter integrates insights from discourse analysis to provide an analytical lens to capture the heterogeneous outcomes of global discourses on socio-environmental change in local land systems. After outlining the conceptual foundations of discursive telecouplings, the concept is applied to the case of global forest conservation discourses. Focusing on the emergence of a win-win discourse in conservation and development, key considerations to account for the heterogeneous outcomes of global discourses are discussed.