Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum Framing sustainability and climate change: Interrogating discourses in vernacular and English-language media in Sundarbans, India Aditya Ghosh a , Maxwell Boykoff b a Institute of Ethics and Transdisciplinary Sustainability Research, Leuphana University, Central Building (Z10), Room No. 311, Universitätsallee 1, 21335 Lüneburg, Germany b Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, 1333 Grandview Avenue, Campus Box 488, Boulder, CO 80309-0488, United States 1. Local concerns and global frames: Indian climate change discourses Successful climate change adaptation and developing sustainably are two of the most pressing social, political and scientific concerns of the time (Field et al., 2014; Eriksen et al., 2015, Moser and Boykoff, 2013). Both concepts however, are discursive constructs (Dryzek, 2013; Springett and Redclift , 2015) and over the past two decades, have generated a diverse range of perspectives, opinions, agendas and understandings. These diverse ideas have been engaged in a discursive battle across the media. Agendas compete in the media for legitimation and greater eventual domination of the policy discourses across scales (van Dijk, 1997, Saraisky, 2015). There is evidence that aggregate shifts in public opinion lead to congruent shifts in public policy (Page and Shapiro, 1983). These correlations are higher when the public opinion shift is larger, more stable, or more salient. (“salience” refers to the number of people that answer “I don't know”; fewer “don’t knows” means higher salience) (Boykoff and Yulsman, 2013). Analysis of media coverage thus not only helps uncover how certain actors exert greater power and domination over issues such as climate change or sustainable develop- ment, it also indicates how certain sub-agendas are set to marginalise other sub-agendas (McCombs and Shaw, 1972) to influence people – specifically in ‘what to think about’ and not ‘what to think’ (Cohen, 1963). Analysing discourses – comprising written and spoken words – helps understand how power flows through culture, politics, and society in shaping the public discourses which in turn shape the terrains of knowledge and public opinion about climate change and global warming (Boykoff and Yulsman, 2013). Many studies on the media coverage of climate change in the past 15 years have shed light on how various actors interact and engage with the issue, and how media create various kinds of discourses about the subject (e.g. Dalby, 1996, Gavin, 2009). These demonstrate how various power struggles and their cor- responding interpretations in the media create certain kinds of sense- making and public opinion (Carmichael and Brulle, 2017). However, majority of these studies have focused on the English language media in developed countries. A small number of studies that has examined media coverage of climate change and sustainability in developing country contexts, also remained confined within the English language media (Billet, 2010, Boykoff et al., 2013, Dutt et al., 2013, Thaker and Leiserowitz, 2014; Thaker et al., 2017) (see Fig. 1). This poses an in- herent risk of a biased and skewed understanding about what ‘traction’ 1 climate change adaptation or sustainable development has among people in a specific society, especially those who are the most vulner- able. English language media are aimed at and consumed by a small section of elites across the developing world. In India for example, the regional language press dominates 90% of the newspaper readership and there is only one English-language newspaper in the top ten most- read newspapers (IRS, 2014). (However, by virtue of their elite read- ership, the English language newspapers have much greater power in setting agendas that in turn dominate national and regional policies.) Here, major gaps remain in the understanding of how public opinion and policies are shaped in developing countries by media coverage out- side of English-language portrayals. Greater analysis of local, vernacular media discourse in developing countries thus assumes importance, along with uncovering local concerns and how the global discourses of sus- tainability and climate change are reinterpreted and renegotiated by the local vernacular media for the consumption of non-Anglophone world. To achieve this goal, inversion of the entry point into the discourse with a specific vulnerable region (see next section) and how it is represented, what agendas dominate about the region and which are marginalised in the media are analysed. The entire volume of coverage on this specific ecosystem is analysed to understand what gained prominence in the media and why as well as what failed to generate media coverage. This is why the codes (as analytical tools) were developed first in the Bengali language media and then applied to the English language one to under- stand whether and how much the coverages match or diverge. Shifting the point of entry to a vulnerable socioecological system in- stead of keywords (such as ‘climate change’ or ‘sustainable development’) is a critical methodological innovation this study attempts in order to uncover how different agendas such as poverty, sea level rise, health, education, erosion, sustainability compete against and interact with each other within the system. A socioecological system (SES), by definition, is a https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.11.014 Received 10 December 2017; Received in revised form 9 July 2018; Accepted 19 November 2018 E-mail addresses: adityo.ghosh@gmail.com (A. Ghosh), boykoff@colorado.edu (M. Boykoff). 1 ‘Traction’ here not only means relevance and recall factor of the specific subject but the quality of impression and perception on the subject. Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx 0016-7185/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Please cite this article as: Ghosh, A., Geoforum, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.11.014