Quando as restrições institucionais encontram as mudanças ideacionais: discursos sobre o nexo entre segurança e mudanças climáticas no Conselho de Segurança das Nações Unidas

Abstract

The present work investigated how the discourses of the permanent members of the UNSC (P5) on the nexus between security and climate change influenced the identification of institutional changes in the UNSC. It is believed that P5's discourses are important to the extent that they facilitate or constrain the discussion of proposals for institutional changes. In these terms, the hypothesis was followed that the discourses that propose the adaptation of existing activities influence the institutional change in the UNSC in an evolutionary sense. The work adopts an interpretive research methodology based on theoretical contributions from discourse analysis. Thus, the main object of discursive analysis are the minutes of the UNSC open meetings that discussed the nexus between security and climate change as the main theme between 2007 and 2022 and that contain the full speeches of all country representatives who participated in the debates. The work adopts as its main theoretical lens the contributions of Discursive Institutionalism, from its specific focus on the role of ideas and discourses, in view of its robust theoretical and conceptual framework to explain institutional change. Furthermore, an overview of the ideas and discourses on climate security identified in the literature is presented to ground a subsequent discursive analysis of the positioning of P5 in discussing the nexus between security and climate change in its agenda. The work ends with a final analysis of how institutional change was framed in climate security discourses: whether around the institutional enlargement of the UNSC in a conscious but measured response by France, the United Kingdom and the United States; or in favor of maintaining a static and reactive UNSC stance in a climate “non-response” by China and Russia. It is concluded that it would be possible to identify an incremental change in the cognitive/cultural dimension of the UNSC through symbolic bricolage, while substantive bricolage to alter the other regulatory and normative dimensions of the UNSC would not have been able to materialize as a result of Chinese and Russian ideational power over the idea of the nexus between security and climate change in the UNSC.