Solving the Climate Crisis? : WWF’s and La Via Campesina’s Work on Mitigating Climate Change Through a Gramscian Lens

Abstract: This thesis conducts a comparative study of two big, international civil society organisations, La Via Campesina and WWF, and their work with climate change. The purpose is to investigate why they have such different perspectives toward solving the climate crisis, and whether the explanation can be found by looking at the different positions they have in relation to the global hegemonic system. Two supplementary approaches of discourse analysis, Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis and Bacchi’s What’s The Problem Represented to Be-approach, are utilised to analyse the organisations’ framing of climate change. Gramsci’s theoretical framework of hegemony is applied in order to inform the analysis and to shed light on how this framing interrelates to the hegemonic system of neoliberalism. In the case of La Via Campesina, the conclusion is that they are a counter-hegemonic movement, fighting in a war of position over the common sense. This spills over into their work on climate change, which is aimed at bringing transformative change. WWF has a more reformist agenda and is effectively enabling the perseverance of the current hegemony, but it cannot be confirmed within the scope if this thesis whether this is a direct consequence of co-optation or not.