Engagement and Framing in the EU's Fair Transition Discourse

On 16 June 2022, the European Council approved Recommendation no. 2022/C 243/04 on ensuring a fair transition towards climate neutrality. This recommendation encourages actions to safeguard people affected by the green transition, promoting quality jobs and facilitating access to proper working conditions while protecting health and safety. Importantly, this recommendation marks a move away from some previous documents—e.g., the Green Deal—issued by international and European institutions, which focused on a ‘just’ transition rather than a ‘fair’ one. As a result, it might be worth exploring the way this new fair transition has been framed, viz. how some aspects of this process have been selected and made more salient from a communicative point of view, in order to background certain dynamics while foregrounding others. In light of the above, this paper sets out to investigate the framing of the discourse featuring the recommendation on ensuring a fair transition towards climate neutrality and the way the text was construed to fulfil certain communication purposes. In so doing, Entman’s four functions of framing—i.e., “defining problems, diagnosing causes, making moral judgments, and suggesting remedies” (Entman, 1993, p. 52)—will be investigated in the text in the context of the Appraisal Theory developed by Martin and White, in order to deal with “the construction by texts of communities of shared feelings and values, and with the linguistic mechanisms for the sharing of emotions, tastes and normative assessments” (Martin & White, 2005, p. 1). More specifically, this paper will seek to understand how the textual voice characterising this recommendation positions itself with respect to other voices and other positions. For the purposes of this study, the category of Engagement will be considered.