Opening closures: Organizational arrangements and moral articulations in institutional global hegemonic and local counter-hegemonic sustainability discourses

This paper interrogates how institutional sustainability discourses enact closure through logocentric operations that structurally marginalize alterity. We argue that closure is not contingent upon geographical origin or ideological-power positioning but constitutes a structural feature of institutional discourses, manifesting equally in Global Hegemonic Discourses (GHD) and Local Counter-hegemonic Discourses (LChD). We identify two interlocking discursive mechanisms that produce closure: Organizational Arrangements (OAs), which establish hierarchical orders and internal dynamics in a dominant meaning structure; and Moral Articulations (MAs), which bind values and identities through normative imperatives that discipline inclusion and regulate exclusion. To expose how closure operates through these mechanisms, we engage with deconstruction as an ethical practice. We apply it through a double-reading strategy, comprising Double Commentary and Disruptive Reading, to two institutional texts: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development ( UN, 2015 ) and The Care Society ( ECLAC, 2022 ). Our readings reveal how OAs and MAs collaborate to constitute, impose, and legitimize particular interpretations of sustainability, rendering alterity unintelligible, contrarian to the dominant discourse, and morally deficient from its very emergence. Through our readings, we unveiled that OAs-MAs function not merely to establish structural positions, internal logics, and disciplinary and regulatory actions, but to prevent inclusion, police alterity, naturalize authority, conceal differánces and aporias, and mask structural incompleteness. Our contribution lies in opening closures, exposing them as structural conditions of logocentric discourse-making. Deconstruction proved essential for opening the closures in institutional sustainability discourses , foregrounding its constitutive inclusion/exclusions and affirming an ethical responsibility toward that which remains unrepresented, excluded, and yet to come.