Everything counts in large amounts: A systemic discourse analysis of official texts related to the UN’s sustainable development goals

Since 2015 and its adoption by the United Nations (UN), the sustainable development goals (SDGs) program and its 17 SDGs have been a source of inspiration for numerous sectors, in order to reach the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. In sectors as diverse as industry, human rights, ecology, or education, several institutions, organizations, and stakeholders have used the opportunity offered by the SDGs to make sustainable choices or apply specific policies. Yet it is also true that the sheer application of the SDGs have triggered grounded criticism, insofar as it offered readymade templates to reproduce inequalities or foster wrong decisions. In this sense, the 2030 agenda has raised some concern regarding a new form of colonialism it seems to rely on, its permanent links to an economy of growth and non-decent work, or the pervasive impacts on education and social inequalities. Such critical points have motivated scholars to work on a reinterpreted application of the SDGs, underline the positive evolution of the SDGs in comparison to the millenium development goals, and call for an adaptation of the SDGs regarding climate change and planetary limits. As a linguist, my approach regarding the 17 SDGs is rooted in systemic discourse analysis-an applied discourse study that simultaneously draws on critical discourse analysis, corpus studies and lexicometric analysis, which I will define later in the present chapter. My goal is to analyze every official text published in order to present and encourage the application of each of the 17 SDGs, thus building a corpus by extracting texts from official sources published on the Internet website of the UN, dedicated to the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. In this sense, a link is made between discourse structures, social structures, and social representations.