Metaphors of sustainable environment and essential-needs supply in Saudi Arabia: A framing-theory approach
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Abstract
This article examines how public Saudi discourse frames sustainable environment and essential-needs supply through metaphor. It analyzes a purposive bilingual sample of official Arabic and English discourse from the Saudi Green Initiative, the General Food Security Authority, and the Saudi Water Authority. The study is empirical in a qualitative discourse-analytic sense: it works with real-life institutional expressions rather than invented examples, while avoiding the stronger claim that the sample statistically represents all Saudi media. The article asks how recurrent metaphorical expressions define environmental and supply problems, allocate responsibility, evaluate policy action, and recommend solutions. The method combines framing theory, conceptual metaphor analysis, and critical metaphor analysis. Every Arabic expression cited in the analysis is presented in Arabic script, romanized form, and English translation. The results show that Saudi sustainability discourse repeatedly presents environmental transformation as movement toward a green future, climate action as struggle, governance as coordination under an umbrella, and food and water provision as security, continuity, reserve, system management, and early-warning preparedness. The article argues that these metaphors form an integrated discourse of governable transformation: the sustainable environment is framed not as a detached ecological ideal but as a national project linked to quality of life, strategic planning, future generations, and the protection of essential resources. At the same time, the analysis shows that the same frames can narrow public visibility. Journey metaphors make transformation appear orderly; war metaphors sharpen urgency; greening metaphors give ecological change a hopeful developmental vocabulary; security metaphors legitimize coordination and preparedness. Yet each metaphor also backgrounds something: conflict over pace, ecological tradeoffs, energy-sector tensions, demand restraint, import dependence, and the deliberative dimensions of sustainability. The article concludes that metaphor is one of the central mechanisms through which Saudi sustainability and essential-needs supply become publicly intelligible.
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