Environmental sustainability challenges in Saudi social institutions: Pragmatic analysis of problem, blame, and solution narratives
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Abstract
Environmental sustainability enters public life through language that identifies what is wrong, indicates who is able or obliged to act, and makes some remedies appear more fitting than others. This article examines those pragmatic choices in a purposive corpus of sixteen English-language webpages and news items published between September 2024 and July 2026 by Saudi universities, municipal and environmental bodies, youth and family nonprofits, and organizations working in civic, conservation, and pilgrimage settings. “Social institutions” is used here in a bounded organizational sense: the sampled bodies structure education, volunteering, family socialization, community participation, and public ritual; they do not stand for Saudi society as a whole. A qualitative pragmatic discourse analysis considers speech acts, presupposition and implicature, modality, pronouns and deixis, agency, evaluation, mitigation, legitimation, and audience positioning. The texts consistently name pollution, waste, desertification, regulatory difficulty, and weak awareness as problems, yet they rarely accuse a specific wrongdoer. Culpability is softened into shared responsibility and prospective capability. Institutions promise, affirm, and report; citizens, students, families, volunteers, and small firms are invited or enabled to act. Solutions are correspondingly practical and coalition-friendly: awareness, volunteering, tree planting, cleanup, waste sorting, training, partnership, and monitored institutional integration. Differences among sectors are consequential. Universities favor pedagogic leadership, municipal bodies quantify participation and urban benefit, nonprofits foreground empowerment, and pilgrimage communication joins environmental conduct to place-specific collective care. A small set of negative cases—especially texts on environmental compliance, violations, and pollution—shows that stronger attribution remains possible. The dominant pattern nevertheless turns environmental conflict into an inclusive narrative of competence, contribution, and national alignment. That strategy protects institutional and audience face and may broaden participation, but it can also obscure asymmetries in environmental burden, regulatory power, and responsibility for harm.
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