Abstract
This chapter focuses on documents and tools created by the European Cyclists’ Federation, the European Environment and Transport Ministers, the Danish public–private partnership State of Green, the World Health Organization. The texts are observed through a corpus-aided qualitative approach, investigating transitivity, nominalisations, modality and lexical choices—in particular road users labels and marketised discourse. Positive discourse strategies are highlighted. The chapter opens with a brief history of the notion of sustainable development, highlighting its ideological contradictions in order to show how these are embedded in the dominant ‘pro-car neoliberal automentality’ (Walks in The Urban Political Economy and Ecology of Automobility: Driving Cities, Driving Inequality, Driving Politics. London and New York, Routledge, 2015). The ‘for what for whom’ questions from Systems Thinking are blended with the discursive analysis of transitivity and agency. The corpus-aided analysis reveals the profound marketisation of the texts observed and, from these observations, starting points for reframing strategies are outlined.
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Notes
- 1.
With the 2018 annual general meeting, ECF announced the intention of becoming the European Cycling Federation as part of its 2030 vision, thus changing the meaning of the C in the acronym from ‘cyclists’ to ‘cycling’. This change has not taken place yet, and while on the one hand, in English, it would have positive effects and would reduce the tendency to perceive ‘cyclists’ as ‘sport cyclists’, the change could create problems in other languages—ECF being a federation, its name is often translated in the local languages of its members. In Italian, for example, the translation of ‘cycling’ with ‘ciclismo’ would actually reinforce the reference to sports, and the more general connotation of cycling could only be rendered with a phrase like ‘andare in bici’ (riding a bicycle). To avoid both ‘ciclismo’ and ‘ciclisti’, the Italian federation of local association (a member of ECF itself) was named Federazione Italiana Amici della Bicicletta (Italian Federation of Friends of the Bicycle) and later transformed into Federazione Italiana Ambiente e Bicicletta (Italian Federation of the Environment and the Bicycle).
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Caimotto, M.C. (2020). Marketisation in European Documents. In: Discourses of Cycling, Road Users and Sustainability. Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44026-8_6
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