Sustainabilities

Abstract

This dissertation asks what sustainability becomes when it is read not as a stable concept, but as a contested signifier constructed by discourse. Rather than seeking a definitive definition, it examines how sustainability is articulated, stabilized, opened, and closed across institutional and political texts. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, Essex School discourse theory, and systems theory, the study develops a deconstructive reading strategy to analyze the tensions, exclusions, and undecidable meanings that shape sustainability discourses. Through a series of empirical and theoretical chapters, the dissertation shows how dominant and counter-hegemonic sustainability texts often produce coherence through desired futures, present diagnoses, and pathways of action, while simultaneously relying on closures that marginalize alternative meanings. It then turns to populist articulations in Latin America, examining how leaders such as Claudia Sheinbaum and Javier Milei mobilize sustainability through unstable and contradictory articulations of the people, their will, and the antagonistic other. The dissertation argues that sustainability is neither fully open nor fully closed, but an undecidable signifier: everything, anything, and all at once