Governing the environment through language: agency, responsibility and silence in Pakistani state educational discourse

This article investigates how environmental issues are discursively governed in state-produced English textbooks used at the secondary level in Pakistan. The corpus comprises two English textbooks (Grades 9 and 10) published by the Punjab Curriculum and Textbook Board and the Punjab Education, Curriculum, Training and Assessment Authority (PECTAA), which are officially prescribed for secondary-level education in Pakistan. Adopting a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach, the study draws on Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework . The analysis focuses on textbook units that address environmental themes, such as pollution, conservation and climate change. The study examines patterns of agency representation, grammatical choices and recurring discursive strategies. The findings suggest that environmental degradation is represented without clearly identifiable agents, while responsibility is framed as generalized and individualized. Institutional, political and economic actors are consistently backgrounded or omitted. These discursive patterns function to naturalize environmental harm and limit the scope of accountability within educational discourse. This study suggests that textbooks operate not only as pedagogical resources but also as sites of ideological work, where understandings of environmental responsibility are normalized. By foregrounding both linguistic patterns and strategic silences, the study contributes to ongoing debates on discourse, power and environmental governance in education, while also highlighting its relevance to global priorities such as quality education and climate action.