Discursive Alignment in EU Palm Oil Policy: How Securitisation Legitimises Ecological‐Neocolonial Governance

The EU has long been regarded as a normative leader in global environmental governance. Yet its restrictive measures on palm oil raise questions about how it exercises environmental authority within unequal relations. Drawing on securitisation theory and ecological neocolonialism, this study examines how the EU constructed and legitimised a threat narrative around palm oil. Using critical discourse analysis in its discourse‐historical variant, it analyses a corpus traced to the problematisation of palm oil at EU level, comprising regulatory texts, advocacy material, producer‐state and producer‐country non‐state responses, and the trade proceedings that followed. The analysis shows that this securitising move did not emerge ex nihilo but relied on discursive alignment, through which the EU grafted technocratic classifications onto established moral‐affective discourses concerning deforestation and biodiversity loss. The securitisation traced here also departs from its classical formulation by operating through the calculation and management of environmental risk rather than the suspension of established rules. This alignment enabled a shift from territorial control towards standardised governance, with instruments such as RED II and the EUDR making compliance a condition of market access. The findings suggest that, although these measures are framed as scientific imperatives, they acquire an ecological‐neocolonial character where regulatory, epistemic, and political‐economic asymmetries converge. Contestation generated illocutionary frustration for producer countries, as the proceedings addressed procedural issues without resolving their substantive concerns.