Discursive entrepreneurship: ethical meaning-making as a transformative practice for sustainable futures

Humanity inhabits a discursive landscape that stimulates our imaginations, guides and influences our behaviour, shapes our ideas of what is possible, and governs what we perceive as normal. The collective human imagination is currently dominated by a discourse of neoliberal capitalism that contributes to global sustainability challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss by framing nature as a resource to be exploited in service of perpetual growth in economic activity. Transformation towards flourishing, sustainable futures will not be possible without the transformation of this dominant discourse. Alternative discourses exist but little is known about how to proactively and ethically pursue the transformation of dominant discourses. In response, this paper develops a conceptual framework to guide an ethical practice of meaning-making towards discursive transformation. It introduces ‘discursive entrepreneurship’, defined as the practice of creating, performing, and transforming memes, stories, narratives, and discourses to promote a desired structure of the discursive landscape. Normative strategies for discursive entrepreneurship are identified from a systematic review of recent literature on how social-ecological stories, narratives, and discourses evolve and change. The paper clarifies the often-inconsistent terminology used to define these ideational concepts, arguing for a nested relationship between discourses, narratives, stories, and memes. Further, it shows how discursive entrepreneurs can engage in iterative strategies of deconstruction, reframing, construction, performance, connection, and collaboration to increase the chances that their meanings will reach audiences, be heard by them, be retold, and perhaps contribute to the emergence of inclusive, life-affirming discourses.