Environmental responsibility and uneven institutional accountability in Pakistani secondary-school English textbooks
This study employs critical discourse analysis on Grade 9 and 10 English textbooks in Punjab, Pakistan, to reveal that while environmental themes are present, they frequently obscure institutional accountability through nominalization and a lack of explicit governance framing, thereby failing to connect personal ethics with concrete regulatory duties and collective participation.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
To understand how a society teaches its children to care for the planet, one must look beyond the pictures of forests and the lists of endangered animals. It requires examining the invisible grammar of responsibility. When a textbook describes a river drying up, the language used can either point a finger at the specific people or organizations causing the problem, or it can let the event happen as if it were a natural force of nature, like the wind or the rain. This distinction is crucial because the way we speak about environmental issues shapes how we believe they should be solved. If a problem is described as a vague tragedy, the solution feels like a personal moral duty for everyone. If it is described as the result of specific actions by specific groups, the solution becomes a matter of policy, regulation, and institutional accountability. This is the core question researchers are asking in the field of environmental education: do our schoolbooks help students see the machinery of governance, or do they leave the machinery hidden?
A team of researchers from universities in Pakistan and abroad set out to investigate this question within the context of Pakistani secondary schools. They focused on the English textbooks used for ninth and tenth grades in the Punjab province, a region facing severe environmental challenges such as air pollution, water scarcity, and deforestation. The researchers were not interested in counting how many times the word "nature" appeared. Instead, they wanted to see who was doing what in the stories the books told. They treated the text as a map of power, looking for the names of governments, companies, and organizations. They asked whether the books explained that environmental damage is often the result of specific decisions made by specific actors, or if the books simply described the damage as a general condition of the world.
To answer this, the researchers selected four specific units from the textbooks that dealt with sustainability, renewable energy, wildlife, and population growth. They broke these texts down into individual sentences and analyzed the grammar of each one. They looked for signs of "nominalization," a linguistic process where an action is turned into a static thing. For example, instead of saying "a factory is polluting the water," a text might say "water pollution is a problem." This shift removes the actor who is doing the polluting. They also looked for "passive voice," where the subject of the sentence is the receiver of an action rather than the doer, such as "resources are being used," without saying who is using them. Finally, they searched for "governance framing," which is the clearest sign of accountability: a sentence that names an institution and describes a specific action it is taking, such as a government passing a law or a company investing in clean technology.
The analysis of 135 distinct sentences revealed a striking imbalance. The most common feature found was the turning of actions into abstract things. Nearly half of the sentences used this technique, presenting environmental processes like "growth," "depletion," or "conservation" as if they were objects floating in the air, detached from the people who cause them. Almost as frequently, the texts described environmental harm without naming any institution responsible for it. In these cases, the damage was described, but the culprit was missing. While the books did mention institutions in about one out of every eight sentences, these mentions were often just names dropped in passing. The researchers found that only three sentences out of the entire set of 135 actually connected an institution to a specific governance action, such as regulation, funding, or enforcement.
In contrast, the textbooks were very good at assigning moral responsibility to individuals. About a quarter of the sentences used words like "must," "should," or "essential" to tell students what they ought to do. The books frequently called on "we," "people," or "society" to act, creating a sense of shared ethical duty. This approach is not inherently wrong; teaching students to care for nature is vital. However, the study suggests that by focusing so heavily on personal ethics and abstract processes, the books leave a gap. They provide a strong sense of moral obligation but offer very little guidance on how that obligation connects to the real-world systems that actually manage resources, enforce laws, and fund solutions.
The researchers did find exceptions that proved the rule. In the sections discussing wildlife conservation, the textbooks were much more specific. They named organizations like the World Wildlife Fund and the Snow Leopard Foundation. They explained how these groups worked with local communities and governments to create regulations, manage hunting licenses, and distribute money to herders who lost livestock to predators. In these passages, the chain of responsibility was clear: an organization acted, a rule was made, and a result followed. Similarly, the sections on renewable energy explicitly stated that governments and companies were investing heavily in new technologies. These examples showed that the textbooks were capable of explaining complex institutional roles, but they did so only in specific topics. In the broader discussions about population pressure, food supplies, and general resource use, the institutional actors largely disappeared, replaced by passive descriptions of pressure and loss.
This unevenness is the central finding of the study. The textbooks are not hiding the existence of institutions entirely; rather, they are presenting them selectively. When the topic is wildlife or energy investment, the books show the gears of governance turning. When the topic is general environmental degradation or resource scarcity, the gears are hidden, and the focus shifts entirely to the moral character of the reader. The researchers argue that this creates a fragmented understanding for students. A student might learn that they have a duty to protect nature, but they might not learn that the government has a duty to regulate pollution, or that a corporation has a duty to manage its waste. Without seeing the full picture, students may view environmental problems as inevitable tragedies or purely personal failings, rather than as outcomes of specific systems that can be changed through policy and collective action.
The study concludes that the solution is not to remove the moral lessons from the textbooks. The call for individuals to care for the environment remains important. Instead, the researchers suggest that these personal calls to action should be paired with clear explanations of institutional duties. A sentence telling students to save water could be followed by a sentence explaining how municipal authorities manage water distribution or how agricultural policies affect water usage. By linking the personal "we" with the specific "they" of government and industry, the textbooks could help students see the complete map of environmental responsibility. This would allow them to understand that while individual choices matter, the scale of the challenge requires the organized power of institutions to be effective. The goal is to move from a curriculum that teaches students to feel responsible, to one that teaches them to understand how responsibility is actually distributed and exercised in the real world.
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