Framing the ‘Double Burden’: A Critical Policy Discourse Analysis of the Climate-Poverty Nexus in the World Bank’s CCDRs for LDCs

ABSTRACT: Climate change and poverty are intertwined global challenges that disproportionately impact Least Developed Countries (LDCs). However, how global institutions discursively construct the climate-poverty nexus to legitimize their policy recommendations remains underexplored. Drawing on Critical Policy Discourse Analysis (CPDA), this study investigates how the World Bank Group frames the relationship between climate change and poverty in its Country Climate and Development Reports (CCDRs) for LDCs, as well as the discursive legitimation strategies embedded in these constructions. Findings identify two dominant, complementary discursive frames: the vulnerability frame and the causality frame. The vulnerability frame constructs poor and marginalized groups as passive victims of climate impacts, leveraging on attributive relational and passive material processes, and deploys moral evaluation as a legitimization strategy to position adaptation policies as a non-negotiable moral imperative. In contrast, the causality frame positions climate change as an active, causal agent driving poverty dynamics, utilizing active material processes and extended causal chains, and employs scientific rationalization to legitimize mitigation policies as rational, long-term investments aligned with LDCs’ development priorities. These two frames collectively shape a hybrid policy agenda that integrates ethical imperatives with technocratic efficiency, reflecting the World Bank’s attempt to legitimize its institutional influence on LDC climate-development trajectories. This research contributes to the scholarship on discourse in global climate governance by equipping stakeholders to engage with international policy advice critically and fostering more context-sensitive strategies for LDCs.