Research Spotlight: When Climate Leadership Becomes a Stage for Power

That tension sits at the heart of Chau Pham’s article, which examines how COP29 became more than a climate summit in Azerbaijan. The paper argues that the summit also became a symbolic stage on which the Azerbaijani government could project environmental responsibility, defend fossil fuel expansion, and seek legitimacy for contested political narratives.

We spoke with the author to learn more about climate rhetoric, state image-building, and why careful qualitative analysis matters when public language carries political power.

Climate conferences are meant to bring governments together around accountability, cooperation, and shared responsibility. Pham’s article is a reminder that these same events can also become arenas for reputation management, where words such as leadership, peace, transition, and sustainability may be used to shape how a government is seen.

This matters for researchers, educators, policy observers, and civil society groups because climate politics is not only about targets and technologies. It is also about discourse: who controls the story, which facts are foregrounded, and which harms are pushed to the margins.

Pham described the implication they consider most important for anyone who follows international climate politics: “The most important implication of this research for those who follow international climate politics is that climate change is becoming increasingly politicized and weaponized by political actors to advance their personal interests, compromising the integrity of the climate movement and global climate progress, as evident in recent COP events. One way to combat this is to critically examine the rhetoric of political actors in such events to better understand their intentions and broader rhetoric patterns.”

By focusing on speeches, framing, and recurring patterns of language, the article shows how qualitative research can make visible the political work done by public statements. It also offers a timely case study for anyone concerned with climate governance, authoritarian influence, fossil fuel dependence, and the credibility of global environmental forums.

The article develops three major contributions that are especially useful for readers who want to understand how climate language can be used to build legitimacy.

• COP29 was framed as evidence of Azerbaijan’s international respectability. The article notes that Aliyev described the unanimous decision to host COP29 as a sign of respect and an appreciation of Azerbaijan’s active role on the international arena, a rhetorical move that connected climate hosting with national legitimacy.
• Fossil fuel legitimacy was central to the speeches. The article points to repeated claims that fossil fuel is a gift from God, the use of energy security arguments, and the finding that about half of Aliyev’s COP29 opening speech concerned fossil fuel, even though the summit’s stated purpose was climate action.
• Environmental language was also connected to militarism and territorial legitimacy. The paper argues that references to green energy zones, restoration, and development in contested or formerly Armenian-populated areas helped frame political and military outcomes as environmental progress.

Asked what surprised them most in the evidence, Pham pointed to the second of those findings: “What I found most surprising was the blatant defense of fossil fuel expansion as a common pattern in Aliyev’s rhetoric.”

The study is qualitative and interpretive. Its primary text is President Ilham Aliyev’s speech at the opening ceremony of the World Leaders Climate Action Summit at COP29 on 12 November 2024, with supplementary material drawn from media coverage and seven additional speeches or public statements delivered between 26 October 2023 and 4 April 2025.

The article uses thematic analysis to examine recurring patterns in the speeches. Open coding produced six main codes, including ecological modernization, claiming victimhood, framing fossil fuel as a divine gift, and legitimizing militarism through environmentalism. Those codes were then organized into higher-order themes informed by greenwashing theory, sharp power theory, and Genevieve Guenther’s analysis of climate language.

Evidano helped visualize patterns in Aliyev’s speeches, including the prominence of words such as gas, energy, green, and oil. The article does not present Evidano as replacing the researcher’s judgment. The coding, theme development, interpretation, and conceptual framing remained the responsibility of the author, who placed the visual outputs within a broader qualitative analysis grounded in greenwashing, sharp power, and climate language scholarship.

This is the kind of careful use of AI-assisted textual analysis that can support research without overshadowing scholarly interpretation. Pham described where the tool helped and where it stops: “Evidano was helpful in identifying rhetorical patterns, a crucial step in the initial research phase. Researchers should keep in mind, however, the importance of original critical analysis and the development of a more nuanced argumentation, which cannot be replaced by any AI tool.”

For climate researchers, the article offers a framework for examining how public officials use environmental language to manage legitimacy. It also shows why close reading remains important even when climate politics is increasingly shaped by large events, media narratives, and competing claims of progress.

For educators and institutional leaders, the study can help students and readers see that climate discourse is never neutral. Terms such as transition, security, modernization, and peace can clarify policy aims, but they can also obscure contradictions when they are separated from material action and accountability.

Pham offered a takeaway for readers who encounter that language in the wild: “It is important to stay alert and aware of climate leadership rhetoric, as it could be greenwashing in disguise, with hidden political motives. We should treat rhetoric with skepticism and critical evaluation, and do the extra research to assess its truth.”

The broader lesson is not that every claim of climate leadership is hollow. Rather, it is that claims of leadership deserve careful, evidence-based scrutiny, especially when they come from actors with strong incentives to protect fossil fuel interests, control international narratives, or deflect attention from domestic repression.