Framing The Future: An Ecolinguistic Analysis Of Government And Media Discourses On Indonesia’s New Capital (IKN)

Abstract

The relocation of Indonesia's capital city to Ibu Kota Nusantara (IKN) in 2019 has sparked public discussion and controversy regarding its environmental, developmental, and political consequences. As a place of national change, IKN is not just a physical project but also a discursive one—built and fought over using language. The article examines how the government (https://setkab.go.id) and the media frame (https://en.tempo.co) IKN in their narratives using an ecolinguistic approach based on Stibbe's (2015) ecological discourse analysis from 2019 to 2025. Although the earlier objective of the study is hypothetically predicted different framing between those two discourses, after undergoing the analysis, the researchers found a surprisingly similar frame between government and media discourse. Especially when they frame IKN throughDevelopment frames, Sustainability frames, and Erasure frames, both discourses aligned in articulating the frame through similar metaphors, lexical choices, and linguistic patterns. This unanticipated alignment changes the emphasis of the study from discursive difference to the discovery of ideological congruence and its consequences for public ecological awareness. The five main frames the study finds are Development, Sustainability, Resilience, Presidential Legitimacy, and Erasure. By means of these frames, both institutions create a common story of national growth while sidelining other ecological voices and suppressing the non-human effect of development. By demonstrating how coordinated framing by strong institutions shapes environmental discourse, hence affecting public perception and limiting the space for critical ecological reflection in Indonesian culture, the results add to ecolinguistic research.