Libraries as pragmatic infrastructures of environmental sustainability: Speech acts, knowledge commons, climate communication, and ecological participation

Abstract

Libraries are often described as sustainable institutions because they share resources, preserve knowledge, and provide civic space. Yet sustainability is not produced by those material arrangements alone. It is also made through language: definitions establish legitimate categories, recommendations distribute responsibility, institutional commitments invite trust, and public programmes turn climate information into occasions for participation. This article develops the concept of the library as a pragmatic infrastructure of environmental sustainability. It reports a qualitative pragmatic-discourse analysis of four public texts issued by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions and its Environment, Sustainability and Libraries Section: the 2022 Green Library definition, the section profile, the Green Library Award page, and a 2022 planning article. The analysis combines speech-act theory with presupposition, implicature, modality, deixis, and felicity conditions, while drawing on knowledge-commons scholarship and climate-communication research. The texts do more than represent environmentally responsible librarianship. Assertives stabilise a professional identity; directives translate broad concern into expected conduct; commissive language projects accountable institutional agency; and scalar expressions connect local practice to planetary programmes. At the same time, inclusive and promotional formulations can obscure unequal capacity, undefined thresholds, and the material footprint of digital access. The article therefore proposes a pragmatic sustainability test organised around authority, clarity, capacity, evidence, uptake, and consequence. It argues that a library becomes a credible environmental actor when its words are answerable to operations and when community members can question, reinterpret, and help govern the commitments made in their name. Pragmatic analysis thus reveals the library not as a neutral channel for climate facts, but as a public institution in which environmental meanings, obligations, and forms of ecological citizenship are continually negotiated.