by Deborah Martínez
Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ redefined sustainability through a populist moral logic, casting it as a conflict between the people and indifferent elites. In doing so, he opened the public debate for populist leaders to reinterpret and challenge the concept using similar articulation.
As Pope Francis’s landmark environmental encyclical Laudato Si’ approaches its tenth anniversary in 2025, it is timely to reflect on its legacy within the political discursive landscape. An encyclical is a papal letter addressed to bishops and the broader Catholic community, offering guidance on how to apply religious teachings.
Laudato Si’ is the first encyclical fully dedicated to ecological and environmental issues. It undeniably inspired collective action and introduced a more accessible and emotionally resonant articulation for understanding sustainability. It achieved this by employing a populist moral discourse that framed a global “us” (the Earth and the poor) against a “them” comprised of “indifferent” political, technological, and economic elites. This construction, which scholars like Ernesto Laclau and Yannis Stavrakakis describe as the creation of a frontier within society, redefined sustainability through an antagonistic logic and a moral discipline that excluded groups and generated tensions in society.
In doing so, Pope Francis unintentionally opened the space for various populist leaders to reinterpret, instrumentalize, or contest the meaning of sustainability using the very logic he introduced. As the world still mourns his death, and with the assumption of the new pope, Leo XIV, it is worth delving deeper into how that articulation came into being and how it continues to shape political discourses.
From a Technical Framework to a Moral Imperative
Long before Laudato Si’, sustainability discourses already carried a moral undertone, evident in the Rio Principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” and the 2030 Agenda’s pledge to “leave no one behind.” Such commitments framed ecological harm not merely as an issue of resource management, but as a matter of justice. Laudato Si’, however, radicalized this latent moralism by declaring environmental degradation “a sin against creation” and relocating responsibility from expert committees to the moral consciences of ordinary believers.
Throughout the text, sustainability crises are personified as “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor,” an affront that demands “ecological conversion.” This affective grammar, as Chantal Mouffe noted, does more than inspire virtue; it sorts humanity into caretakers who heed the cry and exploiters who ignore it.
Thus, the encyclical reframes sustainability from a technocratic exercise in pillar-balancing into a categorical moral imperative — one that confers or withholds collective identity. Those who reject its summons are denounced as “lords and masters, entitled to plunder [the Earth] at will,” whereas the converted are exalted as “instruments of God for the care of creation,” creating a moral frontier that closely mirrors the people-versus-enemy logic characteristic of populist discourses.
The Populist Logic of Laudato Si’
Moralization alone does not constitute populism; it is the construction of an antagonistic frontier that fuses diverse grievances into the singular voice of “the people” against a reified establishment that defines a populist logic. Laudato Si’ exemplifies this shift. Pope Francis reframes sustainability as “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor,” locating the origins of this suffering in powerful elites: economic, technological, and political ones. He unites a heterogeneous array of subjects — practicing Catholics and secular activists, subsistence farmers and slum dwellers, future generations, and even non-human creatures — into a single virtuous collective whose suffering authenticates ecological truth.
The resulting divide is explicitly moral and vertical. On one side stand the humble majorities who endure environmental degradation, on the other, entrenched elites who obstruct ecological conversion and frustrate efforts to achieve sustainability and the people’s will.
How the Encyclical Enabled Its Own Reversal
Despite its powerful contribution to inspiring action and offering an accessible, emotionally resonant language for sustainability, Laudato Si’ also enabled its own reversal through the adoption of a moral-populist logic. This occurred in two key ways.
First, by relocating agency to individual conscience and calling for “ecological conversion,” the encyclical privileges bottom-up mobilization and implicitly elevates the moral will of the people above institutional mediation and even scientific expertise. In place of policy deliberation or empirical evidence, it centers moralism as the core of sustainability discourse. This leaves the technical content underdetermined and easily repurposed, as seen in the denialist rhetoric of various populist leaders.
Second, by universalizing a singular moral ontology rooted in Catholic social teaching, the text marginalizes plural eco-political imaginaries. Indigenous cosmologies, feminist ethics of care, and other alternative perspectives are barely acknowledged and only insofar as they reinforce the encyclical’s binary structure of virtue and vice. Moreover, the populations most affected by the transitions invoked through ecological conversion are granted only a passive and at times negative identity, exhibiting the contradictions within its “common” rhetoric.
This exclusionary tendency has since been reappropriated by populist actors who channel the resentment of marginalized communities to advance nationalist and anti-environmentalist agendas.
In such rearticulations, Laudato Si’s populist grammar becomes what Laclau and Mouffe term a “floating signifier”: Its substantive meaning may shift, but its antagonistic form, a righteous struggle between “the people” and their enemies, remains intact and politically exploitable.
The Legacy: Radical Contestation
The encyclical’s moral populist discourse travels well. Post-2015 populist leaders have appropriated its grammar while inverting its substantive aims. In the United States, President Donald Trump’s rhetoric portrays climate change as an immoral assault on “American workers,” recasting deregulation as an act of ecological justice because it preserved the livelihoods of the virtuous many. Similarly, in Argentina, President Javier Milei denounces “climate fanaticism” as a plot by cosmopolitan elites, while nonetheless invoking stewardship of the Pampas as a patriotic duty. Similar patterns surface in Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán’s attacks on Brussels technocrats, whom he accuses of sacrificing Hungarian families on the altar of net-zero targets, and in Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV) leader Geert Wilders’ claims that Dutch nitrogen regulations betray “hard-working farmers.”
These leaders differ ideologically, yet each filters sustainability through a populist moral discourse. The strategy resonates because Laudato Si’ already authorized a moral verdict rendered in the name of ordinary people against faceless structures.
What changes in the current populist discursive landscape are the referent of “people” and the policy responses construed as expressions of their will.
A New Opportunity for Sustainability
Laudato Si’ reminded the world that environmental collapse is not merely a technical glitch but a profound matter of justice. Yet by moralizing sustainability through a populist logic of “good people versus bad enemies,” the encyclical unintentionally widened the discursive space for leaders who reject its ecological content while reproducing its antagonistic style.
Understanding Pope Francis’ legacy matters for two reasons. Analytically, it illustrates how moral vocabularies can be redeployed across ideological divides. Normatively, it cautions that durable ecological politics require plural, agonistic institutions, rather than universal moral proclamations that risk becoming exclusionary or disciplinary. As Pope Leo XIV assumes office, the pressing question is whether he will continue to invoke the same moral populist logic when addressing sustainability or break from it in favor of a more pluralistic and less polarizing discourse.
Deborah Martínez is a PhD candidate at Radboud University studying how populist discourses frame sustainability. She was a Global Fellow at the CEU Democracy Institute and serves on BYU’s OPUS Steering Committee. Before entering academia, she worked as an international journalist for Nikkei, Russia Today, and TV Azteca.
