Urgency and hope as evaluative orientations in United Nations SDG report forewords: A diachronic analysis (2021–2025)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.62819/jel.2026.2479Keywords:
appraisal theory, corpus-assisted discourse analysis, hope, SDG report forewords, urgencyAbstract
The foreword to each Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) report precedes the statistical sections and sets an evaluative frame. As recurring governance texts, SDG report forewords offer a revealing site for examining how crisis framing and ongoing commitment are negotiated across reporting cycles. This study examined diachronic variation in urgency and hope as higher-order evaluative orientations across five SDG report forewords published between 2021 and 2025, a period of pandemic recovery and global disruption as the 2030 target year for achieving the SDGs approached. The analysis combined Appraisal theory with corpus-assisted discourse analysis of a 3,132-word corpus. Functional categories for each orientation were developed inductively and coded at the clause level. Instances were normalised per 1,000 words. For each year, an urgency–hope ratio was calculated to capture the relative prominence of the two orientations as a proportional independently of text length. Intercoder agreement, assessed on a double-coded sample of 100 instances, was high (κ = .94). Across the five reporting cycles, urgency remained more prominent than hope in normalised frequency terms. Hope-related resources were absent from the 2022 foreword but returned in subsequent years. Both orientations reached their highest normalised frequencies in 2024, and the urgency–hope gap narrowed in 2025. The forewords did not maintain a stable evaluative profile across the five years. The study contributes to Appraisal-based research on institutional genres by showing how ratio-based comparison can reveal evaluative differences across comparable texts and track change over time.
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