‘Humanity will not be saved by promises’: Using an unleadership lens to restory the ‘blah blah bah’ of leadership at COP26

Gaggiotti, Hugo; Kars-Unluoglu, Selen; Galpin, Kay; Jarvis, Carol

Abstract

This paper identifies ways in which leaders, affected nations and activists construct their leadership practices in different ways to address the climate crisis. Whether they advocate for leadership or against it, there remains an opportunity to learn from the way they (often imperfectly) narrate the challenge. This consequently shapes practices of leadership. We offer the approach of restorying (Boje,2014) and the lens of unleading (Kars-Unluoglu et al. (2022) to illuminate these opportunities. We will discuss the constructed nature of the crisis and offer restorying as an approach to explore alternative leaderly practices. Through examination of the speeches delivered at COP26 by leaders, affected nations and activists, we uncover how practices are constructed and reconstructed and through restorying, offer the practice of unleadership as an alternative.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: 38th EGOS Colloquium
• Start Date: Jul 7, 2022
• End Date: Jul 9, 2022
• Deposit Date: Aug 4, 2022
• Keywords: unleadership; climate change; restorying; discourse analysis
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/9838302
• Related Public URLs: https://www.egos.org/2022_Vienna/General-Theme