Abstract
This study examines how development discourse is constructed, disseminated, and embedded in relations of power and the marginalization of local communities within Indonesia’s National Strategic Projects. Using Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the study adopts a qualitative critical approach encompassing three dimensions: textual analysis, discursive practice, and social practice. The data consist of online news articles, government statements, policy documents, and related digital content concerning national strategic projects, collected through documentation and literature study and analyzed through textual, discursive-practice, and social-practice analysis. The findings reveal that, at the textual level, national strategic projects development is constructed through positive diction, progressive metaphors, technocratic terminology, and euphemistic expressions that legitimize development while obscuring social conflicts, land disputes, and the experiences of affected communities. At the level of discursive practice, government institutions occupy a dominant position in producing development narratives, while online and mass media facilitate their circulation and reproduction, contributing to the normalization of dominant development narratives and limiting the visibility of alternative perspectives. At the level of social practice, national strategic projects discourse is embedded in broader relations of state power, developmentalist ideology, privileged forms of knowledge, and social inequality, which contribute to the marginalization of local communities. Overall, the study demonstrates that national strategic projects development discourse functions not merely as a means of communicating development policies but also as a discursive mechanism through which meanings of progress are constructed, particular interests are legitimized, and unequal relations of power are reproduced.