In the spectacular new capital cities of the GCC, actors from nearly all urban development sectors are increasingly drawing on narratives about the need for “green,” or environmentally sustainable, building practices. Recent urban development projects have rapidly become saturated with this rhetoric, but the cities’ explosive growth in the Arabian desert fundamentally defies the logic of sustainability. In this paper, I consider how and with what effect these narratives of sustainability have been deployed by various actors in Qatar. In particular, I illustrate how sustainability discourses are mobilized together with nationalist discourses about modernizing Qatar and building up the country’s international prestige, while preserving “local traditions” and “culture” in the built environment. This is commonly – but not exclusively – articulated with reference to the Qatar National Vision’s fourth environmental “pillar” of development, which emphasizes the need for the Qatari state to balance development with the imperative to “preserve and protect its unique environment and nurture the abundance of nature granted by God.” So although strongly paralleling other nationalist visions in the Gulf promoting “greenness” (e.g. Sheikh Zayed’s vision of “greening” the Emirates), the recent focus on urban sustainability in Doha is promoted through mobilizing uniquely Qatari nationalist scripts. I argue that the intertwining of these two ideological narratives (nationalism and sustainability) – and the identities and interests to which they are bound – are central to understanding the (re-)production of unequal power structures in contemporary Qatar. Methodologically, this paper is informed by fieldwork in Qatar in Fall 2013, when I conducted interviews (n = 20), focus group interviews (3 groups with a total of 15 participants), and extensive participant observation at various events and conferences. This paper also employs textual analysis methods, drawing from a range of texts including newspaper articles and advertisements, governmental and private reports and policy briefs, as well as museums and landscapes. Through interrogating the discursive practices of a wide range of actors, as well as various initiatives, such as Kahramaa’s Tarsheed conservation campaign, Lusail City, and the Msheireb downtown redevelopment project, I shed light on the “disciplining” function of nationalist discourses in efforts to “green” Doha and produce the city as a spectacular “oasis” of modernity in the desert – and more ultimately perpetuate the legitimacy of the techno-modernist nation-building agenda in Qatar.