Environmental disclosure and sentiment analysis: state of the art and opportunities for public-sector organisations

Laura Rocca,Paola Zola,Davide Giacomini

doi:10.1108/medar-09-2019-0563

Abstract

PurposeBecause of the expansion of the internet and Web 2.0 phenomenon, new challenges are emerging in the disclosure practises adopted by organisations in the public-sector. This study aims to examine local governments’ (LGOs) use of social media (SM) in disclosing environmental actions/plans/information as a new way to improve accountability to citizens to obtain organisational legitimacy and the related sentiment of citizens’ judgements.Design/methodology/approachThis paper analyses the content of 39 Italian LGOs’ public pages on Facebook. After the distinction between five classes of environmental issues (air, water, energy, waste and territory), an initial study is performed to detect possible sub-topics applying latent Dirichlet allocation. Having a list of posts related to specific environmental themes, the researchers computed the sentiment of citizens’ comments. To measure sentiment, two different approaches were implemented: one based on a lexicon dictionary and the other based on convolutional neural networks.FindingsFacebook is used by LGOs to disclose environmental issues, focussing on their main interest in obtaining organisational legitimacy, and the analysis shows an increasing impact of Web 2.0 in the direct interaction of LGOs with citizens. On the other hand, there is a clear divergence of interest on environmental topics between LGOs and citizens in a dialogic accountability framework.Practical implicationsSentiment analysis (SA) could be used by politicians, but also by managers/entrepreneurs in the business sector, to analyse stakeholders’ judgements of their communications/actions and plans on corporate social responsibility. This tool gives a result on time (i.e. not months or years after, as for the reporting system). It is cheaper than a survey and allows a first “photograph” of stakeholders’ sentiment. It can also be a useful tool for supporting, developing and improving environmental reporting.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is one of the first to apply SA to environmental disclosure via SM in the public sphere. The study links modern techniques in natural language processing and machine learning with the important aspects of environmental communication between LGOs and citizens.

Highlights

New challenges emerge in communication practises in the public context: posts, messages and comments on social media (SM) platforms tell the story of everyday political and civilsociety life
Facebook is used by local governments (LGOs) to disclose environmental issues, focussing on their main interest in obtaining organisational legitimacy, and the analysis shows an increasing impact of Web 2.0 in the direct interaction of LGOs with citizens
This paper aims to contribute to the debate on dialogical accountability using Sentiment Analysis” (SA) applied to public organisations to understand the public’s interests and emotions towards LGOs’ disclosure of environmental issues, to explore the potential contribution of SM platforms in the construction of a dialogic accountability system and the underlying purpose of that approach

Summary

Introduction

New challenges emerge in communication practises in the public context: posts, messages and comments on social media (SM) platforms tell the story of everyday political and civilsociety life. In 2018, the world population accounted for around 7 billion people, and the number of active SM (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) users was around 3 billion; around 43% of the active world population were using internet and Web 2.0 platforms to communicate. The impact of this novel way of communicating for general purposes and environmental fields determines the grow of researches measuring the sentiment included in the messages leading to the so-calling “Sentiment Analysis” (SA). This study analyses the use of SM for environmental disclosure by Italian local governments (LGOs). Linking these findings with the increasing use of SM platforms leads to the recognition that new channels of communication have to be studied to understand the potential for new forms of environmental accountability (Russell et al, 2017)

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