Social understanding of green building projects in China (2006–2022): Stakeholders, issue attention and divergences

Abstract

Promoting green building projects (GBPs) is essential for a sustainable and low-carbon future. The social context of GBPs in China tends to make large-scale implementation challenging, which requires more attention. As social debates are especially critical for understanding how GBPs fit into the socio-political context, this study investigates GBP-related media coverage from 2006 to 2022 to identify issue attention and divergences among different actors based on text mining and machine learning methods. This research identifies: (1) generally optimistic social perspectives on GBPs, despite issues variance in risk and benefit framing; (2) prominence of environmental, technical, and economic issues around GBPs; (3) significant issue divergences among stakeholders, showing opportunities and challenges for GBP deployment; and (4) less discourse of the general public's voices, indicating some uncertainties surrounding how citizens perceive and contextualize GBPs. Findings can yield insights into an in-depth understanding of the apparent imbalance between strong official support and low social awareness, which is helpful and essential for raising social perceptions and further deploying GBPs.