Abstract
The debate about the relationship between economic growth and environmental sustainability triggers a range of associations. Here we analyze open-ended textual responses of citizens and scientists concerning their associations with the terms “economic growth” and “green growth”. We derive from the responses a number of topics and examine how associations differ across distinct opinion segments of people, namely supporters of Green growth, Agrowth and Degrowth. The results indicate that the general public is more critical of the notion of economic growth than academic researchers. Citizens stress problems of corruption, social inequality, unemployment and poverty, with less variation among the three opinion segments compared to scientists. The latter more strongly emphasize the environmental consequences of economic growth. Concerning associations of scientists with the term “green growth”, we find topics questioning its feasibility to be more likely expressed by Degrowth supporters, while topics stressing the possibility of sustainable economic growth by Green growth supporters. We find that topic polarization is stronger for scientists than citizens. Our results provide further validation for opinion clusters identified in previous studies and uncover additional insights about related views on growth and sustainability.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 106878 |
Pages (from-to) | 1-12 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | Ecological Economics |
Volume | 180 |
Early online date | 23 Oct 2020 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Feb 2021 |
Funding
This study has received funding through an ERC Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n° 741087 ). Ivan Savin acknowledges financial support from the Russian Science Foundation [RSF grant number 19-18-00262 ].
Funders | Funder number |
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Horizon 2020 Framework Programme | |
European Research Council | |
Russian Science Foundation | 19-18-00262 |
Horizon 2020 | 741087 |
Keywords
- Green growth
- Growth-vs-environment debate
- Public opinion
- Scientific opinion
- Structural topic modelling