Patterns and trends in the concept of green economy: A text mining approach

Abstract

The term ‘green economy’ has recently become a topical issue that has engaged the attention of Governments, International bodies and the media. The understanding of this concept and policy concentration is carved in various ways depending on the body that is engaged. There exist varied definitions of the ‘green economy’ with many associating it directly to agriculture since it has the ‘green’ connotation. However, despite the varied definitions, one principle that stands out most is the term ‘‘Sustainable development’’ or simply ‘‘sustainability. It has 3 pillars namely; social sustainability, economic and environment sustainability. Based on the in-depth of knowledge of the concept of green economy and the commitment of Governments and other international organizations, several policy documents and articles have been published on the web for global consumption. This paper uses the web mining algorithms in-built in the R programming language to mine over 402 English articles on the internet on green economy. It identifies relevant terms and patterns, reveals frequent associative words and gives a conglomerate understanding of the concept. It also brings out the most active participants in the green economic drive and sought to find if by chance any of the three pillars of sustainability would be found in the most frequent terms.