A new approach to semantic sustainability assessment: text mining via network analysis revealing transition patterns in German municipal climate action plans

Abstract

Background: Various monitoring approaches have shown that urban areas and their energy systems are major contributors to climate change. Corresponding observations have mostly been based on physical data. However, text data is an untapped source of information that can be analyzed by text mining methods. Taking the example of the German Energy Transition, an interpretation network analysis was used to assess local transition patterns in 16 municipal climate action plans of regional centers in the State of Lower Saxony. Based on the holistic concept of social-ecological systems, three analytical perspectives were introduced, the social system, the energy system, and the three principles of strong sustainability, which inspired three questions: What is the "horizon of attention" regarding the stages of the energy system? What potential, in terms of coordination or collaboration, can be identified on basis of network links between societal sub-systems and the energy system? Are strong sustainability principles adequately linked to the energy system to support a transition towards sustainability? Methods: A computer-aided interpretation network analysis was used. The (co-)occurrence of indicative words representing pre-defined categories was checked in the measures proposed in the plans to analyze the importance and connectedness of these categories. For this purpose, three thesauri were created as fixed literature-based categorization schemes.

Reflecting trends in the academic landscape of sustainable energy using probabilistic topic modeling

“…Therefore, they might not cover the full thematic breadth in a representative way. Considering the potential that large-scale text-based mappings of academic fields offer [29,[85][86][87][88], this study applies a text mining approach for detecting unknown patterns from text [89][90][91][92]. This approach does not replace the qualitative review method but offers a different integrated perspective that allows large-scale quantitative analyses and is unbiased regarding the selection of articles.…”

Perspectives on Comprehensive Sustainability-Orientation in Municipalities: Structuring Existing Approaches

“…Glemarec and Oliveira [29] discuss the role of public institutions in fostering sustainable development, while Caragliu et al [45] examine the concept of smart cities. Recent contributions propose to consider multi-level governance approaches [12,71,72], emphasize public and business participation for solving sustainability problems [73], as well as other specific aspects. Even though the articles contribute to a deeper understanding of the general sustainability-orientation of public administrations, different concepts and supporting and hindering factors of sustainable municipalities, none provide a comprehensive exploration of the organizational development of municipalities and their potential courses of action to foster sustainability-oriented local administrations.…”

Multilevel knowledge management for municipal climate action: Lessons from evaluating the operational situation of climate action managers in the German Federal State of Lower Saxony

“…In this study, we examine the knowledge processes of MUCA in the German Energy Transition from the perspective of Municipal Climate Action Managers (CAMs). As an essential instrument in the German Energy Transition, MUCA is financed out of the national energy and climate fund as part of the National Climate Protection Initiative (Bickel, 2017;BMUB, 2015;German Federal Government, 2011). Through this initiative, 2,180 municipalities have developed municipal climate action plans (MCAPs) and employed 650 CAMs since 2008 (BMU, 2019;BMUB, 2015).…”

“…With this study, we leverage the potential of knowledge management for sustainability transitions to contribute to the multilevel analysis of MUCA. Research on MUCA calls for more integrated multilevel analyses that can leverage the innovation potential of experimental approaches (Bickel, 2017;Bulkeley, 2010;Hildén et al, 2017). Further, research is needed regarding the challenges and opportunities that professionals face in municipal transition activities (Feagan et al, 2019).…”