Environmental sustainability in the online media discourses of Saudi Arabia: A corpus-based study of keyness, intertextuality, and interdiscursivity

Abstract

This paper investigates the online discourses on “sustainability” and explores how environmental sustainability has been constructed within the Saudi online discourse. In doing so, the study focuses on the potential of the Saudi Green Initiative (SGI), along with Green Riyadh and King Salman Park, to promote sustainability awareness in the kingdom. The corpus of the study comprises news articles and Twitter hashtags. In addition, the study uses corpus-based discourse analysis to examine the keyness and intertextuality. The results of the study convey a contextualized national identity while communicating internationally within discursive circles. It is also identified that interdiscursivity is central in the corpus, although the discourse of action especially dominated other smaller discourses, such as consequences/risks, economy, and tourism. The results also indicate the prominent construction of officials, which could be linked to the dynamics of change in the Saudi scene. Finally, the study emphasizes the action-oriented nature of such discourse while drawing attention to some of the challenging issues to long-term advocacy in the country.

Media narratives on (Ecological) sustainability: A topic modeling analysis of entrepreneurship news in the MENA region

“…Perceptions and understandings of sustainability and its dimensions and definitions are largely impacted by local culture, history, needs, and values [1], which in turn shape the nature of emerging entrepreneurial solutions and innovation activities. Additionally, the rapid spread and far-reaching potential of today's entrepreneurial innovations and associated global northoriginating narratives necessitates an understanding of their impacts on various contexts [6].…”

“…Therefore, identifying the framing of sustainability in predominant MENA business and technology media reporting is important to understand how emerging entrepreneurial solutions for environmental crises are perceived, understood, and used in this regional context [1,64]. Understanding media narratives surrounding sustainability in the technological innovation context indicates the legitimacy of those approaches in the MENA region and their appropriateness & impacts with respect to resolving regional eco-crises [59,65].…”

“…Additionally, such an understanding may also shed light on the relationship between the regional investment landscape and sustainability, respective support needs, mindsets, value systems, and societal trends. To our knowledge, analyses of media narratives on sustainability in MENA are virtually non-existent-with the exception of Almaghlout in 2022 [1]., though research on sustainability narratives in general does exist, for instance regarding storytelling in company sustainability reporting [66] or fictional sustainability narratives in books [67].…”

“…The term sustainability as referring to social and environmental concerns has emerged in the 1980s and became a common buzzword in the global north by 2010 [1]. The most universally used definition of sustainability is that of societal "development, that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs", coined by the World Commission on Environment and Development in the 1980s [2].…”

“…Nevertheless, ambiguity in the understanding of what sustainable entrepreneurship entails may hamper its ability to achieve desired outcomes. Indeed, the term sustainable has been criticized as being vague and interpreted differently in different parts of the world [1,5,6]. This has downstream impacts on social norms, such as the understanding and acceptance of sustainable entrepreneurship as a practice, as well as cross-cultural collaborative action to address global social and ecological crises.…”