Unveiling the language of ideology in China’s environmental planning: Pilot ecolinguistic analysis of an Environmental Impact Assessment

Abstract

While predominantly seen as a technical process, environmental planning is in fact largely shaped by cultural and ideological factors. Ecolinguistics offers a coherent approach to analyse these elements, by unearthing their linguistic traces and exposing how they naturalize social-ecological goals. So far, limited efforts have gone into developing tools for a systematic ecolinguistic analysis of Chinese texts informing environmental decision-making. This paper seeks to address this gap, by introducing a novel ecolinguistic framework and the results of its application on a Chinese Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report