Market Legitimacy of Carbon Trading: Evidence from Public Sentiment and Digital Discourse Analysis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.23960/E3J/v9.i1.110-121Keywords:
Carbon Trading, Public Sentiment, Digital Discourse Analysis, Natural Language Processing, Policy LegitimacyAbstract
Carbon trading has gained prominence as a market-based instrument for climate change mitigation, yet its legitimacy depends heavily on public acceptance and trust. This study examines public sentiment, discourse structure, and narrative framing surrounding carbon trading in Indonesia using large-scale YouTube comment data. We applied BERT-based sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and narrative network analysis to a corpus of 15,000 user-generated comments, tracking discourse patterns and evaluating sentiment shifts before and after a major policy announcement. The findings reveal that negative sentiment dominates public discourse, though distinct neutral and positive clusters persist, indicating a polarized rather than uniformly oppositional public response. Narrative analysis shows that public discussions rarely engage with explicit policy or economic mechanisms; instead, carbon trading is embedded within broader social, national, and resource governance contexts. The narrative similarity network further identifies fragmented discourse communities rather than integrated public deliberation. Advanced metrics indicate moderate discourse concentration, a negative carbon market stability indicator, and a marginal policy communication effectiveness score. Event analysis demonstrates that policy announcements exert minimal short-term sentiment impact, with only a slight negative shift following the event. These results suggest that carbon trading policy legitimacy remains fragile in Indonesia's digital public sphere. We argue that effective communication strategies require sustained, context-sensitive engagement that translates technical mechanisms into narratives addressing local economic and social concerns, rather than relying solely on episodic or abstract climate framing. This study contributes an empirical socio-computational framework for monitoring real-time policy perception in emerging environmental markets.
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