Institutional embedding of ecological civilization discourse in environmental justice: A textual thematic evolution analysis based on Supreme People's court cases
Keywords:
Ecological Civilization Discourse, Environmental Justice, Supreme People's Court, Evolutionary Analysis, BERTopic ModelAbstract
To address the disconnect between ecological civilization discourse and environmental judicial practice, and the difficulty of traditional thematic models in capturing the deep semantic evolution of judgment texts, this paper systematically examines the presentation and evolutionary characteristics of ecological civilization discourse in judicial decisions, using 450 publicly available environmental-related judgments from the Supreme People's Court as its research object. This study provides an empirical path for understanding ecological civilization discourse through judicial interpretation and case institutionalization, and offers practical suggestions for judicial standardization and evidence chain construction. Methodologically, at the level of the judgment reasoning paragraphs, this paper employs the BERTopic thematic model framework—based on Chinese SBERT semantic embedding combined with UMAP dimensionality reduction, HDBSCAN clustering, and c-TF-IDF keyword extraction—to conduct time-slice analysis of judicial discourse, revealing the institutionalization path of ecological civilization discourse. The results show that the thematic weights of ecological restoration and restoration to the original state have been continuously increasing (0.193 in 2012, 0.228 in 2024); the themes of ecological civilization value and legal application appear explicitly in 63.6% of the cases, and are significantly correlated with the citation of guiding cases (OR=2.62, p=0.001). The BERTopic model performs well in terms of topic consistency (c_v=0.62), cluster consistency (NMI=0.74), and interpretability (0.84), improving the accuracy and interpretability of identifying the evolution path of ecological civilization discourse in the judicial system.
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