Why don't more people engage in green practices in China? A policy-oriented approach to promoting green transformation in five consumption areas

Green consumption policies (GCP) are an essential measure to achieve carbon peak and neutrality targets and have attracted widespread attention in social media. However, few studies analyze public perceptions of GCP using social media data. Based on the Implementation Plan for Promoting Green Consumption, this study built a dataset of the Chinese public posts on Sina Weibo about GCP from five aspects: green food, green building, green transportation, green products, and green tourism. Firstly, we analyzed the participation level of users and the spatial differentiation of green consumption network attention. Secondly, the fine-tuning bidirectional encoder representation from transformers was used to classify the sentiment of comments. Finally, topic modeling was performed using a class-based TF-IDF procedure to mine barriers to GCP implementation from the negative comments. The results are as follows: (1) public concern about GCP is positively correlated with the level of local economic development; (2) policy makers do not adequately consider the continuity, universality, and timeliness of policies; (3) policy implementers' differences in understanding of policies and organizational inertia cause inadequate implementation; (4) public imbalance of income and expenditure and their level of trust in policies affect consumers' green consumption behavior. To further strengthen the GCP system, this study proposes the following policy recommendations: improve policy implementability, develop policy details according to local conditions, rationalize the use of institutional constraints and spiritual cultivation of the implementation system, play the role of role models, and reduce income disparity.