Mapping the Global Discourse on Sustainable Development: A Sentiment-Based Clustering of SDG Narratives Across 100 Countries

Fahim Sufi (), Mohammed J. Alghamdi and Musleh Alsulami
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Fahim Sufi: COEUS Institute, New Market, VA 22844, USA
Mohammed J. Alghamdi: Department of Software Engineering, College of Computing, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah 21961, Saudi Arabia
Musleh Alsulami: Department of Software Engineering, College of Computing, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah 21961, Saudi Arabia

Sustainability, 2025, vol. 17, issue 16, 1-19

Abstract: Understanding how media narratives frame the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is essential for global sustainability governance. This study presents a novel, data-driven analysis of 135,000 news articles mapped to SDGs 1–17 across 100 countries. Using polarity-based sentiment aggregation and principal component analysis (PCA), we reduce high-dimensional SDG sentiment profiles into a two-dimensional space and identify emergent clusters of countries using K-means. To contextualize these clusters, we integrate national-level indicators like Human Development Index (HDI), GDP per capita, CO 2 emissions, and press freedom scores, revealing robust correlations between sentiment structure and developmental attributes. Countries with higher HDI and freer media environments produce more optimistic and diverse SDG narratives, while lower-HDI countries tend toward more polarized or crisis-framed coverage. Our findings offer a typology of SDG discourse that reflects geopolitical, environmental, and informational asymmetries, providing new insights to support international policy coordination and sustainability communication. This work contributes a scalable methodology for monitoring global sustainability sentiment and underscores the importance of narrative equity in achieving Agenda 2030.

Keywords: Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); global sustainability discourse; sustainability communication; SDG sentiment profiling; comparative sustainability analytics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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