How do politics, news media and the public frame the discourse on coal mining? Implications for the legitimacy, (de)stabilisation and transition of an industry regime

The use of coal for energy generation is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, adversely affecting the climate and attempts to achieve net zero. Yet coal mining is also an important pillar of national economies such as Australia, provoking a contested discourse about the legitimacy of coal mining. We conceptualise the framing of coal mining as reflecting legitimacy pressures through discourse and agenda setting in the economic and socio-political environment that may lead to changes in industry regimes. We thereby examine how coal mining is framed within different arenas of discourse, and how this framing has changed over time. Specifically, we apply natural language processing and topic modelling to analyse and compare a large amount of text data capturing parliamentary documents and debates, news media reports and debates in the broader public over a period of more than 30 years. Our findings reveal that the discourse on coal mining among policymakers is dominated by economic framing, as opposed to a strong socio-political framing in the broader public. This suggests a mismatch between how coal mining is viewed by policymakers focussing on economic benefits versus parts of the broader public raising concerns over environmental and climate issues. Framing of the discourse in news media is more balanced. Our analysis demonstrates that the framing of coal mining has remained remarkably consistent, overall suggesting continuous legitimacy and a relatively stable industry regime.