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Abstract

There is a growing acknowledgment by segments of the global population that it is becoming extremely difficult to ignore the negative production externalities of industrial processes. In this regard, the related concept of “sustainability” has been gaining traction, with use of the word rising considerably since the 1990s. The term itself has been defined in many different ways, however, the core components are becoming common knowledge: economic, environmental, and social—informally referred to as profits, planet, and people. As Borden has aptly noted: “Sustainability ideas are growing and maturing at many levels worldwide”. One way that people come to know about sustainable development and its importance is through media coverage of the movement via various projects and initiatives that have been proposed on a theoretical or conceptual basis, as well as those models which have already been concretely realized. One such project established in 2015 is Dubai’s “Sustainable City’, the emirate’s first net-zero energy working model, which received attention in the world press. This paper investigates and compares the coverage that the Sustainable City has received in the global and local media by utilizing a content analysis methodology guided by framing theory. The research joins the discussion on issues regarding how the media discuss aspects of “sustainability” and how it takes hold within a society, whether it be by grassroots or government policy.

Keywords

media & society mass communication communication social sciences public relations journalism public administration and public policy political science United Arab Emirates

Dubai, a city-emirate in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has burgeoned into an urban conglomeration with a population of 2.1 million in the past decade, with an urbanization rate of more than 80% (Almulhim et al., 2022). With the continuous expansion of the city’s boundaries, its massive growth is not necessarily supported by an equally adequate infrastructure to sustain such growth. As with other cities, Dubai has heavily relied on industrial processes. However, in recent years, there has been a growing acknowledgment that negative production externalities can no longer be ignored. For the UAE, water conservation, coastal erosion, and greenhouse gas emissions are of particular concern, especially in light of the rapid population growth, numerous construction projects, and increased tourist arrivals. In this regard, the related concept of “sustainability” (i.e., living simply and meeting the needs of the present without compromising future generations’ needs) has been gaining traction (Brundtland et al., 1987). Dubai’s leaders have indicated the need to address the negative externalities by creating a socio-economic environment that fosters the adoption of sustainable practices and the favorable identity associated with sustainability. After signing the Paris Agreement, Dubai’s leaders have committed to low-carbon development and the Sustainable Development Goals.

One way that people come to know about sustainable development and its importance is through media coverage. This occurs when various projects and initiatives are proposed and, in some cases, concretely realized. One such project initiated in 2012 with phase I completed in 2016 is Dubai Sustainable City; the remaining phases have yet to be completed, but it is the emirate’s first net-zero-energy working model. In 2020, the developer announced its second project to take place in Sharjah, a neighboring emirate of Dubai in the UAE. This property development receives ample local coverage and has also garnered attention in the world press. This paper investigates and compares the coverage Dubai Sustainable City has received by utilizing a content analysis methodology (coding articles written about the project) guided by framing theory (which indicates that the media package and present information in specific ways to the public).

The importance of this paper lies in the investigation of the ways the Dubai Sustainable City project has been covered in the print and digital media. It is important to study the media coverage of Dubai Sustainable City to investigate whether the city/project has significant resonance within the environmentalist and sustainability narratives or whether it is being covered for economic and political reasons (Vu et al., 2019). Dubai has become a major city in the international arena; nevertheless, since its inception, Dubai has struggled to maintain and foster a sustainable environment in its own right because it relies on external stakeholders. In an attempt to circumvent its environmental predicament that forces the city to heavily rely on external players, Dubai aims to have 75% of its energy come from clean sources by 2050. Dubai Sustainable City was developed by Dubai-based Diamond Developers, who have committed to the 2050 sustainable city goal. Through looking in particular at Dubai Sustainable City and not more generally at sustainability-related topics in the media, the Dubai Sustainable City project functions as a concrete and tangible example of whether the UAE will be able to advance in terms of environmental issues or whether it will focus on the economic advantages of the city. The research joins the discussion on issues regarding how the media discuss and publicize aspects of “sustainability” and how it takes hold within a society, whether it be via grassroots activities or government policies. There has been a clear upward trajectory in the coverage of sustainability-related concepts within the media (Holt & Barkemeyer, 2012). The coverage of Dubai Sustainable City can draw on the parallels between policy shifts that may affect the coverage levels.

Therefore, this research paper draws on the academic field of media representation of sustainability issues (Matar, 2020). The new media branch called environmental media aims at educating and raising awareness among developed countries’ governments. The methodologies of environmental media combine studies from the social sciences and the humanities, aiming at encouraging constructive dialogue around a critical future between ecocriticism and environmental communication (Shriver-Rice & Vaughan, 2019). Ultimately, the aim of environmental studies is to forge “bonds between activists of environmental justice and social scientists of political ecology”Shriver-Rice & Vaughan, 2019). However, the coverage of Dubai Sustainable City could indicate that environmental media coverage does not necessarily have a single trajectory whereby coverage is used to draw awareness to the government but rather indicates how governments could use environmental media to raise public awareness among students (Matar, 2020).

The paper contains a Literature Review section focusing on themes divided into the following sections: Sustainability and Sustainable Development; the Importance of Media Portrayals; Sustainability: Identifying Themes and Determining Frames; the Significance of Sources; Valence, Tone, and Sentiment; and Dubai and Dubai Sustainable City. The Methodology section identifies the unit of analysis, the timeframe, and the relevant news articles and their coding. The Results and Findings section underlines four different aspects of local versus international news coverage, the prevalence of a dominant media frame, the major sources quoted in media coverage, and the journalistic style used. The Discussion and Conclusion section discusses how “sustainability” takes hold within a society, whether it be via grassroots activities or government policies.

Literature Review

Sustainability and Sustainable Development

The concept of sustainability has received ample attention at the global and local levels in recent decades. The very definition of sustainability has been contested in past literature due to the definition’s vagueness and generic meaning (Dixon & Fallon, 1989). The term sustainability and its corollary, sustainable development, were first featured in the Brundtland Report in 1987. The report called for a “Common Future” where it laid the foundation of the sustainable development concept. The report revealed an intrinsic binary between development and the environment: “Development that meets the needs of the present generations without compromising the ability of the future generations to meet their own needs” (Brundtland et al., 1987, p. 43).

According to Giovannoni and Fabietti (2013), the definition of sustainability has been molded based on various streams of thought that could be categorized based on three main pillars or discourses: the environmental, the social, and the business discourses. The environmental discourse has primarily focused on the relationship between the human being and nature. The social discourse emphasizes the anthropocentric meaning of sustainability by focusing on the needs and work of the human being within society (Griessler & Littig, 2005). The environmentalist discourse portrays the interplay between society and nature in a rather simplistic way. Griessler and Littig (2005) called for an approach to sustainability that is both normative and analytical. The third pillar is the business discourse that is centered around “the corporation”. However, there appears to be an inherent contradiction between the economic growth of the corporation and the concept of sustainability.

Gray (2010) defined sustainability and sustainable development not as simply isolated initiatives but as complex paradigms at the social, environmental, and financial levels. Similarly, Drexhage and Murphy (2010) called for a more integrated approach to sustainability through incorporating the three discourses: economy, environment, and business; “Taking sustainable development out of the environment “box” and considering wider social, economic, and geopolitical agendas” (p. 20) is what the authors called for when investigating the journey that sustainable development underwent from Brundtland to Rio 2012. In 1994, John Elkington, the founder of a British Consultancy called SustainAbility, coined the concept of a triple bottom line that consists of three P’s: profit, people, and planet (Elkington, 1998). The triple bottom line is a sustainability-related concept that provides a framework for environmental expansion while integrating the economic and social components into the equation. The profit bottom line refers to the conventional bottom line of profit and loss accounting, the people bottom line measures the social responsibility of a company, and the planet bottom line measures how environmentally accountable the process has been (Elkington, 1998).

The Importance of Media Portrayals

It has long since been uncovered that the mass media not only raise awareness in the minds of the audience but that they also play a special role in forming attitudes about, for example, products, issues, or even cities, via the way that the coverage is constructed (Freeman & Nguyen, 2012). Much of what has been written on this subject has come from advertising and marketing perspectives due to advertisers seeking to establish brand awareness in the public consciousness (Getkate, 2015). Some of the literature has focused on news media and taken a public diplomacy or political communication orientation when looking at the role of news and information programming in attitude formation (McCombs, 2017). As media contribute to the construction of reality (Couldry & Hepp, 2017), researchers know to pay close attention and give careful consideration to any potential patterns or themes that are present or embedded in media messages (Entman, 2006). The resultant “portrayal” of an issue or concept, such as “sustainability” in the case of the current paper, is likely to go a long way in forming the “pictures in the heads” of those who are exposed to the media materials (Vu et al., 2014). Beyond the social constructivist approach, there are a few other theoretical constructs that are often mentioned when examining entertainment, but chiefly, news programming consists of agenda-setting, priming, and framing. Though somewhat contentious (Cacciatore et al., 2016), the use of framing theory still represents a viable approach when examining media coverage and deliberating about the influences of media content and its potential effects.

Though much of the contemporary literature has investigated the role of social media (user-generated content) and its potential influence (Ashley & Tuten, 2015; Schivinski & Dabrowski, 2016) or fatigue (Bright et al., 2015), newspapers and magazines have historically been investigated for their coverage of many topics ranging from gender and ethnicity (Eagleman, 2015) to science and celebrity (Kamenova et al., 2014). Although the death of newspapers has often been declared (Hassan, 2021), for now, they still offer an excellent glimpse into societal consensus views and governmental foreign policies on a wide range of issues in any given country (e.g., climate change, Ford & King, 2015; ethnic representation, Bleich et al., 2016; mental health, Kenez et al., 2015). The same applies for television; whereas television tends toward sensationalism, the press still presents a more serious communication medium (Igartua & Muñiz, 2012). The current study joins the literature examining media coverage. In this case, we investigated the print and digital media coverage of Dubai Sustainable City.

Sustainability: Identifying Themes and Determining Frames

Originally developed in the field of psychology, the term “frame” was first coined by Gregory Bateson in 1954 and later introduced by Gaye Tuchman in studies of journalism (Jiménez-Yáñez, 2018). According to D’Angelo and Kuypers (2010), journalists need “media framing” to provide palatable content of superimposed sources. The authors provide a pluralistic approach to framing, one that is fragmented and not necessarily simplistically locating framing within one correct foundational position (D’Angelo & Kuypers, 2010). Hertog and McLeod diverged from the definition Reese et al. (2001) provided for frames as “organizing principles that are socially shared and persistent over time, that work symbolically to meaningfully structure the social world,” underlining that frames have their own content: “When highlighting some aspect of reality over others, frames act to define problems, diagnose causes, make moral judgments, and suggest remedies to problems” (Kuypers et al., 2012). In this context, frames could be identified using D’Angelo’s definition: “frames are elements of news stories that amalgamate textual items (words and images) with the contextual treatment that they receive from framing devices” (Kuypers et al., 2012). In relation to the climate change frames, Hoffman (2011) identified two institutional logics around climate change; the “convinced” logic underlining solutions, and the “skeptical” logic studying the definition of the problem. Furthermore, Jang and Hart (2015) distinguished five frames that cover climate change: the real frame, the hoax frame, the cause frame, the impact frame, and the action frame.

In examining the literature concerning the topic of sustainability, some common themes are immediately apparent. For example, it is easy to discern that a handful of overarching themes (also referred to as “pillars” in some of the literature) have come to dominate the discussions surrounding “sustainability.” These themes have also been described as meta-frames in other studies. Regardless of the nomenclature, the number and range of frames identified in sustainability studies are quite large (e.g., “data-derived” and “theoretically-driven,”Nambiar, 2014; “culturally embedded,”Van Gorp & van der Goot, 2012; and “environmentalist,”Haluza-DeLay & Fernhout, 2011). However, taken on the whole, three main themes of “economy,”“society,” and the “environment” emerge as the most prominent in the literature (Fisk, 2010). In some cases, the category of “society” is further defined or split into concepts related to “communities,” and in other cases, it addresses issues specific to “individuals” within society. However, in any case, the broader term “people” may serve as an appropriate label in both cases. As a result, the term “planet” can be associated with the environmental themes, and “profits” is often used with regard to media items pertaining to economic considerations. There are different methods by which researchers have uncovered frames. In some cases, frames from previous studies have been utilized (more deductive), whereas in other cases, new frames have been derived from the data that has been freshly collected (more inductive). Different studies have used different definitions and applications, with some even testing and commenting on the differences between and among them (David et al., 2011).

For the current study, we analyzed news stories about Dubai Sustainable City and attempted to discern what we referred to as the “dominant, primary, or meta” frame found within the news stories about Dubai Sustainable City. The three choices for this frame category were indicated in the many previous research studies (people–social, planet–environmental, and profits–economic). We also drew on a recent study that investigated the topic of sustainability in India, considering that the data-derived frames were also appropriate for Dubai’s context (Nambiar, 2014); we refer to these items as the “secondary frames” within the coverage.

The Significance of Sources

In much of the literature examining media coverage of various topics, journalists call upon to assist in elucidating the story items has come to be recognized as significant. For the current study, we carefully observed which sources were being used in the coverage of Dubai Sustainable City, placing them into established categories based on their identification, as well as the gender (male/female) of the person behind a source when it was discernible. Previous studies have indicated that men are more often quoted as sources in news stories than women (Ross, 2007; Zoch & Turk, 1998). Other studies have indicated the correlation between the lack of women as managers in journalistic companies and the lack of women used as sources in the news (García-Gordillo et al., 2007). Journalists themselves are also becoming more and more aware of their choices for story sources (see Leonhardt, 2018, for example).

Valence, Tone, and Sentiment

Another way that media coverage has been analyzed concerns the specific ways that certain language used by journalists might be more positive or negative in terms of the sentiment of the text, and that this may, in turn, convey a certain attitude about the subject being covered (Rossman, 2003). This variable has also been referred to as valence or tone (Rose & Baumgartner, 2013).

Dubai and Dubai Sustainable City

Dubai is an emirate and a city of the seven emirates that were united as the UAE on December 2, 1971. The UAE is a federal monarchy with its capital being the emirate and city of Abu Dhabi. Dubai is located on the northeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula, on the south-west corner of the Arabian Gulf. It sits on the Dubai Creek, a natural inlet that secured a trading business for the city. In recent years, the city has exponentially grown into an urban center that many Gulf states want to emulate the Arab of the Gulf. Dubai’s development has been characterized by its oil boom in the 60s and the construction boom in the seventies. The rapid growth of this emerging economy has placed unprecedented pressure on the environment. Dubai is a city in the desert, and its most significant challenge is access to water. The nature of its dry land limits crop productivity due to a lack of water-holding capacity correlated with soil organic matter (Diaz-Zorita et al., 1999). According to a 2010 New York Times article, “the emirates desalinate the equivalent of 4 million bottles of water a day… producing emissions of carbon dioxide that have helped give Dubai and the other United Arab Emirates one of the world’s largest carbon footprints” with an estimated supply of 4 days of fresh water should the desalinization stop (Alderman, 2010, p. B1). In 2015, the World Bank announced that the UAE was “the country with the most polluted air.” The air contained particle pollution levels much higher than the World Health Organization’s recommended guidelines. In 2019, CO2 accounted for 65% of global GHG emissions (Singh & Singh, 2017). The need to change became clear; the same year, the Ministry of Environment and Water took measures to address this alarming situation. By 2021, the UAE ecological footprint decreased to 7.75 ha per person down from 11.68 hectares in 2006. (Al-Dabbagh, 2022). There has been an implementation of a top-down strategy to ensure Dubai will become a more sustainable city. Since 2015, the UAE government has launched annual initiatives revolving around particular themes. For example, 2015 marked the Year of Innovation; 2016, the Year of Reading; 2017, the Year of Giving; 2018, the year of Zayed; 2019, the Year of Tolerance; 2020, Toward the Next 50; 2021, the Year of the 50th; and 2022, Year of Distinction and Precedence (Ministry of Education, 2022). These initiatives often lead to coverage by the local media. Although no annual themes have as yet been set concerning the environment or sustainability, there have been a few activities that indicate these are going to be more prominent issues in the years ahead—the creation of a “Sustainability Pavilion” at World Expo 2020 is one such indication, and the Dubai Sustainable City project is another.

Hence, this study was set to answer the following research questions:

RQ1: To what extent does the Dubai Sustainable City development project rate as newsworthy in terms of local and international media coverage?

RQ2: How is Dubai Sustainable City’s development framed in the media? In terms of the previously established dominant frames concerning sustainability, which frame is most likely to be used in Dubai Sustainable City coverage?

RQ3: When it comes to news stories about Dubai Sustainable City, how often are external sources quoted? What types of sources are quoted (in terms of job function and gender)?

RQ4: What can be stated about the journalistic style, overall valence, tone, or sentiment of the articles that mention or have assertions about Dubai Sustainable City?

Methodology

A research method that is commonly utilized in the mass communication field is the examination of media by way of content analysis.

Originally introduced by Harold Lasswell (1927) as a systematic method to study propaganda in mass media, media content analysis has become the fastest-growing method used in the field of mass communication in recent decades. The definition of media content analysis varies; Berelson (1952) defined it as a systematic and quantitative description, whereas Berger and Luckman (1966) identified that media content analysis, similar to any scientific social research method, cannot produce totally objective results. Neuendorf (2002), however, defined content analysis as a “quantitative analysis of messages that relies on the scientific method,” thus framing content analysis within a quantitative rather than qualitative research methodology (Macnamara, 2005).

This research paper focuses on the definition of Shoemaker and Reese’s (1996) categorization of content analysis as not being strictly quantitative or qualitative. Content analysis can be undertaken using both approaches.

To be sure, the UAE media have recently featured more articles relating to environmental issues, including sustainability. However, since phase I of the Dubai Sustainable City’s construction has recently been completed, and due to several recent articles focusing on this development, we decided that focusing on this project would be of particular interest. In a way, this project represents a bellwether of sorts in terms of how the Government of Dubai views sustainability and its importance.

In order to examine the media coverage of Dubai Sustainable City, three databases were consulted for the study: Factiva, Lexis Nexis, and Google News, the latter of which was queried to round out the search and to be sure that we were gathering the majority of the stories. By utilizing these three databases, we were able to uncover articles related to Dubai Sustainable City in a thorough manner. The unit of analysis for the study was each mention of “Dubai Sustainable City.” By using “Dubai Sustainable City,” we were able to gather articles that were most relevant to our topic. We were examining articles that were purposively relevant to “Dubai Sustainable City” as a specific project that was launched in Dubai in 2012. The set of keywords is not the same, nor close to what would result from a search for articles about sustainability issues related to Dubai. In some instances, there were duplicate articles; when a duplicate article was found, it was excluded. We found Google News articles that did not come up in Factiva or Lexis Nexis searches and included them in the analysis. After conducting the search and assessing the articles for appropriateness of inclusion (meaning that the article was, in fact, concerning Dubai Sustainable City and included assertions about the project), 136 relevant articles remained for coding. The search was not limited to a specific time period; rather, we included articles in any instance where “Dubai Sustainable City” was mentioned. The time range ended up falling between 2012 (following the announcement of the Dubai Sustainable City project) and the time of the study, 2018.

Using a manual-coding scheme, the articles were culled from the database and assessed based on several factors. Those factors were informed by previous research: (1) the dominant primary frame, (2) the secondary frames (where present), (3) the journalistic style, (4) the sources, and finally, (5) the sentiments of the assertions surrounding the keywords. The coding sheet consisted of a total of eight items when the “year of publication,” the media outlet’s “geographic location,” and the “article number” were considered.

The dominant primary frames variable (also called “pillars” or “meta-frames” in other research) was comprised of the three main themes that have been identified over the years in framing sustainability; that is, environmental, social, and economic. The dominant primary frame of each article was determined after reading the full article. A determination was made based on coding rules specific to the discernment of an overall theme found in the articles. There were instances where articles were written in such a way that it could be argued that more than one frame was present. In these cases, coders were instructed to select the dominant frame according to the most prominent aspects in the article. The variable of “secondary frames” consisted of data-derived frames that were found in Indian media coverage of sustainability from a previous study by Nambiar (2014). The “journalistic style” consisted of two main categories: “descriptive” and “interpretive.” The coders read the articles and determined based on the style whether the journalistic style employed was more descriptive or interpretive in its nature. Descriptive journalism mainly focuses on impartial fact presentation and being source-driven, whereas interpretive journalism denotes reporting beyond descriptive and fact-focused journalism. Journalistic explanations, evaluations, and contextualizations define what people understand through interpretive journalism (Salgado, 2019). The “source” variable was derived from previous studies and divided into eight categories based on the professional status of the sources: (1) scientists/researchers; (2) government officials; (3) industry/business; (4) interests/advocacy/environmentalism; (5) citizens; (6) experts/authors/historical; and (7) other. The sources were also scored based on their gender (female/male). For the final variable of “sentiment” (as mentioned, also sometimes referred to as “tone” or “valence” in the literature), the coders copied and pasted the entire sentence (where Dubai Sustainable City was mentioned directly) and submitted it to the online software known as MeaningCloud. The assessment made by the MeaningCloud software was then recorded for each sentence. MeaningCloud judged the text and would then assign a value along with a range from “very negative” to “very positive.” We then assigned a numerical value to these judgments of between minus two (very negative) and positive two (very positive). Once all of the assertions were judged, the coder tallied the scores and divided the total by the number of assertions to achieve a composite “sentiment” score for each article.

Inter-Coder Reliability

Inter-coder reliability, also known as inter-coder agreement, represents the coherence and the agreement level among researchers who evaluate a characteristic of the same content using the same coding instrument for the quality of the research. As Krippendorff (2004) aptly noted: “Agreement is what we measure; reliability is what we wish to infer from it” (p. 413). According to Tinsley and Weiss (2000), inter-coder reliability measures “the extent to which different judges tend to assign exactly the same rating to each object” (p. 98); however, the inter-coder reliability does not measure the degree to which “ratings of different judges are the same when expressed as deviations from their means” (p. 98). According to Neuendorf (2002), the acceptance standards are a coefficient of .90 or greater (would be acceptable to all), .80 or greater (would be acceptable in most situations), and below .8 (there exists disagreement concerning the acceptance; Neuendorf, 2002, p. 145). The researchers utilized 10% of the dataset for the inter-coder reliability testing and computed the results. On the matter of simple agreement, the coders achieved a score of 91% across all of the variables coded. In the subsequent tests for chance agreement on several of the variables, Scott’s Pi results of .8 and above were noted. The variable of “sentiment” was not part of the inter-coder reliability test, as the researchers used the MeaningCloud online software to make the assessments on the assertions. As mentioned, for each mention of “Dubai Sustainable City,” the coders copied and pasted the entire sentence and then submitted the text to MeaningCloud.

Results and Findings

To report on research question one, our search of the three databases (Factiva, Lexis Nexis, and Google News) uncovered 233 articles in total; however, 97 articles were either duplicates or not specifically dealing with Dubai Sustainable City. The 136 local and international news articles were published mostly by Gulf News, The National, and Khaleej Times, which are English daily newspapers based in the UAE. Gulf News and Khaleej Times were first established in the late 1970s. Gulf News is considered the leading English newspaper in the UAE; it is owned by Gulf News (GN) Media and published by Al Nisr Publishing, which is chaired by the UAE Finance Minister. Khaleej Times is owned by Galadari Printing and Publishing Company and chaired by the Galadari brothers. The National was acquired by International Media Investments, which is owned by the Deputy Prime Minister of the UAE.

We applied a litmus test to each of the articles to determine whether to include or exclude them from our study. The first few articles appeared in 2012 alongside the announcement of the project. The vast majority of the articles were internal media outlets ranging from the daily local newspapers (The National, Gulf News, Khaleej Times) to websites (IG, Construction Week Online, and Buildgreen). Our investigations showed that 73% of the articles were from the UAE and 27% were international. The researchers noticed that the highest number of articles occurred in 2017 (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Local versus international coverage of Dubai sustainable city.^a

As mentioned, there are three prominent frames suggested by the previous literature. Our second research question asked which frames were present in the articles that were examined. In our study, we discovered that two of the frames received the bulk of coverage in the articles. In first place was the “economic” (profits) frame, followed closely by the “environmental” (planet) frame, whereas the “social” aspect (people) frame received very little attention in the media coverage that we examined (see Figure 2). Vu et al. (2019) studied 37,000 articles published between 2011 and 2015 examining the diversity factors in media analyses of climate coverage. The economic impact was identified as a major frame of climate change. While the poorer countries focused on losses and damage due to climate change, the richer countries’ media coverage focused on climate science and regulations. Dubai’s media coverage underlines a pattern that is in between the rich and the poor countries. While the media coverage emphasized the importance of the regulatory aspects of Dubai Sustainable City, it used losses and damage due to climate change as a stimulus to justify the success and continuation of the Dubai Sustainable City project.

Figure 2.

Dominant frames in media coverage of Dubai sustainable city.^a

In terms of the secondary frames—those that were data-derived and informed by a previous study (Nambiar, 2014)—we found that one of the frames, that of “exemplary practices,” was extremely common in many of the articles about the Dubai Sustainable City project. The frame of “changing paradigms” was also often found in the stories, along with that of the “international perspective.” Two other frames were virtually absent in the text (“local evidence” and “empowerment support”).

One variable that is often included in media coverage studies, and rightly so, concerns the types of sources that end up being used to inform the news coverage and that are often directly quoted in the text. The results of our inspection of the study’s articles indicate that one category tends to dominate in the media coverage of Dubai Sustainable City, and that is “industry and business” (68%). In second place, the researchers found that “government and officials” were often utilized as sources (13%). The other categories received some attention, but not as prominently as the first two (see Figure 3). Two individual sources stood out, as they were often quoted in the press reports. Both sources were from the company responsible for the Dubai Sustainable City project, Diamond Developers: CEO Faris Saeed and co-founder of the firm, Wassim Adlouni. Several of the articles had very similar quotes, indicating the potential success of press releases from the company. There is a stark difference between the “industry and business” category having 68% and the “citizen” category having 5% of the coverage. The dominance of the “industry and business” category indicates that the media coverage focuses on the economic factors and the importance of Dubai Sustainable City as a project that will be successfully delivered without paying much attention to the standpoints of the citizens living there.

Figure 3.

Sources quoted in media coverge of Dubai sustainable city.^a

Research question three also inquired about the genders of the sources found in the articles. In this regard, our findings are similar to previous research proving that women are not often quoted in stories. While we did find a few female sources, they were vastly outnumbered by men here as well. The inadequacy of women’s coverage in the news is a worldwide phenomenon which is even more evident in Dubai, given that women’s employment in Dubai surged over the past decade. The disproportionate representation of women parallels that of citizens’ representation, which was only 6%.

Research question four asked: “What can be stated about the journalistic style, overall valence, tone, or sentiment of the articles that mention or have assertions about Dubai Sustainable City?” In response, we can state that the vast majority of the articles in the study revealed that the descriptive journalistic style predominated. The overall valence of the assertions (n = 367) concerning Dubai Sustainable City was found to be positive (Figures 4 and 5).

Figure 4.

Journalistic style in media coverage of Dubai sustainable city.^a

Figure 5.

Tone in local and international media coverage of Dubai sustainable city.^a

One of the study’s limitations was in the unaltered use of the standard MeaningCloud API with regard to the variable of sentiment due to using the general settings of the software. Although the software is robust, it is chiefly intended for advertising, marketing, and social media text evaluation purposes. As such, in future research, the MeaningCloud API should be tailored to more specifically suit the research. Despite this limitation, we compared MeaningCloud’s coding with a human coding scheme of roughly 30% of the total corpus, and in these instances, we found agreement anecdotally in a majority of the articles. In a few instances, the human coding assessment and the MeaningCloud coding were in disagreement (e.g., in one article, the term “buffer zone” was coded as negative, whereas in the context of Dubai Sustainable City, this was considered a positive thing). However, again in most cases where it was checked, the judgments were in agreement.

Discussion and Conclusion

The purpose of this paper was to examine the ways in which Dubai Sustainable City has been covered by the media. The Dubai Sustainable City project does not receive a massive amount of coverage, but the coverage that it does receive is significantly positive. The reviewed articles featured mostly economic and environmental frames; very few discussed social aspects related to the people who would actually be living in the development and what they thought.

In one of the articles, a resident was quoted, but somewhat surprisingly, the vast majority of the quoted sources were industry/business sources—and the information that was mentioned was largely the same from story to story.

The significant increase in articles in the year 2017 was likely linked to the public launch of Dubai Sustainable City in 2016. The coverage thus helped to bring the project and several surrounding issues of sustainability back into the public eye while simultaneously promoting the development as an investment and option for citizens to inhabit. Other real estate developments receive similar attention in the market, but Dubai Sustainable City has stood out to a certain degree due to the focus in the coverage around certain sustainability frames. A cynical reading of this would be that the environmental “angle” was deployed as a marketing tactic. If this is the case, further studies may be required to identify the tactic’s impact in the public eye. For instance, in a study that investigated the performance of firms in the Multan Division of Pakistan, it was identified how social media marketing applications moderate the positive impact of corporate social responsibility on sustainable performance (Abbas et al., 2019). Governments across the globe have devised various initiatives, such as feed-in tariffs and pricing laws, that have significantly increased sun-powered generation capacity in these countries (Singh & Singh, 2017).

However, it must be noted that the developers indicated that Dubai Sustainable City would have to compete in the real estate market the same way that other developments have done. This would imply to some degree that for sustainable practices to be successful, they must receive ample attention and be able to catch the consumers’ attention using traditional means and methods. While some consumers may be predisposed to the “environmental” pitch, and they may already want to live such a lifestyle, others would have to be convinced of this option. There is “selling” that is similar to the way all real estate developments are sold in the market. At the same time, the coverage of this particular development serves—at least in some small way—to further raise awareness of the viability of sustainable practices regardless of whether a person is actually interested in living in this particular development. These sustainability messages are ones that the Government of Dubai is clearly eager to encourage.

The frequent use of “exemplary practice” as a secondary frame is consistent with the government initiatives that it aims to implement. Only one article had “empowerment support” as a secondary frame. This goes along with the fact that we did not detect a “social/people” frame in very many of the articles. Though we cannot be sure, this finding serves to indicate the top-down approach that seems common in the country when it comes to socially oriented initiatives—they tend to originate within government agencies and are spread through standard means and methods (including subsequent obligatory media coverage). As any resident may attest, various initiatives are often introduced by the UAE government to facilitate some kind of positive change. The top-down national policy does not focus on changing the current situation but rather creating an environment where future changes are deemed possible.

Arguably, newspapers acted as publicity agents of a sort for the developers and the government by echoing the language of the government initiatives concerning the issue of sustainability—in many cases, the articles simply directly quoted the business and government sources without a review or analysis of what was being said. Based on Shoemaker and Reese’s Hierarchy of Influences, it becomes evident that newspapers repeatedly rely on routines, which affects negatively the diversity of content publicly available (Carpenter, 2008). Most articles repeatedly emphasized specific aspects of Dubai Sustainable City with an implicit suggestion that these were the latest and best practices in the field. The articles did not mention a multitude of questions that might arise in a reader’s mind as a result of reading the stories. For example, rarely mentioned were the prices of the villas (which place the development out of reach of the average resident), the logistical hurdles that have arisen and might still arise in the second phase of the project, or any of the potential downsides of Dubai Sustainable City. It is of note that the capital city of Abu Dhabi had a similar development called Masdar City, which was scarcely mentioned in Dubai Sustainable City articles despite the linkages between the projects being undeniable.

This study supports prior research about the prevalence of male-dominated sources where “official sources are often titled and typically male” (Armstrong & Nelson, 2005). In rare instances were the sources female. The disproportionate underrepresentation of female sources and the “citizen” category underline and reinforce a hierarchical perception of power and authority. Since the country’s independence in 1971, the UAE has emerged as a late newcomer into the international system aiming to implement gender-equal normative ideals (Pinto, 2019). The UAE government has been adopting progressive policies and initiatives to empower the position of women within the society. Such initiatives are the launch of the National Strategy for Empowerment of Emirati Women in the UAE for 2015 to 2021 (https://www.mofaic.gov.ae/). With females forming 30.88% and males 69.12% of the estimated population of 9.89 million in 2019, the UAE has a value of 0.113 on the Gender Inequality Index. The country ranked 26 out of 162 countries in the 2018 index (Al Khayyal et al., 2021). Socially, Emirati women and men are living in a relatively conservative society characterized by patriarchal affiliations (Alibeli, 2015). Media coverage focuses on the players in the field not necessarily from a grassroots experiential standpoint but rather from a position of authority and officially sanctioned knowledge. In addition, most articles were descriptive in their coverage of Dubai Sustainable City. Only a handful of the articles had any type of analytical interpretation of the news. The researchers did not consider this as entirely surprising due to a number of factors. One is that the nature of journalism in Dubai is such much of what gets published is clearly prompted by either advertising/business interests or government initiatives. Although this is an assumption, there does not seem to be a particular reporter on staff, at least at the local papers, who is regularly tasked with covering environmental issues (no regular byline was noted to indicate such a position). Thus, a combination of factors may be at play, from having someone on staff who understands the issues surrounding the environment and sustainability in the first place to the routines that are typically followed at these papers, which would indicate a heavy reliance on press releases from the government and, in this case, real estate developers and related contractors in the absence of other information.

The current research paper focused on newspaper and online publications; future research would do well to cover more forms of media, such as digital media, radio shows, television news programs, and the various social media platforms that have covered the topic of Dubai Sustainable City and the related environmental issues that are raised.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Ethical Approval

This study did not require a committee approval number since it did not involve animal or human studies.

ORCID iD

Elissa Ayoub

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People,Planet,and Profits: Comparing Media Treatment of Dubai Sustainable City

Abstract

Keywords

Literature Review

Sustainability and Sustainable Development

The Importance of Media Portrayals

Sustainability: Identifying Themes and Determining Frames

The Significance of Sources

Valence, Tone, and Sentiment

Dubai and Dubai Sustainable City

Methodology

Inter-Coder Reliability

Results and Findings

Discussion and Conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

Ethical Approval

ORCID iD

References