Knowledge domain and research progress in green consumption: a phase upgrade study

Abstract

Green consumption (GC), as one of the important initiatives to achieve the goal of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality, has attracted widespread attention from scholars in environmental and economic fields. This article reviews the literature on GC, asking two main questions: how can GC research be analyzed from macro, meso, and micro perspectives? How have the research topics in the field of GC evolved in international and Chinese academia? This study makes a visual analysis of knowledge domain based on the literature of Web of Science Core Collection and China National Knowledge Infrastructure, so as to reveal hot topics, stage division, and research trend of GC research. The results revealed the following: GC research is in a period of rapid growth, and it is mainly distributed in developed countries dominated by the USA and in developing countries dominated by China. There is a trend of interdisciplinary research on GC, such as ecology, psychology, health, systematics, politics, and economics, which indicates that GC research has become increasingly inseparable from human survival and health, psychological acceptance, and social development. For the international academia, GC research pays more attention to the transformation of consumer psychology, while the Chinese academia is more concerned with the regulation of consumer behavior and the activation of green emotions. Considering the focus and characteristics of GC supervision, this study proposes GC 3.0 with a consumer-oriented and emphasizing green emotions and proposes future application scenarios from four aspects: government supervision, social self-regulation, enterprise demonstration, and personal self-monitoring.

Keywords: CiteSpace; Green consumption; Green supervision; Phase upgrade; Visual analysis.