Past local industrial disasters and involvement of NGOs stimulate public participation in transboundary Environmental Impact Assessment

Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) emerged as a regulatory procedure and is now implemented worldwide. EIA aims to increase the sustainability of economic activities by decreasing the impact on environmental components. Transparency of the evaluation process is a key feature of the procedure, and this is achieved predominantly by encouraging participation in public debates. Public participation is essential for EIA's effectiveness, particularly in transboundary projects. This study evaluates whether media coverage of certain projects with transboundary environmental impacts increases public participation during EIA. We analyzed how online media covered the stories about four major projects subject to the EIA procedure in Romania (i.e., reactors 3 and 4 of Cernavoda Nuclear Power Plant, Oltenita used oil recycling facility, Certej mining project, management of Moldova Noua tailing ponds). We focused on articles published between 2010 and 2020, covering stories about the four projects. We further extracted the stakeholders involved in the projects using social network analysis. We extracted the main topics of articles discussing the four projects using deep categorization tools. The polarities of titles and contents of the articles were assessed using sentiment analysis tools. Our findings indicate that EIA is a media subject only when NGOs become important actors in the process and the industry generated local industrial disasters in the past; otherwise, the media rarely debate the environmental impact of projects. Without NGO reactions, Romanian readers are fed with political and economic aspects driven by large projects rather than environmental issues. The outcome of the current study is significant for understanding what triggers NGOs and the media to take a stand against major projects. Projects involving activities that generated ecological disasters in Romania's recent history are strongly opposed by NGOs and the public. In such cases, environmental and EIA topics are more often included in media stories. However, projects with undeniable environmental impact but without a negative background in Romania do not reach the public agenda, and the media stories do not focus on environmental aspects either, leading to limited public participation within the EIA procedure.