Contesting growth and sustainability in Indonesia’s capital city relocation: a corpus ecolinguistic study

Abstract

The global environmental crisis has triggered academic discussions on how infrastructure discourse often eliminates the environment as a part of the ecosystem. One noticeable contested issue is Indonesia’s capital city relocation from Jakarta to Penajam Paser Utara, Borneo Island. Some research has discussed the new capital city (NCC) discourse, but the analysis from a corpus ecolinguistic perspective is absent. It is hypothesised that the lexemes "growth" and "sustainability" in the NCC legal documents represent the government’s intention to communicate the relocation intention and legitimise the plan. This paper investigates the employment of lexemes "growth" and "sustainability" in the NCC legal documents using Sketch Engine, an online corpus tool developed by Adam Kilgarriff. Additionally, we also observed the nominalisation and transitivity of the concordances where the lexemes were used in the documents