Grassroots Environmental Discourse and the National Project “Ecological Well-Being”: Topic Modeling of Russian VKontakte Communities

Effective environmental governance increasingly depends on aligning top-down policy priorities with grassroots civic practices. This study assesses the potential for integrating grassroots environmental initiatives into Russia’s National Project “Ecological Well-Being” by comparing the thematic structure of VKontakte environmental communities with six federal project areas. A corpus of 64,364 posts obtained in 2025 by 201 long-running environmental communities was collected and balanced to 30,500 texts. BERTopic, using multilingual sentence embeddings, UMAP, and HDBSCAN, assigned 15,066 posts (49.4% of the balanced corpus) to 397 stable thematic clusters, while the remaining 15,434 posts were treated as noise and excluded from the thematic comparison. Topic labels and correspondence with the National Project initiatives were subsequently assessed with DeepSeek Chat. Gap Analysis showed that 64 of the 397 topics (16.12%), comprising 3081 of the 15,066 clustered posts (20.45%), directly overlapped with at least one initiative of the National Project. The remaining 333 topics (83.88%), comprising 11,985 clustered posts (79.55%), formed a Grassroots Surplus outside the formal policy agenda. The largest overlap in terms of both topics and posts concerned biodiversity (12.34% of topics; 15.46% of posts) and the circular economy (4.79%; 5.27%, respectively), while the clean air initiative had the lowest representation (0.25%; 0.14%). Animal welfare, school and family environmental initiatives, and local recreation emerged as gateway topics that may connect everyday civic practices with national environmental programs.