Europe ‘Wears’ Green: Investigating Legal Implementation of ‘Green Economy’ Policies

‘A 'green' economy can be understood as one in which environmental, economic and social policies and innovations enable society to use resources efficiently — enhancing human well-being in an inclusive manner, while maintaining the natural systems that sustain us. ‘ (https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/towards-a-green-economy-in-europe). As can be inferred from the statement above, the EU has committed itself to promote a responsible use of economic resources with respect for the environment. More specifically, the EU will attempt to boost resource efficiency while maintaining ecosystem resilience, through the fulfilment of some environmental policy targets and objectives by 2050. Starting from these assumptions, the study is aimed at investigating EU legislative procedures adopted by the EU in order to guarantee an efficient use of economic resources while preserving human well-being. The corpus under scrutiny will include all the legal documents mentioned in ‘Towards a green economy in Europe’ project and adopted by the EU from 2009 to 2020. Methodology will include studies from corpus based approach (Stubbs 2001, Baker 2006) which will help to analyse patterns of language semantically related to ‘green economy’ conceptualizations. More specifically, the co-text of the key words investigated will be analysed in terms of ‘semantic preference’, intended as the relation between a word form and a set of semantically related words. In short, the study will try to examine EU commitment to provide EU citizens with promotion of a more ‘sustainable’ economic path.