Thematic identification and evolution analysis of digital governance elements in megaprojects within a sustainable context

Digital governance has emerged as a critical pathway for sustainable megaproject development. However, existing studies have insufficiently addressed the systematic identification and long-term, cross-regional evolution of governance elements. From a sustainability perspective, this study employs a hybrid BERT-GSDMM and LDA approach to identify and analyze themes in multi-source textual data on megaprojects across China’s eastern, central, and western regions from 2001 to 2025, encompassing news reports, case studies, and policy documents, with emphasis on regional heterogeneity and stage-specific evolution of governance elements. The findings reveal distinct regional patterns: (1) the eastern region, driven by continuous technological advancement, demonstrates open governance features; (2) the central region has established a systematic governance approach centered on a “safety-process-risk” prevention and control framework; (3) the western region, based on ecological sensitivity and unique natural resource endowments, has developed a governance model oriented toward greenness and safety. Although practices differ across regions, they follow an evolutionary logic from “digital foundation building” to “collaborative integration” and ultimately to “intelligent symbiosis”. The primary contribution is characterizing regional features and evolutionary patterns of megaproject digital governance from a sustainability perspective using a hybrid text-mining approach. The findings provide empirical evidence and practical insights for optimizing regionally differentiated governance pathways.