Mind the mismatch: mapping stakeholder-interest divergence in urban e-mobility across major western anglophone arenas using large language models

Urban e-mobility has emerged as a cornerstone of sustainability transitions, yet electric vehicle (EV) adoption has slowed in key markets despite robust policy support, exposing societal tensions in transition governance, and more fundamentally, a persistent gap in understanding how stakeholder-interest misalignments may erode the legitimacy of climate action itself. This research examines stakeholder-interest divergence as an indicator of potential coordination friction in e-mobility transitions, focusing on how government, academia, news media and the public within major Anglophone discursive arenas articulate differing priorities, framings, and concerns. Drawing on a corpus of Western-centric policy documents, scholarly articles, news stories and social-media posts from 2020 to 2024, we deploy a large language model (LLM) pipeline to analyse topic salience and sentiment across discursive arenas. Results show that government and academic arenas devote less than 3% of their coverage to user experience and maintenance, concerns that dominate public discussion, while concentrating on incentives, regulation and technological advance. News media appear to follow the same institutional pattern, reported as an exploratory signal given the lower cross-model consistency of that corpus. In negative narratives, news outlets attribute opposition to subsidy shortfalls, likewise an exploratory signal, while citizens emphasize persistent cost gaps under current tax regimes, helping contextualize why generous incentives coexist with purchase hesitancy. By pinpointing where conversations stray and whose concerns remain unheard, the study provides a transferable diagnostic for informing the realignment of stakeholder agendas and supporting more credible, publicly trusted low-carbon transitions in cities.