GOVERNANCE, CULTURE, AND LAW: THE EXPANDING SCOPE OF ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH
Unknown authors
Jul 2026· Journal of Environmental Science and Sustainable Development· Vol 9· 0 citations
Abstract
Environmental science emerged as a discipline based on physical measurements, such as soil pollutant levels (Ailijiang et al., 2022), ecological restoration (Yue et al., 2026), city surface temperature (Shafizadeh-Moghadam et al., 2025), and microbial density in air samples (Hayleeyesus & Manaye, 2014). However, its objects of study increasingly extend beyond the confines of the laboratory. Questions that were once sufficiently answered with measurement data now require answers through draft laws, Constitutional Court decisions, financial reports of mining companies, and even traditional ritual discourses governing community access to forests. In other words, environmental science can no longer stand alone as a purely natural science (Siegert, 2016). The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework attempts to encapsulate this shift in a single set of targets and indicators that can be used across sectors. However, these indicators do not always translate equally across domains. They are relatively easy to condense into a company’s environmental compliance rating, but much more difficult to translate into legal doctrine, ritual meaning, or market behavior, as each has an internal logic that cannot be fully understood by a single indicator.
The assumption that economic, social, and environmental targets can be pursued simultaneously without infecting others has also repeatedly been shown to underestimate the trade-offs between them. For example, land-use changes that drive economic growth continue to erode ecosystem services even as measured well-being increases (Schirpke et al., 2023), while biodiversity loss and the climate crisis are still often considered externalities (Dasgupta & Levin, 2023), not binding limits. Country-wide evidence suggests that this is not accidental but structural, depending on the extent to which a country’s institutions can translate environmental commitments into truly binding practices. What drives this, not to culminate in governance, is not a single institution, but rather a collective capacity to enforce policies, equitably allocate resources, and listen to stakeholder claims. This capacity is rarely an abstract concept, manifesting in very concrete forms such as protected and unprotected conservation zones within plantation concessions (Li et al., 2024), or environmental management oversight regimes that are oriented toward responding to emerging problems rather than being anticipatory or proactive (Prasetyaningsih et al., 2022). Therefore, the task of environmental science is not simply to measure damage more precisely, but rather to explore the power relations, legal architecture, and everyday behavior that determine whether measurements actually result in protection.
This 16th issue of the Journal of Environmental Science and Sustainable Development is structured to reflect this shift. The empirical core of the discipline, such as climate and soil moisture trends, oil-contaminated soil, urban heat, forest regeneration, and chemical biofertilizers, remains intact. However, it is juxtaposed with studies on smart city governance, cross-generational consumer psychology, traditional ritual language, heritage market revitalization, and the constitutionality of resource priorities.
The articles in this edition cover geographic and sectoral contexts, ranging from long-term climate and soil moisture trends in the Western Himalayas, urban heat mapping and bioremediation of oil-contaminated soil, to smart city governance, green consumer behavior, and the implementation of household composting in Indonesia, India, and Vietnam, as well as the governance of traditional rituals in Flores, heritage market revitalization in Surakarta, sustainable performance in the Indonesian sector, and the validity of various business permits.
Forest governance rests on a stubborn paradox. Conceptual understanding has matured over recent decades, moving from sustained-yield forestry toward a reading of forests as complex adaptive socio-ecological systems, yet governance practice has not followed and remains lodged in fragmented
sectoral structures that keep reproducing incoherent policy, unenforced law, misaligned economic incentives and poor social outcomes. The Integrated Synergy Model is presented to address that gap, a diagnostic framework that couples three bodies of theory not previously brought together: Meadows’
leverage-points hierarchy in the nine-point condensation which Abson
et al
. (2017) proposed, Ostrom’s eight design principles for common-pool resources, and qualitative causal loop diagrams, run across four governance axes of policy, law, economics and society. The design is conceptual
and theory-building, drawing on an integrative narrative synthesis of peer-reviewed literature published between 2000 and 2025, mapping that literature onto Ostrom’s principles, and screening candidate variables through three criteria of structural centrality, leverage depth and cross-axis
reach. Three feedback structures carry the argument. A virtuous reinforcing loop (R1) links secure tenure, community stewardship, ecosystem-service provision and political legitimacy, while a vicious reinforcing loop (R2) entrenches degradation as weak enforcement, illegal extraction and eroded
fiscal capacity feed. A balancing loop of payments for ecosystem services and market signals (B1) operates, but only where tenure security is already in place. Of the nine candidate variables screened, three stand out as priority leverage points; namely, tenure security, independent monitoring,
and intersectoral coordination, each of which acts on system design rather than on parameters. A three-step diagnostic roadmap of mapping, diagnosis and monitoring is presented, which lets national and sub-national forest authorities audit the leverage depth of their own governance portfolios.
H. Ünal, Ü. Birben· International forestry revie...· 0 citations
Management of natural resources (NR) and the environment often creates a gap between sustainability commitments and the benefits that stakeholders actually receive. This article aims to explain how ecological, economic, social, health, cultural, and educational benefits are formed, as well as to identify barriers and strategies for fair implementation. The study uses a qualitative literature review that is integrative and interpretative, analyzing reputable journal articles since 2020, with purposive-iterative searching, conceptual coding, cross-source comparison, and thematic-narrative synthesis. The findings show that sustainability benefits are formed through protecting natural capital, maintaining ecosystem services, reducing risks, strengthening local rights and capacities, and recognizing the plurality of values and knowledge. However, these benefits don't automatically spread evenly. Social-ecological complexity, institutional fragmentation, tenure conflicts, power imbalances, limited funding and data, weak enforcement, short-term market pressures, and symbolic participation often turn policies into mere administrative compliance without real improvements. This article proposes adaptive, polycentric, ecosystem-based, and equitable governance that integrates clear rights, benefit-sharing, cross-sector coordination, long-term funding, open data, participatory monitoring, and policy correction mechanisms. The main contribution of the article is a five-layer analytical framework connecting ecological boundaries, values and benefits, actors and power relations, institutions and instruments, as well as multidimensional outputs. This framework emphasizes that success isn't just measured by compliance or the scale of programs, but by the integrity of the ecosystem, the fairness of benefits, the legitimacy of processes, and long-term resilience
L. Judijanto· International Journal of Glo...· 0 citations
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are widely presented as an integrated framework for social, economic, and environmental progress, yet recent assessments indicate substantial implementation shortfalls. This scoping review maps post-2015 scholarship on one of the framework’s most contested fault lines: the relationship between Goal 8 (economic growth) and the ecologically oriented goals, especially Goals 6, 12, 13, 14, and 15. Following established scoping review guidance, 32 sources published between 2015 and 2026 were identified from Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, citation searching, and selected grey literature. The synthesis indicates four main patterns in the included corpus. First, a substantial share of the reviewed literature characterizes continued growth-centred development and ecological sustainability as difficult to reconcile under current technological and institutional conditions, particularly given evidence on material throughput, emissions, and planetary boundaries. Second, the corpus recurrently describes three mechanisms through which this tension is muted within the SDG architecture: the rhetorical absorption of ecological limits into “green growth” discourse, strategic vagueness in targets and indicators, and the marginalization of alternative development ontologies. Third, the review synthesizes these mechanisms under the interpretive concept of paradigmatic stacking. Fourth, the corpus identifies alternative resources for a successor framework, including relational and plural conceptions of well-being associated in the reviewed literature with Ubuntu, Buen Vivir, and Gross National Happiness. Taken together, the findings suggest that debates about SDG underperformance cannot be reduced to implementation alone but also involve questions of conceptual design. The article concludes by outlining ontological pluralism as a possible direction for post-2030 framework design.
Babu George, T. Henthorne· Sustainability· 0 citations
Here, changes in sustainability are assessed using statistical data for all countries between 1990 and 2015, with a focus on the fifteen most populous countries. The indicators used cover GDP for the economy; poverty, education, and health for human capabilities; as well as environmental impacts on water, climate, air, and bioresources. An authoritative model is used to describe the environmental impacts, resulting from pressures driven by population and affluence; and responses, through decreasing resource intensity, measured by the resource use per GDP, and improving environmental efficiency, defined as emissions per resource use. Resource intensity decreases in most countries. Environmental efficiency improves for wastewater and NOx, hardly changes for CO2, and increases in nature protection areas, but this rarely compensates for deforestation. The combination of pressures and responses reduced water pollution and air pollution, and mitigated climate change in high-income countries, but did not reduce the degradation of biodiversity. While the pressures, responses, and environmental impacts of economic growth vary across all countries, twenty-five growing economies have reduced those environmental impacts. Changes toward sustainability are discussed with regard to the growing share of services in economies in the ‘EKC hypothesis’, innovation for achieving higher value at lower impact in the ‘green growth’ idea, and regulations that lead to profitable environmental investments in the ‘Porter hypothesis’. Combined, they only partially explain the changes because they ignore the low prices of natural resources and high shareholder consumption. Additionally, regulations are needed that increase the price of environmental impacts relative to the price of man-made resources and enforce high-quality performance standards.
Y. Krozer, Frans Coenen, Sebastian Bykuć· Sustainability· 0 citations
The climate issue is twofold centred on cities. They are the greatest contributors to emissions that accelerate warming and they focus the population and resources that are endangered by warming. That dual exposure is the beginning point in this paper and it poses a more difficult question than one can reasonably have with a typical survey. It is not merely the issue of what climate change does to urban ecosystems that are problematic, but why the instruments of managing urban ecologies continue to fail to match the magnitude of the challenge. It bases its argument on the numbers provided by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, UN-Habitat, and some recent peer-reviewed literature, labeling the reaction to climate change in urban areas as being ambitious and lacking in coordination. Medellin green corridors and other examples of nature based interventions demonstrate that urban green areas can be used to quantifiably cool the city. However, their advantages are not equally spread and their form of governance is disregarded in a fragmented polycentric system of municipal networks, ministries of the national governments and private actors which are not accountable to each other. The discussion has come to the conclusion that it is no longer the knowledge or even technology that would be the decisive constraint on the action taken to improve the urban climate. It is the structure of governing: who governs, who funds and who cools off the first.
Keywords: Urban Heat Island; urban climate governance; nature based solutions; climate justice; polycentric governance; green gentrification
D. Pandey· International Journal of Phi...· 0 citations
Abstract Brazil’s agricultural frontier and land-use change make decarbonization a central challenge for meeting climate targets while sustaining productivity. This article applies the multilevel perspective (MLP) to compare three innovative niches with low‑carbon potential: crop–livestock–forestry integration (CLFi), cabruca cocoa agroforestry in the Atlantic Forest, and the emerging forest restoration economy within various sociotechnical regime dimensions. The analysis draws on 42 semi‑structured interviews (2019–2024) with producers, civil‑society organizations, agribusiness, researchers and public officials, complemented by secondary quantitative indicators. We find that scaling these niches depends less on the existence of technical solutions than on (i) market and value‑chain coordination capable of rewarding environmental performance and (ii) institutional and knowledge infrastructures (credit, extension, standards and monitoring) that reduce entry costs and risks—especially for small and medium producers. Cross‑case comparison also shows that land governance and territorial inequalities condition both feasibility and benefit sharing. The paper contributes to sustainability transitions scholarship by grounding MLP concepts in Brazilian agrarian contexts and by identifying policy levers for scaling low‑carbon practices in tropical agri‑food systems.
Niels Søndergaard, C. König, Camila Dias de Sá· Revista de Economia e Sociol...· 0 citations