Collective agri-environmental schemes (cAES) have been introduced in Brandenburg, Germany. This study analyses how the institutional design of cAES should be developed according to the region’s farmers. The results of a Q study reveal three perspectives: a benefit-focused, a business-focused and a stewardship-focused viewpoint. Each viewpoint highlights different aspects essential to engage farmers in the new approach. Farmers agree about increased flexibility and involvement in monitoring and decision making within the collective as well as remuneration to motivate farmers and enable professionalisation. While the farmers see potential benefits of cooperating with external actors, strong caveats exist that conservation organisations will undermine the farmers’ interests. As trust between farmers and towards other actors is limited, the collectives will need to invest in connectedness and social capital. While the governmental, socioeconomic and environmental context needs to be considered when designing new cAES, results may offer insights for newly developing farmer collectives elsewhere. Highlights Different perspectives exist among farmers on the new collective agri-environmental scheme in Brandenburg, Germany. Farmers hope for increased self-governance, feasibility, and effectiveness, as well as reduced bureaucracy. New collectives will need to invest in social capital for successful collaboration.

Landscape designations for heritage-rich areas have generally focused on preventing change and preserving continuity – defensive approaches – in the face of perceived threats. However, in an era of climate breakdown, preservation of cultural landscapes may no longer be viable. Drawing lessons from wider debates on cultural heritage, we explore the potential for developing more adaptive, rather than defensive, approaches to planning for cultural landscapes in an era of climate breakdown. This reflects the growing recognition of the need for adaptive responses that are not only technically effective but also socially and culturally grounded. We argue that planning approaches for cultural landscapes will increasingly need to embrace evolutionary and values-based perspectives to cope with uncertainties and the inevitability of cultural loss. We emphasise local knowledge, intangible heritage, values and lived experience in relation to cultural heritage, contending that these are better suited to assessing vulnerability and to building adaptive capacity.

Recent electrification of propulsion systems can reduce greenhouse gas emissions from waterborne tourism transport. Information on tourists’ preferences for cleaner boat tours may help in designing effective policies, tour packages, and pricing schemes to promote the transition to cleaner transportation. This study implements a choice experiment to investigate preferences of tourists for tour attributes (i.e. destination, boat size, and guide services) and the mix of electrical energy and fossil fuels used by boats in Guatemala. Results from mixed logit models indicate that tourists are willing to pay for cleaner boat tours, although foreign and national tourists have different preferences. While foreigners’ willingness to pay increases with the share of electricity used as propulsion energy at a decreasing rate, national tourists prefer electric boats or hybrid boats with an equal share of electricity and fuel. This study provides useful insights to promote sustainable tourism and the decarbonization of waterborne transport services.

This paper assesses the contribution of Urban Greening Plans (UGPs) to achieving objectives of biodiversity conservation, restoration, and enhancement. Through a systematic content analysis of UGPs adopted by provincial capital cities in Italy, the study investigates which biodiversity-related attributes are relevant in greening plans and what level of commitment local governments demonstrate in planning, implementing, and monitoring biodiversity actions. The research highlights that, despite being sectoral, voluntary, and soft-policy instruments, quality UGPs have the potential to metaphorically generate a “butterfly effect,” sparking small-scale transformations that lead to broader, transformative changes, influencing socio-ecological structures and institutional dynamics. However, the analysis reveals significant challenges, including a lack of baseline data and standardized protocols for measuring urban biodiversity, which undermines the translation of the objectives into concrete actions. Additionally, a weak commitment to implementation, reflected in the limited use of monitoring indicators and biodiversity-related targets, is underlined. The study identifies examples of high-quality greening plans that benefit from strong political support and institutional commitment, as evidenced by the allocation of financial and human resources, and the use of shared governance tools that foster collaboration among diverse stakeholders and enhance the likelihood of successful implementation. Highlights Local governments lack clear and systematic approaches to set goals and act on biodiversity loss. Biodiversity planning faces a knowledge-to-action gap driven by weak political support, poor monitoring, and the absence of standardized indicators. Quality urban greening plans have the potential to drive a nature-positive future, influencing both socio-ecological structures and institutional dynamics.

Assessing the effectiveness of protected area network policies meets two objectives: measuring changes in biodiversity state relative to the objectives set, and providing managers with tools to guide their actions. For Natura 2000 network, few studies link conservation status to the effectiveness of the network, particularly at site-level. This article proposes an operationalisation at the site-level of the “Strategic Environmental Management Analysis” (SEMA), concern-focused evaluation framework, based on an emblematic case study of French Special Areas of Conservation, maintenance of open environments. Although methods for evaluating N2000 sites exist, they do not sufficiently explain the strategic importance of prioritising biodiversity issues to be targeted, and the actions to be taken accordingly inside and outside the site, as the SEMA framework allows. This article addresses this gap by providing managers with the means to assess whether their measures improve the conservation status of habitats and species targeted by Natura 2000.

As natural disasters grow in scale and impact, the ability of local governments to single-handedly manage disaster recovery diminishes. Collaboration for disaster management has become imperative, making inter-local collaboration a critical component of disaster response strategies. This study investigates how inter-local collaboration – cooperation between jurisdictions – affects resilience to natural disasters, focusing on South Korean communities that experienced severe damage from natural disasters in 2010–2012, 2016, and 2018–2019. Our findings show that collaborative networks reduce post-disaster expenses, with a marked decrease in costs as inter-local collaboration’s degree centrality (DC) and closeness centrality (CC) increase. Low economic performance (LEP) communities particularly benefit from higher DC. In LEP communities with severe disaster impacts, higher CC and eigenvector centrality further reduce recovery costs along with higher DC, emphasizing the need for strategic collaborations with neighboring or centrally-positioned communities. These results highlight the crucial role of interjurisdictional cooperation in strengthening disaster resilience.

This article presents a framework for researching how narratives guide management of invasive alien species (IAS). Through identification of plant-oriented, place-oriented and practice-oriented narratives in policymaking, the article demonstrates how framings of spatial context and societal practices challenge the status of ecological approaches to IAS. Through a document analysis of a public consultation process for the revised policies on foreign trees in Norway, it is demonstrated that the utility of foreign trees for timber production conflicts with the preservation of nature diversity. Yet, and through IAS control, Norwegian authorities aim to facilitate both planting and eradication of foreign trees. The article analyses how this paradoxical policy is justified through the use of narratives in policy formulation. The narratives illustrate how conflicts surrounding IAS management are entangled in a complexity of values and knowledge frameworks, causing tensions between ecological and wider societal interests in environmental policymaking that are proving difficult to reconcile.

The ecological and environmental audit (EEA) stands as an important practice of the China National Audit Office to implement an environmental audit system. Utilizing EEA implemented in China as a quasi-natural experiment, we examine the relationship between environmental audit and corporate environmental information disclosure based on the sample of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2011 to 2022. The results show that EEA can prompt firms to disclose more environmental information. Mechanism analysis shows that EEA improves corporate environmental information disclosure by enhancing attention and supervision of external stakeholders, such as local government environmental regulation, public environmental concern, and analyst attention. In addition, the heterogeneity analysis unveils that the stimulative effect of EEA is more pronounced for firms in regions with low economic growth pressure and high legalization degree. Meanwhile, the stimulative effect of EEA is more significant in heavily polluting firms and those with environmental subsidies and low financial constraints. For firms without executive political connections and with executives possessing environmental backgrounds, the stimulative effect is also more pronounced. This research not only enriches the micro-level impact of EEA, but also provides policy references for optimizing environmental audit implementation and incentivizing firms to disclose environmental information.

Environmental regulation is a crucial policy tool in modern environmental governance, shaping firm competition. One significant, yet underexplored, consequence is the “relatively better” effect, where regulatory policies create asymmetric cost burdens between clean and polluting enterprises. To formally analyze this phenomenon, we construct a static game model with incomplete information and derive the Nash equilibrium, demonstrating that environmental regulations enable clean enterprises to partially transfer compliance costs to polluting firms, leading to lower financing costs for clean firms. This theoretical prediction is empirically validated using Chinese firm-level data, confirming the differentiated financial burdens imposed by environmental policies. The result shows that the magnitude of the “relatively better” effect depends on factors, such as the design of emission trading markets, regulatory enforcement stringency, and firms’ technological adaptability. By integrating theoretical modeling, and empirical analysis, we offer a comprehensive framework for understanding the financial and strategic implications of environmental regulations on firms.

Climate adaptation presents significant challenges for small and medium-sized municipalities (SMM) that often operate with limited resources and expertise. However, well-designed and organized public participation can not only address these challenges but also build citizen capacities that are crucial for future adaptation projects. Building on existing studies on the relationship between the design and effectiveness of public participation processes, we address the question how effective public participation in climate adaptation can be designed in SMM particularly. Analyzing two German case studies of voluntary citizen engagement aimed at improving urban green infrastructure, we find that social learning with a focus on co-ownership and citizen empowerment, and citizens’ identification with the local context are important overarching objectives that have gained insufficient attention in the literature. We argue that social learning and local identification can become catalysts for achieving a wide range of participation objectives and addressing the particular challenges faced by SMM.