The analysis found that habitat fragmentation increased substantially during the ecological-data period, with patch density rising by 76.78%. This change points to a growing need for connected habitat, but the study reports that the emerging pattern is not matched by legally enforceable measures designed to prevent fragmentation. The mismatch is described as a fundamental spatial-legal disconnect between ecological conditions on the ground and the legal mechanisms available to govern them.

According to the researchers, provincial policies in the basin tend to prioritise economic development over ecological corridors. Corridor science, including the use of minimum-width thresholds to guide restoration or protection, is also not consistently connected to binding zoning instruments. As a result, principles of connectivity may be recognised in research or policy discussions without being translated into enforceable rules, defined areas or coordinated action.

The diagnosis does not report a field trial of green corridors or measure a direct effect of a new legal framework. Instead, it evaluates governance conditions by combining spatial ecological evidence with policy analysis. The authors argue that the findings reveal inadequacies created when changing ecological metrics must operate through rigid legal structures. The scope is the Gan River Basin, but the proposed implications extend to other rapidly developing watersheds facing similar coordination challenges.

To close the gap, the study recommends an adaptive governance framework with three components: legally defined corridor zones, ecological easements and cross-sectoral oversight. These measures would aim to turn the general goal of ecological connectivity into actionable governance instruments. The study presents this framework as a policy direction rather than a demonstrated intervention, and its effectiveness would need to be assessed if implemented.

Subject of Research: Spatial-legal governance barriers to green corridor implementation in China’s Gan River Basin

Article Title: An integrated spatial-legal diagnosis of governance barriers to green corridor implementation in China’s Gan River Basin

Article References: Islam, M. Z., & Huang, Z. (2026). An integrated spatial-legal diagnosis of governance barriers to green corridor implementation in China’s Gan River Basin. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-09304-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-09304-3

Keywords: Gan River Basin, green corridors, habitat fragmentation, adaptive governance, spatial planning, environmental law, ecological connectivity, urbanisation, China, integrated, spatial-legal, diagnosis

The review, led by Chiedza Ngonidzashe Mutanga of the Okavango Research Institute at the University of Botswana, together with Edson Gandiwa of the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority and Reniko Gondo, synthesizes literature published between 2000 and 2026, drawing primarily on savanna and forest ecosystems across the continent. Using a social-ecological systems and resilience lens, the authors screened roughly 429 publications down to approximately 93 studies, examining how repeated tourism activities including wildlife viewing, off-road vehicle use, trekking, and boating alter biodiversity through interconnected mechanisms that intensify over time, particularly in high-use areas where congestion and overuse have been documented in places such as Kruger National Park in South Africa and the Chobe National Park riverfront in Botswana.

The review identifies three primary pathways through which tourism drives biodiversity change: wildlife behavioral change, habitat degradation, and altered species interactions. At the behavioral level, encounters with tourists, vehicles, and associated infrastructure elicit avoidance, increased vigilance, displacement, aggression, and in some cases habituation. These responses consistently modify patterns of movement, activity, and habitat use, with implications for how wildlife utilize space and resources. In Etosha National Park in Namibia, large mammals modify their diel activity patterns in response to disturbance around waterholes and road networks, with some species increasing nocturnal activity during periods of high human presence. African lions and spotted hyenas in the same system also select areas associated with lower disturbance.

Behavioral responses to tourism are closely linked to physiological stress. In Madikwe Game Reserve in South Africa, elephants exposed to high tourist pressure exhibit increased vigilance, aggression, and displacement, together with elevated glucocorticoid levels during peak tourism periods. Similar patterns are reported in other tourism contexts, including increased stress hormone levels during human interaction in South Africa and behavioral and movement changes linked to tourism activities in Botswana. These findings indicate that repeated tourism exposure can function as a chronic stressor with implications for individual fitness, and that apparent habituation may mask underlying stress or the displacement of more sensitive individuals, meaning that tolerance to human presence does not necessarily imply negligible ecological impact.

Habitat degradation represents the second major pathway. Activities such as off-road driving, repeated vehicle movement, trampling, and infrastructure development alter vegetation structure, compact soils, and accelerate erosion, leading to a gradual decline in habitat quality. These impacts are amplified in ecologically sensitive areas where visitor pressure is high, with consequences for vegetation productivity, soil stability, and associated ecological processes. Tourism-related pollution, including waste accumulation, wastewater discharge, and emissions, further degrades environmental conditions, affecting soil and water quality and extending impacts beyond visibly disturbed sites. In Chobe National Park, persistent congestion along the Riverfront at major viewing points has been documented, while tourism use in Kruger National Park is structured around road networks and focal attractions, concentrating disturbance in specific locations and redistributing ecological processes across the landscape.

Tourism infrastructure reinforces these processes by reshaping both habitat structure and access. Road networks extend the spatial reach of disturbance by enabling repeated use of previously less-disturbed areas. In Katavi National Park in Tanzania, road upgrading involved extensive clearing of woody vegetation, altering woodland structure, while in Kibale National Park in Uganda, road presence contributes to habitat fragmentation and sustained ecological pressure. Increased accessibility also facilitates more frequent human activity across the landscape, as reflected in Kenya where repeated game driving contributes to soil compaction and vegetation damage. Beyond physical disturbance, tourism development often entails the extraction and overuse of natural resources, including water, land, and vegetation, which further alters habitat structure and ecosystem conditions.

The third pathway involves altered species interactions. Tourism-related disturbance modifies patterns of movement, activity, and space use, thereby influencing how species encounter one another. Shifts toward nocturnality alter temporal relationships among species, modifying predator access to prey and hunting success, as reflected in Kruger National Park where leopard activity responds to vehicle presence, and in the Serengeti where tourism reduces carnivore hunting success in the presence of vehicles. Roads and tourism activity concentrate disturbance in high-use areas, leading to avoidance and shifts in habitat use. In Zimbabwe, elephant distribution in Zambezi National Park is structured by vehicle density, while in Kruger National Park animals avoid heavily used roads. Changes in predator space use and activity can influence encounter rates, competition over carcasses, and access to shared resources, with implications for survival, reproductive success, and guild structure.

Tourism-induced behavioral changes also reshape within-species and group-level interactions. In Ghana, primate groups exposed to high tourism activity show increased aggression, reduced home range size, and altered spatial organization, while in Zanzibar, tourism influences activity budgets in red colobus monkeys. In Central African forest systems, gorilla habituation alters movement and group behavior, influencing resource use and interactions within and between groups, including processes such as seed dispersal and forest regeneration. Changes in the distribution of ecosystem engineers further extend these interaction effects. In Madikwe Game Reserve, tourism alters elephant movement and space use, and because elephants play a central role in shaping vegetation structure, nutrient redistribution, and habitat heterogeneity, changes in their movement patterns influence ecosystem processes across spatial scales. In the Amboseli ecosystem, sustained pressure on elephant populations has contributed to the conversion of woodland into grass-dominated habitats through intensive browsing.

Beyond the ecological mechanisms, the review examines the social trade-offs that emerge from tourism-based conservation. Tourism generates substantial revenue and is widely promoted as a mechanism for financing conservation, yet evidence across protected areas shows that only a limited share reaches local populations, and where it does, distribution is often inconsistent and poorly aligned with local expectations. Weak institutional arrangements, including unclear benefit-sharing mechanisms, limited transparency, and weak accountability, undermine distribution systems and contribute to persistent dissatisfaction among communities. Power asymmetries shape access to resources, control over revenue, and participation in decision-making, often resulting in elite capture or external appropriation of benefits. At the same time, conservation imposes tangible costs on communities, including restricted access to land and resources, human-wildlife conflict, and livelihood trade-offs associated with conservation restrictions, creating a mismatch between those who benefit from tourism and those who bear its costs.

Formal inclusion of communities in conservation governance does not necessarily translate into meaningful influence over decision-making. While participation is widely promoted as a mechanism for improving conservation and livelihood outcomes, evidence across African contexts shows that it is often constrained, resulting in limited influence over key decisions. In many cases, decentralization remains partial, with authority over tourism development, revenue allocation, and regulatory enforcement continuing to be centralized within state institutions or shaped by external actors. Structural constraints, including limited access to information, weak technical capacity, and unequal bargaining power, further limit meaningful participation and reinforce existing inequalities, creating a persistent gap between the design of participatory governance frameworks and their implementation in practice.

The shift from state-led conservation to multi-actor governance has increased the diversity of actors involved in tourism-based conservation, including government agencies, community institutions, private operators, non-governmental organizations, and donors. Government agencies typically retain primary responsibility for policy development, regulation, licensing, and enforcement, while private tourism operators influence conservation outcomes through investment and tourism operations. Community institutions contribute to local stewardship and benefit-sharing, although their influence over strategic decision-making often remains constrained. NGOs and donor organizations commonly support conservation through funding, technical expertise, research, and capacity building. Consequently, the influence of these stakeholder groups is not evenly distributed, with government agencies and private operators generally exercising greater authority over tourism planning and resource allocation than local communities, complicating coordination, accountability, and the alignment of interests across actors.

Tourism-based conservation systems also operate within broader environmental and socio-economic contexts that shape how trade-offs emerge and are managed. Climate variability and change, including rising temperatures, rainfall variability, and extreme events, are reshaping ecosystems, influencing wildlife distributions, and affecting tourism infrastructure and operations. These changes interact with tourism pressures, amplifying ecological impacts and increasing the complexity of governance responses. At the same time, conservation areas are embedded within wider land-use systems characterized by agriculture, settlement expansion, and population growth, which intensify pressure on ecological resources. Governance systems must therefore respond not only to tourism-related pressures but also to external drivers operating across scales, yet limited financial and technical capacity, weak institutional coordination, and competing development priorities constrain effective responses, reflecting a broader problem of institutional fit where governance arrangements do not necessarily correspond to the scale and complexity of the ecological and social processes being managed.

The synthesis across the reviewed literature indicates that tourism-related change in conservation systems is best understood not as a series of discrete ecological and social impacts, but as an interconnected process through which pressures accumulate and propagate across the social-ecological system. Three recurring characteristics emerge from the evidence. First, tourism pressure is frequently spatially concentrated and repetitive, particularly around wildlife-viewing sites, road networks, tourism infrastructure and other high-use areas. Second, ecological change is closely connected to social and economic outcomes, as tourism generates revenue, employment and conservation incentives while simultaneously producing uneven costs through restricted access, human-wildlife interactions, congestion and unequal benefit distribution. Third, governance emerges as the principal mechanism through which these interacting pressures and trade-offs are mediated, with adaptive, spatially responsive and participatory measures such as zoning, visitor limits, regulated access, benefit-sharing and co-management able to modify tourism pressures and their consequences, while weak coordination, limited local influence, fragmented institutional responsibilities and reactive management can allow localized pressures to accumulate into broader ecological and social effects.

The review identifies a set of adaptive and context-specific strategies aimed at reducing biodiversity loss while sustaining ecosystem services, including spatial planning and zoning, wildlife-sensitive operations, community-based natural resource management, strengthened governance frameworks, and learning-oriented approaches such as citizen science and environmental education. Where management is adaptive, spatially responsive and participatory, measures such as zoning, vehicle limits, rotation systems, temporal access controls, distance limits, operator regulation, transparent distribution systems, participatory governance, co-management, density caps, transparent licensing, equity models, visitor caps, licensing limits, adaptive thresholds, integrated planning, corridor protection and adaptive governance can modify tourism pressures and their consequences. Conversely, enforcement gaps, expansion of informal tracks, weak benefit-sharing design, low transparency, limited local influence, opaque licensing, external influence, weak land-use integration, absence of growth limits, reactive governance, fragmented governance and weak cross-scale coordination can allow localized pressures to accumulate into broader ecological and social effects.

The review also highlights important gaps in the current evidence base on tourism-biodiversity interactions in Africa. Empirical studies remain unevenly distributed across the continent, with a strong concentration in a relatively small number of well-studied conservation areas, limiting the extent to which existing findings can be applied across the diversity of ecological settings, governance arrangements, and tourism models that characterize conservation systems in Africa. Much of the literature focuses on short-term or site-specific impacts, providing limited insight into cumulative, long-term, and cross-scale processes, and research remains fragmented across ecological, social, and governance domains. The current evidence base is also shaped by a strong focus on high-visibility species and locations, particularly large mammals in flagship protected areas, which risks overlooking less visible ecological processes and tourism impacts in other ecosystem types, including wetlands and marine environments. These gaps point to the need for more systematic, comparative, and longitudinal approaches to research on tourism-biodiversity interactions in Africa, with greater attention to underrepresented regions, longer timeframes, and cross-scale interactions.

Ultimately, the review concludes that the sustainability of nature-based tourism in African conservation systems depends less on tourism presence or growth in itself than on the conditions under which tourism operates and is governed. From a social-ecological systems perspective, sustaining tourism’s contribution to conservation requires attention to the relationships among ecological limits, social and economic outcomes, and governance responses, rather than managing these dimensions separately. This requires management that is capable of responding to cumulative and cross-scale change while recognizing the interconnected nature of tourism and conservation systems, particularly where tourism pressures interact with climate variability, land-use change and population pressure. As tourism continues to expand across the continent, advancing a more integrated and context-sensitive evidence base will be essential for both academic insight and policy relevance.

Subject of Research: A review of how nature-based tourism gradually drives biodiversity change and social trade-offs in African conservation systems, and the adaptive governance responses needed.

Article Title: Tourism and biodiversity dynamics in African conservation systems: gradual ecological change, social trade-offs and adaptive governance

Article References: Mutanga, C. N., Gandiwa, E., & Gondo, R. (2026). Tourism and biodiversity dynamics in African conservation systems: gradual ecological change, social trade-offs and adaptive governance. Frontiers in Sustainable Resource Management, 5, Article 1861347. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsrma.2026.1861347

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsrma.2026.1861347

Keywords: nature-based tourism, biodiversity, African conservation, social-ecological systems, adaptive governance, wildlife behavior, habitat degradation, ecosystem services, protected areas, community-based conservation, climate variability, resilience

The research team, led by scientists at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, screened peer-reviewed literature from the Web of Science and Scopus databases using strict inclusion criteria. Out of an initial search, 1,967 papers met the bar for detailed analysis. Using bibliometric mapping and dynamic topic modelling alongside qualitative synthesis, the team uncovered stark imbalances in where and how flash-flood science is done. Research is heavily concentrated in Europe and Asia, with China and India hosting the largest evidence bases among studies with identifiable locations, followed by Italy, the United States, Egypt, France, Spain, and Saudi Arabia.

That concentration matters because it shapes what the world knows about flash floods in the first place. The authors caution that publication patterns reflect monitoring density, language, database coverage, institutional capacity, and funding priorities rather than a direct measure of where floods strike hardest. Clusters of studies in Ethiopia, Morocco, and South Africa stand against substantial monitoring and reporting gaps across much of Africa and South America, a north-south imbalance the review says ultimately hinders locally tailored risk-reduction strategies. Evidence from the Andes and the East African Highlands remains limited and fragmented, with the East African Highlands represented by only seven studies in the system-resolved subset.

Thematic analysis revealed six interlocking research domains: meteorological forcing and rainfall drivers; arid wadi flash flooding; sediment processes; special geological and topographic settings; risk management and adaptation strategy; and eco-climate impacts. Risk management dominated the corpus, accounting for 683 publications, or 37.4 percent, and has grown steadily since 2014. At the other extreme, special geological and topographic settings, covering hazards such as karst hydrology, glacier-lake outbursts, and volcano-tectonic terrain, remain the least studied despite their high consequence. The review also found that only 72 of the risk-management papers overlapped with sediment-process research, suggesting process understanding and governance remain poorly connected.

At the heart of the review is a technical argument about how flash floods begin. The traditional approach relies on fixed rainfall thresholds, often expressed as intensity-duration-frequency relationships. But the evidence compiled shows that triggering is strongly state-dependent. In Egypt’s Wadi Al-Ambagi watershed, just 10 millimeters of effective rainfall generated roughly 15.7 million cubic meters of runoff, while documented events elsewhere ranged from 43 to 1,631 millimeters of cumulative rainfall. Modelling studies show that raising antecedent soil saturation from 0.20 to 0.50 on a dimensionless scale cut threshold rainfall by 8 to 38 percent across studied catchments. In other words, the same storm can be benign in a dry catchment and catastrophic in a wet one.

Surface conditions and connectivity amplify or dampen these effects. Vegetation acts as what the authors describe as a green reservoir, slowing overland flow; along Ethiopia’s Rift Valley escarpment, peak discharge coefficients correlate strongly and negatively with forest and grassland cover. Wildfire disrupts this protection: post-fire experiments show ash-laden flows forming steep flood fronts that can bulk into debris flows, and in Colorado’s Front Range, susceptibility to infiltration-excess runoff peaked in the first two years after burning before recovering by years five to seven. Landslides and earthquakes leave similar legacies; in the Wenchuan earthquake zone, modelling indicates that when six-hour rainfall exceeds roughly 235 millimeters, peak flows in local sub-catchments can rise by up to 87 percent. Urbanization compounds the problem, with one Mediterranean study estimating that a once-in-50-year rainfall event would produce a natural flood peak of 380 cubic meters per second but 940 cubic meters per second after urban development.

The review then traces how physical hazards become disasters through exposure, vulnerability, and capacity. Mountain settlements cluster on valley floors and alluvial fans where flat land is scarce, and rapid development often pushes construction into hazardous zones, including 1,021 buildings documented on 20-to-45-degree slopes in Petrópolis, Brazil, where 258 millimeters of rain in three hours in February 2022 killed at least 231 people. Recovery is uneven too: in rural Cameroon, only 5 percent of affected households had fully restored livelihoods six weeks after a severe flood, and a rapid assessment after Pakistan’s 2022 floods found 77 percent of female respondents had limited access to sexual and reproductive health services. Cultural heritage, from sections of the Great Wall to Himalayan temples, adds losses that cannot be measured in replacement cost alone.

Perhaps the most striking section deals with cascading hazard chains, where one disaster triggers another. The 2023 South Lhonak event in Sikkim, India, began when a landslide entered a glacial lake, overtopped and breached the moraine dam, and sent a glacial lake outburst flood downstream that contributed to the failure of the Chungthang Dam. In Libya’s Derna disaster, extreme flooding caused the sequential failure of two upstream dams, producing successive destructive flood waves through the city. Simulation studies cited in the review suggest that without the existing dam infrastructure, the same storm would have produced lower maximum flood depths and inundation in Derna, underscoring the need to re-examine aging structures designed for historical climates.

On solutions, the authors argue that effective risk reduction requires coordinated portfolios rather than isolated interventions. Non-structural measures, including dynamic early warning that combines rainfall intensity and duration with soil moisture and catchment conditions, spatial planning, and community preparedness, form one pillar. Structural measures form another: sediment-filled check-dam systems on China’s Loess Plateau can cut downstream peak flows by 60 to 69 percent, and two detention basins modelled for Madeira could reduce peak discharge by 72 percent under a 100-year rainfall scenario. Nature-based solutions complement these, with small wetlands reported to retain 50 to 70 percent of rainfall and green infrastructure in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, reducing outlet peak flows by roughly 60 percent when implemented across all suitable areas, though effectiveness scales sharply with extent and takes years to establish.

The review closes with an adaptive governance framework organized around three functions drawn from UNDRR guidance: preventing new risk through planning and zoning before development occurs, reducing existing risk through monitoring, protection, and preparedness, and managing residual risk through emergency response, insurance, and post-event learning. The authors stress that no portfolio eliminates mountain flash-flood risk, and that governance must avoid simply transferring danger downstream or onto populations with fewer resources. They call for high-resolution rainfall and discharge monitoring, open event inventories, and stronger validation of machine-learning warning systems in the under-monitored mountain regions of Africa and South America, where the evidence base remains thinnest precisely where vulnerability may be greatest.

Subject of Research: Formation processes, cascading impacts, and disaster risk reduction pathways for mountain flash floods

Article Title: Review article: Mountain flash floods: from hazard formation to disaster risk reduction pathways

Article References: Chen, Z., Feng, M., Johnson, M. F., Wright, N., Weng, Y., Chan, F. K. S., & Wu, F. (2026). Review article: Mountain flash floods: from hazard formation to disaster risk reduction pathways. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 26(10), 5073-5102. https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-26-5073-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/nhess-26-5073-2026

Keywords: mountain flash floods, disaster risk reduction, early warning systems, nature-based solutions, hydrology, sediment transport, climate change, check dams, glacial lake outburst flood, vulnerability, adaptive governance, bibliometric review

The research team, led by Frederike Büttner and Ina Säumel with colleagues from institutions across Berlin and Germany, draws a crucial conceptual distinction at the heart of their argument. Residential greenness, they write, is an exposure — a quantity of vegetation measured from satellites and captured in epidemiological indicators such as normalized difference vegetation index values and spatial buffers. Residential greenery, by contrast, is a place: a lived, designed, and managed environment where people actually spend time. The authors define it as green space in the immediate surroundings of residential buildings, created as part of the housing development itself — semi-public everyday spaces situated between private gardens and municipal parks. It is this second category, they contend, that urban health and sustainability governance has treated as a blind spot.

The scale of that blind spot is considerable. In Berlin, the researchers estimate that semi-public residential greenery associated with multi-storey housing covers roughly 43.6 million square meters — comparable in magnitude to the city’s 53.8 million square meters of public green space and exceeding both its 31.6 million square meters of public parks and its 28.8 million square meters of allotment gardens. International figures reinforce the pattern: residential yards have been estimated to occupy about 23 percent of urban area in Great Britain and up to 36 percent in Dunedin, New Zealand. Although these estimates largely concern private yards and are not directly comparable, they underscore how much of the urban green fabric lies immediately around people’s homes rather than in celebrated parks and flagship projects.

Why has such a vast resource escaped strategic attention? The authors trace the answer through more than a century of planning history. During the Wilhelminian period from 1870 to 1918, economic efficiency and rapid urban expansion outweighed health considerations, producing dense perimeter blocks with narrow courtyards that served circulation, storage, and light provision rather than recreation. Early twentieth-century housing cooperatives introduced setbacks and semi-open blocks, creating courtyards visible from the street — an early shift toward shared green space for hygiene and social purposes. After World War I, modernist planners embraced light, air, and sun, weaving tenant gardens, communal lawns, playgrounds, and seating into housing estates. By the 1960s, designers sought urbanity through density, embedding high-rise buildings within expansive open landscapes on the assumption that sheer quantity of open space would automatically improve living conditions.

That assumption failed in practice. Shading, lack of spatial differentiation, and long implementation phases often rendered these spaces unusable; residents described the experience as sitting on a plate. By the mid-1980s, only approximately 30 percent of open spaces in such estates were considered truly usable, while around 70 percent were occupied by infrastructure, distance zones, or garages. The lesson, the authors argue, is that planning intentions and health-promoting outcomes do not necessarily coincide. The landscapes inherited from each era are path-dependent: historical decisions established durable relationships between buildings and open space that continue to shape accessibility, ecological quality, and opportunities for well-being today, interacting with ownership structures, maintenance budgets, and established management routines.

The health relevance of these spaces lies not simply in the presence of vegetation but in how spatial, ecological, and social qualities interact with residents’ daily lives. Residential greenery may influence health through multiple interacting pathways: reducing environmental harms, restoring psychological and physiological capacities, and building capacity through physical activity and social interaction. The Berlin evidence base — field surveys and resident interviews across multi-storey housing typologies — shows these functions vividly. Before the pandemic, residents primarily valued their courtyards for tranquility and passive restoration. During lockdowns, the same spaces became sites of physical activity, social interaction, and neighborhood support. One resident put it plainly: during lockdown, this was the only place where I could meet other people. For older and less mobile residents, regular visual contact with vegetation from windows proved especially important, while vegetation quality and opportunities for recreation emerged as the most valued attributes across all groups.

The pandemic, the authors argue, did not create the health relevance of residential greenery — it exposed a function that had long been overlooked. Yet management practices in the studied estates remained oriented toward maintenance efficiency rather than explicit health outcomes, and such priorities may also underrecognize ecological functions. Independent research on shared residential yards shows that larger potentially vegetated areas and lower maintenance intensity can support greater wild-plant richness and diversity, demonstrating that seemingly ordinary residential open spaces can constitute significant components of urban biodiversity infrastructure. Vegetation structure and management also influence ecosystem services and potential disservices, including exposure to highly allergenic species — a reminder that greening decisions carry biological consequences in both directions.

Co-creation workshops in Berlin’s Marzahn-Hellersdorf high-rise estates reveal how differently residents and institutions can value the same ground. Participatory processes surfaced needs only partially reflected in existing management practices. One participant’s remark captures the shift: I don’t need another big park. I need greenery I can use every day. Where suggestions before 2018 focused primarily on tidiness and maintenance, discussions in 2021 showed a clear movement toward biodiversity, ecological quality, and multifunctional green spaces — though the authors caution this cannot be attributed to the co-creation process alone, as broader societal attention to biodiversity and the pandemic’s exceptional circumstances likely played roles. Competing expectations, such as quiet retreat versus active recreation or naturalistic versus manicured landscapes, highlighted that residential greenery is not a neutral space but a site where different visions of well-being must be negotiated. Historical accounts from Leningrad courtyards, tenement houses in Buenos Aires, and New York City public housing echo the same theme: shared open spaces become social tissue through residents’ practices, encounters, and place attachment — the collective green living room that the authors propose as a reframing concept.

The authors propose an adaptive governance approach to close the gap between potential and practice, combining co-diagnosis of existing conditions, co-creation with residents, implementation of nature-based solutions such as biodiversity-friendly planting, bioswales, resident gardening plots, and shaded seating, and continuous monitoring and learning. They view these steps not primarily as technical interventions but as mechanisms for recognizing residential greenery as urban health infrastructure. Housing providers occupy a pivotal position, but municipalities, public-health authorities, planners, landscape professionals, local organizations, and residents all have complementary roles. Emerging evidence suggests that resident willingness alone is insufficient where access arrangements, responsibilities, communication, and long-term organizational support remain unclear — governance, in other words, becomes part of the infrastructure itself.

The authors are careful not to promise costless transformation. Compact-city densification can conflict with green-space preservation, and in residential environments the tension is particularly tangible because shared greenery represents both potentially developable land and everyday space providing health, ecological, and social functions. Multifunctionality itself involves trade-offs, as biodiversity, recreation, climate adaptation, perceived tidiness, and cost-efficient maintenance do not necessarily favor identical interventions. In rental housing, some maintenance costs may ultimately be borne by tenants, while some biodiversity-sensitive practices may reduce recurrent costs. Environmental justice, the authors stress, is not an automatic outcome of greening but a criterion by which the transition should be assessed: residents already exposed to multiple burdens often have less access to high-quality green space despite potentially benefiting most, and residential greening can become entangled with real-estate valorization and green grabbing. The future of healthy and equitable cities, the Perspective concludes, may depend less on spectacular green interventions than on the quality of the everyday landscapes outside people’s front doors — a matter not simply of better design, but of environmental justice, social resilience, public health, and sustainable urban futures.

Subject of Research: The role of shared residential greenery around multi-storey housing as preventive health and sustainability infrastructure

Article Title: Residential greenery as an overlooked preventive health and sustainability infrastructure

Article References: Büttner, F., Sanft, S., Mohr-Stockinger, S., Butenschön, S., & Säumel, I. (2026). Residential greenery as an overlooked preventive health and sustainability infrastructure. Discover Sustainability, 7(1), Article 1719. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-05022-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-05022-7

Keywords: residential greenery, urban green space, preventive health, environmental justice, urban biodiversity, co-creation, adaptive governance, housing estates, green living room, Berlin, urban planning, sustainability

The research, conducted by Sihan Lu, Yan Zhou, and Tao Hong of the Harbin Institute of Technology in China, starts from a theoretical observation about the academic literature. Most scholarship on generative AI in the public sector has examined the technology through a siloed lens, focusing on a single role at a time. Studies of AI as a governance tool emphasize efficiency gains and service improvement. Studies of AI as a regulatory object emphasize risk, liability, and the need for oversight. A smaller body of work treats AI as a novel decision-making agent with its own capacity to act. Each perspective is useful, but each is incomplete, and the fragmentation obscures what happens at the micro level when these roles intersect inside a single administrative system.

To overcome that limitation, the authors reconceptualize the public management system as a complex adaptive system, a framework borrowed from the study of ecosystems, markets, and other environments in which many interacting agents produce outcomes no single actor intends. Within this framework, generative AI is modeled as an adaptive agent rather than a static instrument. That shift matters because adaptive agents learn, respond to feedback, and alter the behavior of the other agents around them. A chatbot that answers citizen queries changes how civil servants work; a drafting assistant changes how policy documents are produced; a predictive model changes which cases get attention. The technology does not sit outside the governance system. It becomes part of the system’s own dynamics.

The empirical core of the study is a single-case analysis of Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative, one of the world’s most sustained and comprehensive national programs for embedding digital and intelligent technologies in public administration. By tracking governance strategies and their outcomes across a range of situations within that program, the researchers were able to observe how the same underlying technology was assigned different roles in different contexts, and how those assignments generated tensions that no single regulatory rule could resolve.

The central theoretical contribution of the paper is what the authors call the Governance Impossible Triangle. According to this framework, generative AI’s triple identity creates persistent tensions among three goals that public administrators must pursue at the same time: maximizing efficiency, safeguarding the legitimacy of decisions, and maintaining effective risk control. The triangle is impossible in the same sense that classic policy trilemmas are impossible. Push hard on efficiency, for example by automating more decisions end to end, and legitimacy comes under strain because citizens and officials lose the ability to understand and contest how outcomes were reached. Push hard on legitimacy, for example by requiring extensive human review and explanation, and the efficiency gains that justified adoption begin to erode. Push hard on risk control, and both efficiency and responsiveness suffer. The three corners pull against one another continuously, and no configuration satisfies all of them at once.

What makes the triangle particularly difficult is that the three identities of generative AI activate the three corners in different combinations. As a tool, the technology is primarily an efficiency asset, and the governance question is how much discretion to delegate to it. As a regulatory object, it is primarily a risk to be contained, and the question is how to oversee systems whose behavior even their developers cannot fully predict. As a decision-making agent, it touches legitimacy directly, because democratic governance rests on the premise that consequential decisions are attributable to accountable human institutions. When a single platform shifts between these roles depending on the task at hand, the governance burden shifts with it, often faster than rules and oversight structures can adapt.

The authors’ response to this dilemma is the Contextual Identity Configuration Model, a framework that rejects one-size-fits-all regulation in favor of dynamic, context-sensitive assignment of AI’s role. The model is driven by four variables: problem complexity, risk severity, value conflicts, and explainability requirements. Simple, low-risk, low-conflict problems with clear standards can tolerate a high degree of algorithmic tool-intensity, meaning the AI acts with substantial autonomy as an efficiency instrument. As complexity rises, as stakes rise, as values come into conflict, or as the need for explanation grows, the model calls for recalibrating the system, reducing agentic power and increasing human oversight, so that the technology reverts toward a supportive tool role rather than an autonomous one.

To make this concrete, the study analyzes four prototypical scenarios of AI deployment in public governance. In routine optimization, where tasks are standardized and risks are low, generative AI can operate with high tool-intensity, delivering efficiency with minimal threat to legitimacy. In professional assistance, the AI supports trained experts who retain judgment and accountability, a middle configuration that captures productivity while keeping humans in the loop. In high-stakes discretion, where decisions affect rights, liberties, or significant resources, the model demands strong explainability and human authority, constraining the AI to an advisory function. In complex crises, where speed matters but uncertainty is extreme, the framework calls for layered defenses and continuous feedback so that algorithmic recommendations inform but never replace accountable human command. Across all four scenarios, the governing principle is the same: management systems must dynamically recalibrate algorithmic tool-intensity and agentic power through continuous feedback loops rather than fixing the technology’s role in advance.

The practical implications the authors draw are institutional as much as technical. They argue that governments should build multi-layered defense systems, in which technical safeguards, procedural review, and human accountability operate together rather than as substitutes for one another. They also propose joint accountability networks, arrangements in which responsibility for AI-assisted decisions is distributed across developers, agencies, and oversight bodies in ways that remain legible to the public. The goal, in their formulation, is a profound alignment between technological empowerment and core public values, so that the efficiency of generative AI does not come at the cost of the legitimacy and trust on which public institutions depend.

The study arrives at a moment when many governments are experimenting with generative AI faster than they are theorizing it. Its contribution is to name the structural problem: the same technology that makes administration faster also makes it harder to explain, and the same flexibility that makes it useful makes it hard to regulate. By modeling the public sector as a complex adaptive system and the AI within it as an adaptive agent, the researchers offer policymakers a vocabulary for the trade-offs they are already making, often implicitly. The Governance Impossible Triangle will not be dissolved, the authors suggest, but it can be managed, provided that regulators abandon uniform rules in favor of an agile, context-based governance paradigm in which the identity of the technology, and the controls attached to it, are deliberately configured to match the demands of each task.

Subject of Research: The role and governance of generative AI in public administration and government decision-making

Article Title: The “Triple identity” of generative AI in public governance: dilemmas and adaptive solutions

Article References: Lu, S., Zhou, Y., & Hong, T. (2026). The “Triple identity” of generative AI in public governance: dilemmas and adaptive solutions. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-09400-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-09400-4

Keywords: generative AI, public governance, complex adaptive systems, Smart Nation Singapore, algorithmic accountability, AI regulation, governance trilemma, decision-making agents, public administration, risk control, legitimacy, adaptive governance

Participatory forest management, often abbreviated as PFM, rests on a deceptively simple idea: decentralize authority over forest resources by granting communities formal rights and responsibilities to use and protect them. In theory, this aligns conservation incentives with livelihood needs, replacing the adversarial dynamic between state forest guards and local users with a cooperative contract. In practice, the model’s success hinges on a web of enabling conditions—legal recognition, technical capacity, transparent benefit sharing, and sustained institutional backing—that can dissolve quietly when donors move on or governments change priorities. The Gargeda study set out to measure exactly these dynamics, treating PFM not as a fixed policy prescription but as an adaptive governance strategy whose performance must be continually assessed and adjusted.

The researchers employed a mixed-methods design that combined quantitative surveys of 324 Forest User Group members with key informant interviews, focus group discussions, and reviews of official documents. This triangulation allowed them to assess governance performance, socio-economic outcomes, enabling conditions, and barriers across multiple dimensions simultaneously. The survey instrument probed awareness, participation, satisfaction with benefit sharing, and willingness to engage in conservation activities, while the qualitative components captured the institutional history of the groups and the political context in which they operate. The result is one of the more comprehensive assessments of PFM performance in the Ethiopian highlands, offering both a diagnostic of what has gone wrong and a template for what could be repaired.

The headline numbers reveal a striking asymmetry between awareness and inclusion. On the positive side, 85 percent of surveyed community members demonstrated high awareness of participatory forest management and its objectives, suggesting that the core message of shared stewardship has taken root. Transparency in enforcement scored a moderate 62 percent, indicating that rules are reasonably visible in their application even if not perfectly so. Perhaps most encouraging for the model’s future, 83 percent of respondents expressed willingness to participate in conservation training, and 53 percent said they would join forest patrols. These figures point to a reservoir of collective commitment that persists despite a decade of institutional turbulence—a finding the authors treat as the foundation upon which any revival of the program must be built.

Yet the same data expose deep structural weaknesses. Women’s participation in the Forest User Groups stood at just 15.6 percent, a figure that undermines both the equity goals of participatory governance and its practical effectiveness, since women in rural Ethiopia are often primary users of forest products such as fuelwood. Satisfaction with benefit sharing reached only 48 percent, meaning roughly half of the members felt the rewards of participation did not justify their investment of time and labor. This dissatisfaction matters because benefit distribution is the engine of the PFM bargain: communities accept restrictions on use in exchange for a fair share of the returns. When that exchange falters, compliance tends to erode, and the informal extraction that PFM was designed to regulate can resume beneath the surface of formal governance.

The institutional evaluation was equally mixed. Respondents rated policy and legal frameworks at a moderate 60 percent, reflecting Ethiopia’s generally supportive statutory environment for community forestry. But planning and implementation each scored only 40 percent, revealing a gap between what the law permits and what actually happens on the ground. The authors attribute this implementation deficit to a cluster of interlocking barriers: the withdrawal of NGO support that had originally organized and trained the groups, weak technical capacity within communities to develop management plans and conduct inventories, poor coordination among government agencies with overlapping mandates, and political instability that disrupted institutional continuity. In the absence of external facilitation, many of the thirty original groups simply ceased functioning, their bylaws unenforced and their collective activities abandoned.

One of the study’s most interesting findings concerns the friction between statutory and customary rules. Ethiopia’s forests have long been governed in part by customary institutions—traditional authorities, communal norms, and inherited practices that regulate access to resources. Participatory forest management introduced a parallel statutory structure of user groups, committees, and formal bylaws, and in Gargeda the two systems have not always aligned. Where customary and formal rules conflicted, enforcement became ambiguous and legitimacy suffered. The authors identify this tension as a persistent barrier, but also implicitly as an opportunity: governance arrangements that deliberately integrate customary authority rather than competing with it may prove more durable than those imposed as purely statutory creations. This insight resonates with a broader literature on adaptive governance, which emphasizes that effective institutions must fit the social and cultural contexts in which they operate.

Against these challenges, the study identified clear enabling factors that sustained the ten surviving groups. Strong NGO facilitation during the formative years provided training, organizational templates, and mediation between communities and government. Community-developed bylaws gave groups locally legitimate rules that members understood and could enforce among themselves. Youth engagement emerged as a particularly valuable asset, injecting energy into patrols and planting activities and offering a generational bridge that could carry the model forward. These success factors suggest that the PFM approach in Gargeda did not fail on its own terms; rather, it was starved of the sustained support needed to mature. The distinction is crucial for policymakers, because it implies that the model remains viable if the institutional scaffolding is rebuilt rather than abandoned.

The implications extend well beyond a single forest in western Ethiopia. Ethiopia has lost a substantial share of its original forest cover over the past century, and remaining state forests like Gargeda face continuing pressure from agricultural expansion, livestock grazing, and fuelwood harvesting. Participatory forest management has been promoted across the country and much of sub-Saharan Africa as a way to reconcile conservation with rural livelihoods, and the Gargeda findings offer a candid assessment of what that promise requires. The authors conclude that long-term success and wider replication depend on sustained institutional backing, technical and financial capacity building, and genuinely inclusive participation—particularly of women and youth, whose current marginalization weakens both the fairness and the functional capacity of the groups. Without these investments, the model risks becoming a paper framework: legally recognized on paper, hollow in practice.

What makes this study compelling is its refusal to offer either a eulogy or a celebration. The data show a governance experiment that has preserved community commitment through a decade of adversity, achieved meaningful awareness and transparency, and yet fallen short on the inclusion and benefit-sharing mechanisms that give participatory models their moral and practical force. The 83 percent willingness to undergo conservation training is not a trivial statistic; it represents hundreds of individuals ready to invest labor in a collective enterprise, waiting for institutions capable of organizing them. The 15.6 percent female participation is equally telling, a measure of how much human capital the current arrangement wastes. As Ethiopia considers scaling community-based forest governance to meet national restoration and climate commitments, the Gargeda experience stands as both warning and guide: decentralization is necessary but insufficient, and the difference between thriving and abandoned Forest User Groups lies less in the design of the model than in the persistence of the support that surrounds it.

Subject of Research: Participatory forest management and community-based forest governance in Gargeda State Forest, Ethiopia

Article Title: Participatory Forest Management as an adaptive strategy for sustainable forest governance in Gargeda State Forest, Ethiopia

Article References: Telila, Z., Amare, A., & Tolera, T. (2026). Participatory Forest Management as an adaptive strategy for sustainable forest governance in Gargeda State Forest, Ethiopia. PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 5(6), e0000251. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000251

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000251

Keywords: participatory forest management, Ethiopia, forest governance, community forestry, Forest User Groups, adaptive governance, benefit sharing, women's participation, NGO facilitation, forest degradation, customary institutions, PLOS Sustainability and Transformation

A new comparative study published in the journal Environmental Challenges examines how these two neighbouring countries govern the emerging relationship between environmental change and human mobility, and its central finding is striking: despite decades of accumulating climate pressure, both Spain and Morocco continue to manage climate adaptation and migration through entirely separate institutional pathways. The research, conducted by Abdeslam Badre, applies Adaptive Governance Theory to a policy field where it has rarely been used before, and it asks a deceptively simple question. When the climate changes and people move, who is actually coordinating the response? In both countries, the answer appears to be: almost nobody, at least not yet.

The scientific foundation of the study rests on an important consensus within migration scholarship. There is, so far, no evidence that environmental pressures trigger migration through direct and immediate mechanisms. Instead, climate change acts as what researchers call a risk multiplier, an amplifier of existing vulnerabilities rather than a producer of displacement. Declining agricultural productivity and repeated climate shocks reduce the viability of traditional rural livelihoods and increase socio-economic uncertainty, and it is under these conditions that mobility becomes more likely to emerge as one of several adaptive strategies available to households. Many families diversify economic activities, modify agricultural practices, rely on remittances, or strengthen local social networks long before they consider relocation. Migration, in this framing, is one element within a broader portfolio of adaptation responses, shaped by household negotiations, social networks, and expectations about future opportunities.

The study also highlights a phenomenon that has gained increasing attention in recent years: immobility. Environmental stress does not always create opportunities for movement, and in some cases it actively reduces a household’s capacity to migrate. Repeated crop failures can undermine the very financial resources required for relocation, producing situations in which vulnerable populations become trapped in deteriorating environments. This complexity is why the research deliberately avoids the deterministic language of climate migrants and instead uses the term climate-related mobility, referring to population movements that emerge through the interaction between environmental pressures and wider socio-economic conditions. Internal movement, seasonal migration, and circular forms of mobility that allow families to diversify income while maintaining ties to their places of origin are all far more common responses than permanent long-distance relocation.

Spain and Morocco experience strikingly similar environmental pressures but operate within profoundly different socio-economic and institutional contexts, which is precisely what makes the comparison analytically powerful. In Spain, environmental change intersects with demographic ageing, agricultural restructuring, and rural depopulation. In many inland and semi-arid regions, including Andalusia, Murcia, and Valencia, declining agricultural profitability and shifting labour markets combine with reduced rainfall and competition over water resources to accelerate rural transformation. Adaptation strategies there include investments in water efficiency, economic diversification, and a generational shift away from agricultural livelihoods among younger people. Mobility in Spain is therefore part of wider processes of socio-territorial change rather than a direct response to climate hazards. In Morocco, by contrast, environmental pressures are linked more directly to livelihood security, because significant rural populations continue to depend on climate-sensitive agriculture, and recurrent droughts have affected production, rural incomes, and regional inequalities.

Both countries have, on paper, impressive policy architectures. Spain’s National Climate Change Adaptation Plan for 2021 to 2030 coordinates adaptation actions across water resources, agriculture, biodiversity, coastal areas, and public health, and it is complemented by the Integrated National Energy and Climate Plan and a National Strategy on the Demographic Challenge. Its migration governance, reflecting the country’s transformation from an emigration nation into a major destination, combines border management, humanitarian assistance, and integration mechanisms, anchored by the Strategic Framework for Citizenship and Inclusion against Racism and Xenophobia and supported by European funding instruments such as the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund. Morocco has developed a National Strategy for Sustainable Development, a National Climate Plan, integrated water management strategies, and major investments in renewable energy and agricultural resilience, including the Noor Solar Complex and the Green Morocco Plan. Its National Strategy on Immigration and Asylum, adopted in 2013, marked a significant shift toward migrant protection, integration, and regularisation.

Yet the study’s analysis, structured around four dimensions drawn from Adaptive Governance Theory, reveals persistent fragmentation in both cases. The theory, which emerged from research on complex social-ecological systems, holds that effective governance of uncertain, interconnected risks requires continuous learning, institutional flexibility, collaboration across administrative levels, and the integration of diverse knowledge sources. When the four dimensions are applied, the gaps become clear. Institutional coordination between climate and migration bodies is minimal in both countries. Policy integration is weak: climate strategies focus on reducing environmental vulnerability while migration policies address mobility management and integration, and neither domain systematically recognises the other’s concerns. Spain’s decentralised adaptation structure allows policies to reflect territorial differences but complicates coordination, while Morocco’s strong central mobilisation around environmental priorities does not automatically connect national strategies with the local knowledge and lived experience of drought-affected rural communities.

The governance consequences of this separation are tangible. Communities affected by environmental transformations may experience social and economic disruption long before these changes become recognised as mobility-related challenges within any policy framework. Learning processes remain concentrated within specific policy communities: Spain possesses a strong scientific assessment system but struggles to translate environmental knowledge into social and mobility policy, while Morocco’s adaptation efforts would benefit from stronger incorporation of how rural communities actually interpret and respond to changing agricultural conditions and water availability. Adaptive governance, the study argues, does not mean predicting migration flows through environmental indicators alone. It means understanding how environmental pressures interact with social conditions to shape the choices available to individuals and communities, and building institutions capable of adjusting as those conditions evolve.

From these findings, the study derives a set of concrete policy innovations. Climate policies should incorporate mobility as a possible social outcome of environmental change by systematically asking which territories face declining agricultural viability, how those pressures might influence urban demographic concentration, and what governance responses emerging forms of mobility would require. Institutional bridges, such as inter-ministerial coordination platforms, shared policy assessments, and joint strategic planning exercises, could connect environmental and migration actors who currently operate in isolation. At the bilateral level, the study proposes that Spain and Morocco establish a permanent platform dedicated to climate mobility and territorial resilience, supporting joint research, territorial assessments, emergency preparedness, and knowledge exchange. It further recommends integrated information systems that combine climate, demographic, socio-economic, and territorial data, so that declining rainfall patterns and rural demographic trends can be analysed together to identify territories requiring preventive intervention.

Perhaps the most resonant recommendation concerns participation. Environmental change is experienced through everyday realities, and the communities affected by it possess valuable knowledge about transformation and adaptation, from traditional drought-management practices to livelihood diversification and collective resource management. Including local actors in governance processes, the study argues, strengthens legitimacy and improves policy relevance, because adaptation is both a technical and a social process. The broader lesson extends well beyond the western Mediterranean: as climate vulnerability increasingly intersects with complex mobility dynamics in many regions, the Spain-Morocco comparison suggests that effective responses demand a transformation in policy thinking, in which environmental adaptation and migration management become interconnected components of a broader territorial governance approach. Environmental interdependence, the study concludes, makes Euro-Mediterranean cooperation not a choice but a necessity, and shared environmental futures will require shared responsibilities.

Subject of Research: Climate adaptation and migration governance in Spain and Morocco

Article Title: A comparative analysis of climate adaptation and migration governance in Spain and Morocco

Article References: A comparative analysis of climate adaptation and migration governance in Spain and Morocco. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: climate change, migration governance, Mediterranean, Spain, Morocco, adaptive governance, climate mobility, water scarcity, policy integration, drought, Euro-Mediterranean cooperation, rural livelihoods

The study, published open access on 6 October 2026, set out to answer two questions that have haunted urban policy debates for a decade. First, what are the key trends and knowledge gaps in the existing literature on smart cities and resilience? Second, how can resilience be embedded into the smart city framework so that it genuinely contributes to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals? To answer these questions, the team conducted a Systematic Literature Review covering publications from 2015 to 2026, applying the PRISMA criteria to ensure rigorous, transparent screening of the evidence base.

The methodological toolkit is as notable as the findings. The researchers drew on publications indexed in Scopus, one of the largest curated databases of peer-reviewed literature, and analyzed the corpus using two specialized bibliometric platforms: VOSviewer, which maps co-occurrence networks of keywords, authors and citations, and RStudio with the Biblioshiny package, which provides statistical and visual analysis of publication trends. This combination allowed the team to move beyond narrative impressions and quantify how the field has evolved, where research activity clusters, and which conceptual territories remain underexplored.

The central result is deceptively simple but consequential: smart cities that integrate resilience indicators prove more resilient and more sustainable when crises strike, whether those crises are triggered by natural disasters or by the slow-moving pressures of climate change. The mechanism that makes this work, according to the review, is adaptive governance combined with genuine stakeholder participation. In other words, the technology layer of a smart city, its sensors, dashboards and data pipelines, only delivers protective value when it is governed by institutions capable of learning, adjusting and including the communities they serve.

This framing challenges a common failure mode in urban technology programs. Many smart city projects have been built around technology-first logic, procuring platforms and infrastructure before defining the social and institutional capacities needed to use them effectively. The review’s findings suggest that such projects may achieve narrow efficiency gains while leaving the city exposed to shocks. A city can be dense with sensors and still be brittle if its governance cannot absorb disruption, reallocate resources under stress, or draw on local knowledge during emergencies. Resilience indicators, the authors argue, provide the measurable bridge that turns smart infrastructure into smart, durable urban systems.

The connection to the Sustainable Development Goals is where the study acquires its policy urgency. Goal 11 explicitly links sustainability, resilience and inclusiveness in the urban context, yet the researchers found that these dimensions are often treated separately in practice and in the literature. Smart city initiatives tend to be evaluated on innovation and service delivery metrics, while resilience is assessed through disaster risk reduction frameworks that rarely engage with digital governance. By introducing conceptual and integrated resilience indicators, the study offers a way to evaluate smart cities against the full breadth of Goal 11 rather than a fragment of it, deepening theoretical understanding while giving practitioners a practical yardstick.

For stakeholders, the practical implications are concrete. City governments can use integrated resilience indicators to audit existing smart city programs, asking whether data systems support early warning, whether infrastructure planning accounts for climate projections, and whether marginalized communities participate in decision-making rather than merely receiving services. International development agencies and national governments can incorporate resilience metrics into funding criteria for urban digitalization, steering investment toward projects that strengthen adaptive capacity. The authors position the framework as a tool for constructing systems that are simultaneously sustainable, smart and resilient, a triple test that few current initiatives were designed to pass.

The review also maps the intellectual geography of the field. By covering more than a decade of Scopus-indexed publications, the analysis identifies where scholarly attention has concentrated and where the gaps lie. The identification of knowledge gaps matters because the smart city literature has grown explosively since 2015, producing a sprawling, fragmented body of work spanning engineering, public administration, environmental science and urban planning. Bibliometric tools such as VOSviewer and Biblioshiny allow researchers to see through this fragmentation, revealing the conceptual clusters that dominate the conversation and the silences, such as the historically thin integration of resilience thinking, that the field has overlooked.

Geographically, the research team itself reflects the global south perspective that is increasingly central to urban resilience debates. With authors based at the Jusuf Kalla School of Government at Universitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta, the E-Governance and Sustainability Institute in Indonesia, the ASIAN Research Institute for Corporate Governance at Universiti Utara Malaysia, and Mindanao State University in the Philippines, the study emerges from regions where exposure to disasters, rapid urbanization and digital transformation intersect most acutely. Cities in Southeast Asia and similar regions face some of the world’s highest climate and disaster risks while simultaneously pursuing aggressive smart city agendas, making the integration of resilience not an academic luxury but an operational necessity.

The broader takeaway is a reframing of what makes a city genuinely smart. The review suggests that intelligence without adaptability is a false economy: a smart city earns its name not by the density of its technology but by its capacity to anticipate, absorb and recover from shocks while continuing to serve all its residents. Resilience, embedded through measurable indicators, adaptive governance and stakeholder participation, is presented as the vital link that transforms smart city investments into progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals. As cities worldwide confront intensifying climate hazards and accelerating digitalization at the same time, the study offers both a warning and a roadmap, arguing that the two agendas must be designed together from the start rather than bolted together after the first crisis exposes the gap.

Subject of Research: Integrating resilience into smart city initiatives to advance the Sustainable Development Goals

Article Title: The integration of resilience in smart city initiatives for sustainable development goals

Article References: Winarso, U. T., Purnomo, E. P., Amran, N. A., & Miguel, I. S. (2026). The integration of resilience in smart city initiatives for sustainable development goals. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04626-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04626-3

Keywords: smart cities, resilience, sustainable development goals, SDG 11, adaptive governance, systematic literature review, PRISMA, VOSviewer, bibliometrics, climate change, urban policy, stakeholder participation

The research, conducted by Wenjuan Zhang of Jindal Global Law School and Swagato Sarkar of the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy at O.P. Jindal Global University, was published online on 7 November 2025. Rather than treating the divergence as a simple story of communism versus democracy, the authors build an analytical framework centered on two institutional capacities: coordination capacity, meaning the ability of the state to organize collective action across ministries, levels of government, and social actors, and learning capacity, meaning the ability of the planning system to absorb feedback, correct errors, and adapt to changing circumstances. It is the combination of these two capacities, the study argues, that determines whether a planning instrument can survive and evolve.

To classify the historical record, the researchers identify four distinct adaptation patterns that national planning systems can follow. The first is inertia or routine, in which plans continue to be produced but change little and matter less over time. The second is disruptive adaptation, in which crises or political ruptures abruptly break the planning cycle. The third is conducive adaptation, where reforms gradually improve the instrument’s fit with its environment. The fourth, and most demanding, is systematic adaptation, in which coordination and learning are institutionalized so deeply that the planning system can repeatedly reinvent itself while retaining its core identity. China’s trajectory, according to the analysis, ultimately converged on this fourth pattern, whereas India’s oscillated among the others before ending in abandonment.

The Chinese story is one of remarkable institutional reinvention. The early plans of the 1950s were Soviet-style command blueprints focused on heavy industry, with mandatory targets and centralized material allocation. But as the reform era opened after 1978, the planning system did not wither; it mutated. Scholars cited in the study describe China’s broader policy style as adaptive and experimental, a guerrilla-style approach to governance that embraces uncertainty rather than denying it. Five-Year Plans gradually shifted from directive instruments to strategic and guidance-oriented frameworks. Mandatory physical output targets gave way to a smaller set of binding indicators, particularly in areas such as energy efficiency and pollution control, alongside indicative targets meant to signal priorities to markets and local governments. By the time of the Eleventh and Twelfth Plans, environmental targets such as sulphur dioxide reduction had become enforceable commitments with real consequences for local officials, illustrating how the plan evolved into a hybrid tool that both guided markets and disciplined the bureaucracy.

Critically, the study emphasizes that this transformation was underpinned by deliberate institutional engineering. A 1982 resolution on State Council institutional reform, a 2005 State Council document on strengthening plan formulation, and a landmark 2018 directive on unifying planning systems under a national development strategy guided by strategic objectives all served to consolidate the planning apparatus. The National Development and Reform Commission emerged as a powerful coordinating hub, linking plan targets to cadre evaluation, budgeting, and inter-ministerial negotiation. The authors argue that China succeeded in institutionalizing high levels of both coordination and learning capacity, enabling what they call systematic adaptation: each plan cycle incorporates lessons from the previous one, extensive consultation, and pilot programs that feed experimental results back into national targets.

India’s experience followed a starkly different arc. The Planning Commission, established in 1950, produced its First Five-Year Plan in 1951, and the early plans were widely regarded as serious intellectual and technical achievements, drawing international attention from economists and institutions such as the International Monetary Fund. Yet from the beginning, the Indian planning system faced structural obstacles that China did not. India’s federal structure meant that planning depended on fiscal cooperation between the center and the states, a relationship that was often contentious and never fully institutionalized. The Planning Commission lacked the authority to compel ministries or state governments to align with plan priorities, and its recommendations competed with the Finance Ministry’s budget process and with powerful sectoral ministries.

The study traces how India’s political economy further eroded coordination capacity. The dominance of the Congress party in early decades gave way to coalition politics from the late 1980s onward, fragmenting authority and shortening leadership time horizons. Economic scholars cited in the paper describe Indian planning as embedded in a passive revolution, in which the state accommodated powerful landed and industrial interests rather than disciplining them. Plans became progressively less binding: the liberalization of 1991, triggered by a balance-of-payments crisis, dramatically reduced the scope of central planning, yet the Planning Commission continued to produce five-year documents that increasingly resembled aspirational essays rather than operational programs. The authors classify much of this late period as inertia or routine adaptation, with the instrument persisting in form while losing functional substance.

Learning capacity in India, the analysis suggests, was similarly constrained. While the Planning Commission employed distinguished economists and produced sophisticated diagnostics, the feedback loop between plan evaluation and subsequent plan design remained weak. Repeated critiques, from within the Indian economics profession and from official evaluations, noted the gap between plan targets and actual outcomes, particularly in areas such as poverty reduction, infrastructure, and center-state resource transfers. Some commentators have since argued that India discarded planning altogether rather than reforming it, questioning whether the baby was thrown out with the bathwater when the Commission was dissolved. The 2014 announcement and 2015 implementation of the Commission’s replacement by NITI Aayog marked the formal end of the five-year plan era in India, converting the national planning body into a strategy-oriented think tank without allocative or coordinating powers.

What explains the divergence, according to Zhang and Sarkar, is not ideology alone but the interaction of three factors: responses to external and internal crises, leadership dynamics, and governing traditions. China’s planning system was repeatedly stress-tested by crisis, from the failures of the Great Leap era through the chaos of the early reform years, and each rupture prompted institutional correction rather than abandonment. The Communist Party’s governance tradition, which prizes long-term strategic horizons and treats planning as a signature instrument of statecraft, sustained political commitment across generations of leadership. India, by contrast, experienced crises such as the 1991 balance-of-payments emergency as moments of paradigm shift away from planning, and its democratic coalition politics rewarded shorter-term distributive bargains over long-horizon coordination. The authors argue that adaptive change in five-year plans is contingent on how these forces combine, and that India’s inability to build robust coordination capacity ultimately rendered the instrument obsolete regardless of its analytical merits.

The findings carry implications well beyond the two countries studied. A global revival of national development planning has been documented in recent scholarship, with many governments adopting plan-based frameworks to pursue the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, yet the fate of the instrument varies enormously across political systems. The study’s central lesson is that planning documents are only as effective as the institutional machinery behind them: without high coordination capacity to align actors and high learning capacity to correct course, even the most elaborate national plan risks becoming a ritual. As debates continue over whether India’s abandonment of planning was a liberation or a loss, and as China prepares successive plan cycles with growing global influence, the comparative evidence assembled in this research suggests that the survival of strategic planning depends less on the plan itself than on the state’s capacity to adapt it, systematically and over time.

Subject of Research: Comparative analysis of five-year national development planning adaptation in China and India

Article Title: Adaptation pathways of five-year national development planning: a comparative analysis of China and India

Article References: Zhang, W., & Sarkar, S. (2026). Adaptation pathways of five-year national development planning: a comparative analysis of China and India. Global Public Policy and Governance, 6(1), 43-65. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00124-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00124-w

Keywords: Five-Year Plan, China, India, development planning, coordination capacity, learning capacity, adaptive governance, Planning Commission, NITI Aayog, public policy, institutional change, economic reform

The paper introduces what its author calls the 3×2A Framework, a profile-based interpretive approach designed to coordinate the ethical, functional, and institutional questions raised by AI-mediated organizations. The name encodes its structure: three diagnostic dyads, each containing two interdependent axes. The first dyad pairs automation with augmentation, capturing how work is redistributed between machines and people. The second pairs alliance with alignment, describing the relational quality of human–AI cooperation and the degree to which system behavior tracks human values and intentions. The third pairs adaptation with accountability, addressing how institutions learn and change over time and who answers for outcomes when things go wrong.

What distinguishes the framework from existing checklists and compliance tools is its insistence on situatedness. Rather than asking whether an AI system is safe or fair in the abstract, the 3×2A approach asks how a specific configuration of people, models, tasks, and institutions behaves in a specific context. A radiology department using AI-supported screen reading, for example, occupies a very different position on the automation–augmentation axis than a law office deploying automated contract analysis, even if both rely on similar underlying technology. The framework’s output is a six-axis profile, an ordered qualitative description that reveals functional, relational, adaptive, and accountability-related tensions within that configuration.

The epistemology of these profiles receives careful attention, and it is here that the article makes one of its most consequential moves. Ungureanu is explicit that the qualitative profile bands are ordered, evidence-informed interpretive categories, not numerical or cardinal scores. They convey direction and relative position, but they do not support arithmetic. Where numerical scoring is methodologically justified, it requires explicit rubrics, evidence standards, scoring rationales, and clearly stated interpretive limits. The framework also permits a composite synthesis, the 3×2A quotient, but only as a secondary and conditional construct built on an established profile, subject to documented activity–axis judgments, evidential bases, weighting assumptions, aggregation rules, and interpretive limitations.

This epistemic modesty is a deliberate corrective to a familiar failure mode in AI governance: the seduction of the single number. Risk scores, maturity indices, and compliance dashboards promise comparability and ease of communication, but they can obscure the qualitative judgments buried inside them and create false confidence in precision that the underlying evidence cannot support. By insisting that profiles come first and any quotient comes second, the framework attempts to preserve the richness of situated analysis while still allowing structured synthesis when the evidential ground is firm enough to bear it.

To demonstrate the framework in use, the article offers a worked benchmark re-analysis of a publicly documented case: the environmental-monitoring pilot conducted with the Province of Fryslân in the Netherlands, part of a responsible-use-of-AI project carried out with the Rijks ICT Gilde and the Z-Inspection initiative. That project examined a trustworthy AI and fundamental rights assessment of an AI system used in environmental oversight. Ungureanu re-reads the publicly available documentation through the six axes, producing an ordinal qualitative profile of the configuration without numerical scoring or a composite quotient. The exercise illustrates procedure rather than proof; the author is careful to state that the re-analysis does not claim empirical validation of the framework itself.

The Fryslân benchmark is instructive precisely because it shows the framework’s diagnostic texture. On the automation–augmentation dyad, the relevant question is not whether the AI replaced human monitors but how the division of labor shifted and whether the resulting configuration preserved meaningful human judgment. On alliance–alignment, the analysis probes whether the human–AI relationship functioned as genuine cooperation and whether the system’s outputs remained aligned with the values and legal obligations embedded in the assessment. On adaptation–accountability, it asks how the institution absorbed lessons from the pilot and how responsibility for outcomes was distributed among developers, public officials, and external assessors. Each axis generates tensions that a simple compliance verdict would flatten into invisibility.

The broader intellectual context matters here. The article draws on a rich literature spanning human-centered AI, machine behavior, algorithmic legitimacy, and the sociology of sociotechnical systems. It engages the well-documented observation that fairness and ethics principles often fail when abstracted from the concrete systems in which they must operate, and it echoes calls to shift from asking whether AI is good or fair to asking how it shifts power. It also responds to a growing consensus that generative AI in particular demands adaptive governance: rules and review processes that evolve as systems, users, and institutions co-evolve. The 3×2A Framework can be read as an attempt to give that consensus an operational instrument, one that treats governance as an ongoing interpretive practice rather than a one-time certification.

The stakes are considerable. As AI systems become embedded in knowledge production, labor organization, and public decision-making, the question of who is accountable when automated processes fail grows sharper. Research on moral crumple zones has shown how humans positioned near automated systems can absorb legal and moral responsibility for failures they could not realistically prevent. A profile-based approach makes such misalignments visible by mapping, for a given configuration, where control actually resides, where adaptation happens, and where accountability gaps open. In that sense, the framework functions less as a gatekeeping device and more as a mirror, forcing institutions to confront the structure of their own AI-mediated arrangements.

Critics may reasonably ask whether an interpretive, qualitative instrument can carry the weight of governance, particularly in regulatory environments moving toward harmonized rules such as the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act. Ungureanu’s answer, embedded in the framework’s design, is that interpretive rigor and regulatory utility are not opposites. The framework does not replace risk management standards or legal compliance; it complements them by providing a structured way to reason about configurations before and after formal requirements are applied. Its profiles are meant to be evidence-sensitive and revisable, updated as systems and institutions change. Whether the approach gains traction among practitioners will depend on whether organizations find that a six-axis portrait of their human–AI arrangements yields insights that dashboards and checklists miss. The article’s wager is that in a world where humans and machines are coevolving faster than governance can adapt, the most valuable tool is not another score but a clearer way of seeing.

Subject of Research: A profile-based interpretive framework for human–AI coevolution and adaptive AI governance

Article Title: The 3×2A framework: a profile-based interpretive approach to human–AI coevolution and adaptive governance

Article References: Ungureanu, V. (2026). The 3×2A framework: a profile-based interpretive approach to human–AI coevolution and adaptive governance. AI & SOCIETY. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03352-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00146-026-03352-8

Keywords: generative AI, large language models, human–AI coevolution, adaptive governance, AI accountability, automation, augmentation, alignment, sociotechnical systems, AI ethics, AI & Society, 3×2A framework