The team combined two well-established analytical frameworks, PESTEL and SWOT, to map the political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal dimensions of the clean cooking transition, alongside its internal strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Their evidence base was deliberately multi-layered. The researchers analyzed national policy documents stretching back to the Constitution of Nepal and the Renewable Energy Subsidy Policy, conducted a structured household survey of 200 respondents, and carried out focus group discussions in four districts chosen to capture the country’s striking geographic and cultural diversity: Chitwan and Sarlahi in the Terai lowlands, and Kavrepalanchowk and Rasuwa in the middle hills closer to the Himalaya.

The headline numbers tell a story of real but incomplete progress. Between 2000 and 2022, the share of Nepali households relying on biomass as their primary cooking fuel fell from 87.3 percent to 59.8 percent. Over the same period, liquefied petroleum gas, or LPG, climbed from just 5 percent of households to 38.6 percent. On the surface, that looks like a decisive shift toward a cleaner fuel. But the study’s deeper analysis reveals something uncomfortable: this transition was driven mainly by urbanization and rising incomes rather than by targeted policy intervention. In other words, Nepal’s clean cooking gains have largely been a byproduct of economic development, not the result of deliberate state engineering, which means the households left behind are precisely those that development has not yet reached.

That pattern has profound equity implications. Inflation and persistent rural-urban disparities have restricted equitable access to cleaner fuels, with LPG concentrated in cities and along road corridors while remote hill and mountain communities continue to gather fuelwood. The household survey and focus groups surfaced the everyday mechanics of this exclusion: upfront costs for stoves, cylinders, and connections remain prohibitive for poor families; supply chains thin out dramatically beyond district headquarters; and decisions about household energy spending are often shaped by gendered dynamics, with women doing the cooking but men controlling much of the cash. Cultural preferences for the taste of food cooked over wood fires, and the social familiarity of traditional hearths, add further friction that no subsidy alone can dissolve.

The political dimension of the analysis is where the study becomes most pointed. Nepal possesses, on paper, an unusually strong architecture of commitment. The Constitution itself enshrines the right to a clean environment and access to energy, and the Renewable Energy Subsidy Policy, along with successive periodic development plans, has repeatedly promised universal clean cooking. Donor-funded programs have poured resources into improved stoves and biogas plants for decades. Yet the researchers find that these instruments have reduced upfront costs without ensuring sustained use. Stoves fall into disrepair because maintenance systems are inadequate; subsidy delivery is inconsistent; and frequent changes of government, chronic political instability, and weak local governance mean that programs lose momentum, funding, and institutional memory before they can consolidate behavioral change.

Technological and infrastructural constraints compound the governance problem. Electric cooking, often touted as the long-term destination for countries with abundant hydropower, is undermined in practice by an unreliable electricity supply, particularly in rural areas where outages and voltage fluctuations make induction or electric pressure cookers impractical as sole cooking solutions. Nepal’s electricity grid is overwhelmingly powered by hydroelectric plants, which gives the country a genuine decarbonization opportunity as generation capacity expands, but the study emphasizes that clean electricity potential remains a strength on paper until reliability and last-mile distribution improve. Meanwhile, improved biomass stoves, the workhorse of many donor programs, occupy an awkward middle ground: cleaner than open fires but not truly clean, and sometimes crowding out the full transition they were meant to catalyze.

The environmental stakes of continued biomass dependence are substantial. Firewood harvesting contributes to deforestation and forest degradation in a country whose forests are central to both carbon commitments and rural livelihoods. Burning biomass in inefficient stoves releases black carbon and other climate-forcing pollutants as well as the particulate matter that damages lungs and hearts indoors. The study frames these emissions and health burdens as tightly coupled: the same smoke that kills roughly 24,000 Nepalis annually also undermines climate goals. Fragmented and weakly enforced regulations make matters worse, with overlapping mandates among ministries and levels of government diffusing accountability for what is, in effect, a multi-sector problem spanning health, energy, forestry, and gender.

The SWOT component of the analysis distills the strategic picture. On the strengths side, the researchers place Nepal’s clean electricity potential from hydropower and the sustained engagement of international donors, which keeps resources and attention flowing to the sector. Opportunities include falling technology costs, growing awareness of indoor air pollution risks, and the possibility of locally adapted cooking technologies suited to different agro-ecological zones. Against these stand serious weaknesses, including affordability gaps, inadequate after-sales and maintenance networks, and aid dependency that leaves programs vulnerable when donor priorities shift. The threats are stark: political instability, inflation eroding household purchasing power, and the risk that subsidies continue to subsidize equipment purchases without changing long-term cooking behavior.

What emerges from the PESTEL analysis is a portrait of a transition that is simultaneously happening and stalling. Awareness of indoor air pollution has genuinely risen, the authors note, even as cultural preferences and financial barriers continue to constrain adoption. This is an important nuance. Information campaigns have worked; people increasingly know that smoke from the hearth is dangerous. But knowledge has not translated into sustained clean fuel use because the structural conditions, reliable supply, affordable pricing, functioning maintenance chains, and accountable institutions, have not followed. The study’s central argument is that Nepal’s clean cooking problem is not primarily a problem of awareness or technology availability, but of governance and political economy.

The authors conclude that an inclusive and sustainable clean cooking transition in Nepal requires stronger governance, technologies adapted to local contexts, and sustained investment rather than episodic project funding. Achieving this, they argue, would advance multiple Sustainable Development Goals simultaneously: SDG 3 on health, SDG 5 on gender equality, SDG 7 on affordable and clean energy, SDG 10 on reduced inequalities, and SDG 13 on climate action. Few interventions touch so many targets at once. For the millions of Nepali households still cooking over smoky fires, the difference between policy on paper and policy in practice is measured in breaths taken, forests left standing, and lives not cut short. The study’s message to policymakers is blunt: the frameworks exist, the commitments exist, and the technology exists. What has been missing is the institutional staying power to make clean cooking stick.

Subject of Research: Structural barriers and opportunities for the clean cooking transition in Nepal, analyzed with PESTEL and SWOT frameworks

Article Title: Structural barriers and opportunities for clean cooking transition in Nepal using PESTEL and SWOT analyses

Article References: Structural barriers and opportunities for clean cooking transition in Nepal using PESTEL and SWOT analyses. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04927-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04927-7

Keywords: clean cooking, Nepal, energy access, indoor air pollution, biomass, LPG, PESTEL analysis, SWOT analysis, energy policy, governance, sustainable development goals, hydropower

The research, led by Wonsha Michael Didiso with colleagues Brehanu Borji Ayalewu and Sintayehu Assefa Yirga, arrives at a moment of transformation for Ethiopian finance. The sector has grown rapidly as the National Bank of Ethiopia pushes modernization and opening-up reforms, exposing private banks to intensifying competition, economic uncertainty, and shifting customer expectations. Against this backdrop, the team asked a deceptively simple question: does carefully reading the business environment actually make banks perform better, and if so, how does that information travel from the boardroom to the bottom line?

To answer it, the researchers targeted the entire workforce of Ethiopian private banks, a population of 147,367 employees according to the National Bank of Ethiopia’s 2024/2025 annual report. Using a standard sample-size formula attributed to Kothari, they drew 383 respondents through simple random sampling, distributing structured questionnaires across head offices and district operations in Addis Ababa, Hawassa, and Bahir Dar. The survey was translated into Amharic and independently back-translated into English to eliminate linguistic bias, piloted with 30 bank employees excluded from the main survey, and ultimately returned 375 usable responses, a 98 percent response rate that lends unusual confidence to the dataset.

The methodological machinery behind the analysis is where the study earns its scientific weight. The team employed structural equation modeling, supported by exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, to test whether the abstract constructs of environmental scanning, competitive strategy, and organizational performance could be reliably measured and causally linked. Reliability was strong across the board: Cronbach’s alpha values ranged from 0.789 to 0.859 for the seven scanning dimensions, including PESTEL analysis, SWOT analysis, Five Forces analysis, scenario planning, benchmarking, gap analysis, and resource-based view analysis. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy reached 0.960, an exceptionally high score indicating the data were superbly suited for factor analysis.

Model fit statistics told a similarly convincing story. The chi-square to degrees-of-freedom ratio of 2.980 sits just below the conventional threshold of 3, while the Goodness-of-Fit Index, Normed Fit Index, Tucker-Lewis Index, and Comparative Fit Index all exceeded 0.9. The root mean square error of approximation was 0.061, comfortably under the 0.08 cutoff that signals minimal discrepancy between the model’s predictions and the observed data. In plain terms, the statistical architecture of the study held together well enough that its substantive findings deserve serious attention.

Those findings are strikingly consistent. Every one of the seven environmental scanning tools showed a positive and statistically significant effect on organizational performance, with scenario planning and resource-based view analysis posting the strongest coefficients at 0.895 and 0.872 respectively. Environmental scanning as a whole carried a direct effect of 0.36 on bank performance, while its effect on competitive strategy reached 0.894. Competitive strategy itself, spanning cost leadership, differentiation, and focus approaches drawn from Porter’s classic framework, registered the strongest single coefficient in the entire model at 0.914, confirming that how a bank positions itself against rivals is the decisive lever for translating insight into performance.

The mediation analysis revealed the most nuanced result. Competitive strategy partially mediates the relationship between environmental scanning and performance, with an indirect effect of roughly 0.33 layered on top of the direct effect, producing a total effect of about 0.69. Partial mediation means that scanning helps banks in two parallel ways: it improves performance directly, perhaps by enabling faster, better-informed decisions, and it also works through the deliberate construction of competitive strategies that convert environmental intelligence into market advantage. Organizations that scan without strategizing leave much of the value on the table, and organizations that strategize without scanning build on shaky foundations.

The theoretical scaffolding of the study draws on three pillars. Resource-Based Theory holds that durable advantage comes from resources that are valuable, rare, and difficult to imitate, framing environmental scanning capability itself as a strategic asset. Evolutionary theory, in its dynamic capabilities formulation, emphasizes that banks must continuously adapt and reconfigure their resources as the environment shifts, a message especially pertinent for Ethiopian institutions transitioning from manual operations to digital-first models. Porter’s Five Forces supplies the external lens, mapping competitive rivalry, entry threats, substitutes, and the bargaining power of buyers and suppliers onto the scanning agenda.

The practical implications extend beyond Ethiopia’s borders to any emerging-market bank navigating liberalization and digital disruption. The authors argue that banks should embed environmental scanning as a core management function rather than an occasional planning exercise, and that scanning outputs should feed directly into strategy formulation, a process they note many organizations fumble, with prior literature cited in the study suggesting roughly 70 percent of new strategies fail at implementation. For policymakers, the study recommends that regulators require strategic performance measurement systems, such as balanced scorecards linking organizational goals to operational results, with periodic appraisal cycles to enforce alignment and accountability.

The study is candid about its limits. Its cross-sectional design captures a single moment in time rather than tracking how scanning and performance co-evolve, its reliance on self-reported survey data introduces potential bias despite anonymity safeguards, and its focus on Ethiopian private banks constrains generalization to public banks and other national contexts. The authors call for longitudinal designs and multi-group analyses to test how cultural and regulatory environments moderate these relationships. Still, the central message stands firm: in a banking sector where products are increasingly commoditized, the capacity to read the environment and act on it is not a luxury but a measurable driver of survival and success.

Subject of Research: The effect of strategic environmental scanning on private bank performance in Ethiopia through the mediating role of competitive strategy.

Article Title: Effect of strategic environmental scanning on the private bank performance in Ethiopia with mediating role of competitive strategy

Article References: Didiso, W. M., Ayalewu, B. B., & Yirga, S. A. (2026). Effect of strategic environmental scanning on the private bank performance in Ethiopia with mediating role of competitive strategy. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 258. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00620-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00620-2

Keywords: strategic environmental scanning, competitive strategy, Ethiopian private banks, organizational performance, structural equation modeling, PESTEL analysis, SWOT analysis, resource-based view, dynamic capabilities, banking sector, Porter's Five Forces, mediation analysis

The problem the study addresses is structural rather than purely biological. Since the Green Revolution of the 1960s, plant breeding in Europe has been increasingly dominated by private companies that invest where markets are large and returns predictable. Grain legumes such as white lupin occupy only about 2.4 percent of German arable land, and the licence-fee revenue generated from such small acreages rarely covers the substantial research and development costs of a breeding programme. Economists describe the resulting dynamic as a lock-in situation: farmers grow few legumes because improved varieties are scarce, and breeders avoid legumes because demand is weak. The study asks what conditions allowed one partnership to break through this deadlock in a crop that had been nearly abandoned.

White lupin’s troubles were not only economic. The crop was devastated across Europe and globally by anthracnose, a fungal disease caused by Colletotrichum lupini, which made cultivation so unreliable that the species had been of almost no commercial importance since the 1990s. In 2008, LLA intensified research into white lupin with funding from the Bavarian state government, explicitly searching for ways to make the crop attractive again. Breeding lines with improved anthracnose tolerance emerged from that work, and it was this germplasm that caught the attention of DSV, an internationally active seed company founded in 1923 with operations across Europe, North America and beyond.

The resulting cooperation followed a clear division of labour grounded in complementary capabilities. LLA, which maintains experimental field infrastructure and breeding expertise, carried out the upstream stages: evaluating genetic resources, creating new variation through crossing, and conducting selection in early generations. As one DSV informant explained in the expert interview at the heart of the study, there was a very clear work-sharing arrangement in which LLA delivered experimental germplasm and performed early-generation selection before the partners moved to a joint testing approach in later generations. DSV, in turn, contributed trial plots, equipment, breeding and marketing expertise, and eventually the full commercial machinery of variety registration, seed multiplication, quality assurance and distribution.

The outputs of this alliance were the white lupin varieties Frieda and Celina, both characterised by high tolerance to anthracnose. After several years of value for cultivation and use testing administered by the Federal Plant Variety Office, the two varieties received national registration in Germany in 2019. Because the varieties originated from LLA’s research, the public institution owns the intellectual property rights, with DSV acting as licensee and paying royalty fees for production and sales rights under an agreement granting DSV a first right of refusal on promising variety candidates. This arrangement transformed what had begun as an informal, largely trust-based collaboration into an institutionally managed partnership with defined financial flows.

The commercial results have been striking for a crop of this size. DSV estimates that roughly 60 percent of the approximately 25,000 hectares of white lupin grown in Germany in 2023 were planted with varieties from the DSV–LLA cooperation, out of a total sweet lupin area of about 28,000 hectares. The company reports that royalty income covered its cumulative investments in field trials, variety applications and marketing within just a few years of registration, reaching break-even remarkably quickly. Alongside seed sales, DSV has built service offerings such as an alkaloid monitoring system, in which farmers can submit samples for third-party laboratory analysis, reflecting the fact that alkaloid content is a sensitive quality trait that must be actively managed.

That sensitivity centres on quinolizidine alkaloids such as lupinine and lupanine, bitter secondary metabolites that protect the plant against pests and stress but can cause poisoning in humans and animals at excessive doses, affecting the nervous and digestive systems. The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment has set reference values of 500 milligrams per kilogram for animal feed and 200 milligrams per kilogram for food, and EU rules require allergen labelling for lupin in food products because lupin protein can trigger allergic reactions and cross-reactions with other legumes. Even sweet lupin varieties can occasionally show elevated alkaloid levels due to environmental influences or uncontrolled cross-breeding, which is why systematic quality control and strict selection for low alkaloid content are core elements of both maintenance breeding and new variety development. Current German research projects, including the BitterSweet initiative, are working to identify the gene loci responsible for alkaloid production and develop molecular markers to support marker-assisted selection.

To assess the broader environment shaping the crop’s future, the researchers applied a PESTEL analysis covering political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal factors. The political picture is favourable: the European Green Deal and its farm to fork strategy, together with the German Arable Farming Strategy 2035, call for expanding legume cultivation from its current 2.4 percent share of arable land toward 10 percent, which would give grain legumes an importance comparable to rapeseed. The ecological case is similarly strong, since lupins fix nitrogen, leave residual nutrients in the topsoil, interrupt disease cycles in cereal rotations and can be grown on sites unsuitable for soybean, making them attractive for sustainable agriculture, carbon farming and soil health systems. The booming market for plant-based meat and milk alternatives offers a promising new outlet, as lupin protein’s mild flavour, techno-functional properties and protein-to-carbohydrate ratio suit beverage and meat-substitute applications, and its protein digestibility reaches roughly 90 percent of the value of egg protein.

The economic obstacles, however, remain formidable. Yield fluctuations from year to year raise cultivation risk relative to other crops, and marketing infrastructure is thin: as of May 2024, Germany had just over 70 collection points for sweet lupins compared with more than 250 for conventional peas, and the legume market has been characterised as a demand oligopoly in which information asymmetries allow buyers to suppress producer prices. Imported soybean meal is often cheaper and available in consistent quantity and quality, undercutting the domestic protein crop despite European ambitions to reduce import dependency. Recent findings that quinolizidine alkaloids can transfer into milk from dairy cows fed white lupin, and into veal, add a further regulatory watchpoint for ruminant feeding, although breeding and technical solutions for reducing alkaloid levels continue to advance.

The authors conclude that the DSV–LLA case demonstrates how private companies can use public–private partnerships strategically: the private partner gains access to germplasm, expertise and pre-breeding results that would otherwise require years of high-risk investment, while the public institution fulfils its research mandate, benefits from public funding and sees its breeding lines translated into registered, cultivated varieties. The researchers argue that the case verifies calls in the literature for stronger public investment in grain legume breeding, showing how such investment can make minor crops attractive to private breeders, and they recommend greater public sector involvement going forward. At the same time, they caution that the partnership depends on public research capacity being available in the first place, on trust and transparent intellectual property arrangements, and on whether the wider legume lock-in can be eased through demand-led cooperation between breeders, processors and other value chain stakeholders. If those conditions hold, white lupin’s rediscovery in German agriculture may prove less an exception and more a template.

Subject of Research: Public–private partnership in white lupin variety breeding and market establishment in Germany

Article Title: A case study on variety development and institutional conditions in white lupin breeding in Germany

Article References: Wernze, L., Stelling, D., Heinz, M., & Mergenthaler, M. (2026). A case study on variety development and institutional conditions in white lupin breeding in Germany. Discover Agriculture, 4(1), Article 281. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44279-026-00764-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44279-026-00764-4

Keywords: white lupin, plant breeding, public–private partnership, grain legumes, anthracnose resistance, alkaloids, variety registration, PESTEL analysis, crop diversification, plant-based protein, Germany, seed systems