The research, conducted by Xiaoqing Jiang, is built around a concept that has gained traction in governance scholarship: co-governance participation intention, meaning a resident’s stated willingness to take part in collaborative decision-making about tourism in their community. This is not merely a matter of attending the occasional town meeting. In destinations under sustained tourism pressure, residents are increasingly invited — or expected — to share responsibility for managing crowding, protecting local heritage, mediating conflicts with visitors, and shaping the rules that determine who benefits from tourism and who bears its costs. Understanding what motivates that willingness is therefore central to whether collaborative governance actually works or remains a slogan on a planning document.

To probe the question, the study drew on organizational justice theory, which distinguishes three dimensions of fairness. Distributive justice concerns the perceived fairness of outcomes: whether the benefits and burdens of tourism — income, opportunity, congestion, noise, rising costs — are shared in ways residents consider equitable. Procedural justice concerns the fairness of the processes by which decisions are made: whether rule-making is transparent, consistent, and open to genuine resident voice. Interactional justice concerns the quality of interpersonal treatment: whether residents feel they are treated with dignity and respect by authorities, and, in this study’s framing, in the everyday encounters that tourism generates. The survey instrument measured residents’ perceptions across all three dimensions, alongside their emotional solidarity with tourists — feelings of warmth, welcome, and identification with visitors — and their intention to participate in co-governance.

Analyzing the data with structural equation modeling, the study found that all three dimensions of perceived justice were positively associated with both emotional solidarity and co-governance participation intention. In other words, residents who perceived tourism governance as fair — in its outcomes, its procedures, and its interpersonal treatment — reported stronger feelings of emotional connection with tourists and a greater willingness to engage in collaborative management. Notably, the associations for procedural and interactional justice were particularly strong. The fairness of how decisions are made, and the respect conveyed in day-to-day interactions, mattered at least as much as — and in these data, more saliently than — the distribution of material benefits alone.

This pattern challenges a persistent assumption in destination management: that keeping residents satisfied is primarily a matter of distributing tourism revenue, subsidies, jobs, or compensation. Those material flows certainly matter, and distributive justice did show a positive association with both emotional solidarity and participation intention. But the stronger signals from procedural and interactional justice suggest that residents evaluate tourism governance through a broader relational lens. A community meeting that genuinely solicits resident input, a complaint channel that actually responds, a tourism official who treats a local shopkeeper’s concerns as legitimate — these everyday experiences of fairness appear to feed directly into residents’ sense that co-governing tourism is worthwhile.

The study then tested a mediation pathway, asking whether emotional solidarity with tourists serves as a bridge between governance fairness and participation intention. The mediation analysis indicated a significant indirect association: perceived justice was linked to participation intention partly through residents’ emotional solidarity with visitors. This finding adds an intriguing psychological mechanism to the picture. Fair governance, it appears, does not only persuade residents that the system is legitimate; it also seems to soften the social boundary between hosts and guests. Residents who feel fairly treated become, in a measurable sense, warmer toward the tourists whose presence their governance must accommodate — and that warmth, in turn, is associated with a stronger intention to participate in managing tourism collectively.

The logic behind this pathway is worth unpacking, because it links two research literatures that have often run in parallel. Work on emotional solidarity in tourism, rooted in Durkheimian sociology and later formalized in host–guest relationship models, has shown that residents’ affective bonds with tourists influence their support for tourism development. Work on organizational justice has shown that fair treatment builds trust in institutions and willingness to cooperate with them. The Wuxi study connects the two: fairness in governance is not only institutional but relational, and its effects ripple outward from how residents regard their government to how they regard their guests. A resident who perceives that the tourism system treats her fairly may extend a presumption of goodwill to the visitors that system brings to her doorstep — and a resident who feels goodwill toward visitors has a richer emotional reason to help govern the destination than mere economic self-interest alone.

The study also examined whether perceived tourism pressure — the degree to which residents experience crowding, disruption, and strain from visitor numbers — changed these relationships. Here the results were more selective than one might expect. Perceived tourism pressure significantly moderated only one pathway: the association between interactional justice and emotional solidarity. It did not significantly moderate the associations for distributive or procedural justice. In practical terms, this suggests that respectful interpersonal treatment matters most, or works differently, when tourism pressure is high. When the streets are crowded and tempers are short, the quality of everyday encounters between hosts and guests — and between residents and those who govern tourism — becomes a more decisive factor in whether residents maintain emotional solidarity with visitors. Meanwhile, the links between distributive and procedural fairness and emotional solidarity appear comparatively robust across levels of tourism pressure, suggesting that these forms of fairness operate as a steadier foundation regardless of how heavy the visitor burden becomes.

For destination managers and municipal planners, the findings point toward a specific agenda. Transparent procedures, meaningful resident voice, and respectful everyday interactions are not soft extras bolted onto a tourism strategy; in this study they carry the strongest associations with residents’ willingness to co-govern. That has concrete implications for how participatory mechanisms are designed. Consultation exercises that exist to legitimize decisions already made are unlikely to build the kind of fairness perception that motivates engagement. What appears to matter is procedural authenticity — genuine opportunities for residents to influence outcomes — combined with interactional care in every point of contact between the tourism apparatus and the community it affects. The moderation results add a further nuance: as tourism pressure intensifies, investing in the quality of everyday interactions may become even more critical for preserving the emotional bonds that sustain collaborative governance.

The study’s scope and method frame how far its conclusions travel. It relies on cross-sectional survey data from 308 residents in one Chinese city, analyzed through structural equation modeling, mediation analysis, and hierarchical regression; the associations reported are just that — associations, not experimentally established causes. Emotional solidarity and participation intention are measured as perceptions and stated intentions rather than observed behavior, and residents of Wuxi’s major attraction areas may differ from those of other destinations in ways that shape the results. Still, the core contribution stands: collaborative tourism governance is not sustained by institutional design alone, nor by economic compensation alone, but by a relational fabric that runs from the fairness of decision procedures, through the emotional bond between hosts and guests, to residents’ readiness to share the work of governing. In destinations around the world now grappling with overtourism, that insight reframes the problem. The question is not only how to divide tourism’s benefits, but how to govern — and simply treat people — in ways that make residents want to be part of the answer.

Subject of Research: Associations between perceived governance justice, emotional solidarity with tourists, and residents' co-governance participation intention in tourism-affected communities

Article Title: Justice under tourism pressure: Governance fairness, emotional solidarity, and residents’ co-governance participation intention in tourism-affected communities

Article References: Jiang, X. (2026). Justice under tourism pressure: Governance fairness, emotional solidarity, and residents’ co-governance participation intention in tourism-affected communities. PLOS One, 21(10), e0360394. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0360394

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0360394

Keywords: tourism governance, co-governance, organizational justice, distributive justice, procedural justice, interactional justice, emotional solidarity, overtourism, resident participation, Wuxi China, structural equation modeling, destination management

The research, led by Amin Soheili and colleagues at Khoy University of Medical Sciences, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: do nurses who perceive their hospitals as just and fair speak up more often than those who do not? To find out, the team surveyed 309 nurses working across three public hospitals, drawing participants from inpatient wards, intensive care units, emergency departments, and operating rooms. The settings matter, because these are precisely the environments where rapid, honest communication is most critical and where the costs of withheld information are highest.

Organizational silence is not a single behavior but a family of them, and the researchers were careful to distinguish its different flavors. Acquiescent silence describes the passive withdrawal of effort and opinion, a kind of learned resignation in which employees stop offering ideas because they have concluded that speaking is futile. Defensive silence is more calculated: employees withhold information deliberately to protect themselves from trouble, blame, or retaliation. A third form, often labeled prosocial silence, involves staying quiet to protect colleagues or the organization itself. Understanding which form dominates a workplace tells managers something important about why employees are withholding what they know.

In the Khoy hospitals, acquiescent silence scored highest among the participating nurses, while defensive silence scored lowest. That pattern is telling. It suggests that the silence observed was less a matter of nurses actively fearing punishment and more a matter of them having given up on the idea that their voices would make a difference. Resignation, rather than fear, appears to be the dominant force muting these frontline clinicians, a finding that carries sobering implications for hospital leadership hoping to fix the problem with a few open-door policies.

The study used a descriptive cross-sectional design, with participants selected through proportionate stratified random sampling to ensure that the mix of wards, roles, and experience levels in the sample mirrored the hospitals as a whole. Nurses completed validated questionnaires measuring organizational silence and organizational justice, along with a single-item measure of job satisfaction. The researchers then applied a battery of statistical tools: descriptive statistics to characterize the sample, Pearson correlations to test simple associations, and hierarchical multiple regression to isolate the unique contribution of fairness perceptions while controlling for demographic and job-related factors.

The headline result is a moderate but statistically robust inverse relationship between organizational justice and organizational silence, with a correlation coefficient of −0.31 and a p-value below 0.001. In plain terms, nurses who perceived their workplaces as fairer were measurably less likely to withhold their opinions and concerns. Correlation alone cannot prove causation, and the authors are appropriately cautious on this point, but the association aligns with a well-established theoretical framework in organizational psychology: employees constantly monitor how resources, decisions, and respect are distributed, and their willingness to invest discretionary effort, including the effort of speaking up, tracks closely with those perceptions.

The hierarchical regression added a more striking layer to the story. Demographic and job-related variables, things like age, experience, and employment conditions, explained 28.9 percent of the variance in organizational silence. When the researchers added organizational justice to the model, the explained variance climbed to 35.5 percent. That additional 6.6 percentage points may sound modest, but in the noisy world of human behavior, where dozens of factors shape any single attitude, a perceived-fairness variable adding that much predictive power on top of a strong demographic baseline is a meaningful signal. It suggests that fairness is not just another correlate but a substantive lever.

Not all forms of fairness carried equal weight. The study found that interactional justice, the perceived quality of interpersonal treatment, whether nurses feel respected, heard, and treated with dignity by supervisors, and procedural justice, the perceived fairness of the processes by which decisions are made, were particularly associated with lower silence. This distinction matters for intervention design. A hospital can distribute pay and shifts with mathematical precision, but if the process behind those decisions is opaque and the conversations around them are dismissive, nurses will still conclude that speaking up is not worth the risk. Fairness, in other words, is experienced as much in tone and transparency as in outcomes.

The practical stakes are considerable. Organizational silence among nurses has been linked in prior literature to hindered communication, reduced team effectiveness, and compromised patient safety. A nurse who notices a subtle change in a patient’s condition but has learned that raising concerns invites eye-rolls rather than action becomes a broken sensor in a system that depends on thousands of such sensors working in real time. The authors of the new study argue that strengthening fair communication, transparent decision-making, and respectful interpersonal interactions could help create a climate that encourages speaking up and enhances psychological safety, the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.

There are, of course, limits to what a single cross-sectional survey can establish. The study captures a snapshot of perceptions at one moment in three hospitals within one Iranian university network, and the direction of causality remains open: it is at least plausible that nurses who stay silent come to view their organizations as less fair, rather than the reverse. Self-reported questionnaires also carry the usual risks of social desirability bias. Still, the study’s strengths, its stratified random sampling, validated instruments, and careful statistical modeling, make it a valuable addition to a literature that has long underexplored the justice-silence link in nursing specifically. For hospital administrators everywhere, the message is clear and actionable: if you want your nurses to speak, the first step is convincing them, through both fair processes and fair treatment, that their voices genuinely count.

Subject of Research: The relationship between perceived organizational justice and organizational silence among hospital nurses in Iran

Article Title: Iranian nurses’ perceptions of organizational silence and its relationship with organizational justice

Article References: Iranian nurses’ perceptions of organizational silence and its relationship with organizational justice. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-026-05250-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12912-026-05250-2

Keywords: organizational silence, organizational justice, nurses, patient safety, psychological safety, hospital management, Iran, nursing workforce, procedural justice, interactional justice, cross-sectional study, BMC Nursing

The research team conducted a rapid review of global case studies, a method designed to synthesize a broad and scattered evidence base within a structured analytical frame. Rather than cataloguing individual examples of unfairness, the authors interrogated the accumulated evidence to identify where and how climate action is engaging with the core pillars of justice that political philosophers and environmental justice scholars have developed over decades. Their conclusion is both encouraging and cautionary. The three classical dimensions of justice—distributive, procedural, and recognitional—are indeed being engaged with in urban climate initiatives worldwide, but the depth and simultaneity of that engagement determines whether an intervention becomes genuinely transformative or merely cosmetic.

Distributive justice, the first pillar, concerns who receives the benefits and burdens of climate policy. In practical terms, it asks whether a new flood barrier protects wealthy waterfront districts while informal settlements remain exposed, or whether urban tree-planting programs cool already leafy neighborhoods while heat-vulnerable districts stay bare. The review finds that cities increasingly deploy joint mitigation and adaptation interventions—projects that reduce emissions while building resilience—and that the distributional question is now explicitly on the agenda in many of them. Yet distribution alone is a blunt instrument. A solar subsidy program can be perfectly equal in formal terms and still be inaccessible to renters, low-income households, or residents without legal tenure, which is why the authors insist that distributional analysis must be paired with the other pillars.

Procedural justice addresses the second dimension: who participates in deciding. It examines whether affected communities have genuine voice in the design, implementation, and evaluation of climate interventions, or whether participation is reduced to token consultation after the key decisions have been made. The synthesized case studies show that exclusionary governance remains one of the most persistent barriers to equitable urban climate action. When planning processes are technically opaque, conducted in dominant languages only, or scheduled in ways that exclude working residents, the resulting policies tend to reproduce the very vulnerabilities they claim to address. The review identifies procedural reforms—co-production of plans with communities, transparent decision criteria, and accountability mechanisms—as a recurring feature of the more successful pathways.

Recognitional justice, the third classical pillar, goes deeper still. It asks whether the identities, histories, and knowledge systems of marginalized groups are respected within climate governance. Recognition failures can be subtle: Indigenous worldviews dismissed as irrelevant to technical flood modeling, gendered patterns of climate vulnerability ignored in mobility planning, or the specific exposures of migrants and ethnic minorities rendered invisible in aggregate city statistics. The authors find that recognition is increasingly invoked in climate action, but that it is often the thinnest of the three pillars in practice, acknowledged in policy language without changing who holds power or whose knowledge counts.

This is where the paper’s conceptual contribution becomes significant. The team extends the standard triad by integrating two additional dimensions: epistemic justice and restorative justice. Epistemic justice concerns the credibility afforded to different kinds of knowledge. In urban climate contexts, this means treating residents’ lived experience of flooding or heat as legitimate evidence alongside satellite data and hydrological models, and creating institutional channels through which local and Indigenous knowledge can genuinely inform technical decisions. Restorative justice, meanwhile, addresses deeply rooted systemic exclusions by confronting historical wrongs—colonial dispossession, discriminatory housing policy, and the extraction that built urban wealth in some places at the expense of others. A city cannot simply plan forward from an unjust baseline, the framework suggests; it must also account for how that baseline was produced.

The central analytical claim of the review is that climate initiatives are more likely to become transformative when they address multiple dimensions of justice simultaneously. This is a testable proposition with real design implications. A cooling center program that distributes resources fairly (distributive), is sited through community deliberation (procedural), respects the needs of elderly residents and informal workers (recognitional), incorporates their knowledge of neighborhood microclimates (epistemic), and acknowledges past disinvestment in their districts (restorative) is structurally different from a program that scores well on only one axis. The authors argue that single-pillar interventions tend to stall or backslide, because unresolved injustices in other dimensions eventually undermine them—participation without recognition becomes tokenism, and recognition without redistribution becomes symbolism.

From the synthesized evidence, the researchers distill key principles for enabling just and equitable action. While the review is careful not to prescribe a single template—urban contexts vary enormously between, say, a rapidly growing South Asian megacity and a shrinking post-industrial city in Europe—the principles converge on a common logic. Justice must be embedded from the earliest stages of intervention design rather than retrofitted after opposition emerges. Power must be genuinely shared with the communities who bear climate risks. Knowledge hierarchies that privilege formal expertise must be opened to plural ways of knowing. And institutions must be built to sustain these practices over time, because justice is not a one-time consultation but an ongoing condition of governance.

The practical payoff of the framework is a shift in what the field asks of research. As the authors put it in their abstract, the work is intended to move researchers and practitioners beyond identifying climate injustices toward an actionable roadmap for co-producing equitable climate solutions. Co-production is the operative term: the pathways the review maps are not top-down blueprints delivered to passive beneficiaries, but collaborative processes in which residents, municipal agencies, researchers, and civil society organizations jointly define problems and solutions. This framing reflects a broader movement in sustainability science over the past decade, but the review gives it sharper normative teeth by insisting that the quality of co-production be judged against all five justice dimensions.

The timing of this synthesis matters. Urban populations continue to grow fastest precisely in regions with the highest climate exposure and the weakest adaptive capacity, and national governments remain slow to deliver the finance and institutional support cities need. In that gap, municipal governments, community organizations, and hybrid actors are improvising climate action on their own—and the review’s evidence suggests that those improvisations succeed most often when justice is treated as constitutive of effectiveness rather than as a constraint on it. The authors declare no competing financial interests, and the paper is published open access, making the framework available to the practitioners it is meant to serve. What the study ultimately offers is a vocabulary and a checklist for a question that every city will face this century: not simply whether climate action happens, but who it is for, who decides, and whose past it repairs.

Subject of Research: Urban climate justice frameworks for equitable mitigation and adaptation in cities

Article Title: Overcoming urban climate injustice: synthesising global pathways and principles

Article References: Prakash, A., Bulkeley, H. A., Singh, C., McGregor, D., & George, R. (2026). Overcoming urban climate injustice: synthesising global pathways and principles. npj Urban Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-026-00477-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s42949-026-00477-z

Keywords: urban climate justice, climate adaptation, climate mitigation, distributive justice, procedural justice, recognitional justice, epistemic justice, restorative justice, co-production, urban sustainability, climate governance, rapid review

Social life cycle assessment has matured considerably over the past two decades. Guided by the ISO 14075 standard and the United Nations Environment Programme’s 2020 guidelines, it evaluates social impacts such as human rights, working conditions, cultural heritage and governance across a product’s entire life cycle, from raw material extraction through manufacturing, use and end of life. Stakeholders examined typically include workers, local communities, value chain actors, society at large and children. Yet the method’s DNA comes from environmental life cycle assessment, which was built to trace physical flows and processes. When applied to social questions, this heritage means S-LCA tends to anchor its analysis to the stages where materials physically move, leaving the social drama that surrounds a project, the permit battles, the community anxieties, the historical grievances, largely invisible.

The Finnish team, led by Anni Orola with colleagues Laura Kainiemi, Jarkko Levänen and Ville Uusitalo, turned to controversy mapping to fill that gap. The method is grounded in actor-network theory, a sociological framework developed by Bruno Latour and others that treats both human and non-human entities, from mining companies to protected frog species, as actors capable of shaping socio-technical systems. Controversy mapping, which began as a teaching tool in sociology and has grown into a serious research method, examines and visualizes public disputes by tracing who says what, who aligns with whom, and how arguments evolve over time. The approach proceeds through five stages: moving from statements to debates, from debates to actors, from actors to networks, from networks to broader worldviews, and finally to the politics of how controversies develop across time.

To test the approach, the researchers applied it to Finland’s battery material sector, covering mining, the production of precursor cathode active material, cathode active material and battery cathode production, along with transportation. Finland was a deliberate choice: the country holds reserves of multiple critical battery minerals and is investing heavily in its battery sector, yet despite its comparatively high level of social sustainability, battery material projects there have generated persistent contestation. The team collected data from Finnish-language online news media between November 2023 and July 2024, using Google Alerts with search terms for mining, battery metals and battery chemicals. After excluding unavailable and irrelevant items, they assembled a corpus of 93 articles spanning national and local newspapers, magazines and specialist publications, including interviews, opinion pieces and editorials.

The coding process, carried out iteratively with NVivo software and then organized in Excel, identified 95 actors engaged in the disputes. These ranged from mining and battery manufacturing companies and environmental non-governmental organizations to municipal governments, authorities such as the Finnish Safety and Chemical Agency, residents, landowners, business development companies, researchers and journalists. Notably, the analysis also included non-human actors, among them the Eurasian otter and the moor frog, both strictly protected under the European Union’s Habitats Directive, whose presence shapes the fate of mining projects. Strikingly, none of the 95 actors identified in the Finnish-language media represented the Sami, the indigenous people of northern Finland where several controversial projects are located, a gap the authors attribute to their data sources and a recognized digital bias in the method.

The mapped disputes revealed a rich landscape of arguments. Supporters of the battery industry, mostly companies, emphasized new jobs, economic benefits, risk management plans and the global imperative of the green transition, with some arguing that mining in Finland is more sustainable than in Africa. Opponents, largely NGOs and individual residents writing opinion pieces, pointed to Finland’s history of environmental damage from mining, potential biodiversity loss, sulfate emissions into the Baltic Sea, water contamination, impacts on reindeer herding, fishing, trekking and berry foraging, and what they called green sacrifice zones, where indigenous lands and protected areas are put to industrial use in the name of sustainability. Even battery material trade with Russia became entangled in the debates, with some actors questioning whether such commerce might support aggression against Ukraine, while a company representative defended it as sanction-compliant and even patriotic.

Perhaps the most consequential finding concerns timing. In conventional S-LCA, social impacts are usually assessed starting with raw material extraction. But the study shows that the socially decisive processes happen years or even decades earlier: area reservations that companies announce to claim prospecting rights, prospecting permits, environmental and water management permits, all of which can provoke community reactions, uncertainty and mental strain long before any mine is built. In the case of the AA Sakatti mining project near the Viiankiaapa wetland, public attention moved from the prospecting permit to on-site activism and finally to a visit by Finland’s environmental minister. Because these pre-production social processes can determine whether a project ever gains social acceptance, the authors argue that excluding them from S-LCA omits some of the most significant social impacts of all.

The case studies also demonstrated why stakeholder categories in S-LCA guidelines should be treated as illustrative rather than exhaustive. In the town of Hamina, home to a planned battery material plant by CNGR Finland, the municipality supported the project while residents, NGOs and a local fishing co-operative opposed it. Around the Suhanko Arctic Platinum project, neighboring municipalities split, with Ranua supporting the mine while Tervola and Simo raised concerns, partly because a wastewater pipe would cross Tervola’s territory without economic compensation and Simo was not invited into the environmental permit process. These procedural fairness issues, the researchers contend, are central to social acceptance, which research links to five drivers: the planning process, impacts on nature and residents, social norms, economic impacts and attitudes toward the energy transition.

On this basis, the study proposes that social acceptance should become a distinct impact subcategory within S-LCA, particularly for assessments involving high land use, such as mining, or emission potential, such as battery chemical manufacturing. The subcategory would focus on measuring the procedural justice experienced by local communities, and could be assessed through media coverage capturing both positive and negative viewpoints, an approach already used by sustainability rating platforms like EcoVadis. The authors note an important limitation: such a subcategory only works in countries with freedom of speech and a free press, though Finland ranks among the top five nations in the world press freedom index. Because the subcategory centers on procedural justice rather than overlapping outcomes, the researchers argue it would not result in double counting with existing S-LCA indicators.

The broader message extends beyond batteries. Industrial ecology has long excelled at quantifying environmental impacts, but the social dimension demands methods that can capture context, history and the plurality of actors, including those, like a protected frog or an unconsulted municipality, that fall outside standard stakeholder lists. Controversy mapping, the authors suggest, could serve as a preliminary data collection step before site-specific assessments, or as a complement to existing S-LCA databases, and could even help identify relevant actors before interviews begin. Future work might integrate additional social science perspectives, from institutional analysis to power relations between stakeholders, and test the approach in countries with different levels of institutional trust and press freedom. As the clean energy transition accelerates the global demand for battery materials, the Finnish study offers a timely reminder that the social license to operate is earned not in the factory, but in the long, contested years before ground is ever broken.

Subject of Research: Complementing social life cycle assessment with controversy mapping to assess social acceptance in the battery material industry

Article Title: Impact in a context: complementing social life cycle assessment with controversy mapping

Article References: Orola, A., Kainiemi, L., Levänen, J., & Uusitalo, V. (2026). Impact in a context: complementing social life cycle assessment with controversy mapping. Journal of Industrial Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44498-026-00153-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44498-026-00153-6

Keywords: social life cycle assessment, controversy mapping, actor-network theory, battery materials, social acceptance, mining, Finland, industrial ecology, life cycle thinking, procedural justice, stakeholder analysis, green transition