The downtown area in question covers just 1.1 square kilometers but was home to approximately 3,020 residents in 2016, 34.1 percent of whom were young people between 18 and 29 years old. The statistics paint a picture of deep precarity: 93.3 percent of residents were renters, 57.1 percent lived below the poverty line, and the median after-tax household income was three times lower than the city as a whole. Unemployment rates among 25 to 64 year-olds were twice as high as elsewhere in the city. These are the social determinants of health that revitalization efforts plausibly affect, for better or worse.

In the first phase of the initiative, 80 million Canadian dollars were invested, with 25 million from public funds, to build two new towers housing 60 residential rental units, office and retail space, a rooftop garden, and a daycare center. A public space was also developed atop an indoor parking lot, and streetscape aesthetics were improved. The changes were hypothesized to positively impact downtown residents through increased housing availability, proximity to services, and opportunities for social connections. But according to the researchers, the initiative predominantly aimed to improve the downtown physical and economic environment rather than to address social equity.

Using an interpretive descriptive approach, the team conducted nine semi-structured interviews with informants representing municipal staff, elected officials, community organizations, private builders, and advocacy groups. They analyzed transcripts following the framework method, a structured qualitative approach recommended for multidisciplinary teams. The analysis revealed that participants were open to collaborating for a more equitable and inclusive revitalization, but diverging perspectives on four key themes constrained fulsome consideration of young and socially marginalized people.

The first tension surrounded the very reasons for revitalizing the downtown. Participants agreed the area was in disrepair and that economic development was essential for attracting new residents, businesses, and workers. But some felt that pursuing infrastructural and economic interests at the detriment of social equity was problematic. One elected official described the project as more like an investment to advance certain economic interests than a real downtown revitalization. A community organization representative expressed frustration that, given the amount invested, more thought had not gone into securing the people who would be victims of the project’s consequences, noting that taking care of poverty is not that expensive.

The second barrier concerned how participants implicitly defined young and socially marginalized people. Some municipal and private actors assumed the new infrastructure, such as the rooftop garden and daycare center, would serve most young people, whom they defined as young professionals and families. Community organization representatives countered that this population-wide approach failed to address the needs of a specific subgroup over-represented downtown: those living on low incomes, in precarious housing, or struggling with mental health conditions. One representative pointed out that a $2,000 per month apartment with a river view and home automation was not created for the people they worked with, but rather to bring new people downtown while doing very little for those already there.

Third, contrasting experiences of collaborative structures and mechanisms limited inclusion. Early on, the city created an intersectoral committee bringing together entrepreneurs, merchants, community groups, cultural groups, citizens, residents, and health institution representatives. Municipal and private actors considered this structure legitimate given the privileged information discussed and the influence participants could have on decision-making. But community organization representatives reported that final decisions seemed to be taken by the city and private developers, leaving them with little real influence. As a result, their unique expertise regarding young and socially marginalized people was not fully harnessed, potentially leading to superficial solutions such as installing public restrooms for unhoused individuals rather than addressing structural needs.

Finally, public participation processes and strategies fell short. Information was communicated through social media, local radio campaigns, and the city website, and consultation events included a co-creation design charette in 2017 and a question-and-answer online event in 2020. But participants noted these strategies were not tailored to young and socially marginalized people. Organizers seemed to assume social media would naturally reach these groups, although many lacked internet access or social media accounts. Basic outreach, such as posting advertisements near the construction site directly opposite housing for socially marginalized young people, was lacking. Common barriers to participation, including social precariousness, over-solicitation, and mental health issues, were not considered when designing activities.

Despite these shortcomings, all participants recognized that the lack of social inclusiveness likely stemmed from limited knowledge of young and socially marginalized people’s realities rather than conscious attempts to exclude them. One community organization representative noted there was a desire to understand and an open door on the city side to discuss these issues, suggesting that education on both sides could enable deeper intersectoral collaboration in the future. The researchers argue that anchoring urban interventions in the social context of place is essential for equity-focused action, and that defining key terms, establishing a clear understanding of local residents’ characteristics and needs, and centering all phases of revitalization around social equity would be useful moving forward.

The study’s findings serve as a springboard for devising solutions for inclusive and health-promoting urban planning. The researchers recommend early and sustained engagement of those most likely to experience intervention impacts firsthand, accessible and diverse communication strategies, training for citizens and municipal and private actors in inclusive collaboration, and accountability for including marginalized groups. As cities worldwide continue deploying neighborhood revitalization initiatives to improve aging infrastructure and build resilience against climate change, this research underscores that different aims and visions of urban revitalization lead to different action priorities and, consequently, unequal social and health benefits. For urban transformations to be health-promoting and socially inclusive, innovative collaborative governance and public participation structures are needed from the outset.

Subject of Research: Urban Health

Article Title: Considering young and socially marginalized people in urban revitalization: evidence on enablers and barriers from a mid-size Canadian city

Article References: Shareck, M., Blache-Pichette, C., Hugonnier, J., Winters, M., Tougas, A.-M., & Fuller, D. (2026). Considering young and socially marginalized people in urban revitalization: evidence on enablers and barriers from a mid-size Canadian city. International Journal of Public Health, 71, Article 1609821. https://doi.org/10.3389/ijph.2026.1609821

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/ijph.2026.1609821

Keywords: urban revitalization, health equity, local governance, public participation, social determinants of health, youth, urban planning, Considering, young, socially, marginalized, people

The concept of sociotechnical imaginaries sits at the heart of the study. Originating in the field of science and technology studies, sociotechnical imaginaries are collectively held, publicly performed visions of desirable futures that are animated by, and expressed through, science and technology. They are not idle daydreams. Imaginaries do real work in the world: they legitimize certain research programs, justify particular regulatory arrangements, and mobilize publics either in support of a technology or against it. National AI strategies, corporate roadmaps, and government white papers all encode imaginaries of the future, and those encoded visions then circulate through media, education, and everyday conversation, shaping what citizens believe is possible, probable, and permissible. When a society debates facial recognition, algorithmic hiring, or automated content moderation, it is ultimately negotiating between rival imaginaries of the good technological life.

What makes Wang’s study methodologically distinctive is its integration of the sociotechnical imaginaries framework with a second analytical tool known as the Technological Frame. Developed originally to explain how different user groups make sense of emerging technologies, the Technological Frame concept directs attention to the shared interpretive resources a group brings to a new artifact: the problem definitions it applies, the solutions it imagines, and the experiences and metaphors it draws upon. By fusing the two frameworks, the study gains a layered analytical instrument. Sociotechnical imaginaries capture the macro-level, collective visions of technological futures, while technological frames capture the micro-level, group-specific sensemaking through which non-expert participants actually build those visions in conversation. The approach allows the researcher to trace how abstract national narratives about AI are translated, distorted, and sometimes rejected at the level of everyday understanding.

The empirical foundation of the study consists of six online focus groups involving thirty non-expert participants. Focus groups are a qualitative method well suited to this kind of inquiry because they surface the reasoning behind opinions rather than merely tallying them. In a group setting, participants challenge one another, refine their arguments, and reveal the cultural raw material from which their views of AI are assembled. The analysis organized participants’ talk around three dimensions of AI imaginaries: social representations, meaning how people collectively picture what AI is and does; governance mechanisms, meaning who they believe should control the technology and how; and future trajectories, meaning where they think the technology is heading and where they believe it ought to head. This three-part structure gives the study a systematic architecture, ensuring that the findings address not only what people think about AI but how they think it should be steered.

The central empirical finding is a marked divergence between two broad families of imaginaries, which the study labels instrumentalist and humanistic. The instrumentalist imaginary frames AI primarily as a tool, a means of efficiency, productivity, and problem-solving whose value is measured by performance. Within this frame, governance questions tend to be framed as technical optimization problems: how to make systems more accurate, more reliable, more useful. The humanistic imaginary, by contrast, frames AI in terms of its consequences for human dignity, autonomy, employment, and social relationships. Within this frame, governance is not an engineering afterthought but the central question, because the point of regulation is to keep the technology subordinate to human ends. These two imaginaries generate competing narratives at the intersection of technological development and governance, and the study shows that they coexist uneasily within the same population, sometimes within the same individual, producing genuine internal contradiction rather than a simple split between AI enthusiasts and AI skeptics.

This divergence matters because imaginaries are not merely descriptive; they are prescriptive. A person who imagines AI as an instrument will tend to accept governance arrangements that emphasize innovation and deployment speed, while a person who imagines AI as a force requiring humanistic constraint will demand accountability, transparency, and participatory oversight. When a public is divided between such frames, it becomes difficult to form the kind of durable consensus that governance institutions rely upon. The study’s findings suggest that the contest between instrumentalist and humanistic visions is not being resolved in public deliberation but is instead left suspended, with each imaginary pulling governance expectations in a different direction. In the absence of channels through which these competing visions can be articulated and reconciled, the disagreement festers as a source of ambivalence rather than functioning as productive democratic debate.

The most consequential finding, however, concerns what the study calls sociotechnical imaginaries fracture. Wang documents that the participants’ imaginaries, however vivid, are constrained by structural power asymmetries that limit grassroots publics’ capacities to envision future technological directions. In practical terms, the people most affected by AI deployment have the least influence over the scenarios in which that deployment is imagined. The consequential futures of AI are drafted by states and corporations, and ordinary citizens encounter those futures as finished products rather than as open questions. The study finds that this asymmetry produces a loss of imaginative agency: when people cannot see a plausible pathway from their own preferred future to any real decision-making process, the idealized future begins to feel inaccessible, and the imaginary itself fractures.

The behavioral consequence of this fracture is retreat. According to the study, individuals withdraw from governance discourse, stepping back from debates they perceive as having no room for their voice. More troubling still, some participants come to interpret AI development not as a shared project but as a vehicle for disempowering control, a technology whose primary function, as they experience it, is to monitor, manage, and constrain them. This perception represents a significant governance risk. Public legitimacy is a necessary condition for any long-term technological regime, and a public that has stopped imagining itself as a stakeholder will not spontaneously grant that legitimacy. The study thus highlights how structural power asymmetries do not merely exclude people from decisions; they corrode the imaginative foundations on which inclusive technological futures depend.

The implications of the research extend well beyond the Chinese context, even though its setting is specific. Sociotechnical imaginaries fracture describes a dynamic that observers of technology policy in many countries will recognize: publics that are consulted through surveys and comment periods but excluded from agenda-setting, and that respond with disengagement or cynicism rather than opposition. The study’s theoretical contribution, integrating imaginaries with technological frames, provides a transferable template for diagnosing this condition elsewhere, because it links collective visions to the interpretive resources and structural positions of the groups that hold them. For governance designers, the message is that participation cannot be limited to ratifying futures that have already been imagined by others. If citizens are to remain engaged with AI governance, they need genuine imaginative agency, the capacity not only to react to proposed futures but to author them.

The study, which received ethical approval from the Institutional Ethics Committee of the School of Journalism and Communication at Jilin University and was published open access on 14 October 2026, arrives at a moment when governments worldwide are racing to build AI regulatory frameworks while public trust in the technology remains fragile. Its core insight is deceptively simple: the battle over artificial intelligence will not be won solely in laboratories, legislatures, or boardrooms, but in the collective imagination of the people who must live inside the futures being built. Where that imagination is supported, competing visions can be negotiated into something resembling a shared project. Where it fractures, the result is silence, and silence, as this research makes clear, is not consent.

Subject of Research: Grassroots public imaginaries of AI governance in China

Article Title: Support and fracture: understanding sociotechnical imaginaries in Chinese grassroots’ AI governance frames

Article References: Wang, S. (2026). Support and fracture: understanding sociotechnical imaginaries in Chinese grassroots’ AI governance frames. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-09356-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-09356-5

Keywords: artificial intelligence, AI governance, sociotechnical imaginaries, technological frames, public engagement, science and technology studies, China, focus groups, power asymmetries, technology policy, public participation, qualitative research

The methodological rigour of the study sets it apart from earlier, largely anecdotal assessments. The research team drew on more than 410 documents, including laws, decrees, government response documents and press releases, and combined this documentary evidence with interviews and surveys involving 74 experts, among them ministry officials directly responsible for formulating policy responses to the assemblies. Crucially, the team adopted a counterfactual approach to causality, asking in each case whether the corresponding policy decision would have been identical had the assembly never taken place. A recommendation was counted as impactful only if it could be regarded as a necessary condition for a specific decision. The analysis followed the logic of Bayesian qualitative causal inference, in which coders weighed the probability of the evidence under competing hypotheses of impact and no impact, updating plausibility as documents and expert testimony accumulated. Each recommendation’s ambition and impact were coded independently by two coders, with disputed cases deliberated in team meetings.

On the question of ambition, the results were strikingly uniform. Of the 488 recommendations examined, 327—67 per cent—demanded action clearly beyond existing government policy, while a further 133, or 27 per cent, were neither more nor less ambitious than what governments had already enacted or planned. Not a single recommendation was clearly weaker than prevailing policy. The pattern held across all six cases, from the French Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat’s call to ban domestic flights where rail alternatives exist, to Austria’s demand to retrofit every home by 2030, to Scotland’s proposals for raising awareness of localized living. This consistency suggests that the phenomenon is not a quirk of any single national political culture but a systematic feature of deliberation itself, arising whenever citizens are asked to formulate climate solutions after structured learning.

Why do assemblies out-ambition their governments? The authors point to several mechanisms, some normatively comforting and others more troubling. Deliberation exposes participants to factual learning and to the arguments of fellow citizens, which can align values, facts and policy preferences and heighten the salience of pro-environmental commitments. Unlike politicians, assembly members face no electoral cycles, no partisan discipline and no media pressure, allowing them to endorse measures that elected officials shun. But the researchers also flag a subtler possibility: agenda framing. When citizens are tasked with proposing climate ‘solutions’, recommending weaker action is counter-intuitive, so participants may simply omit measures they dislike—as the French assembly notably did with carbon taxation. Ambition may also partly reflect biases in the selection of experts or the framing of evidence, an issue the authors describe as still under-examined empirically.

Ambition, however, proved far easier to generate than influence. In Germany, Scotland and the United Kingdom, not one of the assembly’s recommendations could be shown to have causally altered a political decision. In Austria, a single recommendation—1 per cent—produced decisional change, and in Berlin only two, or 4 per cent. France stood alone: 48 recommendations, one-third of its total, demonstrably shaped decisions that would not otherwise have occurred. A further 62 recommendations across the cases, 13 per cent, were classified as high uncertainty because the evidence was contradictory or insufficient. The study also dissected why recommendations failed. Some 284, or 57 per cent, fell into the ‘no uptake’ category—ignored or rejected by governments—while 211, or 43 per cent, added nothing beyond existing or planned policy. In Berlin, the government claimed that 43 of 47 recommendations had been fully or partially taken up, yet the counterfactual analysis found genuine causal impact for only two, a textbook case of what critics call window-dressing.

Where impact did occur, it took characteristic forms. Recommendations most often enriched existing initiatives by adding substantial new elements, or fortified them by reinforcing momentum and accelerating administrative action—each mechanism observed 29 times. Eight recommendations introduced genuinely novel ideas that policymakers had never debated, and seven helped break political deadlocks. The researchers found no evidence that assemblies stopped planned policies or fundamentally shifted government positions. The French case offers vivid illustrations. The assembly’s recommendation on land take, or artificialization, was transformed into law requiring France to achieve net zero land take by 2050 and to halve its rate of soil sealing compared with the previous decade. Experts told the researchers that the recommendation turned a long-lost battle into a won interministerial decision, strengthening the government against opposition from mayors and businesses and moving the debate forward, in one expert’s estimation, by ten years. Another interviewee, a ministry official, described how the Convention’s endorsement of pre-existing ideas created a powerful acceleration effect, allowing the Ministry of Ecological Transition to win interministerial arbitrages against the Ministry of Economy that it would probably otherwise have lost.

Even in France, however, success came with dilution. The assembly called for banning domestic flights where a rail alternative of under four hours exists; the final legislation restricted the ban to routes with alternatives under two and a half hours, covering only a handful of connections. Ministerial experts acknowledged that most recommendations had been watered down, yet defended their significance, arguing that the assembly was the first in many areas to shift the boundaries of what is considered politically normal. At the recommendation level, the experts cited opposition from interest groups, ministries and parliamentarians as the most frequent killer of proposals, with one official noting bluntly that the fate of recommendations depended largely on whether the opposition was strong enough for the government to drop them. Practical barriers also mattered: some recommendations lacked novelty, conflicted with constitutional or European Union frameworks, or were too vague to implement, while others foundered on political opposition grounded in perceived unfeasibility or unconsidered trade-offs.

The starkest lesson of the study concerns political context rather than deliberative design. France’s exceptional impact flowed from an interplay of unusually high political leadership, genuine delegation of power, and the public pressure these generated. President Emmanuel Macron granted the assembly a ‘co-governance’ role, promising to transmit its legislative proposals to Parliament or a referendum ‘without filter’, and instructed the government to draft a new law—the Loi Climat et Résilience—based directly on its recommendations. This quasi-legislative mandate attracted exceptional media attention and scrutiny from NGOs, journalists and opposition parties, scrutiny that intensified as the government diluted parts of the package, and it helped tip backstage negotiations within the state. Elsewhere, the political scaffolding was absent or fragmented. The German assembly was a civil-society initiative without institutional anchoring, launched shortly before a national election. The UK assembly was a parliamentary process with limited government engagement. Austria’s assembly became seen as a Green Party project openly criticized by its Conservative coalition partners. Scotland’s was commissioned by the government but initiated by Parliament, breeding suspicion. Berlin’s minister used it chiefly as a lever against coalition partners, and the assembly struggled to add value amid parallel expert processes.

The authors conclude that under the current ad hoc advisory model, citizens’ assemblies can raise the ambition of climate policy but depend on unusually favourable political conditions to convert proposals into decisions—conditions that sophisticated procedural design alone cannot supply. They suggest that realizing the full potential of these institutions may require granting them greater institutionalized authority alongside electoral institutions, ensuring their visibility, and reducing their dependence on politicians constrained by party politics and electoral incentives. Such a step, they caution, would demand a broader societal debate about what constitutes legitimate representative democracy. The study’s limitations are acknowledged: it did not assess the substantive content of recommendations or their expected emission reductions, focused on decision-making rather than long-term policy effects, and is confined to Western Europe. Yet its core message is likely to resonate far beyond the six cases examined. Deliberative democracy has proven it can imagine a bolder climate future than elected governments dare to propose; the unfinished experiment is whether political systems will let that imagination govern.

Subject of Research: Policy impact and ambition of climate citizens' assemblies in Western Europe

Article Title: Citizens’ assemblies propose ambitious climate policy but impacts remain limited

Article References: Pfeffer, J., Einhauser, H., Hauke, J., Hoffmann, K., Ruf, L., Weber, M., Weckbecker, F., Wellhausen, M., & Newig, J. (2026). Citizens’ assemblies propose ambitious climate policy but impacts remain limited. Nature Climate Change. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-026-02755-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41558-026-02755-1

Keywords: citizens' assemblies, climate policy, deliberative democracy, policy impact, France, Nature Climate Change, counterfactual analysis, minipublics, climate governance, political leadership, public participation, Europe

The research, published in Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy by Chenyang Lee and Seiichi Ogata of Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Energy Science, examines Japan’s Special Provisions for Photovoltaic Power Generation Facilities, or SPPF. These are local ordinances, adopted by prefectures and municipalities, designed to harmonize renewable energy development with the natural, historical and cultural environment. Because different local governments adopted the provisions at different times, the policy rollout created what economists call a quasi-natural experiment: a real-world setting in which the effects of a policy can be isolated in much the same way as in a controlled trial.

The authors assembled an unusually rich dataset covering 1,689 Japanese municipalities over the period from 2014 to 2022. Photovoltaic installation figures came from the renewable energy statistics maintained by the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, collected under the country’s Feed-in Tariff system, under which the government commits to purchasing renewable electricity at a fixed price and passes part of the cost to electricity users through a surcharge. Land-cover information was drawn from the European Space Agency’s Climate Change Initiative land cover time series, which provides globally consistent classifications at a resolution of 300 meters. Municipal boundaries, local fiscal indicators and meteorological data rounded out the panel.

To extract the causal effect of the ordinances, the researchers employed two complementary econometric techniques. The first is a multi-period Difference-in-Differences model, which compares municipalities that adopted the SPPF provisions with those that had not yet done so, before and after adoption, while accounting for the staggered timing of adoption across jurisdictions. The second is a Continuous Difference-in-Differences model, which exploits variation in the intensity or stringency of regulation rather than treating the policy as a simple on-off switch. This distinction matters, because the SPPF ordinances differ considerably in how they are written: some lay out clear, standardized procedures with explicit time requirements for each step, while others remain more abstract. The authors used the well-documented ordinances of Yamagata Prefecture and Sano Municipality, with their transparent step-by-step guidance procedures, as benchmarks for assessing the timeliness and transparency of implementation.

The headline result is striking. The SPPF policy significantly increased photovoltaic equipment installation, expanded mixed forests composed of both broadleaf and coniferous trees, and improved land-use patterns. In other words, the very regulations designed to constrain solar development did not suppress it — they accompanied more solar deployment and more forest cover at the same time. The likely mechanism is that well-designed environmental provisions channel projects toward appropriate sites, require mitigation measures such as revegetation, and give developers a predictable approval process, which reduces conflict and accelerates rather than stalls construction.

Just as important is where the policy works best. The study finds that the effectiveness of environmental regulation depends on the level of government doing the regulating. Prefectural-level policies proved more effective at promoting overall photovoltaic installation capacity, consistent with their broader jurisdictional reach and their ability to set consistent rules across many municipalities. Municipal-level policies, by contrast, were more effective at encouraging the adoption of small-scale photovoltaic systems and at shaping local land-use patterns, reflecting their closer familiarity with specific sites, ecosystems and community concerns. Neither level dominates the other; each excels at a different dimension of the energy-environment trade-off.

The most consequential finding, however, concerns the interaction between the two levels. The authors report that policy interventions implemented at different governance levels generate complementary effects that enhance overall policy effectiveness. When prefectural and municipal regulations operate together, the combined outcome exceeds what either could achieve alone. This synergy arises through a hybrid regulatory approach that combines traditional command-and-control instruments — binding rules, procedural requirements and standards — with public participation mechanisms such as information sessions and opportunities for residents to influence decisions. Regulatory design and public involvement both matter, and their importance differs across levels of government.

The study also documents a subtler pattern in how governments manage their policy portfolios. Municipalities tend to avoid implementing policies with overlapping objectives simultaneously. In particular, the SPPF policy is typically not enforced concurrently with the Ordinance on Specialization of Global Warming Countermeasures, even though the two share goals such as promoting renewable energy and protecting ecosystems. The researchers note that the global warming ordinance mentions these aims only in general terms, without specific measures or clear benchmarks, so running the two together would risk redundancy and policy conflict. Local governments, it appears, actively curate their regulatory mix to prevent overlap — a finding with direct implications for anyone designing policy packages for sustainability transitions.

These results speak to a long-running debate in environmental governance. Scholars have argued that climate and energy problems are polycentric, requiring action at multiple scales, and that collaborative governance can achieve collective action in social-ecological systems. But empirical evidence on whether multi-level regulation actually complements or merely duplicates itself has been scarce. By quantifying the synergy between prefectural and municipal ordinances, the Kyoto team provides rare causal evidence that vertical coordination pays off. The findings align with international work on policy mixes for sustainability transitions, which emphasizes that the interaction between instruments — not just their individual strength — determines outcomes.

The practical implications extend well beyond Japan. As countries worldwide race to expand solar capacity, conflicts over land are intensifying, from farmland conversion disputes to habitat loss around utility-scale installations. The Japanese experience suggests a template: pair capacity-promoting frameworks at higher levels of government with site-sensitive, participatory regulation at the local level, write ordinances with clear procedures and defined timelines, and audit the portfolio for overlapping mandates. Done well, environmental regulation stops being a brake on the energy transition and becomes its steering mechanism — one that delivers more panels on rooftops and suitable sites, healthier forests on the hillsides, and communities that feel heard in the process.

Subject of Research: Multi-level environmental regulation and its complementary effects on photovoltaic deployment and land use in Japan

Article Title: The complementarity of multi-level heterogeneous environmental regulation: a quasi-natural experiment based on the special provisions for photovoltaic power generation facilities in Japan

Article References: Lee, C., & Ogata, S. (2026). The complementarity of multi-level heterogeneous environmental regulation: a quasi-natural experiment based on the special provisions for photovoltaic power generation facilities in Japan. Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy, 28(10), Article 267. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10098-026-03619-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10098-026-03619-0

Keywords: environmental regulation, photovoltaic energy, multi-level governance, Japan, difference-in-differences, land use, renewable energy policy, public participation, quasi-natural experiment, forest cover, Feed-in Tariff, policy synergy

The tool, called the System for Monitoring and Assessment of Public Participation, or SysMAPP, was developed by Giovana Cioffi and colleagues at São Paulo State University in Brazil and the University of Cádiz in Spain. Its central premise is deceptively simple: procedural quality and substantive outcomes are causally linked, and only by evaluating both together can managers understand why participation succeeds in one place and fails in another. The model rests on five hierarchically organized criteria—Planning, Representativeness, Transparency, Influence, and Effectiveness—each measured through a set of indicators drawn from a systematic review of 86 documents spanning three languages and multiple continents.

The architecture of the system reflects a deliberate theoretical claim. Planning and Representativeness form the foundation: Planning establishes the legal frameworks, meeting infrastructure, and resources that allow a participatory arena to operate at all, while Representativeness determines whose interests enter the room in the first place. Transparency then acts as the axis of information flow and accountability, letting stakeholders monitor compliance and subject state action to public scrutiny. Influence captures the redistribution of decision-making power—the moment when the preceding criteria converge into actual authority over objectives, zoning, budgets, and management plans. Effectiveness sits at the apex, measuring intermediate outcomes such as social trust, conflict resolution, knowledge integration, and implemented agreements.

Building the system was a four-stage process. The researchers began with a conceptual review in Scopus and Web of Science, operationalized the findings into criteria and indicators, and validated them with eight experts from Brazil, Spain, and Portugal. A pilot application in two Spanish protected areas in the Bay of Cádiz exposed methodological limitations that were then corrected. A systematic literature review followed, screening nearly 3,000 records down to 52 peer-reviewed studies and 34 gray-literature documents. The team mapped 407 indicators and variables from this corpus, assigned 358 of them to the five criteria, and consolidated functionally related variables into streamlined, measurable indicators compatible with the data that protected areas routinely hold—management plans, legal instruments, and meeting records.

Scoring follows an ordinal scale from zero to three, with performance classified into four levels: Critical, Deficient, Improved, and Advanced. Crucially, the classification uses a gating condition on priority indicators—the structural elements the review identified as foundational, such as a formal legal framework and basic documentation. A criterion cannot reach a high rating by accumulating points on peripheral items while core requirements remain unmet. Borderline transition zones acknowledge that the boundary between adjacent scenarios is rarely clear-cut, distinguishing a structurally sound arena with isolated weaknesses from one whose foundational mechanisms are failing.

The researchers applied the final version to two coastal protected areas classified under IUCN Category V, where conservation coexists with regulated human use: the North Coast Marine Environmental Protection Area in São Paulo, Brazil, spanning roughly 3,150 square kilometers across four municipalities, and the Bahía de Cádiz Natural Park in Spain, covering 105 square kilometers of salt marshes and salt pans shaped by two millennia of salt production. Both are contested seascapes where unregulated tourism, port infrastructure, and—in the Brazilian case—oil and gas exploitation collide with the livelihoods of vulnerable groups such as artisanal fishers, shellfish gatherers, and salt workers.

The results were strikingly contrasting. In Brazil, the analysis found strong stakeholder influence, achieved largely through the presence of Indigenous Peoples and traditional communities on the council, which elevated artisanal fisheries agendas and translated them into zoning priorities. The chain the model proposes—Representativeness feeding Influence, which in turn drives Effectiveness—was visible in concrete outcomes: management of spatial conflicts between small-scale and large-scale fisheries, and accountability pressures over the impacts of oil, gas, and port activities. The Spanish case ran in reverse. Shellfish gatherers and salt workers remained absent from the council, their concerns went unadvocated, and results on abandoned salt pans and illegal harvesting lagged. Low planning quality and weak transparency further emptied the process, discouraging engagement and feeding back into poor representation.

One of the study’s most pointed insights concerns the difference between formal status and real power. Both councils are legally consultative bodies, yet they occupy clearly distinct positions on what participation scholars call Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation—the Brazilian council operating at a partnership level, the Spanish one at a symbolic stage. The mere existence of seats reserved for vulnerable groups, the authors note, does not make an arena inclusive; their effective presence, the support mechanisms available, and whether outcomes actually favor them must all be verified. In Cádiz, the analysis of meeting minutes confirmed stakeholder perceptions of limited influence and resistance from public authorities, and revealed that low-relevance actors continued to hold council seats while port and real estate interests—key drivers of salt-marsh loss—went unrepresented.

Beyond scoring, SysMAPP is designed as a diagnostic instrument for adaptive governance. Because its criteria are hierarchically related, the system does not merely rate a participatory arena; it locates where the process underperforms and why, tracing the causal chain that constrains influence and outcomes. The researchers derived four adaptation milestones from the relationships among criteria: consolidating the foundations of participation, fostering bidirectional information flow, sharing decision-making on issues of common interest, and achieving concrete outcomes. Applied regularly, these milestones feed results back into the management cycle, converting institutional diagnoses into prioritized, context-sensitive interventions even where human and financial resources are scarce. The Brazilian area reached all four milestones; the Spanish area surpassed none, signaling the need for structural reform rather than incremental adjustment.

The authors are candid about limitations. The system depends on detailed documentation, so its applicability shrinks in protected areas with sparse records or limited technical capacity—a constraint that affected the present study, where some indicators could not be assessed due to missing data. It is built for formally constituted, continuous participatory bodies such as councils and committees, and is less sensitive to sporadic mechanisms like public hearings. The final phase, which translates results into management interventions, has not yet been tested. Even so, the tool arrives at a moment of growing demand: international frameworks including the 2030 Agenda, the Escazú Agreement, and the European Green Deal all emphasize access to information, accountability, and collective decision-making in environmental matters. By bridging the persistent gap between the legal provision of participation and its effective operationalization, SysMAPP offers managers a way to move beyond box-ticking—and offers communities an evidence base for demanding the influence they were promised.

Subject of Research: A monitoring and assessment model for evaluating public participation processes and outcomes in protected area governance

Article Title: A Model for Evaluating the Procedural and Effectiveness Dimensions of Public Participation in Protected Areas: The SysMAPP

Article References: Cioffi, G., Sansolo, D. G., & Sanabria, J. G. (2026). A Model for Evaluating the Procedural and Effectiveness Dimensions of Public Participation in Protected Areas: The SysMAPP. Environmental Management, 76(9), Article 294. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-026-02603-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00267-026-02603-0

Keywords: protected areas, public participation, environmental governance, SysMAPP, adaptive management, stakeholder engagement, conservation, coastal management, participation assessment, Brazil, Spain, Environmental Management

The study, led by Mekonen Mekasha of Addis Ababa University together with professors Belay Simane and Engdawork Assefa, set out to answer a question that has dogged environmental policy in developing economies for decades: does Environmental Impact Assessment, or EIA, actually change what happens on the ground, or does it merely produce documents? To find out, the researchers deployed a concurrent parallel mixed-methods design, combining quantitative survey data from 103 technical experts working across the road sector with in-depth qualitative interviews of 16 senior officials drawn from federal and regional government agencies. This dual approach allowed the team to measure perceptions of effectiveness statistically while also probing the institutional reasons behind the numbers.

The analytical framework rested on four widely used dimensions of EIA effectiveness. Procedural effectiveness asks whether the legally required steps, screening, scoping, report preparation, review and approval, are carried out on schedule. Substantive effectiveness asks whether the process actually improves environmental outcomes, from protecting watersheds and wildlife corridors to reducing soil erosion along cut-and-fill slopes. Normative effectiveness concerns whether the process embodies values such as transparency, public participation and social equity. Transactive effectiveness, the least studied of the four, measures whether the costs of running the assessment system are justified by the benefits it delivers.

The results revealed a striking asymmetry. Procedural effectiveness scored relatively well: environmental impact statements are prepared, reviewed and cleared, and projects obtain the certificates that allow construction to proceed. But the other three dimensions lagged far behind. Mitigation measures recommended in assessment reports were frequently not carried through into construction contracts or supervision plans. Monitoring of predicted impacts during and after construction was sporadic at best, and in many cases effectively absent once the approval stage had been passed. Public consultation, where it occurred, tended to be superficial, announced late and conducted in forms that gave affected communities little genuine influence over project design or compensation decisions.

Behind these weaknesses, the researchers identified a consistent root cause: governance. Poor governance, characterized by a lack of accountability, institutional misalignment and weak enforcement, undermined the performance of the entire EIA system. The Environmental Protection Authority, nominally the regulator, often lacked the staff, technical capacity and political weight to challenge powerful road agencies. Responsibilities for environmental oversight were fragmented across federal and regional bodies with unclear boundaries, allowing responsibility to slip through institutional gaps. When violations occurred, enforcement mechanisms were so feeble that contractors faced few meaningful consequences for ignoring mitigation commitments.

The Modjo–Moyale corridor makes an ideal test case precisely because of its scale and ambition. Stretching hundreds of kilometers from the town of Modjo, south of Addis Ababa, toward the border town of Moyale, the route crosses sharply contrasting ecological zones, from the Rift Valley’s semi-arid lowlands to fertile highland plateaus. Road projects of this magnitude cut through farmland, disturb drainage patterns, generate large volumes of borrow pits and quarries, and open previously remote areas to rapid land-use change. Satellite-based research on Ethiopia’s broader road investment program has already documented how new roads accelerate agricultural expansion and land conversion, making robust environmental follow-up along such corridors not a luxury but a necessity.

The Ethiopian findings echo a broader pattern documented across East Africa and beyond. Studies in Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya and Namibia have similarly reported that EIA systems in the region are procedurally mature but substantively thin, with follow-up and monitoring identified as the weakest links almost everywhere. International best-practice principles for EIA follow-up, first codified by researchers in the mid-2000s, call for continuous monitoring, adaptive management and clear feedback loops between predicted and actual impacts. The Ethiopian case shows how difficult those principles are to institutionalize when the agencies charged with them are under-resourced and politically subordinate to the very projects they are meant to scrutinize.

What distinguishes the new study is its insistence that the remedy is not primarily technical. The authors conclude that the key barriers to effective EIA implementation in Ethiopia’s road sector arise from governance deficiencies rather than from gaps in scientific methodology or legal drafting. Ethiopia has had a mandatory EIA proclamation since 2002, and its assessment guidelines are broadly consistent with international norms. The problem, the researchers argue, lies in how power and accountability are distributed. Improving baseline surveys or adding more sophisticated impact-prediction models will accomplish little if nobody is obliged to act on the findings.

Accordingly, the study prescribes a set of targeted institutional interventions. First, transparency must be strengthened, with assessment reports, monitoring data and compliance records placed in the public domain so that civil society, the media and affected communities can act as external watchdogs. Second, public involvement must move from token consultation to substantive participation, in which community input demonstrably shapes project alignment, mitigation design and compensation schemes. Third, an independent and reliable monitoring system is needed, insulated from the construction agencies it oversees, with statutory authority to halt works, impose penalties and require corrective action when environmental conditions are breached.

The stakes extend well beyond a single road corridor. Ethiopia’s road network is the backbone of a national development strategy that aims to connect landlocked production zones to ports and regional markets, and international lenders including the World Bank and the African Development Bank finance a substantial share of that expansion. If environmental assessment remains a procedural formality, the cumulative costs, degraded watersheds, lost biodiversity, eroded soils and unresolved community grievances, will accumulate silently across thousands of kilometers of asphalt. Conversely, if the governance reforms identified in this study are implemented, the authors argue, EIA could be transformed from a bureaucratic checkpoint into a cornerstone of sustainable development, ensuring that the country’s remarkable infrastructure growth does not come at the expense of the landscapes and livelihoods it traverses.

Subject of Research: Effectiveness of Environmental Impact Assessment in Ethiopian road infrastructure projects

Article Title: Environmental Impact Assessment Effectiveness in Ethiopian Road Infrastructure Projects: Evidence from the Modjo–Moyale Interregional Road Corridor

Article References: Mekasha, M., Simane, B., & Assefa, E. (2026). Environmental Impact Assessment Effectiveness in Ethiopian Road Infrastructure Projects: Evidence from the Modjo–Moyale Interregional Road Corridor. Environmental Management, 76(10), Article 323. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-026-02594-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00267-026-02594-y

Keywords: environmental impact assessment, Ethiopia, road infrastructure, Modjo–Moyale corridor, governance, environmental management, public participation, monitoring, sustainable development, East Africa, institutional capacity, environmental policy

The study, authored by Brady Kennedy of Columbia University’s Department of Sociology, Cristian Capotescu of Columbia’s Trust Collaboratory, and Jennifer Laird of Lehman College, challenges the prevailing assumption that trust in smart city technologies can be engineered through better privacy protections, more reliable sensors and clearer communication. Drawing on a thematic synthesis of sociological research on trust alongside the literature on public participation, the authors contend that trust is not an attitude stored in the minds of individuals and measured by surveys, but a property of ongoing social relations between residents and the experts and institutions behind these initiatives.

Smart city initiatives typically combine several layers of technology: distributed sensors and connected devices grouped under the heading of the Internet of Things, which collect data from the built environment; information and communication technologies and cloud computing, which transmit and process that data at scale; and increasingly, artificial intelligence and algorithmic decision-making, which translate the resulting data into classifications and predictions for operational use. Stated aims range from optimizing public services and improving environmental sustainability to making infrastructure more accessible and cities safer and more livable.

Much existing research on trust in smart cities operates within a risk-benefit logic. Scholars have produced testable models simulating how mistrust hinders deployment, measured public attitudes through surveys, and proposed lists of trust characteristics such as privacy, reliability and fairness that designers can integrate into systems. The assumption is that as initiatives follow prescribed security parameters, privacy standards and governance norms, and communicate those choices transparently, public trust will follow. Kennedy and colleagues call this a technology-centric view that treats trust as flowing in one direction, with the public asked to extend it according to how experts adjust technical features.

In contrast, recent sociological scholarship, particularly from the field of science, technology and society, understands trust as inherently relational. In this account, trust emerges from interactions between trustors, the people doing the trusting; trustees, those in whom trust is placed; and trust objects, the specific focus of the relation at a given time and place. A smart city initiative may be the object of a trust relation, but it is never the trustee: residents extend or withhold trust with respect to the agency, vendor or partnership that designs and operates the system. Crucially, because uncertainty is what makes trust necessary in the first place, its conditions can never be fully engineered away through technical decisions.

The authors further draw on work describing trust as a verb, an active practice of trusting. Trusting is a skillful evaluative process in which residents scrutinize information and conduct rather than placing blind faith in experts. This carries a demand for both sides: the trustor must do the work of assessment, and the trustee must render itself answerable to that scrutiny. Because the trustee in these relations is an institution whose authority is itself at issue, answerability requires that decisions, and the power behind them, be made contestable. Notably, the authors argue that mistrust is not a failure of trust-building but internal to the same relational ties, playing an important role in promoting accountability and public engagement.

From this foundation, the study develops a typology of three participatory roles: the public as co-accessors, co-collectors and co-designers. Each role names the position residents occupy relative to smart city experts, and, because a relation cannot be specified from one side alone, also names what experts must place at stake. As co-accessors, residents shape, monitor and contest how data is gathered and used, while institutions accept the vulnerability of scrutiny. Examples range from static open data dashboards such as London’s DataStore to deeper arrangements like Barcelona’s New Data Deal, which re-envisions collected data as a public commons, and Manchester’s data governance practices, where residents and policymakers negotiate data gathering within structured engagements.

As co-collectors, residents directly produce data for smart city systems, through passive smartphone sensing or active crowdsourcing, while experts accept dependence on evidence they did not themselves produce. The MiraMap platform in Torino, Italy, allows residents to report and track urban problems, research showing it increased trust in government and technology alike. At the furthest extent, residents deploy their own sensors through systems such as HabitatMap AirSense and AirBox to generate environmental evidence independent of official accounts, converting mistrust into an instrument of accountability. As co-designers, finally, residents participate in shaping what is built, with experts relinquishing exclusive control. Iterative workshop approaches that visibly incorporate resident feedback have been shown in follow-up surveys to increase community trust in both the technology and the researchers, while game-based and virtual reality formats help include elderly and non-technical participants.

The framework carries pointed lessons for practitioners. Tokenism and consultation that leave residents feeling passively managed are not failures of technique but interactions in which no reciprocity was established; the mistrust that follows is a proportionate response, as illustrated by the urban data trust proposed for Sidewalk Toronto, constituted by the operator on the operator’s own terms, which failed to generate the mutuality on which trusting depends. The authors also caution that participatory approaches do not encounter a ready-made public but bring one into being, and that formats demanding time, mobility and technical confidence tend to reproduce existing inequalities, underrepresenting marginalized groups. Compensation and trusted community intermediaries can help widen who participates.

Ultimately, the authors argue, smart city professionals should stop treating participation as an instrument for raising approval scores and start treating it as the intentional structuring of reciprocal interaction in which trust, and mistrust, can both operate productively. There is no single modality for building trust, and each initiative will pose context-specific challenges. But without a relational understanding in which experts make themselves genuinely answerable, they warn, even well-intentioned future initiatives will face the same public backlash that has already derailed smart city projects from Toronto to San Diego.

Subject of Research: Trust-building through public participation in smart city initiatives

Article Title: Reframing participatory approaches to the smart city as opportunities for trust-building

Article References: Kennedy, B., Capotescu, C., & Laird, J. (2026). Reframing participatory approaches to the smart city as opportunities for trust-building. Discover Cities, 3(1), Article 177. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44327-026-00352-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44327-026-00352-7

Keywords: smart cities, public trust, public participation, sociology of trust, STS, expertise, data governance, participatory design, citizen sensing, urban technology, co-design, mistrust