The review employed a semi-systematic search built on the PRISMA scheme, the standard protocol for identifying, screening and including studies in systematic reviews, combined with the CIMO logic, which structures a research question around Context, Intervention, Mechanism and Outcome. The ultimate research question asked what the most common innovation initiatives are that prevail in implementing or accelerating the green energy transition in the EU. The final query, run on Scopus on 21 February 2024, initially returned 197 records, which were narrowed through exclusion criteria such as removal of duplicates and publications without a valid DOI, restriction to specific document types and English language, down to 137 eligible papers, all screened for explicit links to innovation. A complementary, less structured search in Google Scholar added 16 more publications, bringing the total pool to 152 studies.

To classify this body of work, the team used a content-based approach rather than a conventional bibliometric one. Instead of fixing thematic categories in advance, they let categories emerge from the literature itself through a modified version of a proxy approach developed in earlier research. Every paper was tagged, often with multiple keywords, and these proxies were iteratively regrouped as the pool grew, so that the clustering evolved according to the literature reviewed. The result was seven broad categories: Policy, Innovation and Research; Industry and Economy; Localised studies; Energy; Society; Digital transition and New Tech; and Environment. A separate comparison analysis was run using the VOSviewer software.

The temporal pattern of the literature is telling. Although no time limits were imposed on the search, every retrieved study was published after 2016, in the aftermath of the United Nations’ adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, suggesting that the establishment of the green transition narrative in the scientific literature matches the aftermath of the internationally agreed sustainability goals. Only 11 papers appeared before 2019, but publication accelerated sharply in 2020, with 25 papers that year, and the pace remained sustained until it began to level off around 2024. Geographically, the majority of studies, 91 in total, focused on individual countries, while 61 had an international or undefined scope, suggesting that research on the green transition remains predominantly oriented towards national and local investigations of individual member states rather than EU-wide or global explorations.

The headline finding concerns where the research weight lies. The three categories the authors describe as the soft sciences, Policy, Innovation and Research, Industry and Economy, and Society, together account for roughly 70 percent of the collected papers. Within the policy cluster, which was the main topic in 104 papers, the UN Sustainable Development Goals were the most popular proxy, appearing in 51 studies, while EU-funded initiatives were the least studied with just 10. The authors note that in the five years after the SDGs were agreed, seven papers on that theme were published, whereas 18 papers have addressed the EU Green Deal in the period from 2020 to the start of 2025, and they expect a similar and greater uptake in Green Deal-focused research as its timeline advances.

The Industry and Economy cluster carried the most proxies, ten in all, and was the main topic in 83 papers. Sustainability and innovation in organisations’ operations was the most popular proxy with 28 papers, while jobs and green skills was the least popular with just three. The reviewed studies range from an empirical case where industrial processes minimised crop losses, to survey data from Italian companies on energy consumption and decarbonisation, to Portuguese analyses of organisational commitments towards the SDGs. Macroeconomic studies mostly presented applied methodologies, including advanced statistical assessments of the relationship between economic globalisation and decarbonisation technologies and a synthetic development indicator applied to Eastern Europe. Green finance studies showed that green taxation and changes across emissions trading systems relate to categories outside the economic cluster, indicating potential implications across other sectors, while public-private relationships and job creation remained under-represented.

By contrast, the Energy category was the main topic in only 35 papers, and Localised studies in just 25. Within energy research, the green energy transition itself dominated with 23 papers, spanning topics from human rights to clean energy and policy obstacles, while green and e-mobility and built-environment energy performance attracted only eight each. Only a handful of studies dealt with renewable energy technologies and investments or energy storage. The authors offer possible explanations: energy outcomes may often be reported as technical studies outside the green transition and SDG discourse, or research at the energy-industry interface may be oriented towards commercialisation rather than academic publication, and they acknowledge that the initial keyword selection for the search may have constrained the energy results. In the localised cluster, urban focus studies led with 11 papers on urban transformations, smart cities and urban agriculture, while islands attracted only three, two concerned with energy and one with water. Just 12 percent of the eligible papers referred to an urban or rural setting, and rural studies mostly linked local development to community and cooperation rather than technical topics.

The Society cluster, the main topic in 72 papers, was led by human behaviour, personal traits and beliefs with 23 studies, largely surveys of stakeholder opinions across farming, energy, mobility, education and waste management, while heritage appeared in only four. Education and pedagogical innovation emerged as a strong priority, with proposals for updated curricula, social innovation and sustainability in educational settings gathering enough interest that this proxy encompasses more papers than other highly relevant topics such as renewable energy, mobility or smart cities. Justice studies were mostly found in reference to an equitable and inclusive energy transition. The Digital transition and New Tech category, the main topic in 42 papers, was led by farming advancements with 13 studies, including laser technologies, digital adoption and eco-innovations in sheep farming, while pharmaceuticals and healthcare innovation appeared in only two. Artificial intelligence and Industry 4.0 applications emerged as horizontal issues across materials development, higher education and energy systems. The Environment category, the main topic in 41 papers, was dominated by forestry, agriculture and aquaculture with 22 studies, often tied to circular economy practices, while maritime topics appeared in only three, and the authors note a lack of studies on decarbonisation of the EU building stock, energy-intensive industries and the aviation and maritime sectors.

The cross-linkage analysis sharpened the picture. By counting how often papers simultaneously addressed proxies from different categories, the researchers found that the most cross-linked domains were Environment with Policy, Innovation and Research, tied with Environment and Industry and Economy, followed by Society with Policy, and Industry and Economy with Policy. Society topics in relation to Industry and Economy were explored in 31 papers, while Energy and Localised studies were jointly investigated in only six. The authors interpret the dominant pattern as a triple helix of industrial innovation serving societal needs under the guidance of policy, with comparatively little attention paid to the environment, the twin digital and energy transitions, and place-based research. The gap analysis went further, identifying topics entirely absent from the intersections of the six highest-ranking categories. Islands, education and pedagogical innovation, smart cities and urban planning, and environmental quality and indoor air quality were each missing from four of the six. The single most commonly missing topic was pharmaceuticals and healthcare innovation, absent from all six, though the authors caution that this gap is not necessarily linked to the most urgent needs of the transition. The human behaviour category, despite being popular overall, held the most internal gaps, indicating that research there concentrates on a narrow range of questions, while the accelerating transformation and innovation category proved the most well-rounded.

The comparison with VOSviewer, which ran a co-occurrence analysis of all keywords with fractional counting and a minimum of two occurrences, produced seven clusters but proved less elaborate than the content-based analysis. The software split references to the Sustainable Development Goals into multiple distinct items, likely because of variability in spelling, and some publications lacked keywords altogether, creating ambiguity in the robustness of the co-occurrence results. The authors conclude that while the proxy approach demands more manual effort, it is preferable for small datasets where precise research gaps matter. The study carries clear limitations: the search was collected in February 2025 and complemented during revision, so later publications were excluded, publication delays mean the counts for 2024 and 2025 may be inconclusive, with reliable trend insights limited to years before 2024, and the assignment of topics under each proxy category was partly subjective, though the authors argue the emerging classification reflects the literature pool as a whole. Within those bounds, the conclusions are pointed: despite the considerable greenhouse gas emission burden of the energy and buildings sectors, and the global carbon footprints of maritime and aviation, these domains remain under-documented, the role of local authorities and grassroots action is not well reflected, and no quantitative assessments of the EU Green Deal appeared in the pool, unlike the many for the SDGs. The authors call for future work on local innovation ecosystems, on the energy dimension of the transition at the intersection of global economics and green finance within the context of the new emissions trading system, and on the energy and water consumption of data centres as artificial intelligence penetration reshapes global energy demand.

Subject of Research: A systematic literature review of innovation research topics on the EU green transition

Article Title: Emerging research topics on the role of innovation in the green transition in the EU

Article References: Kyprianou, I., Papadopoulos, P., Kafantari, N., & Montagnino, F. M. (2026). Emerging research topics on the role of innovation in the green transition in the EU. Energy Reports, 16, Article 109800. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egyr.2026.109800

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.egyr.2026.109800

Keywords: green transition, European Green Deal, innovation, systematic literature review, PRISMA, sustainable development goals, energy transition, research gaps, EU policy, social innovation, circular economy, bibliometric analysis

The study arrives at a politically charged moment. The European Union’s Mission “A Soil Deal for Europe” explicitly calls for new business models that support soil health, and regulators across the world are experimenting with carbon credits, biodiversity credits, and sustainability reporting rules that push companies to pay for ecological outcomes. Business models, in the widely used definition of Osterwalder and Pigneur, describe how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value. If policymakers want to incentivize land managers, the authors contend, they first need to understand precisely which types of value soil health investments produce, and who stands to benefit from them.

To build that understanding, Mathijs and Van Ruymbeke borrow the Total Economic Value framework from neoclassical environmental economics, refining it with the work of scholars such as Bartkowski, Davidson, and Pascual. The framework distinguishes output value, the aggregate worth of ecosystem services delivered by a system in a given state, from insurance value, the system’s capacity to keep delivering those services under disturbance and uncertainty. Output values split further into use values, covering consumptive goods like food and non-consumptive benefits like recreation, and non-use values, such as existence value and bequest value, the satisfaction people derive simply from knowing soil ecosystems persist for others and for future generations. The authors are careful to position the framework as a structured policy vocabulary rather than a neutral or exhaustive theory, noting that it must be complemented where labour, rights, power, and values that resist monetization are concerned.

From this foundation the researchers derive six complementary perspectives on soil-health-based business models. The productivist perspective treats soil as a form of capital whose improvement raises yields, cuts input costs, and increases land value, giving land managers an intrinsic motivation to invest. The ecosystem services perspective widens the lens to regulating and cultural services that benefit society at large, which can be monetized through compensation mechanisms provided that willing payers exist. The resilience perspective corresponds to insurance value: healthy soil reduces the likelihood or severity of adverse outcomes for farmers, lenders, insurers, and food processors alike, and the authors retain it as a separate category to make accounting, discounting, and long-term stewardship visible as policy concerns.

The remaining three perspectives push beyond conventional market logic. The non-use value perspective captures the benefit people obtain from the mere existence and preservation of soil ecosystems, including value for future generations, and therefore demands a commitment to benefits that may never be visibly realized. The intrinsic value perspective goes further still, asserting that soil possesses worth independent of any human preference, a view rooted in ecocentric and value-pluralist worldviews that echo the land ethic of Aldo Leopold and the agrarian essays of Wendell Berry. Finally, the social perspective, an addition not found in the original Total Economic Value framework, recognizes that soil health is a socially co-constructed concept: soil values are co-produced through natural properties, human labour, management history, and institutions, all shaped by power relations including unequal ownership and historical dispossession. This perspective emphasizes inclusive governance, community agency, and fair access to soil-related benefits.

Together, the six perspectives give economic content to the capital dimension of the broader soil security framework, which also includes capability, connectivity, and codification. Soil health investments, in this reading, are best understood as maintaining or appreciating a natural asset rather than merely boosting short-term productivity. The framework can help policymakers and financial institutions identify beneficiaries, construct credible investment cases, and design safeguards, supporting loans, guarantees, insurance arrangements, and payments for ecosystem services without assuming that every component of soil value must be monetized or collapsed into a single figure. Spatially explicit indicators can partly operationalize the idea: recent Australian research has combined soil functions, services, and threats to estimate soil management capital per hectare, and comparisons between managed phenosoils and least-modified genosoil references can reveal degradation or improvement over time. Measures such as pH-regulation costs, nutrient stocks, and available water capacity can guide targeting, though the authors stress these methods cannot capture every value perspective and should complement, not replace, plural indicators and public deliberation.

Each perspective also implies distinct policy tools and distinct failure modes. Under the productivist view, incentives should in principle be unnecessary if income gains cover the investment, but three problems commonly arise. Returns may be delayed, as in the transition to organic farming, justifying temporary subsidies whose level and duration are context-specific. Returns may be too small to cover the investment, requiring permanent additional income streams or investment subsidies. Or land users may lack the equity or credit access to invest at all, a case where government guarantees can lower lenders’ risk. The ecosystem services perspective, by contrast, relies on payments and markets such as the EU Emissions Trading System and the emerging biodiversity credit market, reinforced by mandatory rules like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. Here the authors flag three complications: interventions may not consistently deliver the expected services, which argues for hybrid schemes blending practice-based and performance-based payments; services are often co-produced, making individual contributions hard to isolate; and credits frequently fail to reflect true opportunity costs, since a one-off carbon payment does not cover the ongoing investment needed to maintain soil carbon, whose marginal gains also decline over time.

The resilience perspective exposes a classic coordination failure. Because every actor benefiting from reduced risk might be willing to pay a premium, uncoordinated action invites free-riding, over-subsidization, or under-subsidization, and unlike discrete ecosystem services, risk cannot be decomposed among beneficiaries. There can also be a direct trade-off between income and resilience, as when crop diversification forces less profitable rotations that buyers, who typically purchase only a single crop, are reluctant to support with broader contracts. The non-use and intrinsic value perspectives, lacking conventional market returns, instead call for public expenditure, intergenerational protection, legal minimum standards such as the EU Soil Monitoring Law, and cultural and educational programmes that revitalize land-based knowledge and sustain an ethic of care. The social perspective demands relational and institutional incentives: peer-exchange platforms such as EIP-Agri, adaptive policy frameworks, grants for community projects, open-access knowledge tools, and participatory research funding, alongside attention to tenure security, bargaining power, transaction costs, and benefit sharing, particularly where external investors might shift control away from local actors.

The article’s central message is deliberately uncomfortable for policymakers seeking a silver bullet: no single instrument can serve all six perspectives effectively. Soil health is shaped by multiple, overlapping values that rarely occur in isolation, and different actors may hold diverse or simultaneous values at once. Effective governance therefore requires a flexible, differentiated strategy that supports land managers with targeted, easily adoptable measures integrated into their business models, while guarding against over-subsidization and free-riding where benefits are non-excludable, and ensuring coordination, accountability, distributional safeguards, and adaptive learning. The authors also warn of the risks of tokenism and co-optation, in which community-led soil initiatives are superficially adopted without genuinely empowering communities, and note that scaling social innovations beyond pilot contexts remains a persistent challenge. By clarifying how soil as a stock can generate different flows of value, and how management can make that stock appreciate or depreciate, the framework offers decision makers a foundation for designing inclusive and adaptive policies, one that adds economic substance to soil security while preventing capital valuation from becoming the sole account of what soils are and why they matter.

Subject of Research: Value-based frameworks for soil health business models and soil policy design

Article Title: Soil health-based business models: perspectives and policy implications

Article References: Mathijs, E., & Van Ruymbeke, K. (2026). Soil health-based business models: perspectives and policy implications. SOIL, 12(2), 835-840. https://doi.org/10.5194/soil-12-835-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/soil-12-835-2026

Keywords: soil health, soil security, business models, ecosystem services, total economic value, soil policy, resilience, carbon credits, biodiversity credits, EU Soil Deal for Europe, natural capital, social innovation

The concept of grassroots innovation refers to networks of activists and organisations generating novel bottom-up solutions for sustainable development and sustainable consumption. Unlike the top-down model of innovation driven by policy, markets and formal science, grassroots initiatives typically emerge in response to social or environmental problems that public and private institutions have failed to solve. They often satisfy needs unmet by the state or industry, reshape social relations by involving disadvantaged groups, and enhance communities’ capacity to participate in socio-political life. India has a particularly rich history here: the Honey Bee Network, founded in 1988, has spent decades documenting and disseminating innovations devised by rural inventors, navigating the delicate balance between spreading ideas and protecting them from co-option by powerful actors.

To study plastic-focused initiatives, the research team developed a composite framework drawing on circular economy literature, studies of community waste management, and evaluative frameworks from the sustainability field. They characterised each initiative across six categories: context, appropriateness, governance and management, innovation, diffusion, and outcomes and impacts. Data came from thirteen semi-structured interviews with people involved in the fifteen initiatives, which spanned states including Haryana, New Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Goa, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Assam and Kerala. The team coded transcripts deductively against the framework categories, with researchers in India and Australia cross-checking each other’s interpretations to strengthen the credibility of the qualitative analysis.

One striking finding concerned the circular economy strategies the initiatives actually pursued. Although the circular economy is often imagined as a hierarchy of actions, with refusing and reusing plastic ranked above recycling, ten of the fifteen initiatives focused on recycling, with only two each devoted to refuse, reuse and repurpose, and one to recovery. The researchers suggest this reflects a desire to tackle immediate, visible environmental problems such as littered streets and overflowing landfills, as well as the fact that collection can be organised with limited resources. The pattern hints at an untapped opportunity: with better support, community initiatives might branch into higher-order strategies that prevent plastic waste from arising in the first place.

Context, perhaps counterintuitively, was more often a barrier than a booster. Interviewees rarely cited enabling conditions, and where the regulatory environment did help, it was usually through municipal by-laws that made activities such as multi-way waste segregation compulsory, lending legitimacy even when enforcement was weak. National campaigns like Swachh Bharat Abhiyan and state bans on single-use plastics also created favourable conditions. More typically, however, initiatives ran into structural walls. India’s Extended Producer Responsibility rules were described by one participant as functioning less as a catalyst for recycling than as a business model that channels plastic to cement kilns, because the collection and segregation infrastructure needed for genuine recycling simply does not exist in many places. Another interviewee noted that tender prices paid under EPR, as low as 1.5 to 2 rupees per unit of service, made it impossible for a waste picker-managed collection centre to compete.

Infrastructure gaps compounded these regulatory frustrations. Some initiatives collected more plastic than local facilities could process; others found that the waste they gathered ended up in landfill or was burned because recycling centres were inaccessible or nonexistent. Building new infrastructure was often impossible without a reliable power supply or sufficient waste volumes to justify the investment. The low commercial value of certain plastics, and the unsuitability of contaminated material for recovery, further undermined efforts to repurpose or recycle what communities collected. Even the availability of affordable alternatives to plastic products proved a bottleneck, with one campaign for small vendors unable to supply viable substitutes at the time of its activities.

Where initiatives did succeed, three aspects of governance and management stood out: collaboration, stakeholder engagement and financial sustainability. Multi-stakeholder collaboration was the most commonly cited success factor, bringing together urban local bodies, waste management corporations, recyclers, community organisations and households. In one housing society segregation program, the municipality mandated segregation and funded bins, the waste corporation processed the material, and households operated the system. Public sector involvement also conferred trust, with one participant reporting that it generated considerable faith and comfort among citizens. Cross-sectoral partnerships proved equally important, as when an environmental group concerned about menstrual pad pollution joined forces with health departments after discovering the scale of health problems women were experiencing.

Engaging communities required overcoming real resistance. Interviewees described residents who found segregation an inconvenient burden, questioned the legitimacy of campaigns lacking government backing, doubted that individual actions could change anything, or simply prioritised livelihoods over environmental concerns. Successful initiatives countered these attitudes by providing early, personalised information, demonstrating tangible results, such as park benches made from beach-collected plastic, and working through existing structures like women’s groups, schools and religious leaders. Financial sustainability remained the Achilles heel: one initiative collapsed after its pilot phase when funding dried up, others limped along on personal funds, and public money was described as very minimal even where it existed. Some organisations achieved self-sufficiency through stall fees at annual exhibitions or by helping participants build businesses selling cloth bags or running their own waste collection centres.

Diffusion, when it happened, followed three distinct scaling patterns: strategic, demand-led and participant-led, alongside replication by governments or citizens and translation of ideas to new settings. A school initiative that lets children pay fees with collected plastic was invited by a state government to expand, though without funding the expansion stalled. Drop-off point schemes grew organically as participants established and managed new sites themselves. The innovations themselves clustered around three foci: most shaped alternative material arrangements through reuse, repurposing and recycling; seven built individual competences; and five created alternative socio-economic settings, notably by formalising informal waste pickers, providing them with identity documents, insurance, bank accounts and salaried employment. The authors argue this last dimension deserves more attention, since the circular economy has long been criticised for privileging economic and material flows over social equity, and in India, where the informal sector handles much of the nation’s waste, grassroots initiatives may be uniquely positioned to embed justice in the transition, provided policymakers treat them as stakeholders in their own right rather than passive beneficiaries.

Subject of Research: Grassroots innovation initiatives supporting a circular economy for plastics in India

Article Title: Transitioning to a circular economy for plastics in India: what role for grassroots innovation?

Article References: Ruoso, L.-E., Goswami, G., Retamal, M., Panandiker, A. P., Gupta, A., & Niazi, Z. (2026). Transitioning to a circular economy for plastics in India: what role for grassroots innovation?. Journal of Industrial Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44498-026-00194-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44498-026-00194-x

Keywords: grassroots innovation, circular economy, plastic pollution, India, waste management, recycling, informal waste sector, waste pickers, sustainability transitions, extended producer responsibility, community initiatives, social innovation

The study, published in Discover Global Society, rests on a deliberately conditional argument. Local knowledge, the authors contend, does not inherently become tourism value; a tourism activity is not inherently a social innovation; and social innovation does not necessarily produce inclusive development. Each step requires something extra. Knowledge must be translated with community authorization, translation must reorganize relationships and capabilities to count as innovation, and innovation must be institutionalized under community control before its benefits can be called inclusive. In Kampung Yoboi, the researchers found strong evidence for the first two steps and only partial evidence for the third.

The raw material is distinctive. Sago, the starchy staple of Papuan communities, functions simultaneously as food, livelihood, ecological system, cultural identity, and intergenerational knowledge. In Kampung Yoboi it has been reinterpreted as a tourism experience through guided sago-forest tracking, traditional food preparation, storytelling, and the sago grub festival. A tourism manager told the researchers that sago is not merely food but the community’s identity, a medium through which visitors can learn about the culture, environment, and way of life around Lake Sentani. The floating settlement itself, with its colorful docks and painted houses, has been reframed as the destination rather than a backdrop to separately constructed attractions.

Methodologically, the study is an interpretive qualitative case study. The team used purposive, criterion-based sampling to assemble informants across seven categories: one community leader, four members of the Tourism Awareness Group known as Pokdarwis, one tourism manager, five residents involved in tourism, four local knowledge holders, five visitors, and four village-level institutional actors. Semi-structured interviews lasting forty-five to sixty minutes were audio-recorded with consent, transcribed, and analyzed thematically in NVivo 12, combining deductive codes drawn from social innovation theory with inductive codes that surfaced unanticipated issues such as dependence on individuals and damaged facilities. Triangulation across participant groups, field observations, and documentary sources strengthened the analysis, and an audit trail preserved interpretive decisions.

The findings show that tourism value in Kampung Yoboi is co-created rather than manufactured. A community leader explained that the village becomes attractive because what visitors see comes from local life itself, from the lake, the houses on water, and the way people live with sago and nature. Ordinary infrastructure doubles as tourism infrastructure: bridges are both daily pathways and visitor routes, and household practices such as craft production and food preparation become small-scale income opportunities. This supports value co-creation theory, in which tourism value emerges from interactions among residents, knowledge holders, visitors, and the material environment rather than from managers alone.

Yet the translation process remains fragile. Much of the community’s knowledge about sago, customs, and lake life is transmitted orally and resides with individual elders. One local knowledge holder noted that many stories still need to be written down and introduced more clearly to visitors and younger generations. Without community-controlled documentation, the researchers warn, tourism development could fragment or erode the very knowledge it celebrates. The study treats documentation not as a technical fix but as a political question: who decides what is recorded, who is authorized to share it, and how customary authority is preserved when cultural content circulates to outsiders.

The social innovation dimension emerges through what the authors call relational recombination. Elders contribute cultural interpretation; households supply food, crafts, and hospitality; Pokdarwis members and the tourism manager coordinate activities; visitors provide feedback and recognition; and village institutions shape legitimacy and resources. Training sessions and community forums allow residents to discuss visitor suggestions and improve management skills. A Pokdarwis member described how villagers support tourism in different ways, some making crafts, some preparing food, and others beautifying the village. Innovation here is not technological novelty but the reorganization of roles, relationships, and collective capabilities in response to locally defined needs.

However, the researchers draw a sharp line between emergent and institutionalized innovation. Kampung Yoboi’s creativity is relationally rich but institutionally weak. Roles and responsibilities have not been fully formalized, tourism is not consistently integrated into village planning and budgeting, and activities depend on a small group of motivated individuals. A tourism manager observed that the ideas already exist but must be managed collectively so tourism does not depend on a few people and instead becomes a shared responsibility of the whole village. Youth involvement in digital promotion and oral history documentation is promising but remains peripheral to formal decision-making.

Inclusion, the study’s most demanding criterion, is emerging but incomplete. Recognitional inclusion is the strongest dimension: tourism visibly affirms sago culture, floating settlement identity, and lake-based livelihoods, and the village’s national recognition, including a place among the top fifty villages in the 2021 Anugerah Desa Wisata Indonesia and finalist status in the 2025 Wonderful Indonesia Award, has reinforced community pride. Economic opportunities exist through food, crafts, and hospitality, but they remain small-scale and unevenly accessible. Procedural and distributive inclusion lag behind, because evidence on who controls priorities, who receives the largest benefits, and how women, youth, and less-connected households participate is limited. Visibility of Indigenous culture, the authors stress, is not the same as inclusion when communities lack authority over representation and development priorities.

Material constraints compound the governance gap. Limited village funding restricts the maintenance of bridges, toilets, sanitation systems, and public spaces, and poor sanitation threatens both visitor comfort and the environmental quality of Lake Sentani. Human resource limitations affect guiding, interpretation, digital promotion, and safety management, while existing training is too occasional to build a continuous capacity system. These constraints reinforce one another: weak institutional recognition limits funding, inadequate facilities reduce visitor satisfaction, limited skills weaken service quality, and reliance on a few individuals threatens continuity. The central problem, the researchers conclude, is not a shortage of creativity but the absence of stable governance, financing, maintenance, and capacity-building arrangements.

The study’s theoretical contribution is a conditional pathway with clear policy implications. Local knowledge contributes to inclusive community-based tourism through community-authorized translation, relational recombination, and community-controlled institutionalization. The authors recommend integrating tourism into village planning and accountable budgeting, treating bridges, sanitation, and public facilities as shared community and visitor infrastructure, establishing representative coordination among village governments, customary leaders, Pokdarwis, knowledge holders, households, women, and youth, and making benefit distribution transparent. Institutionalization, they caution, should not mean imposing external bureaucratic models that displace Indigenous institutions, but rather formalizing rules and roles while the community retains cultural authority.

The limitations are acknowledged candidly. A single-case, interpretive design with twenty-four informants cannot establish statistical representativeness or causal effects, demographic data were too incomplete for subgroup analysis, and the absence of longitudinal data prevents assessment of whether current initiatives endure. Visitor statistics are also patchy; available records indicate roughly 1,852 visitors during 2021 to 2022, but comprehensive seasonal series do not exist. Future research, the team suggests, should compare Indigenous lake-based tourism cases, track governance and benefit distribution over time, and test whether the proposed pathway holds under different customary, ecological, and institutional conditions.

For a village of floating houses on a Papuan lake, the stakes extend well beyond tourism. Kampung Yoboi demonstrates that communities can convert inherited ecological knowledge into experiences that visitors genuinely value, and that this conversion can strengthen identity, pride, and learning. But the research also delivers a caution to policymakers and destination marketers everywhere: participation is not empowerment, visibility is not inclusion, and creativity without institutional foundations risks evaporating when its few champions step away. The pathway from knowledge to inclusive development, the study shows, must be built deliberately, governed locally, and maintained continuously, one bridge, one budget, and one documented story at a time.

Subject of Research: Local knowledge and social innovation in inclusive community-based tourism in an Indigenous lake settlement in Papua, Indonesia

Article Title: Local knowledge and social innovation for inclusive community based tourism in Kampung Yoboi, Papua, Indonesia

Article References: Risamasu, F., Srem, A. I. A., Wabe, T. G., Manaqib, I. W., Amandaria, R., Azkar, R., Darma, R., & Ardiansyah, M. F. P. (2026). Local knowledge and social innovation for inclusive community based tourism in Kampung Yoboi, Papua, Indonesia. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 265. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00627-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00627-9

Keywords: community-based tourism, Indigenous tourism, social innovation, local knowledge, sago, Lake Sentani, Papua, inclusive development, value co-creation, participatory governance, cultural sustainability, Indonesia