Researchers led by Syaharuddin Alrif, Rahim Darma, Muhammad Hasbi, and Reza Asra applied a multidimensional sustainability assessment, adapted from a fisheries evaluation technique called RAPFISH, to the emerging konjac agrifood system in Sidenreng Rappang, one of the first areas in South Sulawesi to cultivate the crop commercially. Their approach, which they call RAP-Konjac, scored 27 attributes across five dimensions: economic, social, environmental, technological, and institutional. Thirty-two key informants, including twelve smallholder farmers, six local collectors, processing representatives, extension officers, academic researchers, and regional planners, provided structured scores on a five-point scale, with risk-based attributes such as export dependency reverse-coded so that higher values always meant more sustainable conditions.

The choice of study area was deliberate. Sidenreng Rappang had roughly 164 hectares of konjac under cultivation involving about 30 farmer groups and 600 farmers, and two districts, Pitu Riase and Watang Sidenreng, accounted for approximately 141 hectares, or 86 percent of the regency’s identified konjac area. Pitu Riase serves as the principal production center, while Watang Sidenreng hosts a processing factory capable of handling 40 to 70 tons of fresh tubers daily, along with aggregation, marketing, and logistics functions. Together they offered a complete window into the value chain, from field to factory gate.

The analytical machinery behind the assessment is elegant in its transparency. Multidimensional scaling transforms the ordinal attribute scores into positions within an ordination space, generating a sustainability index on a 0-to-100 scale for each dimension. Stress statistics below 0.20 and coefficients of determination above 0.80 confirmed that the ordinations fit the data well; in this study, stress values ranged from 0.145 to 0.165 and R-squared values from 0.924 to 0.933. Monte Carlo simulations, which rerun the analysis under random scoring perturbations, shifted the indices by no more than 1.39 points, meaning the results were robust to the inevitable uncertainty in expert judgment.

The headline number looks reassuring. Averaged across the five dimensions, the konjac system scored 57.41, placing it firmly in the moderately sustainable category. But the researchers’ central insight is that this aggregate figure conceals a striking asymmetry. The environmental dimension scored 67.73, the strongest of the five, while the technological dimension scored just 48.80, the only one classified as less sustainable. The 18.93-point gap between the best and worst dimensions reveals a system whose ecological foundation has developed far faster than its capacity to convert that potential into stable quality, local value addition, and resilient market participation.

The technological weakness is not a deep collapse but a near-threshold constraint, sitting just below the 50-point boundary that separates less sustainable from moderately sustainable. That positioning matters for policy, because it suggests comparatively focused improvements in farmer-level post-harvest facilities, industrial downstream processing access, certified seed systems, logistics, and innovation support could shift the dimension into a stronger category. Without such improvements, farmers remain locked into selling fresh tubers, while actors with processing facilities capture most of the value added. Nationally, the scale of this mismatch is stark: of more than 700,000 tons of konjac produced in 2020 and 2021, only about 150,000 tons met export requirements, a gap attributed to product quality, processing capacity, and compliance with market standards.

To identify where intervention would matter most, the team performed a leverage analysis, removing each attribute in turn from the ordination and measuring how much the sustainability configuration shifted. Seven attributes exceeded the high-leverage threshold of a root mean square change of 10 or more. Supply chain efficiency scored 14.90 and export market dependency 14.89, followed almost identically by agricultural extension at 14.88 and partnership effectiveness at 14.66. Seed variety conservation (11.56) and pest and disease management (11.14) anchored the environmental dimension, while industrial downstream processing technology sat exactly at the 10.00 threshold. Notably, none of the five social attributes reached even the borderline range, suggesting that social factors function as long-term enablers rather than immediate leverage points.

Combining each dimension’s sustainability status with its leverage scores produced a clear policy priority ranking: technology first, then economic restructuring, institutional strengthening, ecological consolidation, and finally inclusive rural capacity building. The economic findings carry a particular warning. Heavy dependence on a narrow export market exposes farmers and processors to external demand shocks, shifting quality standards, and buyer concentration, while fragmented supply chains raise transaction costs and weaken farmers’ bargaining positions. The researchers argue that konjac development should not be managed solely as an export-oriented commodity opportunity; transparent pricing, clearer grading standards, domestic market development, and stronger buyer-farmer coordination are equally essential. Institutional support, especially commodity-specific extension services, is the glue that holds these improvements together, because konjac cultivation, drying, slicing, grading, and quality standards all demand specialized knowledge that many farmers currently lack.

The environmental story is more nuanced than the strong 67.73 score might suggest. The assessment covered locally observable management practices, erosion risk, pest management, seed conservation, and chemical input use, but it did not quantify water use, energy consumption, or greenhouse gas emissions, so the index reflects local environmental management rather than a complete life-cycle footprint. Even so, the high leverage of seed variety conservation and pest management signals a real vulnerability: as commercial cultivation expands, reliance on selected planting materials can erode genetic diversity and intensify disease pressure. Ecological suitability, the authors conclude, is a necessary foundation for konjac development but is nowhere near sufficient on its own for a sustainable transformation.

Perhaps the most transferable lesson of the study is methodological. A system can be classified as moderately sustainable overall while remaining poorly prepared for transformation in one or more of its enabling dimensions, a condition the researchers call asymmetric sustainability. By pairing dimension-specific indices with attribute-level leverage scores, RAP-Konjac turns stakeholder knowledge into a transparent, testable order of policy attention, an approach that could be applied to other konjac-producing regions and to other emerging bio-based commodities racing from forest edge to global market. The konjac boom in South Sulawesi is real, and its ecological footing is comparatively solid, but whether smallholder farmers capture a fair share of the glucomannan economy will depend on closing the technology gap before the raw-material export pathway hardens into permanence.

Subject of Research: Multidimensional sustainability assessment of Indonesia's emerging konjac (porang) agrifood system using RAPFISH-based multidimensional scaling in Sidenreng Rappang Regency

Article Title: Multidimensional sustainability assessment of Indonesia's emerging konjac agrifood system: A case study in Sidenreng Rappang

Article References: Alrif, S., Darma, R., Hasbi, M., & Asra, R. (2026). Multidimensional sustainability assessment of Indonesia's emerging konjac agrifood system: A case study in Sidenreng Rappang. Environmental and Sustainability Indicators, 32, Article 101555. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indic.2026.101555

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.indic.2026.101555

Keywords: konjac, porang, glucomannan, sustainability assessment, RAPFISH, multidimensional scaling, agrifood system, Indonesia, South Sulawesi, smallholder farmers, value chain, transition readiness

The core insight of the research is that transition readiness is not simply a matter of having good policies, abundant capital or clean technology in place. Instead, the authors argue, readiness depends on the structure of the feedback loops that connect governance, reinvestment, production, energy and ecology. A zone can look integrated on paper while its reinforcing and balancing loops quietly constrain transformation in ways no sector-specific assessment would detect. To capture this hidden architecture, the team built a causal loop diagram, a standard tool of system dynamics in which variables are linked by arrows marked with positive or negative polarity, indicating whether a change in one variable pushes another in the same or the opposite direction.

Constructing the diagram was a disciplined exercise in reduction. The researchers screened candidate variables drawn from the literature on sustainability transitions, circular economy, renewable energy, adaptive governance and coastal planning, retaining only those that influenced at least one core subsystem, rested on theoretically plausible causal relationships, and bridged at least two sectoral domains. Thirteen variables survived the filter, spanning renewable energy availability, energy cost, resource efficiency, material recovery, waste leakage, coastal ecosystem quality, eco-tourism attractiveness, local economic value, reinvestment capacity, agro-marine production stability, industrial environmental footprint, governance effectiveness and regulatory alignment. Each link was assigned a polarity following established system dynamics conventions, and closed chains of causation were traced to identify feedback loops.

The resulting map contains fifteen directed links and three closed loops. One is reinforcing, labelled R1, a governance-mediated pathway linking regulatory alignment, governance effectiveness, reinvestment capacity and production stability. Two are balancing loops: B1, in which industrial expansion generates environmental pressure that constrains reinvestment, and B2, a longer energy-circular-tourism pathway in which resource and ecological limits moderate economic dynamics. Following the standard rule that loops with an even number of negative links reinforce and those with an odd number balance, the topology yields a Structural Synergy Potential of 0.33, meaning one reinforcing loop against two balancing ones. A second indicator, the Governance Structure Involvement Ratio, also 0.33, shows that governance variables participate in one of the three loops.

What makes the framework genuinely novel is the analytical layer it occupies. Qualitative causal mapping has long been used for participatory modelling and stakeholder learning, while fully calibrated system dynamics simulation demands empirical data that most planning contexts lack. Between these sits a gap: no reproducible way to quantify how a transition system is wired before calibration is possible. By treating the causal loop diagram as a directed network, the authors could compute degree centrality for each node and overall network density. The density came out at 0.096, meaning only about 9.6 percent of all theoretically possible directed links are present, a signature of a selectively connected system organised around specific causal pathways rather than uniform interconnection.

The centrality results are striking. Reinvestment Capacity emerges as the most connected node, with five links and a normalised centrality of 0.21, roughly two and a half times that of the typical variable. Its three incoming connections carry economic value, governance effectiveness and industrial environmental pressure, while its two outgoing links feed renewable energy availability and production stability. In structural terms, reinvestment is the hinge on which the entire cross-sector system turns. Agro-Marine Production Stability ranks second with three links. The authors are careful to stress that high centrality does not establish causal strength or intervention leverage, but it does identify where governance strategies aimed at coordination, regulatory alignment and resource mobilisation may have the broadest structural relevance.

To test whether these diagnostics are robust or artefacts of arbitrary link choices, the team ran a single-link perturbation test, conceptually removing individual connections and recalculating the indicators. The results were revealing. Deleting a link from the reinforcing governance loop collapses both the Synergy Potential and the Governance Involvement Ratio to zero, because the system’s only reinforcing structure disappears. Removing a link from either balancing loop raises the Synergy Potential to 0.50 while leaving governance participation at one of two remaining loops. Crucially, deleting a link outside any loop changes nothing. The indicators respond specifically to feedback-loop membership, not to generic connectivity, which supports their interpretation as topology-dependent comparative diagnostics rather than performance measures.

The framework then translates these structural findings into four governance-based scenarios. Under Business-as-Usual, with low governance and low renewable-energy activation, the reinforcing loop is weak and both balancing constraints dominate, yielding low transition readiness. A Renewable Energy Push that deploys clean technology without strengthening governance achieves only moderate readiness, because the governance-mediated reinforcing pathway remains dormant. Governance Reform alone raises readiness further by activating R1. Only the Integrated Transition scenario, combining high governance capacity with high renewable energy, ecosystem quality and economic capital, suppresses both balancing constraints and produces very high readiness. The progression carries a clear message: technological deployment without institutional capacity leaves the system structurally unprepared, and governance reform without cross-sector integration only goes so far.

The theoretical implications extend beyond coastal zones. By embedding governance variables directly inside the feedback architecture rather than treating them as external enabling conditions, the study repositions institutions as endogenous components of transition systems, consistent with transformative governance scholarship that views institutional coordination as a capacity capable of redirecting systemic change. It also complements industrial symbiosis research, which has shown that resource exchanges depend on organisational and network conditions as much as on physical flows. The authors acknowledge significant limitations: the causal architecture derives from literature synthesis rather than field observation, no stakeholder workshops or expert elicitation informed the diagram, and no empirical calibration establishes effect sizes or dynamic validity. The framework is explicitly conceptual and requires case-specific adaptation before application to operating zones.

Even so, the practical promise is considerable. For planners weighing billion-dollar investments in coastal development, the method offers a low-cost, pre-implementation diagnostic that can expose coordination gaps, ecological trade-offs and governance dependencies before they become expensive failures. The authors outline a staged research agenda: apply and refine the causal map across real coastal special economic zones, incorporate stakeholder knowledge through participatory mapping, test whether the structural descriptors correlate with observed transition outcomes using longitudinal data, and ultimately translate validated diagrams into quantitative system dynamics or hybrid agent-based models. If subsequent empirical work confirms that zones with higher governance embeddedness and stronger reinforcing orientation do transition more smoothly, this humble act of drawing arrows on a diagram could become a standard first step in deciding whether the world’s coastal engines of growth are genuinely ready to go green.

Subject of Research: Structural feedback diagnostics for assessing sustainability transition readiness in coastal special economic zones

Article Title: Governance-embedded structural diagnostics for assessing sustainability transition readiness in coastal special economic zones

Article References: Yandri, E., Tuwo, A., Monoarfa, W. D., Demmallino, E. B., Maulana, A., & Achmad, A. (2026). Governance-embedded structural diagnostics for assessing sustainability transition readiness in coastal special economic zones. Environmental Challenges, 25, Article 101671. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envc.2026.101671

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.envc.2026.101671

Keywords: coastal special economic zones, sustainability transitions, system dynamics, causal loop diagrams, network analysis, governance, feedback loops, transition readiness, circular economy, renewable energy, coastal ecosystems, structural diagnostics