The Triple Bottom Line framework, long a touchstone of sustainability policy, demands that interventions be judged simultaneously on ecological, economic, and social grounds. Most smart city technologies are evaluated on only one axis, typically efficiency or emissions. The research team set out to test whether a single technical architecture could deliver gains across all three dimensions. Their vehicle for doing so was a multisector platform that links sustainable urban mobility with health and cultural services through token-based incentives executed by smart contracts, the self-executing programs that run on blockchain networks and automatically enforce the rules of an agreement without intermediaries.

Technically, the study combines two modeling approaches that rarely appear together. The first is agent-based simulation, a computational technique in which thousands of individual virtual actors, each with its own behaviors and preferences, interact within a modeled environment and produce emergent system-level patterns. The researchers deployed 10,000 heterogeneous agents, meaning the simulated citizens differed from one another in their characteristics and travel choices, over a simulated 30-day period. The second layer was a simulated permissioned blockchain, a type of distributed ledger in which only approved participants can validate transactions. Permissioned designs are favored for municipal deployments because they offer the auditability and tamper resistance of blockchain while avoiding the enormous energy costs and throughput limits of public cryptocurrencies.

On top of this architecture, the team layered the incentive machinery. When an agent chose a sustainable transport mode, the platform recorded the corresponding green kilometers on the ledger, and smart contracts automatically issued tokens proportional to that distance. The tokens were not merely symbolic. In the most ambitious configuration, they could be redeemed for benefits in entirely different sectors: health services, cultural attractions, and tourism offerings. This is the crucial design insight of the study. Rather than treating green behavior as an isolated transaction between a citizen and a transport authority, the model turns sustainable mobility into a currency that flows through the whole urban economy, creating what the authors describe as value circulation across sectors.

To measure the effect, the researchers compared three scenarios over the same simulated month. The first was a baseline with no incentives at all, representing business as usual in a city without behavioral nudges. The second was a linear incentive model in which tokens simply rewarded green transport choices one-to-one, with no cross-sector redemption. The third was the full cross-sector ecosystem model, in which green kilometers unlocked health, cultural, and tourism benefits. This experimental design allowed the team to isolate not just whether token incentives work, but whether connecting them to multiple city services amplifies their impact.

The results, according to the study, show that token-based incentives can increase the use of sustainable transport modes and reduce CO2 emissions relative to the unincentivized baseline. More strikingly, the cross-sector scenario achieved the strongest ecological, economic, and social effects of the three configurations. In other words, the simple act of letting green mobility tokens purchase cultural and health benefits made the whole system perform better on every dimension of the Triple Bottom Line than rewards confined to the transport sector alone. The authors interpret this as evidence that blockchain can support sustainability by connecting emission reduction, automated value distribution, and citizen-oriented services within a unified smart city ecosystem.

The ecological mechanism is straightforward: if enough agents switch from cars to walking, cycling, or public transport, aggregate emissions fall. The economic mechanism is subtler and arguably more interesting. Because tokens are issued and redeemed automatically through smart contracts, value generated by green behavior does not sit idle; it is routed to local health providers, cultural institutions, and tourism operators, multiplying the economic footprint of each sustainable trip. The social dimension emerges from citizen participation itself, as residents gain tangible, immediate benefits from choices that normally pay off only in distant, abstract terms such as future air quality or climate targets.

The study sits within a rapidly growing body of research on blockchain in urban systems. Prior work has explored distributed ledgers for secure electric vehicle charging, dynamic key management in intelligent transportation, sharing-economy services, and even the provenance of cultural heritage assets. Surveys of smart contract applications have catalogued both the opportunities and the technical challenges, including scalability, privacy, and governance. What distinguishes the new study is its integration of these threads into a single multisector platform and its insistence on evaluating the outcome against a three-dimensional sustainability framework rather than a single performance metric. The authors also build on their own earlier work, including a sustainable transport model based on blockchain presented at the EAI International Conference on Future Access Enablers, and research on optimizing urban air pollution measurement stations using graph clustering.

As with any simulation, the findings come with inherent caveats that the authors’ methodology makes explicit. Agent-based models are only as good as their behavioral assumptions, and real citizens respond to incentives in ways that are messier than any 10,000-agent abstraction can capture. The blockchain layer was simulated rather than deployed, so questions of real-world throughput, latency, energy consumption, and integration with existing municipal IT systems remain open. The study also reports that no datasets were generated or analysed during the research, underscoring that the contribution is a proof of concept at the modeling stage rather than a field trial. Nonetheless, simulations of this kind are a standard and valuable step between theoretical proposals and costly pilot deployments, allowing planners to stress-test incentive designs before committing public money.

The implications for city governments are nonetheless significant. Cities worldwide are already experimenting with mobility credits, low-emission zones, and app-based rewards, but these schemes typically operate in silos, with transport rewards locked inside transport apps. The study’s central lesson is that the architecture connecting these silos matters: a permissioned blockchain with smart contracts can serve as the trust layer that lets a green kilometer earned on a bike lane become a cinema ticket or a physiotherapy session, automatically and transparently. If future real-world pilots confirm the simulation’s promise, the humble commuter token could evolve into a genuine urban currency for sustainability, one that pays citizens for building a greener, healthier, and more culturally vibrant city every time they leave the car at home.

Subject of Research: Blockchain-based token incentives for Triple Bottom Line sustainability in smart city ecosystems

Article Title: Simulation of Blockchain Supporting Triple Bottom Line Sustainability in Smart City Ecosystems

Article References: Jotanovic, G., Dobrilovic, D., Jausevac, G., Perakovic, D., Brtka, V., & Stojanov, Z. (2026). Simulation of Blockchain Supporting Triple Bottom Line Sustainability in Smart City Ecosystems. Mobile Networks and Applications. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-026-02537-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11036-026-02537-1

Keywords: blockchain, smart cities, triple bottom line, sustainable mobility, token incentives, smart contracts, agent-based simulation, CO2 emissions, urban sustainability, permissioned blockchain, green transport, cross-sector ecosystem

The research, published in the journal Discover Sustainability, was conducted by Harimukti Wandebori, Anak Agung Ngurah Tata Pinandhika, and Bernadetta Nadya Amarani Sitompul of the School of Business and Management at Bandung Institute of Technology. Their starting point was a long-standing unresolved question in the sustainability literature: do the very capabilities that keep small firms viable in volatile markets also move them toward greener practices? Most previous studies could not answer this because they collapsed economic, social, and environmental performance into a single composite score, obscuring exactly the differences that matter most for policy and practice.

The team focused on strategic agility, a dynamic capability that combines two distinct components: market responsiveness, meaning the speed with which a firm detects and reacts to changes in customer needs, competitor moves, and emerging threats; and resource fluidity, meaning the ease with which money, people, and equipment can be redeployed across activities. They also modelled three separate channels through which agility might indirectly influence sustainability: managerial ties with buyers, ties with suppliers, and ties with government officials. Crucially, each channel was specified separately, and each of the three sustainability pillars was treated as a distinct outcome rather than blended into an index.

The survey gathered responses from 179 strategic decision makers in Indonesian micro and small enterprises. The measurement design showed unusual care for a survey study of this kind. Predictor and outcome blocks used deliberately differentiated response anchors so that, for example, economic performance was rated relative to competitors while environmental practices were rated on frequency of use. Two attention check items with prescribed answers were embedded at separate points, completion times were recorded automatically, and a marker variable built from questions about attitudes toward the colour blue allowed the researchers to test statistically whether common method bias was inflating their estimates. Analysis proceeded with partial least squares structural equation modelling, a technique suited to complex path models with modest samples.

The headline result was a clear asymmetry. Strategic agility predicted economic performance with a path coefficient of 0.409 and social performance with 0.365, both medium effect sizes, but environmental performance at only 0.218, roughly half the strength of the other two. Because the outcome scales used different anchors, the team checked the gap on scale-free metrics. On latent correlations, the environmental pillar separated from the economic pillar by 0.229 and from the social pillar by 0.196, with bootstrap intervals that excluded zero in both cases. On the metric of partial coefficients, only the separation from the economic pillar was statistically distinguishable, and the authors are explicit that their title claims only that contrast. The gap also passed a battery of robustness checks: the environmental block showed the lowest ceiling rate and the most symmetric response distribution of the three, which is the opposite of what a ceiling effect or social desirability bias would produce, and correcting for unequal reliability across blocks widened rather than narrowed the difference.

Perhaps the most sobering finding concerned prediction. The model achieved out-of-sample predictive relevance for the economic and social pillars, meaning the estimated structure genuinely anticipated new observations, but it achieved none for the environmental pillar. In other words, the capability-and-ties framework that works for explaining how small firms prosper and serve their communities simply does not contain enough signal to forecast their environmental behaviour. The indirect effect of agility on environmental performance through managerial ties was statistically equivalent to zero against a triviality bound of 0.10, tested with two one-sided tests on the bootstrap distribution.

The tie-based channels themselves fared almost entirely empty. Of the nine paths running from the three tie types to the three pillars, only one, buyer ties to social performance, reached significance at a coefficient of 0.193. The authors handle this carefully: one significant result out of nine tests is a count compatible with chance, and it does not survive correction for multiplicity. They report it as a pattern to be tested in future work rather than as an established mechanism, a level of statistical honesty that stands out in a literature where such a result might otherwise be presented as a discovery.

The study also probes what the gap means mechanistically, and here an item-level analysis delivers a subtle twist. One plausible explanation for weak environmental performance would be simple economics: environmental practices cost money without returning it, so agile firms invest where returns register. If pricing were the boundary, the one environmental practice that pays for itself, reducing waste and resource inefficiency, should attract agility’s influence more strongly than the two that do not. The item-level estimates ordered the three environmental items exactly as that reward-boundary argument predicts, but no within-block difference was statistically distinguishable. Pricing alone, therefore, is not the whole story; the boundary appears to lie in whether a firm’s existing routines register any return at all, and environmental returns rarely do for a small enterprise.

There is an important design caveat the authors state plainly: because a cross-sectional sample contains only surviving firms, the strong economic association is consistent with two competing accounts. Under a capability account, agility genuinely produces better economic outcomes; under a selection account, agile firms simply survive longer and therefore appear in the sample more often. The design cannot separate the two, and the researchers do not pretend otherwise. Nor could the study resolve whether the agility gap differs between resource-rich and resource-poor firms: multigroup comparisons across six operationalisations of resource endowment produced signs that flipped between splits and no significant differences, and a power analysis showed the observed differences all fell below the minimum the sample could detect.

The policy implication, the authors argue, follows directly from the pattern of results. If capability building alone does not reach the environmental pillar, because the returns from environmental practices are invisible to the routines that small firms already have, then progress will depend on instruments that make those returns visible and required: regulations that set minimum standards, incentives that convert environmental savings into financial ones, and market mechanisms that reward green practices through the buyers small firms already depend on. For the vast population of micro and small enterprises in emerging economies, the path to environmental sustainability is not a matter of becoming more agile. It is a matter of changing the payoffs the environment of business, rather than the natural one, currently provides.

Subject of Research: The relationship between strategic agility, managerial ties, and the three pillars of sustainability in Indonesian micro and small enterprises

Article Title: Strategic agility reaches the environmental pillar of small firm sustainability more weakly than the economic pillar: disaggregated evidence from Indonesian micro and small enterprises

Article References: Wandebori, H., Pinandhika, A. A. N. T., & Sitompul, B. N. A. (2026). Strategic agility reaches the environmental pillar of small firm sustainability more weakly than the economic pillar: disaggregated evidence from Indonesian micro and small enterprises. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04788-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04788-0

Keywords: strategic agility, small and medium enterprises, sustainability, triple bottom line, environmental performance, managerial ties, Indonesia, PLS-SEM, dynamic capabilities, emerging economy, green practices, business strategy