National climate citizens' assemblies (CCAs) are often praised as democratic innovations capable of enhancing climate policymaking, yet many struggle to translate their recommendations into policy. This paper offers a new perspective on the problem of transmission by introducing a conceptual framework grounded in agonistic political theory. Rather than viewing transmission as a linear, procedural process, we conceptualize it as dynamic and contested, shaped by evolving relationships, institutional conditions, and political uncertainty. Through a comparative analysis of CCAs in Denmark and Scotland, we show that successful transmission depends not only on formal mechanisms but also on the strength of institutional arrangements, shared expectations, and trust between facilitators and commissioning authorities. Our findings highlight the importance of informal dynamics and relational infrastructure in determining whether deliberative outputs gain political traction. For policymakers and practitioners, this underscores the need to support not just design quality but the broader ecosystem in which CCAs operate.
This study examines discourse and structural conditions that facilitated Japan's 2020 carbon neutrality declaration given the increased need to elucidate sociopolitical drivers underlying recent net-zero policy shifts. Policy texts, discourse and practices, and structural conditions were analyzed using Fairclough's three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis. Textual analysis (description) identifies the 'virtuous cycle of the economy and the environment' and top - down leadership rhetoric as textual values. The interpretation stage reveals that these values reflect a dominant discourse of weak ecological modernization, influenced by Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga's political motivation to dismantle bureaucratic silos and implement regulatory reforms. Finally, the explanation stage demonstrates that discourses and political practices were underpinned by three interrelated structural conditions, namely, Japan's centralized kantei-shudo (cabinet-led) governance system, changes in global financial and economic structures, and Japan's historical energy insecurity. By demonstrating the operationalization of discourse within institutional and material constraints in the formation of climate governance, this study contributes to environmental policy research by providing a holistic understanding of how radical policy shifts are enabled and legitimized beyond conventional actor-based explanations.
This article reconstructs and analyzes the evolution of sustainability in regional-scale spatial planning in Chile between 1994 and 2021. It identifies four phases of normative evolution, from the first legal frameworks to the incorporation of Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) and recent policies, using a qualitative-quantitative mixed design that combines content analysis of 11 instruments with exploratory visualization through MDS and clustering and inferential testing through PERMANOVA. The findings reveal statistically significant differences across periods and normative hierarchical levels and indicate a paradigm shift from an impact-based approach, centered on Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), to a strategic framework supported by SEA. This shift coincides with an emergent polycentricity driven by the direct election of regional governors. Nevertheless, challenges remain, including the hegemony of a growth-oriented weak sustainability model, a persistent hierarchical misalignment of environmental concepts, and significant SEA implementation gaps. The study shows that sustainable development, climate change, and SEA act as bridges between environmental and territorial domains. Building on these findings, the research contributes a normative genealogy and a transferable framework for evaluating governance coherence in Latin America. It identifies three priorities: strengthening the hierarchical rank of sustainability principles, mandating SEA as a cross-cutting tool, and enhancing subnational capacities.
Urban environmental governance today is undergoing a legitimacy crisis. In contemporary city planning, prevailing paradigms from market-based instruments and ecosystem-service valuation to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and Nature-based Solutions (NbS) promise integration and expand biodiversity discourse, but remain fundamentally anthropocentric and rooted in market-based logics. More-than-human life is managed as capital, reduced to ecosystem services or infrastructure, and nature is preserved primarily for people's benefit, yielding sophisticated forms of valuation but not transformation. This paper proposes Multispecies Justice (MSJ) as a transformative governance-oriented framework for rethinking urban environmental governance and as a radical reordering of environmental ethics and urban governance. MSJ redefines cities as interdependent collectives of human and more-than-human life, recognising non-human co-inhabitants and co-constituents that have agency and intrinsic value. It centres obligation, reciprocity, ecological agency, and care as foundational to planning, and calls for legal pluralism, participatory cohabitation, and epistemic plurality to support multispecies co-flourishing, not just resilience or sustainability. By embedding relational ontology and ecological ethics into law and planning, this paper outlines MSJ as a governance blueprint for just and resilient cities that equitably accommodate all species.
