Culture enables sustainable development, becoming the fourth pillar of sustainability, yet the theater’s role in sustainability transitions remains poorly explored. In the context of the European project STAGES—Sustainable Theater Alliance for a Green Environmental Shift (2022–2025), this article examines the transition to sustainability of three European theaters, the Piccolo Teatro in Milan (Italy), the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II (Portugal), and the Slovenian National Theater in Maribor (Slovenia), using the STAGES Doughnut Protocol, derived from Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics. Drawing on institutional self-assessment, the study investigates how these theaters interpret sustainability across diverse organizational cultures, policy environments, and governance structures. The main challenges are related to data availability, time, personnel, and financial resources. In addition, three systemic obstacles emerged: fragmented policy frameworks, inconsistent benchmarks, and the risk of symbolic rather than structural actions. The theaters overcame these critical issues, identifying concrete opportunities to reduce environmental impact and strengthen social responsibility. The main findings show that the Protocol stimulated internal dialogue on governance, production practices, resource use, accessibility, and institutional identity, thus acting as a catalyst for reflection. The study concludes that a green and fair transition requires a shift from individual to collective responsibility, from symbolic gestures to systemic practices, and from project-based initiatives to long-term cultural change. By offering empirical evidence from three national contexts and evaluating a novel organizational tool, the article contributes to research on cultural sustainability and provides actionable insights for policymakers, cultural managers, and theater practitioners.
The capitalist growth paradigm’s continuous production of intertwined and mutually reinforcing crises underscores the need for a social-ecological transformation toward a more just and sustainable economy. Investigating the economy as composed of monetized and non-monetized provisioning processes, feminist ecological economics foregrounds the non-monetized social-ecological foundation of our economy and the foundational provisioning processes taking place therein. This article contributes to debates on social provisioning and provisioning systems by unpacking the role of communities and commons in ensuring human and planetary well-being. More concretely, we investigate the transformative potential of commoning to revalue the non-monetized economy of social-ecological provisioning. We find that commoning prioritizes use value over exchange value and allows for value practices incompatible with a capitalist growth paradigm. We illustrate what role commoning – for instance, commoning land for collective food provisioning – can play in the boundary struggles over what is, and is not, valued. Taking a multi-level approach, we find that debates on public provisioning that foreground collective forms of provisioning (e.g., foundational economy, universal basic services) as well as alliances within and beyond the meta-industrial labor class constitute important building blocks for revaluing the foundation(al).
Despite the necessity of batteries for a successful energy transition, the battery value chain poses numerous environmental, social, and governance challenges that are further exacerbated by rapidly growing demand. Although the sustainability of batteries is gaining increasing attention in policy and industry, no research to date has addressed how experts construct, negotiate, and evaluate their inherent characteristics. This article seeks to address this gap by reporting on interviews with battery industry experts in Norway. Drawing on social representations theory and critical discursive psychology, we attend to both the construction (what is said) and the function (why it is said) of expert talk. The analysis illustrates that the hegemonic representations of battery sustainability align with weak sustainability, framing batteries as a necessary solution compatible with continued growth and prosperity. Respondents use the flexibility of the sustainability concept to legitimize social and environmental consequences, thereby justifying the status quo and maintaining the existing system of inequality. Yet, critical (polemic) representations also appear in the interviews, where the experts question electrification and batteries as the path to a sustainable future. These alternative representations emphasize systemic transformation and sufficiency, opening space for stronger forms of sustainability. Overall, the results highlight how expert discourse shapes the meaning and practical use of sustainability in the energy transition, primarily reinforcing dominant understandings of sustainability, while expressing personal aspirations for more transformative alternatives.
This article explores more sustainable alternatives to disposable nappies (diapers), which the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) identifies as a major contributor to global plastic waste. Over the past 30 years, the dominance of disposable nappies has resisted disruption despite attempts such as recycling and niche products like compostable nappies. We examine why disposable nappies remain so entrenched and whether a compostable nappy service could challenge this status quo. While extensive research exists on the environmental impacts of nappies through life cycle analyses and the limitations of reusable options, little attention has been given to the durability of disposable nappy practices. Beyond identifying the attitude-action gap, the disparity between people’s intentions and behaviors, there is limited research addressing disposable nappy practices and their sustainable alternatives. Using social practice theory (SPT) to analyze everyday practices and the multi-level perspective (MLP) to examine systemic industry dynamics, this article reports on a qualitative trial of a compostable nappy and collection service in Sydney. Interviews with key stakeholders, including retailers, childcare centers, waste regulators, innovators, composting operators, and local councils, revealed systemic factors at play. The study identifies four attributes that reinforce the use of single-use nappies and hinder the adoption of alternatives. Despite limitations in the compostable nappy trial, the findings suggest several interventions to inform future innovations, policies, and awareness campaigns, offering a pathway toward addressing this critical environmental issue.
Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) depends on localization, in which subnational governments translate global commitments into territorially grounded and operational policy frameworks. Empirical research, however, focuses on national alignment or a limited set of leading cities, leaving the intermediate regional and provincial tier underexamined and insufficiently benchmarked. This article addresses this gap by systematically comparing the subnational strategies for sustainable development (SSDs) adopted by Italian regions and autonomous provinces in 2025. Italy provides a testbed because SSDs are mandated nationwide, generating an unprecedented corpus of comparable strategy documents. Using qualitative content analysis and a coding protocol, we assessed seven dimensions of strategy design-including SDG coverage, balance, and density of Key Area (KA)-SDG mappings; implementation provisions; monitoring systems; financial integration; and internal coherence-and synthesized them into two composite indicators: an SDG Framing Index and a Completeness Index. Results show uniformly high nominal SDG coverage but substantial variation in integrated framing and, critically, in operational maturity, with monitoring systems and budget/programming linkages emerging as bottlenecks for feasibility and accountability. A threefold typology (aspirational, structured, and integrated) differentiates rhetorical alignment from strategies embedded in governance routines, budgets, and monitoring frameworks. While territorial disparities persist, several less-advantaged regions suggest that institutional design can partially offset capacity constraints. The study advances a transparent, replicable assessment framework and identifies policy priorities to strengthen vertical coordination, statistical capacity, and alignment with European and national funding streams, highlighting SDG-aligned monitoring systems and budget/programming linkages as key levers to enhance policy feasibility and accountability.
Relational perspectives are gaining prominence in sustainability science, prompting discussions about a possible “relational turn.” Because of this growing interest, we propose a systematic mapping of the current state and publishing patterns on relational thinking within the field. This article proposes a comprehensive bibliometric and network analysis of 262 publications from 2010 to 2024 that explicitly engage with relational approaches in sustainability science, offering a meta-perspective on the evolution of this literature. Using data from the OpenAlex database, we mapped coauthorship networks, keyword co-occurrence networks, and the co-citation networks, which we complemented with qualitative content analysis. Our results reveal a rapidly expanding and relatively globally distributed research community, with key hubs in Europe and North America. Two major thematic orientations emerge: one focused mainly on “relational values,” emphasizing the ethical and policy-relevant dimensions of human-nature relationships, and another on “relational ontology,” which challenges foundational assumptions of Western thought and advocates ontological and epistemic transformation. This study identifies key actors, concepts, and research clusters. It provides a valuable resource for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers seeking to engage with relational approaches in sustainability science. By highlighting both consolidated and emerging themes, the article encourages further exploration of underrepresented perspectives and fosters dialogue across epistemic communities.
This study examines how urban online shoppers in Chile evaluate the economic, environmental, and social attributes of last-mile delivery and how heterogeneity in age and sustainability-oriented attitudes toward last-mile delivery shapes these preferences. Using a factorial survey experiment, we randomly varied delivery fees, delivery speed, delivery location, delivery time windows, workers’ social benefits, and air-pollutant emissions across hypothetical delivery strategies, enabling the causal estimation of each attribute’s effect on purchase intentions. Multilevel regression models show that participants simultaneously favor delivery options that are inexpensive, fast, and home-based while also preferring low-emission and socially responsible delivery practices—a combination of attributes that is costly for retailers and logistics providers to offer simultaneously. Preferences, however, are not uniform. Moderation analyses indicate that age and sustainability attitudes shape preferences for selected attributes, particularly within the economic and environmental dimensions. Younger adults place greater weight on delivery speed, whereas older adults penalize high-emission delivery strategies more severely. Consumers with stronger sustainability attitudes are more willing to accept higher delivery fees or less convenient delivery locations when these reduce environmental harm, and they exhibit heightened aversion to environmentally harmful delivery options. Together, these findings suggest that consumer heterogeneity can partially alleviate these constraints by shifting the relative importance of delivery attributes across consumer segments. We discuss implications for consumer-centric logistics and argue that differentiated service menus may help retailers and carriers tailor fulfillment strategies to distinct customer segments.
This article contributes to debates on the need and potential for transforming the democratic state under conditions of planetary crisis by examining the underexplored field of sustainable consumption governance. While demand-side mitigation has gained prominence in climate policy, its democratic dimension remains poorly theorized and undervalued. Most existing strategies reflect the dominance of a liberal state paradigm—centered on market mechanisms, individual responsibility, and behavioral nudging—while failing to address broader questions of democratic legitimacy, justice, and collective agency. In response, the article develops a normative and institutional entry point to this debate grounded in green republicanism, a political theory that redefines freedom as non-domination and situates sustainability within the pursuit of the ecological common good. Through this lens, we assess how liberal democracies must reimagine democratic processes and state capacities if they are to facilitate lifestyle change that is socially just, ecologically sufficient, and democratically legitimate. Drawing on the consumption corridors concept, we then use green republicanism to imagine what implementation pathways democratic consumption governance, rooted in impactful participatory and deliberative mechanisms and strengthened provisioning systems, could look like. While acknowledging critiques—such as concerns about paternalism, representation, and feasibility—we contend that a republican reorientation of the state would be necessary for overcoming the democratic and sustainability deficits of current consumption policy.
What is sustained in discourses on social sustainability? Conceptualizations of social sustainability typically fail to consider exclusions, limits, and sovereignty, thereby raising questions regarding the limits of what or who is to be sustained. Communities of various types and sizes exist, as do policies at different levels, but how can we sustain communities without limitations, divisions, or exclusions? For any society, the question of its own continuation is a constitutive issue. Societies that sustain themselves over time must develop enduring institutions that can be collectively responsible for the survival, welfare, and well-being of their members. These are fundamentally biopolitical concerns related to governing a population, yet biopolitics is largely absent from discourses on social sustainability. Since antiquity, governing the state has been likened to governing the body, and using the human body as an analogy for the body politic, one could argue that both medicine and politics address the same problem: How to protect and preserve the body. Immunity has been a central concept and metaphor traversing this analogy. This article aims to introduce the concept of immunity as a biopolitical approach to questions regarding what is to be sustained and how, in the context of social sustainability. To illustrate the usefulness of thinking about immunity and social sustainability together, this article explores Norway and Sweden’s divergent policy responses to the onset of the recent COVID-19 pandemic.
Biodiversity loss is a central dimension of the triple planetary crisis and underscores the need for stronger science-policy engagement to support transformative change. Early-career researchers (ECRs) can make important contributions at the biodiversity science-policy interface but often face barriers, including limited training, networks, time, resources, and institutional recognition. This Brief Report draws on insights from a two-day capacity-building workshop that brought together 20 doctoral and postdoctoral researchers from Swiss institutions and 13 experts from academia, government, and boundary organizations. The workshop aimed to strengthen participants’ understanding of science-policy processes in biodiversity conservation and to support the development of tailored engagement strategies. Based on workshop discussions, practical exercises, and expert exchange, we identify five key components of effective science-policy engagement for ECRs: understanding one’s position, analyzing the policy environment, defining engagement objectives, building networks, and reflecting on success. We argue that science-policy engagement is context-specific and requires strategic, adaptive, and sustained approaches rather than standardized solutions. Strengthening institutional support through training, mentorship, and appropriate incentives is essential to enable ECRs to engage meaningfully in biodiversity governance. Supporting ECRs at the science-policy interface can enhance both their professional development and the contribution of research to biodiversity conservation.
Urban sustainability transitions require cities to combine political leadership and commitment, long-term planning, experimentation, stakeholder engagement, and adaptive governance. Research in transition management (TM) has largely focused on early-stage niche experimentation or long-term transition, offering limited insight into how municipalities govern transitions once emerging practices are embedded within institutional frameworks. This article examines how South Bend, Indiana, a mid-sized post-industrial city in the United States, pursued a sustainability transition through mobility and public space transformations between 1992 and 2024. Drawing on an exploratory case study, the analysis identifies three governance modes - (1) long-term strategic planning, (2) short-term experimentation, and (3) co-creative partnerships and four governance mechanisms - (1) collaborative knowledge production, (2) participatory urbanism, (3) innovative institutional design, and (4) reflexive learning. Together, these elements illustrate how municipalities can operationalize a development-by-design logic, using experimentation, stakeholder participation, and iterative learning to design and scale transformative urban practices. Our empirical findings contribute to TM theory in three ways. First, the simultaneous operation of governance modes in South Bend illustrates that we can better understand TM phase models as a typology of coexisting governance logics than as a stepwise process of development. Second, development-by-design logics can be deliberately institutionalized through a combination of governance mechanisms, rather than left to emerge from niche experimentation. Finally, governance-driven transitions create structural second-order tensions of their own, including exclusion, inequity, and private influence, which cannot be resolved by the governance mechanisms that produced them. This points to the need for framework adaptations that connect how cities govern transitions with the progress that those transitions have made.
Despite the entanglements between people and their environments in contexts of war and the aftermath, how people negotiate everyday life during peace transitions in changing environments remains largely unexplored in scholarship. This article examines the environmental dimensions of everyday peace—the mundane interactions and practices through which individuals navigate and cope with conflict and engage in care during transitions out of war—to better understand peace and sustainability in lived realities. The study presents the findings from a systematic literature review of 72 academic articles in the everyday peace literature. The majority of these publications featured little to no reference to people’s natural or built environments. This study subsequently conducted a thematic analysis of the 31 articles coded for environmental content to identify four emergent themes as a starting point to interrogate how environments shape and are shaped by everyday peace. The discussion makes two key arguments. First, environments are not passive backdrops, but they enable and constrain what people do and how they interact. Second, environmental change, degradation, and loss coevolve with changing human experiences, actions, and meaning (re)making. These intertwined relationships underscore that the dynamic material and affective qualities of everyday environments where people live, work, and spend their time are relevant to the study of social micro-interactions constituting survival and coexistence. This research opens new avenues for understanding and supporting relational recoveries from the human and environmental wounds of war, while also laying the groundwork for shared futures that depend on biosocial healing.
As a critical dimension of sustainability policy and practice, Just Transition (JT) offers a framework for equitably and inclusively managing the social, economic, and political implications of climate and sustainability action. Yet global JT discourse has largely been shaped by high-income countries, often marginalizing the historical and structural realities of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). This article makes an original contribution which centers the Anglophone Caribbean - one of the world's most climate-vulnerable regions - as a site of both exclusion and innovation in emerging debates on JT. Drawing on a social dialogue workshop in Kingston, Jamaica, and surveys engaging 35 key stakeholders across the region, the study explores how a range of Caribbean actors conceptualize a decolonized JT. Participants expressed support for JT as a potentially transformative agenda but voiced concern over its possible cooptation to justify privatization or job losses. Reparations were seen to be an essential mechanism for achieving JT, redressing the enduring legacies of slavery, colonialism, and environmental extraction. While participants deemed financial justice to be critical, they also stressed that it should not be a substitute for or delay urgent local action. By amplifying the voices of Caribbean stakeholders in debates on JT as reparations, the research advances a policy and practice agenda that integrates climate justice with historical accountability. It has significant implications for sustainability policy and the development of a decolonial JT framework in terms of context-specific pathways that prioritize inclusive governance, regional cooperation, and self-determined development in LMICs.
Interdisciplinary research is crucial for addressing complex sustainability challenges, but teamwork in this context often faces conflicts due to differing professional languages, methodologies, and values. Scholars have identified cross-understanding - accurate knowledge of team members' mental models-as a key factor for fostering collaboration in interdisciplinary teams. This study examines the development of monodisciplinary and interdisciplinary cross-understanding over time in student teams engaged in project-based learning within higher education for sustainable development. We analyzed a longitudinal dataset from 267 students in 47 interdisciplinary teams across three universities. Students completed self-report surveys assessing cross-understanding (beliefs, knowledge, preferences, and sensitivities) at four time points over one semester and we analyzed data using multilevel structural equation modeling. Monodisciplinary cross-understanding was consistently higher than interdisciplinary cross-understanding at all time points. Both forms increased over time, yet interdisciplinary cross-understanding remained consistently lower, despite a narrowing of the gap. The findings underscore the importance of time for developing cross-understanding in interdisciplinary teams. Structured opportunities for dialogue and reflection can help overcome initial disciplinary barriers. The study highlights the need for longitudinal approaches in interdisciplinary team research and emphasizes that fostering collaboration requires both time and targeted learning strategies. These insights are crucial for educators and practitioners aiming to enhance interdisciplinary teamwork in sustainability projects.
Denmark has gained recognition on the agri-food political stage as the first country to launch an action plan and funding programs to promote plant-based food. This may seem surprising, given that the country is historically characterized by a large and economically strong meat and dairy sector. From the outside, one might also expect that the internal market and consumer trend underpins "going plant-based" - but this is not necessarily the case. We gathered Danish researchers working on consumer-citizen food practices to jointly reflect on what is known, what remains unclear, and how we should investigate developments further to accelerate the reduction in consumption of animal-based food and the transition to more plant-rich diets. Based on this discussion, we advance four recommendations for stakeholder actions and identify four key items for a future research agenda to help close knowledge gaps and inform market and policy efforts that support a shift to more sustainable diets.
Scholars have shown that lifestyle change is pivotal for any effective climate-mitigation scenario. But what lifestyle changes are needed and how can they be enabled and mainstreamed? This is the question pursued by the EU 1.5 degrees Lifestyles project, the results of which the article summarizes and synthesizes. The project integrated quantitative and qualitative methods, ranging from input-output analysis-based footprint calculations to co-creative "thinking labs" and policy Delphi workshops across five European countries (Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Spain, and Sweden) to identify the most impactful lifestyle changes; determine conditions for their mainstreaming; suggest how rebound effects could be prevented; uncover the main political, economic, and societal barriers to lifestyle change and governance in its pursuit; and assess how changes in welfare systems and business models could contribute to lifestyle change. Our results show that changing from car-based mobility (especially internal combustion engine-powered cars) to other modes of transport has the largest emissions-reduction potential across a range of European countries, with changes in housing, especially switching to renewable-based heating systems, comprising a second group of impactful options. The article also shows that achieving meaningful changes in lifestyles requires transforming politico-economic, technological, and societal structures to enable (or to cease hindering) the adoption of relevant low-carbon lifestyle options at the household level. Acknowledging the political challenges to achieving such transformations, the article considers the options for mobilizing transformative change.
Governments and other organizations worldwide have promoted the idea of a "green recovery," advocating that post-pandemic economic stimulus measures address environmental concerns such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and socioeconomic inequalities. There is, however, little evidence on the extent to which adopted policies have sought to achieve these broader objectives. This article presents a comparative analysis of policies adopted in three coastal regions - Scotland (UK), northwest Germany, and Massachusetts (United States). The analysis starts with the blue economy, which encompasses coastal and ocean-based activities such as fishing, shipping, and tourism, and has experienced a range of negative impacts due to the COVID-19 pandemic and associated restrictions. We utilize a previously developed framework that identifies the four key pillars of green recovery - climate action and environmental, social, and economic sustainability - to assess the extent to which polices have supported green recovery holistically in the blue economy and beyond. The results show that policies addressing each of the green-recovery pillars exist across regions, and that the essential components of the green-recovery framework are also present, albeit with varying degrees of emphasis. There are, however, questions about the integration of these elements. This approach demonstrates an evidence-based process that could help policymakers identify how measures, even when enacted individually, can, when combined, constitute a comprehensive policy package that supports green recovery or development.
Living labs (LLs) can play a vital role in driving sustainability transitions, providing a space for experimentation and the co-creation of practical solutions to complex societal problems. While existing research emphasizes the importance of collaboration among diverse stakeholders to integrate their needs and perspectives, there is a lack of comparative evidence on the motivations and barriers to such engagement. Understanding these factors is crucial for scaling up and replicating successful LLs and LL processes more generally. This research analyzes the motivations, enablers, and barriers to engagement in transdisciplinary co-creation processes within LL contexts for four stakeholder groups: civil society, administrations/local governments, business, and science. We distinguish between intrinsic/extrinsic motivations and barriers and enablers, using a mixed-methods approach based on interviews, focus groups, and participant observations of LL processes in a Swiss city. Our results show that motivations are similar across stakeholders. A key motivation for residents and local businesses is increasing social cohesion, while all stakeholders cite supporting and driving sustainable change. Engagement barriers and enablers are diverse, influenced by internal and external factors. Accordingly, effective participation requires tailored, context-sensitive strategies. Engagement is further influenced by systemic barriers and power dynamics, underscoring the need for trust, alignment, flexibility, and inclusive structures to support the development, scaling, and replication of LL processes. Finally, local administrations should capitalize on the motivation of grassroots initiatives by providing better support and streamlining their bureaucratic processes to scale up transformation processes, especially if overall visions align.
This study relies on NielsenIQ data from 2020 and computes a food purchase sustainability index (FPSI) for households in the United States based on three dimensions—environmental, nutritional, and economic. A household-level score is calculated for each of the three dimensions, and 26 indicators are used to construct the final FPSI. I aggregate household-level indices to derive an overall state-level FPSI and show how findings differ across states, separately for environmental (ENPS), nutritional (NPS), and economic purchase scores (EPS). I use multiple linear regression to assess the strength of the correlation between various household demographics and the FPSI. The analysis reveals stark differences in the overall FPSI across states; these differences extend to environmental footprints, nutritional quality, and affordability of food purchases. I find Maryland and Wyoming are the highest-ranking states in overall FPSI, with higher scores indicating greater overall sustainability. No state ranks the highest across all dimensions. Idaho and Oklahoma are the lowest-ranking states; thus, targeted interventions could yield the most significant improvements in sustainability metrics in those two states. These results advance Sustainable Development Goal 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production) by addressing socioeconomic disparities in sustainability outcomes across households in the United States and individual states, providing evidence to support targeted, region-specific policymaking. The FPSI and its sub-scores enable researchers and policymakers to identify the states requiring the timeliest interventions in each dimension, and to track temporal shifts in sustainability levels.
