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.
This paper examines how new development pathways emerge through changes in governance under conditions of structural shrinkage, using the case of Parkstad Limburg, a shrinking urban region in the Netherlands. Drawing on Evolutionary Governance Theory and a path-mapping methodology, it analyses how rigidity, flexibility, and contingency interact in the co-evolution of actors, institutions, and discourses shaping the region's governance path. The findings show that inherited legacies of parochialism and social inertia, rooted in the coal-mining past, long constrained regional collaboration and reinforced fragmented, growth-oriented responses to decline. Path creation became possible when the growing recognition of urban shrinkage as a structural problem enabled collective learning, strengthened regional leadership, and supported the gradual reworking of institutional arrangements towards coordinated regional action. In turn, an unanticipated conflict over demolition opened space for experimentation through a local project, which was strategically reframed as part of a circular construction agenda and subsequently institutionalised as a broader regional path to reinvention. The paper concludes that deliberate path creation hinges on iterative interplay between learning, leadership, and bricolage within evolving governance configurations.
The European Green Deal (EGD) is an ambitious European Union (EU) policy programme towards climate neutrality by 2050. This set of political instruments and strategies addresses interconnected challenges of climate change and environmental degradation through a deep transformation of the economy. However, serious doubts exist about whether the EGD can fulfil these goals. Its translation into policy practice has proven challenging, regarding the involvement of relevant stakeholders, overcoming dominant discourses, and realising ambitions of policy coordination. To address this, we report on an empirical study within the SHARED GREEN DEAL project, applying four governance principles across six EGD policy domains to identify transformative policy pathways towards EGD targets by more than 150 workshop participants. Our results suggest that the use of future imaginaries aids understanding both the obstacles and preconditions for transformation-oriented EU policy. Furthermore, our analysis highlights the importance of identifying pathways, their trade-offs, and co-benefits in order to support the translation of EU policy targets into transformative action. Our findings offer insights for policymakers and practitioners in shaping regional innovation policies across the EU, concluding with future research avenues that further identify actionable pathways towards a 'green and just transition.'
