ABSTRACT International concerns around the equitable distribution of income generated by communal trophy hunting tourism have raised questions about the industry's effectiveness in promoting rural livelihoods and nature conservation. We examine how communities in Namibia derive benefits from wildlife and explore local perspectives on fostering active economic participation in the trophy hunting economy. Through community‐centric value chain analysis, we uncover that rural communities capture half of the value that local hunting tourism operations generate. Formal community institutions play a central role in redistributing these benefits and facilitating rural socio‐economic development. Moreover, strengthening human capital and active economic participation of communities can further enhance local community value capture and creation. Our findings contribute to discourse on aligning conservation with rural development objectives. This value chain model offers a replicable framework for evaluating distributional equity in nature‐based industries and provides a pathway to enhance it, ensuring support of both people and nature.
ABSTRACT Countries around the world have committed to a range of sustainable development initiatives aimed at advancing the Sustainable Development Goals and promoting the circular economy. However, the implementation of these sustainability initiatives entails substantial costs and resource requirements which may result in potential trade‐offs. We examine these sustainability trade‐offs by focusing on the relationship between the Sustainable Development Goals and the circular economy. Drawing on a panel dataset of European Union member states spanning 2009–2021, we find that progress on the Sustainable Development Goals is negatively associated with circular economy outcomes, indicating potential trade‐offs between these major sustainability initiatives. Furthermore, we find that strong environmental policy settings within ruling governments, higher levels of government spending, and greater trade freedom positively moderate the relationship between the Sustainable Development Goals and circular economy outcomes, thereby reducing sustainability trade‐offs. The findings of this study contribute to extant theory and have implications for policymakers.
ABSTRACT This study aims to explore the impact of a firm's external environmental factors (macro and micro) on business performance mediated by green practices. Data is collected from 280 managers of food processing firms in North India. Through Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) it is found that a firm's macro and microenvironmental factors positively impact the adoption of green practices; in turn, green practices positively influence business performance. Results of mediation analysis reveal that green practices fully mediate the relationship between macro environmental factors and business performance and partially mediate the relationship between micro environmental factors and business performance. The results from the moderation analysis reveal that environmental preservation moderates the relationship between green practices and business performance. The study provides theoretical and practical implications that will assist practitioners and policymakers in promoting environmentally friendly practices and improving firm performance.
ABSTRACT This paper examines the effect of environmental pressure, geopolitical risk, technological innovation, economic growth, and urbanization on Environmental Policy Stringency (EPS) of E7 economies for the period 1992–2024. The main estimator is MMQR, and the other estimators are AMG, CCEMG, and median IVQR. The MMQR results demonstrate that technical innovation is positively and strongly related to EPS in all the quantiles considered, with larger coefficients in the higher quantiles. We find positive and significant relationships between economic growth and urbanization at upper quantiles, and modest negative associations between carbon emissions and higher quantiles. Geopolitical risk has mostly insignificant relationships. AMG and CCEMG studies provide complementary data on technological innovation and carbon emissions, whereas the IVQR results further strengthen the positive innovation‐EPS association. The current study adds to the existing body of evidence by investigating EPS as an effect of economic, technological, environmental, and geopolitical factors in rising economies via a distributional framework. The results of the study show the significance of technology capacity and regulatory circumstances adapted to the context for environmental governance, providing insights pertinent to SDG 9, SDG 11, and SDG 13.
ABSTRACT Rapid population growth, environmental degradation and institutional constraints continue to shape environmental sustainability in Sub‐Saharan Africa (SSA), yet evidence on nonlinear demographic dynamics, governance moderation and regional differences remains limited. This study examines the determinants of environmental sustainability using panel data for 45 SSA countries from 2000 to 2023. A multidimensional environmental sustainability index (ESI), incorporating CO 2 emissions, forest cover, PM2.5 pollution and energy use, is developed to capture broader environmental conditions. The findings indicate that government effectiveness is negatively associated with environmental sustainability, while economic development is positively associated with environmental outcomes. Nonlinear analysis identifies a U ‐shaped relationship for population density and an inverted U ‐shaped relationship for energy use. Governance also moderates the relationships between population density, energy use and environmental sustainability, although only the population‐density threshold appears economically meaningful. Regional differences underscore the importance of context‐specific environmental governance, land‐use planning and cleaner energy transitions to support environmental sustainability across SSA.
