This study examines how natural climate solutions (NCS) are institutionalised through carbon market governance in tropical contexts, focusing on Brazil's emerging Emissions Trading System (SBCE). It contributes to debates on the effectiveness, equity and governance of nature-based climate action by analysing how carbon market instruments interact with biodiversity governance, land-use regulation and socio-ecological systems characterised by territorial diversity and inequality in Brazil. Using a qualitative multi-method design combining statutory and document analysis, legislative process tracing, and computationally assisted text analysis, the study evaluates horizontal, vertical and functional coherence across climate, biodiversity, land-use and territorial governance domains. The findings show that the SBCE represents a significant regulatory innovation, supported by a technically advanced architecture, particularly in monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) systems and registries. However, institutional coherence remains partial and uneven, with stronger integration in financial and technical domains than across biodiversity, land-use and territorial governance systems. Stakeholder patterns are also uneven: governmental and financial actors have greater procedural visibility, while territorial, Indigenous and environmental actors are more strongly concentrated in formal or supplementary legislative records and are less consistently represented across procedural stages. These patterns indicate differentiated institutional access rather than, by themselves, a direct measure of stakeholder influence. The findings suggest that NCS governance in tropical contexts can be institutionalised through carbon-market frameworks that operate alongside, rather than fully integrated with, broader socio-ecological governance systems. These findings further suggest that deeper institutional integration and meaningful inclusion of territorially embedded actors are important conditions for effective and legitimate NCS governance.

This paper aims to arrive at a better understanding of the integration of the diverse values of nature (instrumental, intrinsic, relational) into (environmental) law and policy, using peatland restoration in Scotland as a case study. It argues that adopting a pluri-value approach is a useful tool for both the design and implementation of environmental law and policy. It can lead to a better understanding of which policy interventions are needed (framing) and enhance the implementation of environmental policy, by enabling fuller consideration of trade-offs, contributing to a broader understanding of nature and improving early engagement by affected/interested parties. The paper first explores the pluri-value approach as presented by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. This serves as the background for the Scottish case study, which combines a review of scientific literature on peatland values, public survey data on perceptions of Scottish peatlands, and a documentary analysis of three key policy instruments. The findings reveal a discrepancy between the broad range of values attributed to peatlands by the public and the instrumental values, in particular climate-related ecosystem services and economic opportunities, that are currently being emphasised in peatland restoration policy. This narrow framing risks overlooking key socio-cultural drivers of degradation and constrains the effectiveness and legitimacy of restoration efforts. In this context, the establishment of partnerships is proposed as a mechanism to embed diverse values in decision-making, establish long-term collaboration among diverse interested/affected parties, foster peer-learning and challenge persistent unsustainable narratives.

European forests provide multiple ecosystem services but are increasingly under pressure from climate-related disturbances such as droughts, storms and insect calamities. Forest policy is an important driver for the adaptation of forest management practices to climate change. The paper aims at exploring how individual policy actors from four European countries perceive and learn about various forest policy topics in the context of climate-related disturbances. Informed by the Advocacy Coalition Framework, it addresses the research question of how flexible and divisive their beliefs about different topics are, in order to identify areas with high and low propensity for policy-oriented learning. Based on focus group discussions and the assessments of policy actors' beliefs at three points in time between 2023 and 2025, we found for about half of the assessed forest policy topics a relatively high propensity for policy-oriented learning through contestation or collaboration. All assessed empirical policy core beliefs about policy instruments and approximately half of the studied normative policy core beliefs on the perceived importance of forest uses and about whose welfare counts most in forest management showed a rather high degree of belief alteration. Contrary to theoretical expectations, the results did not show a higher degree of alteration for secondary beliefs than for policy core beliefs. The paper thereby makes an empirical contribution to research on forest and environmental policy and, through its analytical framework to assess the propensity of policy-oriented learning, a theoretical contribution to the literature on policy learning and the Advocacy Coalition Framework.

The rapid expansion of data centres and their environmental impacts, including high energy and water consumption and land-use changes, pose urgent challenges to existing regulatory systems. These impacts exhibit a distinctive ‘hybrid-point source pollution’ character, originating from a physically discrete facility yet producing dispersed, cumulative and cross-sectoral environmental consequences that evade existing regulatory classifications. A comparative study of the EU, the US and China shows that, despite their governance models being characterised, respectively, as norm-anchored, market-oriented and policy-directed, all suffer from fragmented regulation and insufficient integration of environmental issues. At the international level, existing environmental treaties provide only partial and largely non-binding coverage, leaving major legal gaps. Dealing with these deficiencies requires a comprehensive governance framework that strengthens environmental assessment, includes spatial planning, optimises regulatory tools and establishes unified standards and disclosure mechanisms, thereby advancing a cross-border model that connects environmental, international and digital law.

The European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) is a policy that prohibits access to the EU market for commodities that are linked to deforestation. We did a systematic review to understand perceived challenges, opportunities and potential impacts of the EUDR on producing countries of cocoa and coffee. The challenges include national laws that are incompatible with the EUDR, a lack of awareness and technical capacity, map misclassifications, and the burden on smallholder farmers. The opportunities include setting standards for fairer prices, improving human rights, and strengthening local collaboration and capacity building. The potential impacts are linked to country-level legal alignments with the regulation and required investments to comply with the EUDR. The EUDR could become an incentive for more similar policies and more environmental policies at different levels. The EUDR might initially bring a financial burden to invest in formalising environmental compliance, but long-term financial, economic and social benefits are expected.

The biodiversity and climate crises are interconnected through land use and land use change, posing significant threats to ecosystem integrity, human well-being, food and water supply and climate resilience. To effectively address these challenges, policies for climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation and biodiversity protection must be considered jointly. In this paper, we analyse Norwegian national policy documents related to these three areas within the land use sector. We assess the extent to which climate and biodiversity policies are integrated into these national policy documents and identify three approaches to integration. (1) an ambition for integration that applies ecosystem management as a guiding principle, (2) a tendency towards partial integration, which is inconsistently applied throughout the documents; and (3) a lack of ambition for integration, where only one issue is addressed or where the three issues are treated superficially. The latter approach is by far the most prevalent, highlighting an absence of comprehensive integration and revealing a fragmented bureaucracy that prioritises individual policy issues over interconnected strategies. We argue that successful integration may require not only strong cross-sectoral leadership, but also structural reforms and the establishment of new decision-making bodies to effectively address the intertwined challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss.

As governments intensify efforts to achieve net zero goals, they increasingly rely on forms of indirect governance to mobilise societal actors and facilitate climate action. Governance literature focuses on orchestration by organisations and governments that engage intermediaries to pursue shared governance goals. While intermediaries are recognised in climate governance as go-between organisations operating between governance levels to affect climate policy, less is known about states that establish and design intermediaries for steering climate action. This paper unpacks policy characteristics of what we call state-initiated climate intermediaries (SICI) to gain a nuanced understanding of this dynamic. It examines cases of SICIs in Sweden and the Netherlands using grey literature analysis. Case analysis is guided by a novel conceptual framework that bridges orchestration theory with mission-oriented innovation policy. The analysis indicates that mission-oriented policy of SICIs that encourages cross-sectoral participation and dialogue with the wider public facilitates inclusive climate action. However, neither intermediary provides systematic mechanisms for tracking participants' implementation of voluntary commitments. The available evidence therefore indicates facilitation and stakeholder mobilisation, but does not permit conclusions about the resulting climate outcomes. This paper makes a conceptual contribution to climate governance literature by defining SICIs as a distinct climate intermediary type with mission-oriented policy characteristics. It contributes to an empirical understanding of states as orchestrators of SICIs and mission-oriented innovation policy to steer these intermediaries' climate initiatives towards mission goals.

Studies of knowledge development and use for public decision-making can be found across the social sciences. There have been increasing calls for meaningful integration of the contrasting disciplinary perspectives on this topic, including from environmental and sustainability sciences. This paper provides a preliminary investigation of the feasibility of such an agenda by examining environmental studies of knowledge development and use, using an analytical framework derived from the policy sciences of evidence-based policymaking. These two literatures have progressed in parallel for several decades, with just a subset of scholars working at their interface. The paper presents an interpretive systematic review of environmental studies to assess its conceptual coherence with the policy sciences. The literature survey indicates a schism between contrasting epistemologies, much like in policy sciences. Yet, most literature, regardless of epistemological orientation, demonstrates an appreciation of the complexities and contingencies of knowledge use for policymaking in ways that align well with interpretivist policy sciences. Environmental literatures are, however, pre-occupied by science-policy interfaces as the central locus of knowledge development and use, contrary to policy sciences' understanding of contemporary policy advisory systems. The surveyed literature also neglects performative uses of evidence and how contrasting rationalities may be used when deploying evidence in policy formulation. We propose that a common conceptual framework between these subdisciplines is possible but needs to better account for the politics of knowledge development and rational choice in policymaking.

Climate change increasingly threatens coastal fisheries and the livelihoods of small-scale fishers. Although the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) has been widely used to explain pro-environmental intentions, its application to climate adaptation in fisheries remains limited, and the role of risk perception as an antecedent to the TPB constructs requires further examination. This study applies an extended TPB model in which climate change risk perception (RP) is specified as an antecedent, while political trust (PT) and environmental responsibility (ER) are examined as moderators. Survey data from 426 small-scale fishers in Ningbo, China, were analyzed using structural equation modeling. RP had a significant direct effect on adaptation intention and a significant total indirect effect through attitude (AT), subjective norms (SN), and perceived behavioral control (PBC) considered jointly. AT and SN significantly predicted adaptation intention (AI), whereas PBC showed a positive but non-significant direct association in the full structural model. PT and ER strengthened the relationships between the TPB constructs and adaptation intention. These findings show that risk perception is related to adaptation intention both directly and through the core TPB constructs, while political trust and environmental responsibility affect the strength of the proximal TPB relationships. The results support policies that improve locally relevant risk communication, reduce practical barriers to adaptation, strengthen community support, and promote transparent and participatory fisheries governance.

Policy coherence has become a central principle in climate and development governance, particularly following the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This article presents a systematic review of 78 peer-reviewed empirical studies published between 2005 and 2024, examining how policy coherence is conceptualized, operationalized, and explained in climate governance research. The review finds a field consolidated around a single conceptual framing: policy integration accounts for two-thirds of the corpus and for every study published before 2015, while alignment-oriented, sustainable development, and normative framings remain marginal. Empirical coverage is concentrated in Europe, which supplies nearly half of all studies, and methodologically narrow—four-fifths of studies are wholly qualitative, three-fifths analyze a single case, and three use cross-national data. Synthesizing explanatory factors, the review shows that political and normative drivers of coherence are widely identified but seldom analyzed: 83% of studies attribute coherence outcomes to ideational factors, while two conduct discourse analysis. The clearest dimension-specific pattern concerns economic and donor-related factors, which are distinctively associated with vertical coherence across governance levels and strongly regionally structured—studies in Global South contexts make this link in 76% of cases against 36% of European and North American studies. Where external finance shapes national policy systems, coherence follows the flow of funding rather than the architecture of planning. These patterns follow from where and how coherence has been studied. The article concludes by outlining directions for more analytically direct, regionally inclusive and politically attentive research on policy coherence in climate governance.

Climate change requires governance arrangements that coordinate governmental authority, civic action, and specialized contributions from nongovernmental actors. Yet research on climate-policy participation has focused largely on formal participation opportunities, paying less attention to citizens' expectations regarding governance roles and their evaluations of policy processes. This study examines how three survey-derived governance role orientations—governmental, civic, and industry-and-media orientations—and perceived climate policy governance quality are associated with two participation outcomes: institutional participation intention and climate-related civic participation behavior. The analysis uses data from a nationwide quota-based online survey of 500 adults in South Korea and applies hierarchical regression models. Civic orientation is positively associated with both participation outcomes, whereas governmental orientation is negatively associated with institutional participation intention. Industry-and-media orientation is not significantly associated with either outcome. Perceived climate policy governance quality is positively associated with both institutional participation intention and civic participation behavior, but none of its interactions with the three orientations is statistically significant. The findings distinguish citizens' expectations about governance roles from their evaluations of governance-process quality. They suggest that civic orientation and favorable process evaluations operate as separate and largely additive correlates of climate-policy participation. Effective participation strategies should therefore combine meaningful institutional openness with durable connections to citizen- and civil society-led climate action.

This article examines two European rights-based climate litigation cases—Klimaatzaak v Belgium and Milieudefensie v Shell—where courts were asked to set quantified climate mitigation targets. Such determinations inherently involve distributive questions, as they require allocating shares of a finite global carbon budget across actors and over time. I analyse how courts navigate this task while maintaining a posture of neutrality to preserve judicial legitimacy. Courts engage in ‘boundary work’ to distinguish law from policymaking and thereby enable the neutralisation of judicial intervention. I analyse how this imperative operates in these two case studies: Judges rely on the authority of scientific consensus, particularly reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to delimit the legitimate scope of adjudication. In doing so, courts treat scientific objects, notably climate scenarios and mitigation pathways, as stabilised outputs whose underlying normative assumptions and distributive implications remain largely unexamined. Overall, rather than evaluating competing climate pathways in light of human rights considerations, courts tend to interpret human rights obligations by deferring to scientific recommendations. This interpretive stance has two major implications. First, it sidelines equity arguments, given that equity requires explicit normative engagement. Second, it produces a dependence on the scientific construction of a single roadmap, thereby constraining adjudication in the face of multiple pathways that reflect different socio-political futures. These dynamics reveal the politics of neutrality: Efforts to ground climate adjudication on ostensibly neutral and consensual foundations generate their own political implications by privileging certain forms of expertise, delimiting acceptable mitigation pathways, and influencing the distribution of climate responsibilities between actors.

Participatory processes are increasingly recognized as essential components of modern environmental governance. While much scholarly attention has been devoted to the design and implementation of such processes, less is known about the critical phase between participatory processes and final policy outputs. The article addresses this research gap by proposing policy translation as an analytical lens to investigate how narratives are transformed as they are transmitted from participation to policy. In order to apply the concept of policy translation empirically, the ideational policy integration of forestry into the German National Water Strategy (NWS) is investigated. Accordingly, this research examines how forestry was, after previous fragmentation of the water and forest sectors, ideationally integrated into the NWS. Based on a qualitative analysis of 100 process-accompanying documents, two drafts and a final version of the NWS, as well as eight semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, the study uncovers a narrative shift throughout the NWS' development. The results insinuate that this shift occurred primarily throughout the translation process, which is here characterized as ongoing discursive struggles, including practices of gatekeeping and imposition. This research contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the policy process by illuminating the discursive dynamics that occurred throughout the translation process. It calls for future research to critically explore the policy translation between participatory process and final policy output, as it highly influences policy outcomes and may, as shown here, overshadow the inputs from the participatory process.

This commentary engages with Harro van Asselt and Tejas Rao's analysis of the implications of the ICJ's Advisory Opinion on Climate Change for fossil fuel-producing States. The Court affirmed that States are subject to a ‘stringent’ due diligence obligation to prevent harm to the climate system and other parts of the environment, proportionate to the risk of irreversible harm. I examine the content and ‘stringency’ of this standard through a systemic interpretation of inter-State and international human rights law, arguing that it entails a duty to phase out fossil fuels. This duty operates both as a forward-looking mitigation obligation, differentiated according to historical responsibility and respective capabilities, and as a secondary obligation of cessation where the primary obligation has already been breached. On this basis, I respectfully reject van Asselt and Rao's conclusion that ‘it may be too early to declare that international law requires the phase-out of fossil fuels’.

This article examines how planning law in Flanders (Belgium) and the Netherlands regulates residential gardens as nature-based solutions, identifying both legal opportunities for and obstacles to activating the ecosystem services of gardens. The comparison and analysis focus on normative conditions, planning permission as a regulatory permission and enforcement. The EU's Nature Restoration Regulation makes this comparison a timely exercise, as it contains specific obligations for urban nature, which will likely lead to an increased focus by planning authorities on private gardens.