Trade unions are increasingly expected to play a role in sustainability transitions, but their legitimacy as environmental governance actors remains underexplored. Our study uses a multidimensional framework to examine how workers, both union members and non-members, evaluate trade union legitimacy “from below.” This framework distinguishes between normative legitimacy, based on environmental values, and instrumental legitimacy, reflected in perceived dual-mandate capability. Survey data from Slovenia reveal robust normative support for union involvement in sustainability, fueled by environmental concern. In contrast, instrumental legitimacy is more conditional and closely linked to union membership. Interestingly, non-members with high environmental concern express even stronger expectations for union involvement than members do. These findings suggest that legitimacy is co-constructed through value alignment and perceived effectiveness rather than inherited from institutional status. By centering worker perceptions, we contribute to environmental governance scholarship by positioning unions as civic actors whose legitimacy is formed “from below” and to legitimacy theory by showing how internal and adjacent publics assess unions' purpose and performance, suggesting that these evaluations may condition unions' authority claims in contested transitions.

Renewable energy projects continue to fail at the local level despite enjoying broad public support and successive rounds of participatory reform. This article asks what institutional pattern produces this persistent gap and what kind of response would address it. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 10 actors across resident, developer, consultant, local government, and civil society positions, alongside procedural analysis of two decades of wind energy disputes in Penghu, Taiwan, the study traces how the architecture of the country's Environmental Impact Assessment generates conflict at each node where it meets the communities it affects. The pattern is specific: community encounter precedes binding decision, while binding authority sits in a body structurally removed from those who bear the consequences. The architecture offers adjudication where the situation calls for multi-party negotiation. This diagnosis points toward an institutional response that does not adjust the procedure but changes who initiates it. The article develops the Resident Tendering Mechanism (RTM): a procedure in which communities first specify the conditions under which a project would be acceptable, and developers respond through competitive bids that, once selected, become binding. The mechanism gives communities the position of initiator that consent-based and negotiation-based approaches presuppose but do not themselves provide.

Local environmental politics in China is often said to be dominated by state-controlled modes of multi-level governance. However, top-down governance is embedded within and transformed by local politics, adding complexity to governance practices and environmental outcomes. This article draws on the case of Hengqin's Tianmu River to provide a context-rich and theoretically nuanced account of how local environmental politics emerge through the interplay of structure and agency. We explain how the local government co-opted the environmental impact assessment process to expedite a flagship development project and restructured the public-participation mechanisms embedded in the river chief system into a technocratic governance approach. These findings complicate narratives of China's environmental governance—local governments are not simply implementers of top-down strategies (which themselves are inconsistent). Rather, local political-technocratic dynamics continually contest and reshape top-down initiatives, bending them to context-specific realities.

The European Union (EU) framework for end-of-life vehicles (ELVs) has progressed beyond waste disposal to formally cover vehicle design, producer responsibility and material recovery. However, it is less clear whether these provisions effectively connect across the relevant stages of the product life cycle. This article examines the coherence of EU ELV law in light of life cycle thinking, with particular attention to whether legally binding obligations connect the design stage to end-of-life outcomes, including through producer responsibility mechanisms. It adopts doctrinal analysis, transposition analysis and a comparative study of Denmark and Sweden, in order to assess whether EU ELV law translates life cycle thinking into binding legal connections across the vehicle life cycle. The analysis shows that the EU End-of-Life Vehicles (ELV) Directive's obligation still focuses on the end-of-life stage. The EU's proposed ELV Regulation, which will replace the ELV Directive, strengthens certain upstream–downstream linkages but does not fully resolve the problem of regulatory coherence across the vehicle life cycle. Thus, the proposed law will only partly address identified problems.

Governance is a well-known dimension of adaptive capacity across various frameworks, however specific links between perceptions of governance (il)legitimacy and adaptive capacity remain relatively unexplored. In this study, we investigate connections between climate change adaptation and perceptions of governance (il)legitimacy using focus group and interview data collected in 2016 in fishing communities of the Lake Victoria Basin, Uganda. We found that perceptions of illegitimate fisheries governance across the four dimensions of legitimacy—state accountability to the local level, legitimacy of local level crafted rules by higher level government, legitimacy of the institution as a whole, and legitimacy of the rules by users—undermined adaptive capacity to climate change and other shocks in these resource-dependent communities. We draw links between perceptions of illegitimate governance and adaptive actions that have negative food security and livelihood impacts, and we illustrate how improved legitimacy could bolster adaptive capacity for local fisheries actors. We argue that (1) improving one dimension of legitimacy improves all other dimensions, (2) improving governance via legitimacy improves all other domains of adaptive capacity, that is, learning and knowledge, access to assets, diversity and flexibility, and natural capital, and (3) the ‘legitimacy crisis’ in fisheries management extends to an adaptation crisis.

Environmental policy addresses wicked problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution—issues marked by complexity, conflicting objectives, and stakeholder resistance. After often-contested policy formulation, implementers face intense pressure to deliver results. While implementation research has identified many determinants of success and failure, little is known about their prevalence in environmental policy and whether the context of implementation shapes determinant frequencies. To address this gap, we conducted a systematic review of 88 empirical studies on environmental policy implementation spanning a geographically diverse set of countries. We synthesize the results across studies, quantifying determinant frequencies both overall and for different contextual dimensions, including instrument type and target group. The most prevalent determinants were implementer resources, political salience, instrument coherence, and target group attitudes. While broad determinant categories varied little across contexts, several individual determinants differed substantially—especially between economic and regulative instruments. By combining a medium-N overview with a context-sensitive analysis, the study provides an important empirical base for contingency-oriented theories of policy implementation and provides practitioners with clearer evidence for tailoring strategies to specific environmental policy settings.