Open research questions in Sustainability and Climate Change Governance

What the literature leaves open

• The existing literature does not fully account for the impact of colonial history on the spatial distribution of renewable energy innovation. There is a lack of understanding of how enabling technologies shape the pathways toward energy independence driven by renewable energy innovation. The study fills this gap by providing a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between colonial history, renewable energy innovation, and energy independence.

  Colonial history shapes the pathways toward energy independence driven by renewable energy innovation · 2026 · DOI

• Further research on the effectiveness of climate budgets in facilitating transformative change - Investigation of climate budgets in other countries or regions

  “Delivering on Expectations”: The Potential of the Climate Budget to Facilitate Transformative Change · 2026 · DOI

• An empirical agenda for studying how coordination is negotiated, stabilized, contested, and unevenly distributed across distributed energy systems.

  When Distributed Energy Becomes Governable: A Perspective on Coordination and Aggregation in Energy Transitions · 2026 · DOI

• Small sample of eight municipalities - Limited to Norwegian municipalities - No comparison to other countries or regions

  “Delivering on Expectations”: The Potential of the Climate Budget to Facilitate Transformative Change · 2026 · DOI

• Yet while MSPs have been extensively researched as a participatory governance mechanism, there are limited studies examining the impact of sustainability awareness and knowledge on stakeholder participation in MSPs.

  What determines participation in multi-stakeholder partnerships? Assessing sustainability awareness and knowledge · 2025 · DOI

• There are plenty of studies on this issue in developed country context, but such studies in the context of developing countries are lacking, especially in India.

  Analyzing the Role of Polycentric Governance in Institutional Innovations: Insights from Urban Climate Governance in India · 2024 · DOI

• The research findings suggest that polycentric governance increases diversity and autonomy in decision-making centers across levels, which can enable more innovation or flexibility, leading to improving governance capacity to respond to changing circumstances, but these developments are still in nascent stage and further research is needed to assess the long-term sustainability of these capacities.

  Analyzing the Role of Polycentric Governance in Institutional Innovations: Insights from Urban Climate Governance in India · 2024 · DOI

• Here, we conduct a comparative synthesis of three modeling approaches- integrated assessment modeling, engineering-economic optimization, and agent-based modeling-with underexplored potential to represent institutions.

  Simulating institutional heterogeneity in sustainability science · 2024 · DOI

• Despite the extensive literature on adaptive governance since its inception in 2003, a comprehensive review of the literature spanning two decades remains to be conducted.

  Progress in adaptive governance research and hotspot analysis: a global scientometric visualization analysis · 2024 · DOI

• Yet, current institutionalised ethical standards, which largely follow the tradition of medical ethics, are insufficient to guide transformative researchers in navigating such dilemmas.

  Neither right nor wrong? Ethics of collaboration in transformative research for sustainable futures · 2024 · DOI

• However, the relationship between interdisciplinarity and attention from policy documents remains unclear.

  Interdisciplinary research attracts greater attention from policy documents: evidence from COVID-19 · 2024 · DOI

• The mechanism analysis (Table 8) shows that environmental regulation strengthens the GFP-UER relationship, but does not specify which regulatory instruments (emissions trading, command-and-control standards, voluntary programs) drive these interaction effects in demonstration cities. Disaggregating the ENV variable into specific policy instruments would clarify optimal regulatory combinations with fiscal measures.

  Impact of green fiscal policy on urban ecological resilience—evidence from China’s “comprehensive demonstration cities for energy conservation and emission reduction fiscal policy” · 2026 · DOI

• The quasi-natural experiment design uses 2011 as the policy implementation cutoff for comprehensive demonstration cities, but the paper does not report parallel trends testing or robustness checks validating the validity of the difference-in-differences assumption. Explicit pre-treatment covariate balance tests and placebo analyses using falsified cutoff years would strengthen causal inference claims.

  Impact of green fiscal policy on urban ecological resilience—evidence from China’s “comprehensive demonstration cities for energy conservation and emission reduction fiscal policy” · 2026 · DOI

• The challenge of agreeing on milestones for the transition. The challenge of handling technical indicators around decarbonisation versus softer, more intangible objectives around social justice. The need for systems approaches and to build MEL capacity.

  MEL4JT – South Africa’s emerging monitoring, evaluation and learning ecosystem around a socially just transition to a stabilising climate · 2026 · DOI

• Future research can build on the paper's findings to develop more effective MEL systems. Future research can explore the application of MEL systems in other countries.

  MEL4JT – South Africa’s emerging monitoring, evaluation and learning ecosystem around a socially just transition to a stabilising climate · 2026 · DOI

• Further study on the impact of informal ties between state elites and business interests on low-carbon policy implementation. Analysis of the effectiveness of transparent governance designs in minimizing fossil fuel dominance and accelerating progress toward the 2060 Net Zero Emission target.

  The Political Network Governance of Indonesia's Low-Carbon Transition: A CIMO-Based Review · 2026 · DOI

• The gap between ambitious rhetoric and stalled execution in Indonesia's low-carbon policy implementation. The lack of understanding of the role of state-business relationships in shaping low-carbon policy implementation.

  The Political Network Governance of Indonesia's Low-Carbon Transition: A CIMO-Based Review · 2026 · DOI

• Future research can focus on developing more effective supervision mechanisms for blue carbon sink trading in China. Future research can explore the implications of the study's findings for other countries and contexts.

  From action to legislation: challenges and enhancements of the regulatory frameworks concerning China’s blue carbon sink trading · 2026 · DOI

• There is a lack of specialized legislation for blue carbon sink trading in China. The current supervision system for blue carbon sink trading in China has core problems that need to be addressed.

  From action to legislation: challenges and enhancements of the regulatory frameworks concerning China’s blue carbon sink trading · 2026 · DOI

• The study identifies a gap in understanding the impact of narrative dynamics on the legitimacy of market-based climate mechanisms. The existing literature does not provide a comprehensive framework for analyzing the relationship between narrative dynamics and market legitimacy.

  Narrative Dynamics and Carbon Market Legitimacy: Distortion, Asymmetry, and Advocacy-Driven Closure in Market-Based Climate Mechanisms · 2026 · DOI

• Conclusion of market-based This study demonstrated that the legitimacy and effectiveness climate mechanisms (MBMs) are shaped not only by technical rigour or regulatory reform alone. Through a qualitative discourse analysis of 108 documents spanning 2021 to 2025, the research revealed that narrative dynamics, specifically distortion, asymmetry, advocacy-driven closure, and narrative extraction, play decisive roles in how MBMs are perceived, contested, and ultimately governed. The evidence shows that crisis-oriented narratives, while numerically fewer, are disproportionately amplified through media, advocacy, and policy channels, shaping market behaviour and public perceptions to a greater extent than either reform-oriented or technical-neutral perspectives (Boykoff et al., 2021; Ejaz et al., 2025). Narrative distortion, where project-level integrity issues are generalised and amplified into systemwide claims of failure, undermines trust even when technical deficiencies are limited or contextspecific (Treen et al., 2020; Lamb et al., 2020; Wetterberg et al., 2024). Advocacy-driven closure, particularly within Type B civil society and media collaborations, prestructures inquiry towards predetermined abolitionist conclusions, systematically excluding co-benefit evidence and reinforcing binary the permanence critique (Blum, 2020; Greenfield, 2024b; Streck et al., 2025). Narrative asymmetry persists as Global North actors dominate and discourse marginalising and community-level evidence (Newell et al., 2021; Sovacool et al., 2022; Fricker, 2007). Narrative extraction is also recurrent, with communities and invoked as discursive projects material, often with minimal recognition of their agency or contribution.

  Narrative Dynamics and Carbon Market Legitimacy: Distortion, Asymmetry, and Advocacy-Driven Closure in Market-Based Climate Mechanisms · 2026 · DOI

• Data & sources substitutes for structural RE additions; sustainability + MRV integrity are decisive require MRV + sustainability safeguards; ensure parallel RE capacity acceleration Resources, 2023). Regulation No. 12/2023 on biomass co firing in CFPPs.

  From UNFCCC rules to domestic delivery: An institutional economics explanation of Indonesia’s commitment and implementation gap in emission reduction · 2026 · DOI

• This research is designed to provide an institutional and documentary-based explanation rather than a causal econometric estimate. Accordingly, findings should be interpreted as mechanism-based inferences grounded in documentary evidence and descriptive emissions trends, not as quantified causal effects. The approach prioritizes traceability, coherence of interpretation, and plausibility of institutional mechanisms, appropriate for the study’s objective to explain how UNFCCC governance influences domestic commitment structures and delivery constraints in Indonesia. A further limitation is that documentary evidence may reflect formal design more clearly than informal practices; however, this is addressed by triangulating across legal texts, regulatory instruments, and institutional reports that capture implementation conditions. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS UNFCCC as a Global Institutional Driver of Domestic Policy Direction UNFCCC operates not only as a diplomatic arena but as a rule setting institutional architecture that reorganizes domestic expectations about credible climate action. Under the Paris Agreement’s pledge and review logic, national performance becomes the binding locus of climate governance: targets are domestically determined, yet their credibility is continuously tested through transparency, periodic review, and expectations of progression (Bodansky, 2016; Falkner, 2016; Keohane and Victor, 2016). This architecture effectively positions the UNFCCC regime as a “meta institution” that standardizes what must be made legible (targets, inventories, policies, and support) and thereby creates structured pressure for domestic reforms in data systems, coordination routines, and financing arrangements (Konrad et al., 2022; Winkler et al., 2017). A central mechanism of this influence is the Enhanced Transparency Framework (ETF), which functions as governance by information: it shapes what states must report, how progress is assessed, and how implementation support is tracked, with downstream effects on domestic administrative routines and policy coherence (Winkler et al., 2017). In practice, countries experience dual pressures. The first is normative, demonstrating ambition consistent with global expectations. The second is operational, building domestic systems capable of converting commitments into measurable outcomes. This duality is precisely where institutional capacity becomes decisive and where commitment implementation gaps tend to emerge, particularly in emerging economies confronting growth energy security trade offs (Hale, 2020; Keohane and Victor, 2016). Indonesia’s Domestic Legal Basis Indonesia’s domestic legal anchoring of the Paris Agreement is clear: Law No.

  From UNFCCC rules to domestic delivery: An institutional economics explanation of Indonesia’s commitment and implementation gap in emission reduction · 2026 · DOI

• The existing frameworks explain institutions, niches, and system formation well, yet they are less explicit about how coordination intensifies across physical, digital, and social domains. The gap becomes especially clear when scholars move between levels of analysis, as MLP and TISs explain institutional dynamics, but are less explicit about how intensifying coordination unfolds within the operational life of emerging infrastructures.

  When Distributed Energy Becomes Governable: A Perspective on Coordination and Aggregation in Energy Transitions · 2026 · DOI

• Entrenched corporate-state alliances and risk-averse political cultures shape spatial inequality and thwart democratic ownership of energy infrastructures. The energy system remains largely locked into privatisation and dominated by private and corporate forms. Localised regimes of obstruction pose a significant challenge to remunicipalisation campaigns.

  Mobilising for local energy democracy in the United States: confronting political lock-in and private capture in the campaign for public power · 2026 · DOI

Most-cited papers in Sustainability and Climate Change Governance

• A General Framework for Analyzing Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems · Science · 2009 · 6,421 citations
• The Struggle to Govern the Commons · Science · 2003 · 2,777 citations
• INSTITUTIONAL EVOLUTION AND CHANGE: ENVIRONMENTALISM AND THE U.S. CHEMICAL INDUSTRY. · Academy of Management Journal · 1999 · 2,158 citations
• Resilience and Sustainable Development: Building Adaptive Capacity in a World of Transformations · AMBIO · 2002 · 1,941 citations
• Beyond the ABC: Climate Change Policy and Theories of Social Change · Environment and Planning A Economy and Space · 2010 · 1,753 citations
• More evolution than revolution: transition management in public policy · foresight · 2001 · 1,393 citations
• Common Property Institutions and Sustainable Governance of Resources · World Development · 2001 · 1,281 citations
• Citizen Participation in Decision Making: Is It Worth the Effort? · Public Administration Review · 2004 · 1,199 citations
• Tackling Grand Challenges Pragmatically: Robust Action Revisited · Organization Studies · 2015 · 1,187 citations
• Background on the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework · Policy Studies Journal · 2011 · 1,174 citations

Most recent work

• A new framework for collaborative climate governance: linking consensus building and collective action · Policy & Politics · 2026
• Democratizing climate change mitigation pathways using modernized stabilization wedges · Science · 2026
• From urban renewal to resilience: The impact of China's ecological and urban restoration project · Habitat International · 2026
• Against the planetary: carbon fetishism and the politics of false solutions · The Journal of Peasant Studies · 2026
• Regeneration beyond growth: Reimagining urban futures through justice and climate resilience · Habitat International · 2026
• A sustainable assessment framework for cross-regional ecological governance: Integrating socio-ecological system and complex network approaches · Socio-Economic Planning Sciences · 2026
• Toward the institutionalization of social sustainability · Annals of Tourism Research · 2026
• From intention to action under institutional nudges: governmental pathways to climate adaptation technology adoption in rural China · Journal of Rural Studies · 2026
• Collaborative foresight: Major research trajectories and future research agenda · Futures · 2026
• Green Refrontierisation: Critical Cartographies of the Hydrogen Rush in Africa · Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers · 2026

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