Search Results (751)

Green collaborative innovation is a complex socio-technical system involving interactions among governments, universities, enterprises, and financial institutions. However, existing studies often examine these actors separately or focus on bilateral relationships, limiting the understanding of how multi-agent strategies jointly evolve toward sustainable innovation. This study develops a four-player evolutionary game model incorporating regional governments, universities, local enterprises, and green financial institutions to investigate the dynamic evolution of green collaborative innovation under bounded rationality. The model integrates fiscal incentives, technology commercialization returns, financial constraints, reputation effects, and social advocacy mechanisms to explore the conditions under which collaborative strategies emerge and stabilize. Theoretical analysis identifies the evolutionary conditions of different strategic combinations, while numerical simulations examine how key factors influence the evolution process. The results reveal that enterprise deep green transformation plays a central role in shaping the evolution of the entire collaborative innovation system. Government subsidies and financial constraints jointly influence enterprises’ transformation decisions, while technology commercialization returns and research support determine universities’ incentives for green R&D. Green financial institutions contribute not only through capital provision, but also through environmental risk assessment and market-based governance. In addition, social advocacy indirectly affects the evolutionary process by influencing reputation-related incentives and strengthening institutional accountability. This study contributes to green innovation and systems science research by providing a multi-agent evolutionary framework that explains the interactions among policy, technology, finance, and institutional factors. The findings suggest that effective green collaborative innovation requires coordinated governance mechanisms that integrate fiscal support, financial regulation, technology transfer, and social supervision. Full article

Living shorelines are widely promoted as nature-based solutions to coastal erosion and wetland protection, yet hardened shoreline structures continue to dominate even in jurisdictions with explicit policy mandates prioritizing living shorelines. In this research, we examine why non-optimal shoreline modification outcomes persist in Virginia (USA) despite a regulatory framework designed to promote ecological alternatives. We use primary data from interviews with wetlands board members, marine contractors, and nonprofit organizations and findings from a secondary survey of shoreline property owners to analyze shoreline management as a multi-sector collaborative decision-making process. Findings show that shoreline outcomes are shaped less by individual regulatory decisions than by recurrent interaction mechanisms across sectors that operate upstream of permit review. Contractors play a critical agenda-setting role by shaping the alternatives presented to property owners, while social norms, anticipatory adaptation to regulatory expectations, and informal decision heuristics constrain option sets before projects reach wetlands boards. Formal co-management institutions are therefore asked to arbitrate projects that are already highly constrained, limiting their ability to advance policy goals. Improving policy fidelity requires attention to decision sequencing, intermediary incentives, and structural feedback dynamics, rather than simply refining permitting guidance. Targeting upstream decision points and interaction mechanisms offers greater potential to align shoreline management outcomes with living shoreline policy objectives. Full article

Partnership development has become increasingly important in Design–Build government building projects due to the need for effective collaboration among project stakeholders. However, limited studies have examined how partnership maturity mediates the relationship between collaborative factors and project performance. This study investigates the effects of relationship factors, process factors, and environmental factors on partnership maturity and project performance in Design–Build government building projects. A mixed-methods approach was employed, combining a questionnaire survey of 214 professionals involved in Design–Build projects with Structural Equation Modelling–Partial Least Squares (SEM-PLS) analysis and expert validation through Focus Group Discussions. The results indicate that relationship factors, process factors, and environmental factors significantly influence partnership maturity, with process factors exerting the strongest effect (β = 0.403). Relationship factors demonstrated the strongest direct influence on project performance (β = 0.376), followed by partnership maturity (β = 0.208), process factors (β = 0.202), and environmental factors (β = 0.167). The model exhibited strong explanatory power, with R² values of 0.851 for partnership maturity and 0.800 for project performance. The mediation analysis revealed that partnership maturity significantly mediated only the relationship between process factors and project performance. The study contributes to construction management literature by introducing partnership maturity as a selective mediating mechanism in Design–Build projects and provides practical guidance for strengthening collaborative processes to improve project performance in government building projects. Full article

Amid shifting urban renewal approaches and industrial restructuring in China, small and medium-sized cities face the challenge of conserving industrial heritage through adaptive reuse. Drawing on gazetteers, planning documents, and interviews, this paper examines the transformation of the Anqing Baiqitun Cement Plant into a cultural and creative park across environmental, social, economic, and governance dimensions. The case is significant as a typical heavy industrial heritage in a smaller city, while the enterprise’s restructuring and relocation have produced a rupture in collective memory and identity. The study finds that minimal intervention in the heavy industrial remains achieved carbon sequestration and emission reduction, succeeded in ecological restoration, and attained financial viability by leveraging local markets and intangible assets. However, the industrial past has been selectively reconstructed, creating a divide between the former industrial community and the present one, partly due to an over-reliance on Authorised Heritage Discourse logic and insufficient collaboration with the existing enterprise. Participatory governance, driven mainly by government coordination and market capital, proved efficient but lacked public engagement. The paper argues that regenerating industrial heritage in small and medium-sized cities requires not only physical upgrading but also social mechanisms that enable public participation in conservation. Full article

This study analyzes how the integration of native maize cultivation, cultural identity, and technological innovation can promote sustainable and experiential tourism in rural Mexico. The research was conducted in the community of Llano de Guadalupe, Tlaxiaco, Oaxaca. The participatory Action Research process progressed through institutional coordination, participatory diagnosis, biofertilization training, monitoring activities, and community dissemination phases conducted between 3 March 2025 to 25 May 2026. The methodological process included institutional coordination, participatory diagnosis, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, field observations, and the implementation of agroecological practices based on biofertilization. An AI-assisted illustrated field notebook was co-designed to support intercultural education, knowledge exchange, and community participation. The study also incorporated collaborative storytelling, seed preservation practices, and the co-design of sustainable tourism routes grounded in local gastronomy, biodiversity, and agricultural traditions. Preliminary impact indicators showed the expansion of participation from two pilot producers to 54 local producers after community dissemination activities. Findings indicate that the integration of traditional ecological knowledge with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) can strengthen community empowerment, intergenerational learning, and sustainable livelihoods while preserving biocultural heritage. The proposed circular framework connects ecological, social, cultural, and economic subsystems by transforming agroecological practices into educational and tourism assets. The results suggest that Indigenous and rural communities can lead sustainable destination development when supported through participatory governance, inclusive education, and context-sensitive technological innovation. The Tlaxiaco case offers a transferable framework for sustainable rural development that contributes to food sovereignty, biodiversity conservation, environmental stewardship, and local economic resilience. Full article

Air pollution stands as one of the most critical environmental challenges confronting nations worldwide, and investigating the differential impacts of diverse environmental governance modes holds pivotal implications for global sustainability. Based on panel data of 284 cities in China from 2012 to 2024, this research takes the Central Environmental Protection Inspection and the Air Pollution Comprehensive Control Action Plan in Autumn and Winter as quasi-natural experiments representing hierarchical intervention and horizontal collaboration, respectively, and employs a difference-in-differences model to evaluate their impacts on atmospheric pollution. Results show that (1) while both modes significantly curb atmospheric pollution, hierarchical intervention presents a weaker effect than horizontal collaboration; (2) hierarchical intervention exhibits greater effectiveness in low-pollution and high-development areas, whereas horizontal collaboration yields more pronounced effects in low-pollution and low-development areas; (3) hierarchical intervention suppresses pollution by intensifying promotional pressure, while horizontal collaboration exerts effects by advancing environmental decentralization; (4) the former exacerbates border pollution, whereas the latter does not. These findings provide substantial implications for policymakers seeking to scientifically utilize environmental policy tools to promote green and sustainable development. Full article

In the healthcare and clinical domain, artificial intelligence (AI) is evolving from earlier models that primarily predicted outcomes or generated content toward agentic AI systems that demonstrate the capability to make decisions and complete tasks autonomously. Previous research on AI has contributed significantly to disease identification, deep learning applications, large language models (LLMs), and generative AI. These systems primarily function as assistive tools, as they generate text or predictions without directly interacting with clinical infrastructures. Therefore, recent research trends are increasingly oriented toward agentic AI systems that extend beyond traditional predictive and generative model performance. This manuscript provides a detailed review of the current state of agentic AI, starting with the evolution of AI and the concept of a medical agent. A medical agent refers to an intelligent AI system designed to assist in clinical or administrative tasks by analyzing data, supporting decision making, and interacting with healthcare environments. Its underlying agentic AI architecture integrates planning, memory, reasoning, and environmental interaction to enable autonomous tool use, multi-agent collaboration, and continuous perception decision action loops across diverse healthcare applications and clinical workflows. The review further examines safety mechanisms, including human-in-the-loop oversight, self-verification strategies, and regulatory alignment frameworks, which are designed to ensure reliability, accountability, compliance, and safe deployment in regulated healthcare environments. Our findings indicate that a large number of AI agents have been introduced in various manuscripts for healthcare applications; however, fully autonomous systems remain challenging to achieve, as AI still faces several limitations related to reliability, interpretability, data dependency, and integration within complex clinical workflows. In response to these challenges, this survey shifts the focus from task-specific model performance to system-level autonomy and workflow orchestration, providing a structured foundation for understanding the design, deployment, governance, and limitations of agentic AI systems in modern healthcare ecosystems. Full article

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have emerged as a major global environmental challenge because of their widespread use, exceptional persistence, environmental mobility, bioaccumulation potential, and associated risks to human and ecosystem health. Their continued release threatens water security, environmental quality, and sustainable development, highlighting the need for effective governance and sustainable chemical management. This review critically evaluates PFAS governance by synthesising recent advances in regulatory frameworks, environmental monitoring, and environmental risk management across major international jurisdictions. The analysis demonstrates that effective PFAS governance extends beyond establishing regulatory limits and depends on integrated approaches combining class-based regulation, harmonised environmental monitoring, adaptive governance, robust enforcement, and stakeholder collaboration. Despite significant regulatory progress, persistent challenges, including fragmented governance, inconsistent monitoring capacity, limited toxicological data for emerging PFAS, and disparities in institutional resources, continue to hinder effective management. The review identifies international regulatory harmonisation, expanded monitoring of emerging PFAS, advanced analytical technologies, improved data sharing, and integration of One Health and circular economy principles as priorities for strengthening future governance. Collectively, these findings provide a comprehensive framework to support evidence-based policymaking, sustainable PFAS management, and long-term protection of human health and the environment while contributing to the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Full article

Government–enterprise collaboration does not automatically produce responsibility sharing in digital environmental governance. Integrating Social Role Theory with evolutionary game theory, this study constructs a role-based evolutionary game model to examine how governments and enterprises adjust responsibility strategies under bounded rationality. The model incorporates legitimacy benefits, role-deviation losses, digital governance capacity, compliance costs, penalties, and governance costs. Results show two possible stable outcomes—mutual responsibility fulfillment and mutual shirking—with threshold-sensitive dynamics. Stronger digital capacity, detection probability, penalties, and legitimacy incentives, combined with lower costs, expand the attraction basin of mutual responsibility fulfillment; weak monitoring, high costs, insufficient penalties, and ambiguous boundaries increase shirking risk. A focused VRBG mechanism—value cultivation, responsibility identification, benefit sharing, and guarantee mechanisms—is proposed to adjust the incentive conditions that make responsibility fulfillment self-reinforcing. Full article

The rapid expansion of intelligent technologies and digital transformation has intensified global debates regarding sustainability, ethical governance, industrial resilience, and human well-being within contemporary industrial systems. Industry 5.0 has emerged as a human-centred and sustainability-oriented framework that seeks to balance technological innovation with broader societal and environmental objectives. This paper critically examines the relationship between Industry 5.0, intelligent technologies, and human-centric sustainability in the digital age. The study adopts a conceptual and integrative literature review methodology grounded in an interpretivist research philosophy. The findings reveal that intelligent technologies such as artificial intelligence, IoT, blockchain, collaborative robotics, and digital twins have substantial potential to improve sustainability, resource efficiency, industrial resilience, and workforce empowerment when responsibly governed. The paper develops a Human-Centric Sustainability Framework for Industry 5.0 and recommends strengthening ethical governance, inclusive innovation, workforce reskilling, and sustainability-oriented policies to support resilient and human-centred industrial transformation. Full article

The collaborative transformation of digitalization and greening has become a core trend for modern enterprises to build sustainable development systems. As a typical voluntary environmental regulation in China, green factory certification plays an important role in promoting the integration of digital technology and green production. Based on the unbalanced panel data of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2012 to 2022, this paper adopts a multi-period difference-in-differences model to empirically investigate the impact, internal mechanisms and heterogeneous characteristics of green factory certification on corporate digital-green collaborative transformation. The results show that green factory certification can significantly boost the level of corporate digital-green synergy, with an average policy effect of 2.07%. Mechanism tests confirm that this policy realizes the dual transformation through four core paths: stimulating green technological innovation, raising public environmental awareness, improving corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance and easing financing constraints. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the promotion effect varies distinctly across regions, enterprise life cycles, pollution types and executive backgrounds. This study reveals the systemic logic of voluntary environmental regulation enabling digital-green collaborative transformation, and provides empirical support and targeted policy suggestions for enterprises and governments to accelerate the integrated development of digitalization and greening. Full article

Global environmental change, biodiversity loss, emerging infectious diseases, antimicrobial resistance, and widening social inequalities increasingly interact to create complex risks for human, animal, and ecosystem health. Although international One Health frameworks and funding mechanisms are essential, implementation at national and especially community levels often remains uneven, fragmented, and weakly evaluated. This Perspective presents a structured, reproducible networking model designed to strengthen community-level One Health implementation through voluntary global collaboration among civil society organisations. The model connects bottom-up community mobilisation with interdisciplinary scientific support, shared evaluation templates, and iterative learning cycles. It outlines a transparent process for identifying and engaging One Health-oriented organisations and for organising their collaboration through thematic Project Working Groups that support situation analysis, strategic planning, implementation, evaluation, and dissemination. The framework translates community action into seven intervention fields: surveillance and early warning, animal health and welfare, water/sanitation/hygiene, food safety and food systems, community awareness and education, environmental risks and ecosystem health, and multisectoral governance. By linking local practice to comparative synthesis, joint publication, and policy dialogue, the network aims to transform isolated initiatives into a coordinated learning system while preserving community and organisational autonomy. As a conceptual framework, the model is ready for empirical testing in diverse settings to assess feasibility, participation, and evaluation quality. Full article

Ports are increasingly required to respond to environmental regulation, digital transformation, and demands for more sustainable logistics systems. Although research on smart ports, green ports and innovation ecosystems has expanded, less attention has been given to how Open and Sustainable Innovation is enabled, constrained and institutionalised within public port authorities. This study examines this process in the Port of Sines, Portugal’s largest port and a strategic Atlantic logistics hub. A qualitative single-case study was conducted, drawing on institutional documents, nine semi-structured interviews, observational material and MAXQDA-supported qualitative coding. The analysis was structured around four interdependent dimensions: environmental, organisational, cultural and technological. The findings show that Open and Sustainable Innovation is enabled by European sustainability agendas, digitalisation initiatives, the NEXUS Agenda and multi-stakeholder collaboration. However, it remains only partially institutionalised. Organisational fragmentation, limited learning routines, uneven cultural readiness, data-sharing concerns and dependence on externally funded projects constrain long-term innovation capabilities. The study contributes by conceptualising Open and Sustainable Innovation in public port ecosystems as an institutionalisation process rather than as a set of isolated digital, environmental or collaborative initiatives. It offers practical insights for strengthening governance coordination, stakeholder trust, data-sharing arrangements and organisational learning in sustainable port transformation. Full article

Smart city innovation has emerged as a strategic concept in urban governance to improve the quality of life, requiring collaboration among diverse stakeholders. This study examines smart city development from a stakeholder perspective, focusing on Malang City, Indonesia. A qualitative approach was employed, including in-depth interviews, policy document analysis, and field observations, guided by stakeholder theory to understand how various actors influence policy and implementation. The findings indicate that Malang has implemented several smart initiatives, including e-government services, digital infrastructure, traffic management, and environmental monitoring. These efforts are generally perceived to enhance efficiency and transparency. However, challenges persist, particularly in ensuring inclusivity, strengthening inter-agency coordination, and improving digital literacy. The local government plays a leading role, while the private sector, academia, and civil society contribute technical expertise and community engagement. Overall, smart city innovation in Malang is progressing but remains in its early stages and requires stronger collaboration, institutional capacity, and accountability. This study underscores the importance of stakeholders as supporting actors in advancing collaborative and inclusive smart city governance. Full article

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reports are increasingly important for maritime ports and large service and industrial companies, as they measure sustainability, social responsibility, and integration with society. This study aims to strengthen collaboration between port administrations and academia by identifying differences between industry needs and academic focus. The research analyzes ESG indicators from sustainability reports of 23 port administrations and keywords from 34 SCOPUS publications (2020–2025). Indicators and keywords were grouped into ESG dimensions and thematic clusters, generating two criteria: the number of indicators used by ports and the number of keywords in academic research. Two multicriteria decision analysis methods, Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) and Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluation (PROMETHEE), were applied to rank and compare topics across clusters and criteria. Results show similarities in rankings but also reveal differences in priorities between ports and academia, highlighting the need for stronger collaboration and common ESG indicators. Key priorities identified include data and innovation, ranked 1st and 2nd in the governance pillar, employment and job benefits, ranked 1st in the social pillar, and energy efficiency and management, ranked 1st in the environmental pillar. Differences in some environmental and social topics suggest further efforts are needed to align academic research with port administration priorities. Full article