Search Results (6)

This study investigates the institutional dynamics behind the phenomenon of apartment construction within urban parks in South Korea, using the Policy Arrangement Approach (PAA) as an analytical framework. By comparing two landmark policies—the Citizens Apartments Construction Project (CACP69) of 1969 and the Private Park Special Project (PPSP09) initiated in 2009—it will reveal how park erosion has been legitimized through shifting governance structures, legal mechanisms, and discursive strategies. CACP69 emerged under authoritarian rule to address housing shortages, leveraging public authority to repurpose park land. In contrast, PPSP09 reflects neoliberal tendencies, incentivizing private capital to develop unexecuted park sites amid looming sunset clauses. Both cases illustrate how the long-term neglect of park creation and ambiguous legal definitions have enabled the commodification of public green spaces. The study argues that park management policies in Korea have been shaped by a property-rights-oriented logic, sidelining community participation and ecological integrity. These findings offer critical insights into the intersection of urban planning, environmental governance, and the privatization of public space. Full article

The European Green Deal (EGD), a complex policy program meant to address climate change and ensure a “just, fair and inclusive” transition into a more sustainable and greener Europe, was launched by the EU in 2019. It was clear from the very beginning that the opportunities and costs of the ambitious green transition would be very uneven geographically, not only within the EU but also among its regions and locations. Regions with higher environmental stress and/or less technological and economic capacities will inevitably be disadvantaged. The EGD requires large-scale public acceptance, which comes with democratic innovations and participative practices, which are less embedded in many regions. The former socialist bloc still struggles today with establishing decent levels of public participation, as well as with adopting and implementing democratic community principles in practice. The main aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, we intend to give an assessment of where Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries stand in the process of the green transition and what the major focus areas affecting them are, based on the existing academic literature. On the other hand, we intend to give a clear overview of the causes for and aspects of the weakness of civil society in the post-communist bloc and reasons why the adaptation of democratic innovations is lagging in this region. For this purpose, a systematic literature search and bibliometric analysis was performed based on articles indexed in the Scopus and Web of Science databases. Altogether, 172 articles published in the region were filtered and systematically analyzed according to the main themes of the papers related to the EGD. Research findings show that the interests of researchers in CEE countries largely differ from those in the mainstream academic discourse. Research topics, high on the agenda in Western countries, are hardly present in the academic discourse in CEE countries. On the other hand, issues like energy efficiency, urbanization’s impacts on green growth and renewable energy development, and innovations towards a circular economy dominate the research agenda. This region started the green transition process with major handicaps compared to the West, connected to path dependency and the legacy of socialist structures. The paper analyses the bibliometric aspects of articles published on these topics and highlights the highly sectoral and country-focused approaches taken with regard to the EGD. In our paper, we highlight the importance of the region on a geographic scale, which goes beyond the initial framework and offers a different approach to addressing the issue. The paper proves that the presence of EGD-related participation processes is significantly lacking in academic literature in the CEE region. However, the most important finding of our paper is the identification of an academic gap regarding democratic innovations and deliberation, as well as regarding active involvement and participation of people in EGD-related programs. This gives an even more important base for the assessment of the region in terms of the EGD, which faces growing populism and advancing authoritarian regimes, such that public participation and citizen control have become vitally important for the implementation of the green transition. Full article

Just and fair transitions to low-carbon and nature-positive ways of living need to occur fast enough to limit and reverse the climate and nature crises, but not so fast that the public is left behind. We propose the concept of “Regenerative Good Growth” (RGG) to replace the language and practice of extractive, bad GDP growth. RGG centres on the services provided by five renewable capitals: natural, social, human, cultural, and sustainable physical. The term “growth” tends to divide rather than unite, and so here we seek language and storylines that appeal to a newly emergent climate-concerned majority. Creative forms of public engagement that lead to response diversity will be essential to fostering action: when people feel coerced into adopting single options at pace, there is a danger of backlash or climate authoritarianism. Policy centred around storytelling can help create diverse public responses and institutional frameworks. The practises underpinning RGG have already created business opportunities, while delivering sharp falls in unit costs. Fast transitions and social tipping points are emerging in the agricultural, energy, and city sectors. Though further risks will emerge related to rebound effects and lack of decoupling of material consumption from GDP, RGG will help cut the externalities of economies. Full article

This paper addresses issues pertaining to the future of work and sustainability through the lens of a case study of ecological deterioration and how it destroys and creates green jobs in a forest village of Istanbul. As elsewhere in major urban centres of developing countries, the hyper-expansion of city regions due to authoritarian developmentalism fosters the state-led construction sector in Turkey. Growth-driven economic policies continue to have adverse effects on the environment, resulting in deforestation among an array of ecological damage. Based on a qualitative analysis of oral history interviews and observations informed by a larger interdisciplinary research project, we observe resilience in the forest village under scrutiny as certain types of work are abandoned, and new forms are created by adaptation to the ecological and social conditions. The perceptions of changing conditions by locals vary across existing ethnic, gender, and class hierarchies in the local community. Moreover, our findings indicate that the types of work available in the village prior to urban transformation were not all decent or green. In face of ongoing ecological deterioration in a (formerly) forest community, participatory micro-initiatives, and grassroots, utilizing local community projects emerge that nevertheless pursue a green and just transition. We focus on one such initiative, the Community Fungi platform, to demonstrate the possibility of working towards a collective imagination of a green future inspired by past but unforgotten sustainable communal practices, in the context of the forest village under scrutiny in this paper. Full article

How we effectively train our future business leaders is critical to the success of the implementation of the SDGs. Higher education will play a central role in this effort. This research examines business student support for environmentally oriented organizational strategy (“green strategy”) and human resource management policies and practices (“green hrm”) in comparison with sustainable development (SD) students to explore the barriers facing the education of our future business leaders on the SDGs. We explore whether student political orientation, gender, or authoritarianism are associated with different levels of support within each discipline. We also examine whether business students prioritize the same UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as SD students. Results (n = 281) indicate that business students (particularly those who are male, conservative, or authoritarian) are less supportive of green strategy and green HR than SD students. However, business student support of prosperity/people-oriented SDGs offers a potential avenue for progress. Full article

This study aims to develop an empirical measurement framework of the green state and compare twenty-four OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries’ cases through the fuzzy-set multiple conjunctural analysis and the ideal type analysis. Based on the analysis model of the outcome set (Sustainable Development Goal Index) and the causal sets of seven variables on the four green state categories (‘ecological authoritarian state’, ‘ecological modern state’, ‘ecological democracy state’, and ‘ecological welfare state’), this study reveals the following results. Among OECD member countries, if ones have high environmental tax, high environmental innovation (patent), high economic development and democracy, high levels of environmental governance and social expenditure, or have high economic development and democracy, and high levels of environmental governance and environmental health, they can be seen to have reached a high level of green state (consistency: 0.980, total coverage: 0.675). Also, the thirteen ideal types of green state of twenty-four OECD countries were derived. Norway (fuzzy-set membership score of 0.515) is a country of Type 1, with a characteristic of ‘strong green state’ having all high features of the four green state categories. Greece (membership score, 0.692) and Ireland (0.577) belong to Type 13, characterized by ‘weak green state’ with all four low features. As a result, the green state types of the twenty-four OECD countries can be assorted into five levels: ‘Strong Green State’, ‘Quasi-Strong Green State’, ‘Quasi-Green State’, ‘Quasi-Weak Green State’, and ‘Weak Green State’. Full article