Plastic microbeads are intentionally added microplastics, widely used in personal care and cosmetic products with documented risks to human health and the environment. Although several jurisdictions across the world have adopted explicit legislative bans on plastic microbeads, legislative action in India remains indirect, fragmented and inconsistently enforced. This study critically examines the scope, legal architecture and enforcement capacity of provisions in the Indian regulatory landscape governing plastic microbeads. It evaluates standards prescribed under the Bureau of Indian Standards 2017.) and the Cosmetics Rules 2020,). The findings show that the current regulatory landscape in India is predominantly health risk-centric, relies on non-binding or indirectly enforceable standards, lacks independent statutory definitions, provides limited product coverage and lacks standardised analytical protocols. The study proposes a legally executable and environmentally grounded pathway utilising sections 3, 5 and 6 of the Environment (Protection) Act of 1986..) to establish a comprehensive prohibition on plastic microbeads. It also evaluates Corporate Social Responsibility spending under the Companies Act (2013). as a possible future complement to this pathway. Also, the pathway is assessed against ongoing negotiations towards a global plastics treaty. A phased implementation roadmap is outlined to support regulatory coherence, multistakeholder coordination, compliance monitoring and transition to sustainable alternatives.

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) requires quantitative tools to identify responsibility concentration and prioritize interventions. This study introduces an inequality-based framework combining Lorenz curves, Gini coefficients, and concentration ratios to assess producer responsibility in marine plastic pollution. We analyzed 232 producer-attributable items from 830 macrolitter items collected on Isla Arena, an uninhabited Colombian Caribbean island, identifying 48 producers, 72 brands, and 95 products. A Corporate Environmental Impact (CEI) index assessed whether abundance-based dominance corresponded to potential environmental impact. Producer responsibility was highly concentrated (Gini = 0.690; bootstrap 95% CI: 0.629–0.698), with the five and ten leading producers accounting for 65.5% and 80.6% of attributable litter, respectively. Beverage companies dominated, while Pony Malta alone represented 27.2% of attributable items. Impact-based inequality was nearly identical (Gini = 0.692). Sensitivity analysis addressing the 72.0% unattributed fraction showed that category-specific attribution corrections increased inequality (Gini = 0.714), supporting the robustness of observed concentration. These findings establish responsibility inequality as a measurable property of pollution assemblages and provide a transferable framework for targeting EPR interventions, assessing governance feasibility, and monitoring corporate environmental performance across pollution systems.

Blue spaces are recognised as vital public resources that support human health and wellbeing through pathways such as physical activity, psychological restoration and social connection. Coastal environments are especially distinctive for their multisensory stimuli, expansive vistas and cultural significance, with benefits shaped by environmental quality, accessibility and usability. Climate change threatens these benefits via extreme events, such as storm surges and flooding, and gradual processes, including rising sea levels, erosion and warming temperatures, which can also alter people’s perceptions, engagement patterns and cultural connections. A conceptual framework is proposed to explore the mechanisms through which climate change affects coastal amenities. This framework offers a structured approach to understanding how environmental processes, interventions and social factors interact to shape health and wellbeing outcomes, and identifies where, why and at what scales adaptation interventions can be most effectively applied. Adaptation measures can help sustain wellbeing benefits under climate hazards by reinforcing positive feedbacks, such as stewardship and investment in amenities, while mitigating negative feedbacks from environmental degradation or overuse. Climate-informed adaptation of coastal amenities, integrating ecological, social and governance considerations, is essential to preserve quality, access, usability and the equitable delivery of health benefits. The framework therefore offers both a theoretical basis for understanding climate–wellbeing interactions and a practical tool to support internationally relevant interventions, policy development and co-designed justice-sensitive adaptation strategies that sustain the health, cultural and social value of blue spaces under climate change.

The literature increasingly disaggregates political systems for examining the differences in international policies and domestic decision-making according to diverse regime typologies. The following research adds to this literature by studying the impact of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) on the likelihood of ratifying international environmental agreements in different types of autocratic regimes. Building on a theory that focuses on the provision of environmental public goods, the author distinguishes between single-party regimes, military juntas, monarchies, and personalist dictatorships. The core argument claims that the provision of public goods varies among those regime typologies, ultimately leading to the expectation that the lobbying efforts of ENGOs should be most weakly pronounced in those autocracies that are likely to provide more environmental public goods anyway, i.e., single-party regimes. The empirical analysis using data on the ratification of international environmental agreements and autocratic regime types between 1973 and 2006 supports the theory.

This paper focuses on the democratic quality of ‘new’ modes of EU governance. Since these innovative governance arrangements are more likely to demonstrate democratic features of a deliberative nature, the criteria for an ideal type of deliberative democracy are developed based on the well-known work of theorists Jürgen Habermas and Iris Marian Young. The empirical test case of the Industrial Emissions Directive and, more specifically, the selection and deliberation processes of its Technical Working Groups are assessed using these criteria. The research reveals how a particular new mode of EU governance works in practice and how it performs from the perspective of deliberative democracy.

What happens when scientists, dedicated to basic scientific research, are called forth to participate in politically fraught scenarios? We explore this question through a qualitative study of the intimate experiences of scientists who developed the first Argentine National Glacier Inventory (2010–2018). This inventory was entrusted to IANIGLA, a state-funded scientific institute. It arose from the world’s first glacier protection law, drafted to protect all glacier and periglacial environments as hydrological reserves as mining megaprojects encroached on them. This article examines the failed attempts to turn periglacial environments into “governable objects” (Hellgren 2022). Interviews and an auto-ethnography among scientists involved reveal that these failures can be attributed to unresolved tensions in upscaling and downscaling practices that are needed to simultaneously produce world-class climate science and locally relevant policy science. The failure to anticipate or resolve those tensions, in the context of grassroots opposition to mining, undermined trust in science and government, pointing to the local limits of global climate science.

Previous studies have primarily advocated enhancing the deterrent effects of sanctions against offending firms to prevent organizational environmental violations. However, despite stricter regulatory environments, violations that cross the ‘red line’ remain pervasive. Limited research has delved into the factors that influence an organization’s ability to learn from environmental sanctions imposed on others. To address this gap, inspired by social learning theory, we examine whether environmental sanctions imposed on violating firms deter environmental governance among their industry and regional peers using a sample of Chinese-listed firms from 2008 to 2021. Our findings indicate that increasing the frequency and severity of penalties for offending firms – particularly those leading firms and state-owned-enterprises or those with close ties – can affect the environmental governance practices of their peers, both in terms of process and outcome, underscoring the critical role of peer influence in enforcing environmental regulations. Additionally, the current article also concludes that the general deterrence effect on peers is more pronounced in competitive industries and regions with underdeveloped legal frameworks.

The rational allocation of authority across government levels is crucial for the effective provision of environmental public goods. Based on China’s environmental policy texts (1973–2023) and case studies, this paper analyzes the division and adjustment of environmental governance powers. The findings reveal selective decentralization under the trend of centralization over the past fifty years in China’s environmental governance: (1) Legislative power has been conditionally devolved, to encourage distinctive local environmental legislation that is non-contradictory to central legislation; (2) Administrative power has transitioned from an ambiguous two-tier system to a three-category framework with attempts to quantify shared authorities. This recentralization aligns with the principle that national public goods are provided by the central government, while regional ones are supplied jointly; (3) Supervisory power has transitioned from local to vertical management, and its oversight has been elevated to a national initiative, receiving strong political endorsement.

Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 36 policymakers, experts and scholars, this paper employs a principal-agent framework to analyse China’s carbon market governance. The findings reveal that institutional misalignment between central and local priorities undermines market efficacy. While mechanisms like the Target Responsibility System (TRS) and environmental inspections aim to enforce compliance, fragmented incentives and passive central supervision exacerbate policy incoherence. Owing to competing mandates, local governments prioritize short-term GDP growth over the development of the carbon market, thereby relegating emissions trading to a peripheral status. State-owned enterprises (SOEs) dominate market participation, fulfilling compliance through political alignment but distorting price signals and marginalizing private actors. China’s hybrid governance model, which combines top-down controls with decentralized experimentation, generates systemic contradictions where weak enforcement, ritualistic compliance and data opacity persist as the dominance of SOEs colludes with local developmentalism to weaken carbon pricing. Overall, carbon market governance mechanisms have paradoxically incentivized regulated entities to prioritize developmental goals over improving carbon market infrastructure.

Mediation is characterised as a voluntary, consensual process, with self-determination a core value. The literature does, however, indicate a significant evolution in its role within society. Scholars contend that government-backed mediation exhibits capacity to ‘govern’ where the process has disputants reconfigure their selves and orientation to the conflict and align their behaviour with a guiding norm (or ideal). In this way, ‘mentalities’ can be moulded by the state to secure wider political aims. This paper provides empirically grounded insights into the efficacy of mediation-based governance in the context of environmental disputes. It analyses complaints submitted to National Contact Points (NCPs) by interested parties (eg individuals and non-governmental organisations (NGOs)) against multinational enterprises. NCPs are state-based non-judicial grievance mechanisms which seek to assist the resolution of alleged breaches of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct. I argue that the empirical reality exposes tensions within mediation-based governance which present challenges and opportunities for it: (in)consistency in the state’s influence over negotiations, background levels of (dis)trust between disputants and (future-orientated) temporal focus. Until these are remedied, it will remain incapable of realising wider political aims, such as sustainable development. Private interests are too deeply ingrained and prevailing power structures too dominant.

Carbon credits have become increasingly important for supporting sustainable forest management and mitigating climate change. However, carbon projects can be challenging for local communities and smallholders to implement due to high expenses and complicated protocols. Forest projects often suffer from inefficiency, lack of transparency, and uneven benefit distribution. This study suggests a blockchain-based framework for aggregating forest carbon projects. This framework is the first in the forest sector to provide a reward mechanism for local communities or smallholders with a direct integration into an accredited registry protocol of Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification. The system combines digital identities, smart contracts, and automated incentives to improve transparency, responsibility, and trust among stakeholders. Two types of tokens are introduced: (i) Carbon Coin represents verified carbon credits within the system; and (ii) Forest Coin functions as a security token used to proportionally distribute project revenue among stakeholders. The revenue distribution was demonstrated in scenarios of afforestation, reforestation, and conservation. In addition, a web application was developed so that users can monitor project details. Unlike most blockchain carbon platforms that focus on investment and trading, this framework addresses upstream challenges, prioritising equitable benefit-sharing. The framework supports project aggregation and prioritises community ownership, advancing inclusive access to the carbon market. This study demonstrates how technological advantages can be transferred to community-driven ecological conservation.

There are several examples of collective action/social movements for the environmental cause in India. The literature on environmental governance and environmental economics, identifies a significant role of the nature of environmental goods with respect to the twin classifying criteria of rivalry in consumption and excludability. The common pool resource and public good nature of environmental property require varied governance approaches. These economic theory-based classifications can be associated with diverse types of property rights regimes in the legal realm. By developing an analytic narrative, this article attempts to identify how common individuals related with environmental movements, identify some of these nuances with respect to nature of environmental goods and associated property rights regimes and develop strategies for improvements. This article utilises secondary qualitative data to examine the perspective of common individuals, groups, and leaders of environmental movements to infer theoretical learnings from a few cases in India.