International aid for biodiversity conservation is expected to provide alternative livelihoods for forest‐dependent communities to offset restrictions on forest use. This aligns with the contemporary conservation discourse that promotes pro‐poor, human rights‐based, and sustainability...

A growing number of studies apply the social‐ecological systems (SES) framework with its standardized set of variables to examine place‐based environmental governance. Yet, due to the wide diversity of social‐ecological systems, a general theory about how variables interact—and systems...

Research has shown that effective flood risk management is closely connected to land use governance, i.e., the land use system involving diverse, relevant stakeholders (e.g., landowners, public authorities, disaster management organisations) and their formal and informal land development...

Environmental governance research (EGR) has been criticized for not being cumulative, despite the importance of cumulative knowledge for evidence‐informed decision‐making in addressing global sustainability problems. However, defining, measuring, and assessing knowledge cumulation in EGR...

The environmental and health problems caused by plastics throughout their life cycle have attracted considerable public attention over the past decade, triggering policy responses in many constituencies. Similarly, interdisciplinary research on plastics has been burgeoning in the past few years,...

Multistakeholder co‐management is no blueprint for smooth and accepted environmental policy implementation. Parallel processes of cooperation and conflict rather shape co‐managing processes, which is the focus of this article. Combining the analysis of narratives, identities, and relational...

Research on international bureaucracies, such as treaty secretariats, has predominantly focused on broadening our understanding of their role, function, and influence within their respective regulatory domains. However, the potential for treaty secretariats to manage situations of institutional...

This study considers how and why agricultural groundwater users would limit their own water consumption. We find that voluntary governance arrangements are based on a form of legitimacy that stems from informal social processes. Agricultural irrigation reform in Nebraska, U.S. took place after...

Local authorities are important actors in sustainability transformations, but smaller municipalities generally do not have the same capacities as larger ones to work strategically with climate‐related risks and long‐term sustainability issues. Our study analyses the efforts of two Swedish...

Environmental policy integration (EPI), that is, the incorporation of environmental concerns in non-environmental policy areas, has been widely adopted in public policies. However, EPI research has found much discrepancy between environmental objectives and actual implementation. This paper...