Abstract Environmental transition is increasingly governed through multilevel systems in which authority is shared across supranational, national, and regional governments. Existing research on multilevel climate governance has focused on coordination, implementation, and compliance, largely treating environmental objectives as politically consistent among territorial levels once adopted. This paper argues that multilevel governance also reshapes the political content of environmental transition itself, a process we call political reinterpretation: common climate objectives are selectively reprioritized and reframed as they enter territorially distinct political arenas. We test this argument using text analysis of parliamentary discourse, applying structural topic modeling to 10,564 speeches delivered across Spainâs seventeen Autonomous Communities (ACs) between 2019 and 2024 to uncover five substantive dimensions of environmental-transition discourse directly from legislative text. We find that these dimensions are distributed unevenly across regions, and, more critically, that Spainâs major statewide parties do not reproduce their national environmental-transition profiles across territories: territorial variation in the topics they prioritize within each party systematically exceeds the variation observed between parties operating in the same region. This pattern holds even among parties whose organizational structure gives them a strong incentive toward national uniformity, indicating that territorial incentives can outweigh the integrative pressures of statewide party organization. Understanding climate governance in decentralized systems therefore requires attention not only to how environmental policy is implemented across levels of government, but to how its political meaning is reconstructed as authority becomes territorially dispersed.
The Green Climate Fund (GCF) is the primary financial mechanism under the Paris Agreement, yet its governance architecture remains underexplored theoretically. This study examines how multiple decision centers and actors interact within the GCFâs governance structure and what coordination mechanisms are built into it, using a polycentric governance lens. By analyzing 43 official GCF documents (2015â2024) through qualitative content analysis and the polycentric orders framework, the study finds that the GCFâs governance structure exhibits formally institutionalized coordination mechanisms consistent with a strong polycentric order. These structural features are designed to support problem-solving and adaptive management, although their operational effectiveness requires further empirical investigation. Contributions include a replicable, document-based coding and network-analysis method for characterizing polycentric governance, along with evidence that formal decentralization in the GCF coexists with a concentration of documented coordination ties among a small core of actors.
We examine how capital allocation responds to the technological abatement of a major environmental externality in cryptocurrency markets. Exploiting 34 million account-level trades around Ethereum's The Merge, a quasi-natural experiment that reduced the asset's carbon footprint by over 99.9%, we examine the presence of environmentally conscious (green) investors. To disentangle environmental concerns from general yield-seeking or reactions to altered protocol tokenomics, we identify these investors ex-ante by their revealed preference to divest when public attention to global warming escalated during a pre-event quiet period. Results show that these sophisticated green investors apply a significant brown discount pre-Merge, purchasing less Ether than their peers. Interestingly, this gap closed entirely post-Merge, indicating the rational removal of an environmental penalty rather than a market-wide pursuit of new staking yields. A decomposition of returns reveals that green investors earned superior financial gains relative to the non-green peers pre-Merge. However, the advantage vanished thereafter, indicating that the trading activeness reflects the sophisticated pricing of environmental transition risk rather than pure altruism. Overall, we argue that technological abatement can reshape capital flows and thus serve as a powerful complement to environmental regulation.
Kevin K.W. Ho, Dickson K.W. Chiu, C. H. Au, Francis Dalisay ¡ 6 authors
This position article summarizes the panelistsâ presentations and discussions at the panel âFake News, Misinformation, and Privacy: How COVID-19 Pandemic Changed Our Society,â held at the 15th International Conference on Information Resources Management (Conf-IRM 2022) on October 18, 2022. The panel discussed their views on (1) how to stop the spreading of health misinformation; (2) how information sources affect online health information behavior; (3) how news literacy increases people's desire to seek out information by increasing their skepticism; and (4) how political beliefs, trust, and privacy concerns affect people's decisions during COVID-19. This article also discusses how blockchain and distributed ledger technologies can help tackle the fake news and misinformation problem.
Geordan Shannon, Alix Faddoul, Alexander Lai, Tony Lai ¡ 7 authors
Planet.Health addresses imagination and coordination challenges for planetary health through innovative approaches to social organising. This report presents the findings from the inaugural Planet.Health event in 2022, including the Planet.Health unconference. An unconference is a participant-driven event format that provides flexibility for emergent ideas and connections. In this (un)conference report, we share the challenges, achievements, and lessons learned during the initial year of activities in the leadup to and following the Planet.Health unconference event. We also discuss how the intersection of web3 and planetary healthâa major focus of the first yearâprovides an alternative lens for envisioning, innovating, and coordinating beyond conventional social and institutional frameworks. We explore the potential impact of web3 technologies and decentralised social, economic, and financial networks and highlight the implications of these approaches for addressing planetary crises and supporting a flourishing humanâenvironment relationship. As a new contribution to the planetary health field, this work emphasises the importance of building decentralised systems to foster creative actions and inspire global engagement for planetary wellbeing. The report concludes with some practical insights on how we begin to build and sustain decentralised social networks, including a discussion of the benefits and limitations of these approaches.
In this study, I examine how an online cryptocurrency community discusses the issue of climate change. In particular, I examine distinctive themes present within discussions that occur on the r/CryptoCurrency forum hosted by reddit.com. Existing research has demonstrated that there are significant carbon emissions linked to cryptocurrency. However, cryptocurrency primarily exists as a peer-to-peer system, meaning that the individual perceptions of cryptocurrency adopters may provide insight into how to address the emissions problem. Using latent Dirichlet allocation and publicly available textual data from Reddit, I find that Reddit's cryptocurrency community engages in robust discussions pertaining to the energy needed to power cryptocurrency systems, most of which is generated from fossil fuels. Therefore, the discussions identified in this study suggest that the social aspect of cryptocurrency may be important when examining the links between cryptocurrency and climate change since they help identify what subjects related to climate change are important for this community.
The development of decentralized renewable energy systems is of crucial importance for the decarbonization of energy generation worldwide. Purchase decisions regarding innovative energy systems depend to some extent on consumers' perception of the systems' degree of autarky. We assumed that, in addition to the energetic perspective, consumers associate other non-energetic facets such as independence, autonomy, self-sufficiency or control with the concept of autarky. These psychological facets of autarky were expected to contribute to purchase decisions. In Study 1, participants (\textit{N}=168) evaluated three future energy supply scenarios. The scenarios varied regarding their range of autarky (household/ neighborhood/ small town), but the individually realized degree of energetic autarky did not vary. Participants reported a higher willingness to pay in connection with a higher perceived psychological autarky for the Household Scenario. Study 1's findings were confirmed by Study 2, in which qualitative interviews (\textit{N}=13) also revealed that participants favored the Household Scenario on several points. These evaluations were driven by the anticipated psychological facets of autarky, that is the subjective perception of being independent, autonomous, self-sufficient, energy secure and of control. To promote an adoption of renewable energy systems, these psychological autarky facets need to be addressed. Enabling the people to self-determine, control and secure their energy provision even in complex organizational settings in such a manner is likely to increase their acceptance and therefore foster the required social transition as a whole.