The attention paid to justice dimensions in societal change toward decarbonization and resilience is growing in sustainability governance and research. "Just transition" is emerging as an emblematic concept in these discussions, yet there has been limited systematic stock-taking of the major strands of research in this area. This paper aims to analyse the evolution of the "just transition" concept in the context of sustainability in empirical and theoretical scholarly literature. The paper provides comprehensive mapping and analysis of key trends and themes in peer-reviewed literature, which could contribute to conceptual clarity around just transitions. We explore the scope of changes, i.e., whether and how the studies engage with narrower sector-wise changes or broader profound societal changes; what justice dimensions are highlighted and in what ways; and what geographies dominate the research field. The analysis builds on a review of 491 peer-reviewed papers published between 1998 and 2023. The literature on just transitions has expanded rapidly since 2020, with growing conceptual breadth and sectoral relevance. While papers frequently emphasize distributive justice in decarbonization processes in industrial regions, later studies also integrate procedural, recognitional, ecological, and emerging justice dimensions like planetary and intergenerational justice. Transitions are increasingly understood as complex, interconnected cultural, social, technological, economic, and political changes. However, most empirical studies focus on high-income countries, with growing-but limited-coverage of middle- and low-income contexts. This geographic imbalance risks reinforcing power asymmetries. Broader case diversity is needed to make the concept of just transitions applicable across varied socio-economic, cultural and environmental settings.

Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) is a globally established tool to support integrated ocean management. As Small Island Developing States (SIDS) embrace MSP, this study focuses on Fiji as it begins its MSP process alongside the implementation of newly established ocean-related policies and legislation. The study investigates whether MSP has the potential to address the challenges identified by various actors and, if so, to explore how this can be achieved. A mixed-methods case study approach was employed, combining analysis of national policy documents with semi-structured interviews involving key actors in Fiji’s ocean governance. Guided by collaborative governance theory, interview data were thematically analyzed using NVivo. The results indicate that MSP could serve as a viable governance tool capable of addressing institutional silos and overcoming coordination challenges. However, prevailing interagency conflicts, power imbalances between stakeholders, and ambiguity surrounding roles and responsibilities pose significant barriers to meaningful participation, risking the reinforcement of the status quo. Our findings highlight that effective leadership, inclusive governance arrangements, financial sustainability, and social capital are mutually reinforcing enablers of collaboration within MSP. Finally, we recommend a staged, evidence-based approach to institutional reform aligned with fiscal and political realities that offers the most viable pathway to building a legitimate, resilient, and durable MSP system

Institutional reforms are crucial to meeting growing transboundary challenges. However, the scholarship recognizes that institutions are often sticky due to path dependencies. This paper aims to contribute to the literature on institutional reform by highlighting the web of processes interacting to enable or prevent change from happening. The paper argues that a framework for understanding prospects for reform must combine perspectives about agency and architecture in order to gain insights into the coming together of the supply and demand of reform proposals. An international institution that faces growing calls for reform is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This paper examines UNFCCC reform options through an interview study with a range of stakeholders. The interviews reveal factors that can advance or block reform. The paper concludes by discussing its findings and implications for understanding the politics of institutional reform.

Operationalizing the indivisibility and integrated nature of the UN 2030 Agenda poses a complex governance challenge. Although research has advanced our understanding of SDG localization and interlinkages, important gaps remain. In this paper, we depart from these two strands of literature by asking how synergies and trade-offs manifest in localized SDG programs and what governance opportunities, challenges, and recommendations this may bring. We find that the SDGs provide a platform to organize and communicate local sustainability work but that organizational realities will drive prioritization of goals considered connected and synergistic, such as SDG4, SDG9, and SDG11, which stand in contrast with global assessments of interlinkages. In line with emerging literature on the strategic effect of the SDGs on governance, we argue that the ethos of indivisibility serves as an important heuristic for civil servants and policy makers beyond prioritizing or reporting progress on global goals.

Tillgång till vädervarningar med information om förväntade konsekvenser av vädret är nödvändigt för god krisberedskap hos myndigheter, kommuner, näringsliv och privatpersoner. Vidareutveckling av varningssystem som fokuserar på förväntade störningar (konsekvensbaserade varningssystem) är därför en viktig komponent i samhällets hantering av klimatförändringar. Forskningsprojektet AI för klimatanpassning (AI4CA) har analyserat möjligheter och hinder med att inkludera AI-baserad text- och bildanalys som stöd till SMHI:s konsekvensbaserade vädervarningssystem och på sikt även stödja långsiktig klimatanpassning. 

In October 2021, the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) launched a novel national system for impact-based weather warnings, moving from the traditional format for meteorological, hydrological, and oceanographic warnings towards an assessment process that includes collaboration and consultation with regional stakeholders. For certain types of warnings, joint assessments of the potential impacts of weather events for a specific geographic area and time frame are made in collaboration with local and regional actors. As part of this new system, local and regional administrative efforts are made to create assessment-support documentation which are collated by practitioners at the municipal or organizational level, drawing on local knowledge, and subsequently compiled by the County Administrative Board. This process aims to support the collaborative decision-making processes ahead of the publication and in the evaluation of issued weather warnings. This paper explores the potential of integrating long- and short-term perspectives in societal response to climate change impacts with focus on extreme weather events. We present a case of AI-based technology to support processes linked to the national system for impact-based weather warnings and its integration with local and regional climate adaptation processes. We explore opportunities to integrate an AI-based pipeline, employing AI-based image and text analysis of crowdsourced data, in the processes of the warning system, and analyse barriers and enablers identified by local, regional, and national stakeholders. We further discuss to what extent data and knowledge of historical extreme weather events can be integrated with local and regional climate adaptation efforts, and whether these efforts could bridge the divide between long-term adaptation strategies and short-term response measures related to extreme weather events. Thus, this study unfolds the existing and perceived barriers to this integration and discusses possible synergies and ways forward in risk management and climate adaptation practice.

Chapter 3 assesses the literature and a set of cases on how transformative change occurs. Based on this assessment, it identifies six broad approaches to transformative change and synthesizes key insights for achieving the 2050 Vision for Biodiversity and global sustainability. In combination, these six approaches can promote, accelerate and scale transformative change for global sustainability in diverse contexts. Chapter 3 recognizes that transformative change takes place in a complex world and that navigating such change calls for adaptability, agility, transparency, continuous monitoring, evaluation and adaptive learning across multiple scales. Other elements for navigating transformative change are delineated by the findings of the assessment below.  

Studies of transformative change have been making headway in understanding the complexity of societal transformation processes. Yet, we lack understanding of how people’s lived experiences of transformations both shape and are shaped by meaning-making processes. In addressing this gap, we make two assumptions: Firstly, change processes comprise interactions between social actors that shape the way they are made sense of and experienced by the people involved in such interactions. Secondly, such change processes involve transformative experiences, which can bring to light previously taken-for-granted dimensions of lived experience. To address this research gap, we describe two complementary tools for analysing transformations: dialogical sense-making and critical phenomenology. These approaches share a focus on the experiential and sense-making dimensions, yet ask distinctly different kinds of questions and use different methods. Dialogical sense-making explores how people create meanings around transformations through various social interactions. Critical phenomenology analyses subjectivity, lived experience and structures that make possible and help shape experience. When brought into dialogue with each other, they allow for richer analyses of how the sense or meaning of transformations is constituted in experience.