This paper investigates the role of digital transparency in enhancing consumer awareness of product origins and sustainability. As consumers increasingly seek to make informed, ethically aligned purchasing decisions, digital platforms - such as blockchain-enabled systems, mobile apps, and e-commerce sites - offer a medium for brands to communicate supply chain transparency. Through a comprehensive literature review, this article examines how transparency practices impact consumer trust, decision-making, and the adoption of sustainable products. Findings reveal that while digital platforms can significantly influence ethical consumption, their effectiveness depends on the clarity, accessibility, and perceived credibility of information presented. Key challenges, including greenwashing and information overload, can hinder transparency efforts, thereby reducing consumer trust. Additionally, stakeholder theory and the theory of planned behaviour provide insights into the ethical responsibilities of brands and the cognitive factors shaping consumer choices. Practical recommendations are offered, including the need for simplified, interactive transparency tools and collaboration with third-party certifiers to enhance authenticity. The study highlights the importance of evolving digital transparency practices to meet the ethical demands of modern consumers and suggests ways for future research to explore the impact of transparency across diverse consumer segments and regions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed weaknesses in traditional supply chain finance systems, highlighting the need for digital change. Blockchain technology, with its ability to create secure and transparent records of transactions, offers a potential solution. This study uses bibliometric analysis and a literature review to examine research on blockchain-enabled supply chain finance, drawing on a database of 446 articles from ScienceDirect and Scopus. The findings show a growing interest in how blockchain can improve transparency, efficiency, and security in supply chain finance, addressing challenges like information asymmetry. This study suggests future research should focus on real-world applications of blockchain, how it can be used with other technologies, regulations and governance, and the social and environmental impacts of blockchain-based supply chain finance. This research also highlights the different priorities of the Global North and South in blockchain-enabled supply chain finance. The North focuses on efficiency and traceability, while the South emphasizes adding value and transparency. A lack of research on fair pricing, especially in the Global South, points to a critical gap that future research needs to address to ensure fairness in global trade.

The Southeast Asia (ASEAN) stands as one of the compelling markets for digital banks to grow due to its large population and fact that financial inclusion still be an issue for the region. Within the region, Commercial banking is still the backbone of the region’s financial system, but Regulators in various Southeast Asia countries have started to issue guidelines for digital banking licenses in their respective countries. We found that in general, there is a different regulatory approach in Southeast Asia in which the requirement is less stringent during the initial start-up period versus the commercial banks such as Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia. Several countries such as Singapore and Malaysia also limit the issuance of digital banking licenses. Additionally, regulators also seem to give some business restrictions for the pure digital bank during the initial period to prove the business model and limit the potential impact should they fail. We also conducted a country-level analysis to identify the readiness of ASEAN members bloc to adopt digital banking using two dimensions, which are room for growth and state of readiness. The findings have highlighted ASEAN is a highly diverse region.

Policy brief ini menyoroti urgensi pengembangan pertanian perkotaan inovatif di Indonesia sebagai respons terhadap tantangan ketahanan pangan dan pemenuhan gizi di perkotaan. Pertanian perkotaan inovatif tidak hanya menawarkan solusi dalam meningkatkan ketersediaan pangan, tetapi juga berperan penting dalam mewujudkan pangan bergizi berbasis lokal dan melestarikan kearifan lokal, khususnya menunjang program pangan bergizi gratis. Selain itu, pertanian perkotaan inovatif juga berkontribusi pada pengurangan kemiskinan dan perbaikan kualitas lingkungan. Namun, implementasinya masih terkendala oleh keterbatasan kebijakan yang ada. Oleh karena itu, diperlukan perubahan kebijakan yang komprehensif, termasuk integrasi pertanian perkotaan dalam tata ruang kota, peningkatan kapasitas masyarakat, dukungan infrastruktur dan teknologi, serta peningkatan kesadaran publik akan pentingnya pertanian perkotaan inovatif dalam mewujudkan ketahanan pangan, pemenuhan gizi berbasis lokal, dan pelestarian kearifan lokal.

Background: Indonesia is the world’s third-largest banana producer, yet its value chains remain structurally fragmented, with pervasive information asymmetries and substantial technical inefficiencies among smallholder farmers. Research integrating relational governance determinants with frontier efficiency analysis across upstream, middle, and downstream actors remains limited. Methods: A cross-sectional survey comprising 251 respondents (237 farmers, 5 wholesalers, and 9 retailers) was conducted across Cianjur, Lumajang, and Lampung, of whom 194 provided valid complete cases (181 farmers, 5 wholesalers, and 8 retailers). Constructs used reflective multi-item scales adapted from established supply chain governance literature; validity and reliability were confirmed through confirmatory factor analysis (Cronbach’s α = 0.731–0.941; composite reliability = 0.746–0.940; average variance extracted = 0.348–0.546). Antecedents of supply chain coordination were tested using hierarchical multiple regression on the farmer subsample with complete data (n = 181), and relative technical efficiency across value chain actors was estimated using input-oriented Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Results: The comprehensive regression model explained 63.3% of the variance in supply chain coordination performance. Inclusivity (β = 0.251), commitment (β = 0.259), information quality (β = 0.233), and trust (β = 0.160) were significant positive predictors, and a parsimonious model identified commitment and trust as the strongest. DEA showed low mean technical efficiency among smallholder farmers (0.683) relative to retailers (0.934) and wholesalers (0.954), with only modest variation across the three regions. Conclusions: Relational governance mechanisms primarily drive farmer-level supply chain coordination, whereas structural position within the value chain shapes technical efficiency. These empirically validated determinants and efficiency benchmarks can inform targeted agricultural policy. No artificial intelligence system was developed or tested in this study; the results are offered only as candidate inputs that could support the future design of AI-enabled decision-support tools in food supply chain management.

The rise of big data and smart cities has expanded from time to time. The smart cities concept also connected with big data as the key factor. The big data analytics have a chance for a starting point to reduce carbon emissions that contribute as part of climate change. Big data analytics refers generally to any huge amounts of data that may be gathered, saved, retrieved, integrated, selected, pre-processed, converted, analyzed, and interpreted in order to learn something new or extract relevant knowledge. Big data analytics, in the context of smart sustainable cities, refers to a collection of sophisticated and specialized software applications and database systems operated by devices with extremely high processing power, that can transform a significant amount of urban data into knowledge, for well-informed decision-making and enhanced insights in relation to various urban domains, such as transportation, mobility, traffic, environment, energy, land use, planning, and design. Big data analytics have potential to be used as a solution for smart and sustainable cities. The importance to every city in country to have a precision data about carbon emission is to evaluate result and make a better decision to reduce carbon emission. This research finds the integration of different and varied systems in a smart city environment is a practical challenge for emergency management. Smart cities in the next generation must be focused on this integration which provides valuable data to support emergency detection, warning and mitigation.