Municipal net-zero initiatives in Malaysia are constrained by fragmented environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices, uneven green-technology uptake, and weak performance measurement and coordination across municipal, regulatory, and knowledge actors. This matters because municipalities need an integrated, policy-aligned tool to prioritise interventions, coordinate stakeholders, and track progress toward net-zero targets. This study designs the Sustainability Balanced Scorecard for Net Zero Municipalities (SBSC-NZM) by integrating perspectives from Northern Malaysian municipal officers, Department of Environment (DOE) regulators, and sustainability academicians with Malaysian national and ASEAN policy frameworks. Using a qualitative exploratory design, data were triangulated for 18 semi-structured interviews with seven national and ASEAN policy documents. Thematic analysis of interviews and policy documents identified five cross-cutting themes: ESG institutionalisation, energy transition as a strategic backbone, uneven green-technology adoption, financial and capacity constraints, and underutilised community engagement which were synthesised and mapped into BSC perspectives to construct the SBSC-NZM Strategy Map. In this study, the Strategy Map is a causal logic model that shows how capabilities and governance processes translate into stakeholder outcomes and net-zero results. The SBSC-NZM links intended outcomes, key performance indicators (KPIs), data source, targets, and actionable initiatives across five perspectives: Learning & Growth, Internal Processes, Citizen/Society, Financial/Resources, and Net-Zero Outcomes. Overall, the SBSC-NZM offers Malaysian municipal leaders and regulators an operational scorecard to plan, monitor, and evaluate net-zero actions, and advances SBSC scholarship by operationalising multi-stakeholder municipal net-zero governance in an emerging-economy context.

The effectiveness of environmental taxation and renewable energy deployment in mitigating carbon emissions remains a central concern in energy and sustainability policy. This study examines how tourism-driven energy demand interacts with green energy consumption and environmental taxation to influence carbon emissions across 36 OECD countries from 1980 to 2018. Using Bayesian Model Averaging and Weighted-Average Least Squares, the analysis explicitly addresses model uncertainty in long-run energy–environment relationships. The results indicate that tourism expansion significantly increases carbon emissions, reflecting its energy-intensive nature. Environmental taxes, when considered in isolation, do not consistently reduce emissions across OECD countries, largely because of tax exemptions and uneven enforcement. However, the interaction between tourism activity and environmental taxation reveals that well-designed fiscal instruments can mitigate tourism-induced emissions. Moreover, environmental taxes are found to be effective in reducing emissions in high-income OECD economies, while their impact remains insignificant in upper-middle-income countries. Renewable energy consumption consistently contributes to emission reductions. These findings underscore the importance of integrating environmental taxation with energy-transition policies and renewable energy investment. The study provides policy-relevant insights for designing effective carbon mitigation strategies that align fiscal instruments with long-term sustainability and energy-transition objectives.

The accelerating convergence of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) digital technologies and circular-economy imperatives presents both a research opportunity and a coordination challenge. Although scholars increasingly examine how Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and other digital technologies act as enablers for resource-efficient business models and closed-loop systems, the literature remains scattered across disciplines, geographies, and methods. Here, this study seeks to fill that gap through a systematic bibliometric and network analysis of 689 Scopus-indexed records retrieved via an advanced Scopus query, cleaned and harmonized in OpenRefine. The data are profiled using Scopus Analyzer for descriptive statistics and visualized with VOSviewer to generate co-occurrence and co-authorship maps. Numerical findings reveal a concentrated production profile, with China leading with 251 documents, 6,406 citations, and a Total Link Strength (TLS) of 117, followed by the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US). Network analysis produced seven robust thematic clusters in the keyword co-occurrence map and nine stable country collaboration clusters, identifying core themes (technology enablers, circular business models, environmental performance) alongside policy and regional empirical strands. Collaboration topology is dominated by China, with the UK acting as a high-connectivity collaborator and several emergent regional hubs such as Malaysia and India. Collectively, these results synthesize the field’s intellectual structure, reveal under connected yet promising topic bridges related to digital finance and circular business models, and indicate priority areas for causal empirical research and cross-cluster collaboration. We conclude by recommending a targeted research area integrating causal identification, multi-level datasets, and reproducible materials to accelerate theory consolidation and evidence-based policy in the digitally enabled transition to Circular Economies (CEs).