Target 7c of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG 7c) aimed to halve the population that had no sustainable access to water and basic sanitation before 2015. According to the data collected by the Joint Monitoring Programme in charge of measuring progress towards MDG 7c, 2.6 billion people gained access to safe water and 2.3 billion people to basic sanitation. Despite these optimistic figures, many academics have criticised MDG 7c. We provide an overview of this critique by performing a systematic literature review of 62 studies conducted over the MDG implementation period (2002–2015) and shortly after. Our objective is to contribute to the debate on the operationalisation of the Sustainable Development Goal on water and sanitation (SDG 6). The academic debate on MDG 7c mainly focused on the effectiveness of the indicators for safe water and sanitation and on the political dynamics underlying the selection of these indicators. SDG 6 addresses some of the concerns raised on the indicators for safe water and sanitation but fails to acknowledge the politics of indicator setting. We are proposing additional indicators and reflect on the limitations of using only quantitative indicators to measure progress towards SDG 6.

Reducing GHG emissions and mitigating climate change would require significant investments in renewable energy technologies. Foreign direct investments (FDI) in renewable energy (RE) have increased over the last years, contributing to the diffusion of RE globally. In the field of climate policy, there are multiple policy instruments aimed at attracting investments in renewable energy. This article aims to map the FDI flows globally including source and destination countries. Furthermore, the article investigates which policy instruments attract more FDI in RE sectors such as solar, wind and biomass, based on an econometric analysis of 137 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and non-OECD countries. The results show that Feed in Tariffs (FIT) followed by Fiscal Measures (FM), such as tax incentives and Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS), are the most significant policy instrument that attract FDI in the RE sector globally. Regarding carbon pricing instruments, based on our analysis, carbon tax proved to be correlated with high attraction of FDI in OECD countries, whereas Emissions Trading Schemes (ETS) proved to be correlated with high attraction of FDI mainly in non-OECD countries. Key policy insights

The notion of Circular Economy is often presented as a more sustainable alternative to a ‘linear’ economic system. However, there is a distinct gap in the academic literature surrounding the concept, particularly in terms of implementation. This article provides an initial exploration into critical factors influencing the process of implementation by studying 12 bottom-up CE initiatives in the two Dutch cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with key stakeholder(s) for each initiative in order to identify the perceived importance of the critical factors. In total, 18 critical factors were identified, grouped into 5 overarching categories: financial, institutional, policy and regulatory, technology and knowledge, and social. The analysis shows that the critical factors identified do not act in isolation, and form a complex web of interconnecting critical factors. Furthermore, it illustrates how certain critical factors are of significant influence at particular stages throughout the process of implementation.

This paper aims to explain how the governance model changes in smart cities by using South Korea's experience as a case study. South Korean smart city development is divided into three phases according to the national master plan and maturity of smart cities. Phase 1 took place from 2008 to 2013, phase 2 extended from 2014 to 2018, and phase 3 began in 2019 and will last into 2023. The cases under consideration are three representative smart cities: Seoul, Songdo, and Sejong. The analysis traces how the governance model of each city changes throughout the three phases. According to stakeholders’ roles and relationships, the governance model is categorized into four types (corporate, market, multilevel, and network governance). The governance model in all three cities showed little change. In Seoul and Songdo, market governance was dominant, while in Sejong, multilevel governance was. However, in phase 3, the institutional setting is changing to facilitate network governance in all three cities. The government guided the collaboration, giving more opportunities for private, academic, and civil actors to engage.

Considering the current emerging demographic, urbanization and climatic trends, integrating sustainability and resilience principles into urban development becomes a key priority for decision-makers worldwide. Local and national governments, project developers and other urban stakeholders dealing with the complexities of urban development need projects with clear structure and outcomes in order to inform decision-making and ensure sources of financing. The need for developing an integrated assessment methodology that would capture and quantify multiple urban sustainability and resilience benefits of projects in one common framework and eventually lead to verifiable sustainability and resilience outcomes is immense and challenging at the same time. The main objective of this paper is to present the development of a methodological approach that aims to integrate sustainability and resilience benefits, derived from the implementation of green growth urban projects, into a unified framework of criteria addressing environmental, social, economic and institutional perspectives. The proposed sustainability and resilience benefits assessment (SRBA) methodology is a combination of top down and bottom up approaches, including GIS-based scenario building. The different types of sustainability and resilience benefits of urban green growth projects are also identified at different levels (i.e., individual, neighborhood, city and global). Moreover, the proposed methodology creates scenarios that can be illustrated by a map-based approach to enable a better illustration and visualization of benefits. It demonstrates how a map-based approach can assess not only the extent of sustainability and resilience benefits accrued (how much is benefitted), but also their spatial distribution (who is benefitted). The main methodological challenges and issues on developing an integrated sustainability and resilience benefits assessment are identified and discussed.