In England and Wales planning regulations require local governments to treat waste near its source. This policy principle alongside regional self-sufficiency and the logistical advantages of minimising distances for waste treatment mean that energy from waste incinerators have been built close to, or even within urban conurbations. There is a clear policy and research need to balance the benefits of energy production from waste incinerators against the negative externalities experienced by local residents. However, the monetary costs of nuisance emissions from incinerators are not immediately apparent. This study uses the Hedonic Pricing Method to estimate the monetary value of impacts associated with three incinerators in England. Once operational, the impact of the incinerators on local house prices ranged from approximately 0.4% to 1.3% of the mean house price for the respective areas. Each of the incinerators studied had been sited on previously industrialised land to minimise overall impact. To an extent this was achieved and results support the effectiveness of spatial planning strategies to reduce the impact on residents. However, negative impacts occurred in areas further afield from the incinerator, suggesting that more can be done to minimise the impacts of incinerators. The results also suggest that in some case the incinerator increased the value of houses within a specified distance of incinerators under specific circumstances, which requires further investigation.

Despite widespread sustainability commitments, many firms struggle to translate intention into action. This persistent intention–action gap suggests limitations in prevailing accounts of how sustainability is integrated into strategic management that tend to emphasize top-down structures, formal systems and senior leadership. We draw on insider change agency and micro-foundations research to examine how individuals across organizational levels contribute to sustainability integration. Based on a comparative study of three multinational firms, we develop a maturity-contingent model of sustainability integration. We identify a set of top-down and bottom-up micro-strategies that individuals enact, and four mechanisms through which these micro-strategies achieve integration: finding common ground, spatial-temporal ringfencing, establishing sense of ownership and enabling self-efficacy. We show that sustainability integration emerges from shifting configurations of micro-strategies shaped by maturity-dependent opportunity structures. By theorizing how individual actions combine to embed sustainability into organizations, we advance research on corporate sustainability, its micro-foundations, and insider change agency.

This paper examines how the growth and decline of agglomerations and peripheries in metropolitan regions can be understood in the context of Advanced Producer Service (APS) firm decisions, regional conditions and institutional policies. Focusing on Germany, it responds to divergent quantitative findings for Munich and Dresden and to outcome-oriented studies documenting spatial patterns, leaving underlying mechanisms under-specified. This study adopts an embedded qualitative case study design, analysing Munich and Dresden as contrasting metropolitan subunits within a shared national framework. Drawing on documentation, archival records and expert interviews with economic development and regional governance actors, it uses explanation building and template analysis to link empirical material to an analytical framework integrating firm, location and public authority perspectives. The results identify four recurrent configurations in the firm–location–policy nexus: reinforcing agglomeration, emerging limits to agglomeration, balancing peripheral growth and reinforced peripheral decline. These configurations show how the same metropolitan region can simultaneously exhibit core growth, constraints on further concentration, selective peripheral upgrading and cumulative peripheral disadvantage. Conceptually, this paper develops a mechanism-based account of APS-driven metropolitan development and proposes refined propositions that help reinterpret outcome-based studies on Munich and Dresden. More broadly, the configurations offer an analytical lens for analysing APS location dynamics and metropolitan governance challenges in other polycentric and federal contexts.