The article presents a review of the research on green hydrogen from the social sciences, identifying its main lines of research, its problems, and the relevant challenges due to the benefits and impacts that this energy vector has on energy transitions and climate change. The review analyzes a corpus of 78 articles indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) and SCOPUS, published between 1997 and 2022. The review identified three research areas related to green hydrogen and the challenges for the social sciences in the future: (a) risks, socio-environmental impacts, and public perception; (b) public policies and regulation and (c) social acceptance and willingness to use associated technologies. Our results show that Europe and Asia lead the research on green hydrogen from the social sciences. Also, most of the works focus on the area of public policy and regulation and social acceptance. Instead, the field of social perception of risk is much less developed. We found that little research from the social sciences has focused on assessments of the social and environmental impacts of hydrogen on local communities and indigenous groups, as well as the participation of local authorities in rural locations. Likewise, there are few integrated studies (technical and social) that would allow a better assessment of hydrogen and cleaner energy transitions. Finally, the lack of familiarity with this technology in many cases constitutes a limitation when evaluating its acceptance.

This article presents a systematic review of sustainable watershed management at the international level. Based on the risk regulation approach, this review approaches the specific gaps in the literature related to relevant issues outlining the international freshwater resources socio-environmental regulation issue, especially in regards to its sociological dimensions: the organizational capabilities of agents involved in regulatory efforts, issue-implicit challenges, and regulatory effort-generated socio-environmental risks. The study identifies the reflexive components of the involved institutions, outlines the deployment of organizational processes in normative regulatory components, and explores the modalities for addressing change and complexity in the regulatory field. A corpus of 64 articles published in the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases between 2021 and 2024 was analyzed, and the following findings are demonstrated: (1) regulatory requirements emerge across the three dimensions due to sociological factors, with the need for broad-ranging coordination capacities and socio-technical improvements highlighted, (2) while high political–technical capacities are exhibited by regulatory agents in the field of study, significant regulatory challenges persist, complicating the sustainable management of watersheds, and (3) decision-making based on socio-environmental risks is deemed feasible within the field of study, enabling advancements in techno-scientific and socio-political areas, although achieving this is considered challenging. It is concluded that sustainable watershed management can be better understood when the risk-based approach is used as an explanatory framework, particularly in priority areas for addressing—and regulating—the global and local dilemmas involved in governing water resources. As this field has been scarcely examined from this perspective, a series of potential research avenues with substantial scope are faced by the social sciences. Socio-environmental challenges related to water should be rigorously analyzed in future studies through innovative approaches, with the social components of the issue prioritized.

This paper examines trust in pollution management in Lake Villarrica, located in La Araucanía, Chile. Twenty-four semi-structured interviews were conducted with actors from three sectors: local and regional government, civil society, and private companies. Findings show that trust and mistrust relate to poor lake management by public institutions and the responsibility of polluting industries in this region. There is little concern for those affected in favour of political and private interests, a lack of transparency of information, little confidence that the commitments made by the institutional framework will be fulfilled, and the need for greater involvement of those affected in solving the problems arising from the pollution of this ecosystem. It concludes that the lack of trust between the actors involved in risk management hinders the resolution of the issue despite the possibility of improving the lake’s state by working on the affective dimension of trust.

Los servicios ecosistémicos y su aplicación para la toma de decisiones dependen de un mejor entendimiento del vínculo de las personas con los ecosistemas bajo distintos contextos socioeconómicos y ambientales. Esto ha conducido a un creciente interés por considerar el valor social en el marco de los servicios ecosistémicos. Las metodologías para obtener el valor social son muy variadas, y su mapeo requiere de múltiples enfoques para comprender y explicar de mejor forma el valor social espacialmente. La presente revisión tiene como objetivo proporcionar una descripción del estado del arte sobre el mapeo del valor social en el marco de los servicios ecosistémicos. Se desarrolló una revisión sistemática identificando 27 investigaciones publicadas entre 2011 y 2018 que estudian el mapeo de los valores sociales en el marco de los servicios ecosistémicos. Se encontró que el enfoque participativo es elpredominante en la literatura, variando principalmente en los niveles de participación. Los resultados obtenidos sugieren que el mapeo de los valores sociales representa una herramienta útil para comprender mejor las dinámicas sociales y naturales que tienen lugar en un lugar específico y ofrecer un respaldo para la toma de decisiones, por lo que se necesitan más investigaciones al respecto.

La biología sintética es una disciplina emergente y altamente promisoria, aunque la investigación en el campo se concentra en países desarrollados. En este marco, la presente investigación mapea el campo de la biología sintética en Chile con el objetivo de describir las redes de colaboración, las características de los investigadores y líneas temáticas que configuran este campo en un país periférico. El trabajo ha seguido un diseño de estudio cuantitativo no-experimental descriptivo. A partir de un corpus de 89 publicaciones con autoría de investigadores afiliados a Chile, se ha construido una red de coautoría de 375 nodos y otra de coocurrencia de palabras clave compuesta por 290 nodos. Sobre tales redes se han aplicado técnicas cienciométricas y de análisis de redes sociales. Los resultados evidencian una red de baja densidad en el campo de la biología sintética en Chile, la cual se encuentra fragmentada en 48 componentes. Asimismo, se han identificado seis líneas de investigación, entre las cuales domina un énfasis productivo, aunque también existen clústeres orientados a la ciencia básica y a la dimensión social de la biología sintética.