Law, Business and Sustainability Herald

Tourism Regulation, Resident Satisfaction and Sustainable Rural Tourism: A Chinese Case

2026-09-07T17:33:39+03:00

Against the UN 2030 SDGs framework, rural tourism facilitates inclusive growth (SDG8), sustainable communities (SDG11), and inclusive governance (SDG16). Resident satisfaction bridges tourism regulation, commercial operation, and destination sustainability. Most prior studies treat satisfaction as a passive outcome of tourism growth and lack an integrated empirical framework that combines tourism law, benefit distribution, and multidimensional resident perceptions. This study constructs a six-dimensional resident satisfaction system that covers economic benefits, living environment, cultural inheritance, government services, community identity, and personal development. Based on 264 valid resident questionnaires from Liulaozhuang Village (a tourism site in Northern Jiangsu), we apply reliability and validity tests, correlation analysis, and multiple regression to explore how satisfaction shapes sustainable tourism development. Regression results show that all six dimensions are positively associated with perceived sustainable rural tourism development (β = 0.198–0.284, p < 0.01), jointly explaining 58.2% of its variance (adjusted R² = 0.582); government service satisfaction was the strongest predictor (β = 0.284), whereas personal development satisfaction combined the lowest mean score (M = 3.21) with the second-strongest association (β = 0.271), a “low satisfaction–high association” configuration. The data expose institutional drawbacks: unfair revenue sharing, weak legal protection for resident participation, insufficient support for tourism micro-firms, and a lack of long-term ecological supervision rules. The study embeds tourism regulation and micro-enterprise operation logic within a resident satisfaction framework, adds the dimensions of personal development and community identity, and provides micro-level evidence from a government-led tourism destination. These findings inform evidence-based governance pathways, statutory benefit-sharing rules, resident hearing mechanisms, micro-enterprise incubation, and long-term ecological monitoring. They can be applied to other government-led cultural tourism destinations in developing countries.

Climate Adaptation, Regional Inequality and Sustainable Economic Growth in Nigeria

2026-09-07T18:11:07+03:00

Climate change and persistent regional disparities continue to pose significant challenges to achieving sustainable economic growth in developing economies. While a growing body of research has examined the individual effects of climate change or inequality on economic performance, few studies have integrated climate adaptation, regional inequality, and sustainable economic growth within a single empirical framework for a developing, climate-vulnerable economy such as Nigeria. This study addresses that gap by examining the relationship among these three dimensions over the period 1990–2024. The data were obtained from the World Bank's World Development Indicators, the Worldwide Governance Indicators, and reports of the Nigerian Climate Change Commission, and the analysis is grounded in Endogenous Growth Theory and Climate Justice Theory. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds-testing technique was employed to estimate the short-run and long-run relationships among the variables, owing to its suitability for the time-series properties of the data. To ensure comparability, the climate adaptation and spatial inequality indices were standardised using z-score transformation prior to estimation. The empirical findings indicate that climate adaptation, governance quality, and trade openness exert positive and statistically significant effects on sustainable economic growth, with the long-run effect of climate adaptation (0.62) exceeding its short-run effect (0.28), confirming that sustained adaptive capacity yields cumulative benefits. Conversely, regional inequality and carbon emissions exert significant negative effects, with the adverse influence of inequality intensifying over the long run (−1.88). The positive coefficients on GDP per capita and its squared term further indicate that Nigeria has not yet reached the turning point of the Environmental Kuznets Curve. These findings suggest that strengthening adaptive capacity, alongside deliberate efforts to reduce regional inequality, is essential for advancing sustainable economic growth. The study accordingly recommends greater investment in climate-resilient infrastructure, renewable energy development, and balanced regional development to promote inclusive and sustained growth, in line with SDGs 8, 10, and 13.

Green Finance and ESG Strategy Under Environmental Governance Systems: A Bibliometric and Systematic Review (2015–2026)

2026-09-08T11:39:22+03:00

Evidence on green finance, environmental, social and governance (ESG) strategy, and environmental governance has expanded rapidly, but it remains fragmented across finance, management, sustainability, and regulatory research. No prior bibliometric review has systematically integrated the three domains as a single field. This study addresses that gap through a hybrid bibliometric and systematic review of 2,500 English-language peer-reviewed journal articles retrieved from Dimensions for 2015 to the 2026 extraction date, interpreted through Institutional Theory, Stakeholder Theory, Legitimacy Theory, and the Natural Resource-Based View. Publication activity accelerated sharply after 2020, reaching 1,043 articles in 2025; the 424 records for 2026 represent only a partial year. Four interconnected thematic clusters structure the field: green finance and sustainable investment; ESG strategy and corporate sustainability; environmental governance and regulatory systems; and green innovation and sustainable development. Green finance, ESG, sustainability, environmental governance, and green innovation are the most central concepts, while disclosure, regulation, climate finance, and sustainable development bridge the clusters. Research output is geographically concentrated, with China accounting for 987 publications, whereas African scholarship remains underrepresented. The evidence therefore points to an emerging sustainability-governance domain in which finance, regulation, disclosure, and firm-level environmental capabilities increasingly interact. However, participation remains uneven because institutional capacity, data availability, and research infrastructure differ across jurisdictions. The review contributes a multi-theoretical synthesis and a research agenda focused on comparative institutional analysis, credible disclosure, regulatory capacity, data infrastructure, and firm-level capability development. These priorities are particularly relevant to emerging-economy scholarship and policy. The review also clarifies the field's relevance to SDGs 7, 12, 13, and 17.

Energy Consumption, Urbanisation and Ecological Footprint in Nigeria: Evidence from Fourier Quantile ARDL Approach

2026-09-08T11:51:37+03:00

Despite the rising awareness of sustainable development, environmental degradation in Nigeria has worsened due to increased urbanisation and energy demand, which have caused ecological pressure. Previous literature has investigated the relationship between energy use and air quality. However, studies rarely examine the non-linear and asymmetric effects and impulse response of renewable energy and urbanisation on ecological footprint using sophisticated econometric methods. This study examines the impact of renewable energy consumption and urbanisation on Nigeria's ecological footprint from 1990 to 2024 using the Fourier Quantile Autoregressive Distributed Lag (FQARDL) method. The FQARDL framework can account for structural changes and heterogeneous effects across conditional distributions of ecological footprint and, as such, offers more substantial empirical evidence than conventional linear models. The empirical results show that in both the short and long run, the use of renewable energy significantly decreases ecological footprint, suggesting that the more renewable energy is adopted, the more sustainable Nigeria's environment would be. In contrast, urbanisation has a positive and statistically significant influence on ecological footprint, indicating that urban growth is associated with environmental degradation, due to its positive impact on energy consumption, infrastructure growth and resource extraction. The findings also indicate that GDP per capita and its squared term remain positive acrossall quantiles, suggesting that Nigeria is not yet at the 'upside-down' stage of the Environmental Kuznets Curve. Moreover, the causality analysis shows that there is a bi-directional relationship between the consumption of renewable energy and ecological footprint, and the relationship between urbanisation and ecological footprint is unidirectional. The study supports increased investment in renewable energy generation, sustainable urban development and stronger environmental policies to mitigate environmental degradation and achieve long-term environmental sustainability in Nigeria.

Fibre-Optic Network as an Object of Law: Access, Licensing, Cost Allocation and Resilience in the EU Gigabit Strategy

2026-09-14T14:45:40+03:00

Optical fibre cable is normally considered an engineering artefact, but almost any obstacle to rolling out the cable is a matter of law rather than technology. No existing study, however, reconstructs that framework function by function to show which legal technique carries each obligation and where each technique fails. This paper explores how European law creates the optical fibre network as a subject of law and whether it can provide economically feasible and ecologically sustainable connectivity. The study employs doctrinal, comparative and interpretive analysis of the body of EU instruments for regulating fibre-optic rollout, including, primarily, Regulation (EU) 2024/1309 (Gigabit Infrastructure Act), Directive (EU) 2018/1972 establishing the European Electronic Communications Code, state aid guidelines for broadband networks of 2023 and the resilience frameworks of Directives (EU) 2022/2555 and 2022/2557, taking account of the case law of the Court of Justice and the implementation of the legal instruments in Greece and Cyprus. The study identifies nine regulatory functions and reconstructs them in law: access to physical infrastructure, civil works coordination, permitting, in-building infrastructure, competition and market remedies, resilience, public funding, environmental consent, and copper transition. The study finds that regulation is shifting from telecommunications market regulation to property, administrative and planning law and security law; the critical constraint on roll-out is the time and inconsistency of multi-authority permitting, not the availability of funds; and sustainability emerges rhetorically but not as a substantive duty. The study suggests consolidating the permitting procedure, creating published reference cost models, reengineering conditionality and requiring route diversity for peripheral states. These proposals are aligned explicitly with Sustainable Development Goal 9 on resilient infrastructure, Goal 16 on effective and accountable institutions, and Goal 12 on responsible consumption and production.

Modelling Contributing Factors of Judicial Judgment in Medical Negligence Cases

2026-09-14T15:18:36+03:00

Medical negligence litigation poses significant challenges for healthcare systems, justice institutions, and patient safety. Yet the specific criteria shaping judicial judgment in such cases — and the differential weight assigned to them by distinct professional actors — have not been empirically modelled. This study addresses this gap by examining the criteria that contribute to judicial judgment in medical negligence cases in Greece, with particular focus on their relative importance in determining liability outcomes and the amount of compensation awarded. Using a structured questionnaire administered to a convenience sample of 71 professionals — judges, lawyers, and medical experts — the study empirically assesses the significance attributed to 27 predefined adjudication criteria. The study analysed data using descriptive statistics, correlation coefficients, and multiple ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models, using participant characteristics such as profession, court type, and years of experience as explanatory variables. Results indicate that severity, permanence, and extent of harm, along with the existence of a causal link between the medical act and patient outcome, are consistently rated as paramount across all participant groups. The regression models exhibit limited explanatory power (R² = 7–35%), reflecting broad inter-professional consensus on criterion ranking. The study identifies cross-court inconsistency in adjudication and procedural barriers to access to justice as institutional deficiencies linked to SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-Being) and SDG 16 (Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions). These failures carry direct implications for insurance markets, healthcare expenditure, and the practice of defensive medicine. To address them, the study advances two concrete reform proposals: introducing harmonised adjudication guidelines to standardise judicial decision-making across courts, and establishing a no-fault compensation mechanism for the Greek healthcare system.