The policy to accelerate the design of the Detailed Spatial Plan regulation document (RDTR) is a strategic step to enhance ease of doing business and promote sustainable development in Indonesia. Targeting 2036 RDTR sites nationwide, the initiative relies on various policy interventions and technical approaches. However, as of 8 January 2024, only 399 RDTRs (19.59%) were enacted after four years of implementation. This underperformance suggests the need to examine factors influencing the process, including issues at each stage of the RDTR design business process. While often overlooked due to its perceived irrelevance to the core substance of planning, analyzing the process is crucial to addressing operational and procedural challenges. This research identifies critical issues arising from the preparation to the enactment stage of RDTR regulations and proposes necessary policy changes. Using an explanatory approach, the study employs methods such as Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), post-review analysis, stakeholder analysis, business process evaluation, and scenario planning. Results show several impediments, including challenges related to commitment, technical and substantive issues, managerial coordination, policy frameworks, ICT support, and data availability. These findings serve as inputs for the development of business process improvement scenarios and reengineering schemes based on Business Process Management principles.

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly restricted household resilience, particularly in developing countries. The study investigates the correlation between livelihood capital and household resilience amid uncertainties due to the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically in Bekasi Regency, West Java Province, Indonesia. Livelihood capital encompasses social, human, natural, physical, and financial, which are crucial in shaping household resilience. This study used the SEM-PLS method and utilized a survey of 120 respondents (household heads) from four villages in two districts (Muaragembong and South Tambun) in Bekasi Regency to identify critical factors that either enhance or impede rural household resilience during and after the pandemic. Findings reveal that households possessing human capital, financial capital, and empowerment are more adept at navigating socioeconomic difficulties during and after the pandemic. However, this research stated that trust and social networks enhance household resilience during the pandemic, whereas social norms are crucial for rebuilding household resilience in the post-pandemic phase. The finding revealed that social cohesion adversely affected household resilience during and after the pandemic, while trust diminished household resilience in the post-pandemic COVID-19 phase. These findings offer insight to policymakers, scholars, and other stakeholders aiming to foster household resilience during and in recovery efforts after the pandemic.

Cross-border ecological cooperation is always a challenging issue. Ecological cooperation in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area has its own uniqueness as it is cross-border cooperation under “One Country, Two Systems”, which is different from multinational cooperation or regional collaboration within one country. This paper analyses the cooperation documents of Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao, official reports and academic literature, and then summarises the unique pattern of ecological cooperation in the Greater Bay Area under “One Country, Two Systems”. It outlines four characteristics: different priorities in ecological management of each side, case by base cooperation, government-dominated cooperation with low public participation, and huge institutional gap between three sides. This article also identifies several problems and causes: lack of common ecological targets for each side and effective cross-border regulative measures, cumbersome coordination in cross-border cooperation. Finally, four feasible recommendations have been put forwarded: creating new institutional arrangements under the context of “One Country, Two Systems”, establishing the efficient decision-making platform for the inter-city cooperation, introducing the market-based resource allocation, and encouraging public participation in ecological monitoring.

The People's Republic of China (PRC) wants to become a key regional actor in the Arctic. PRC's underlying priority in the region is gaining access to commercial opportunities from trade and natural resources. To this end, PRC is building its domestic capacities for research and commercial development in the Arctic, increasing its involvement in multilateral forums on Arctic governance and deepening ties to Arctic nations, especially Russia.

Attitudes towards PRC among Arctic nations are diverging, but Beijing generally faces high levels of skepticism and opposition to its Arctic involvement, explicitly grounded in perceptions of PRC as a state undermining the rules-based international order and potential military build-up in the high north.

The analytical framework in this article builds on an outline authored by Exner-Pirot in 2012 (Exner-Pirot, 2012) to detail the current schools of thought within Arctic governance, and builds on it by including more recent developments in Arctic governance, incorporating the updated Arctic policies of most Arctic countries and connecting it to PRC.

This article contends that Beijing wants to change the status quo of Arctic governance and shift it towards a more accommodating approach to non-Arctic states. This article finds, based on the stated Arctic strategies of the eight Arctic states and PRC, that there are different views on Arctic governance where Arctic countries for the most part indicate an openness to a Chinese entry into the Arctic, albeit in diverging ways. This creates a complex governance scenario for PRC to navigate as it seeks to become a key Arctic player

The use of geotechnologies combined with remote sensing has become increasingly essential and important for efficiently and economically understanding land use and land cover in specific regions. The objective of this study was to observe changes in agricultural activities, particularly agriculture/livestock farming, in the North Forest Zone of Pernambuco (Mata Norte), a political-administrative region where sugarcane cultivation has historically been the backbone of the local economy. The region's sugarcane biomass also contributes to land use and land cover observations through remote sensing techniques applied to digital satellite images, such as those from Landsat-8, which was used in this study. This study was conducted through digital image processing, allowing the calculation of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), the Soil-Adjusted Vegetation Index (SAVI), and the Leaf Area Index (LAI) to assess vegetation cover dynamics. The results revealed that sugarcane cultivation is the predominant agricultural and vegetation activity in Mata Norte. Livestock farming areas experienced a significant reduction over the observed decade, which, in turn, led to an increase in agricultural and forested areas. The most dynamic spatiotemporal behavior was observed in the expansion and reduction of livestock areas, a more significant change compared to sugarcane areas. Therefore, land use and land cover in this region are more closely tied to sugarcane cultivation than any other agricultural activity.