It is not often that international collaborations are sustained for any significant period, let alone for three decades. However, despite relying on largely voluntary contributions of individuals within its member institutions, the International Network of Agencies for Health Technology Assessment (INAHTA) has not only been an example of sustained collaboration over 30 years but also an example of how an initially modest collaboration can grow and thrive. Current and former serving Chairs and secretariat of the Network have come together to review network documents and outputs and reflect on the history of INAHTA, since its inception in Paris in 1993. Building on the paper from Hailey et al 2009 that documented the growth of the network after 15 years, we have considered and documented the factors that we believe have helped sustain the network and enable it to flourish in the subsequent 15 years. We have also considered the various challenges experienced along the way, as these too can aid in making a collaboration stronger. Future directions for the network have also been contemplated, given the evolving nature of HTA and the regional collaborations that have recently emerged. We hope that by sharing the lessons learned from this living example of international global collaboration relationships between like-minded organizations can be similarly fostered and enhanced into sustainable collaborations, for the benefit of all.

In political decision-making processes in Greenland, comparisons are often drawn with Denmark, Scandinavia, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland. With Greenland as a case, this article analyses a series of aspects across the societies to highlight the politics of comparisons, which are taken for granted, and to emphasise contextual conditions. Comparisons are central to cultural meaning-making and navigation with nation building strategies. We conclude that the current comparisons are significant in terms of explaining Greenland’s challenges with a vulnerable economy and with the sustainable use of natural and human resources. To utilise local resources and create a sustainable livelihood, there is a need to break from the existing trajectories based on the current politics of comparison to explore local conditions more carefully and find other models of inspiration. By developing the concept of island operation, the article unfolds distinct characteristics of the Greenlandic socio-economic structures and includes statistical data on trade, education, and the labour market to support the identification of conditions that can contribute to future analyses of Greenland’s sustainable development. This analysis has relevance for societies that share geographical and cultural conditions with Greenland and post-colonial countries that must deal with complex path dependencies to navigate towards sustainable development.

Competition law is experiencing a transformation from a niche economic tool to a Swiss knife of broader industrial and social policy. Relatedly, there is a narrative that sees an expansive role for competition law in broad areas such as sustainability, privacy, and workers and labour rights, and a counternarrative that wants to deny it that role. There is rich scholarship on this area, but little empirical backing. In this article, we present the results of a comprehensive empirical research into whether new goals and objectives such as sustainability, privacy, and workers and labour rights are indeed endorsed in EU competition law and practice. We do so through an investigation into the totality of Court of Justice rulings, Commission decisions, Advocate General opinions, and public statements of the Commission. Our findings inject data into the debate and help dispel misconceptions that may arise by overly focusing on cherry-picked high-profile decisions while overlooking the rest of the EU’s institutional practice.

We find that sustainability is partially recognised as a goal whereas privacy and labour rights are not. We also show that all three goals are more recent than classic goals, that EU institutions have not engaged much with the areas of sustainability, privacy, and workers and labour rights, and that the Commission’s rhetoric is seemingly out of pace with decisional practice. We also identify trends that may bode for change, and we contextualize our analysis through the lens of the history and nature of the EU’s integration and economic constitution.

Sino-Arab Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) have remained elusive over two decades of increasing economic relations and trade negotiations. Nevertheless, substantial investments and trade demonstrate the Arab region’s strategic importance to China. Recent strategic drivers of China’s engagement with the Middle East have evolved from an original energy security focus, to more recently integrating technological investments into partnerships, such as artificial intelligence and renewable energy infrastructure—complicating progress towards an FTA. Such measures can help progress achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals and offer economic development opportunities, but negotiations may be hindered by concerns ranging from technological dependency to trade competition. Examining opportunities and challenges in the developing China–Arab relations, the article explores legal and policy obstacles and opportunities towards securing an FTA. With a focus on recent developments in AI and sustainability partnerships, the article analyses legal strategies and international law best practices for a model FTA for Arab countries.

Sustainability practices of a company reflect its commitments to the environment, societal good, and good governance. Institutional investors take these into account for decision-making purposes, since these factors are known to affect public opinion and thereby the stock indices of companies. Though sustainability score is usually derived from information available in self-published reports, News articles published by regulatory agencies and social media posts also contain critical information that may affect the image of a company. Language technologies have a critical role to play in the analytics process. In this paper, we present an event detection model for detecting sustainability-related incidents and violations from reports published by various monitoring and regulatory agencies. The proposed model uses a multi-tasking sequence labeling architecture that works with transformer-based document embeddings. We have created a large annotated corpus containing relevant articles published over three years (2015–2018) for training and evaluating the model. Knowledge about sustainability practices and reporting incidents using the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standards have been used for the above task. The proposed event detection model achieves high accuracy in detecting sustainability incidents and violations reported about an organization, as measured using cross-validation techniques. The model is thereafter applied to articles published from 2019 to 2022, and insights obtained through aggregated analysis of incidents identified from them are also presented in the paper. The proposed model is envisaged to play a significant role in sustainability monitoring by detecting organizational violations as soon as they are reported by regulatory agencies and thereby supplement the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) scores issued by third-party agencies.

We present two examples of how the environmental humanities have built bridges with governments and made effective policy interventions. Lessons can be drawn about how public humanities can help develop social and cultural understanding and societal resilience.

Diet indices are quantitative assessments of the quality of population intake. Understanding diet quality is crucial to support health and well-being; however, knowledge of diet quality across racial groups is limited. To examine diet quality of acial groups ‘White’, ‘Black’, ‘Asian’, and ‘Other’ in the United Kingdom (U.K.) and United States (U.S.), U.K. and U.S. national survey data were used to calculate Alternative Healthy Eating Index (AHEI-2010), Diet Quality Index-International (DQI-I), and EAT-Lancet scores. ANCOVA tests compared median total quality scores across racial groups adjusting for covariates. Kruskal–Wallis tests examined differences in individual component scores. Spearman correlations identified association of diet quality scores across indices. Highest diet quality scores were reported for U.K. and U.S. Asian groups. Most noticeable differences were apparent between U.S. Asian and White/Black groups (62% Asians within highest tertile of AHEI-2010 score vs. 29% Whites; P < 0.001). All racial groups demonstrated poor diet quality in terms of sustainability; EAT-Lancet scores were <40% of maximum total score for U.S. White, Black, and Other groups. AHEI-2010 diet quality scores were moderately associated with EAT-Lancet scores, evident across all groups (r = 0.53–0.65; P < 0.001). There is a need for all groups to increase intake of wholegrains, especially Black groups (mean Wholegrain score for U.S. Black group within DQI-I was 0.60 (maximum score of 5)) as demonstrated within AHEI-2010, DQI-I, and EAT-Lancet component scores. Additionally, increased intake of vegetables and legumes and decreased intake of processed and red meat would improve the adequacy, healthiness, and sustainability of U.K. and U.S. racial diets.

We analyze the disclosures of sustainable investing by Dutch pension funds in their annual reports by introducing a novel textual analysis approach using state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques to measure the awareness and implementation of sustainable investing. We find that a pension fund's size increases both the awareness and implementation of sustainable investing. Moreover, we analyze the role of signing a sustainable investment initiative. Although signing this initiative increases the specificity of pension fund statements about sustainable investing, we do not find an effect on the implementation of sustainable investing.

The concept of agro-sustainability is presented and discussed. The paper shows that sustainable farming practices, sustainable development and the preservation of biological diversity require adequate valorization of local biodiversity. Special emphasis is given to neglected and underutilized crop species. The role and importance of these plants, including primitive wheat, wild anise, food legumes, several vegetables and forage legumes in southern Italy is presented. Each case is presented as an example of cultivation linked to different aspects of utilization, conservation, genetic erosion, and of their potential for sustainable agriculture.

In the past decades, a backlash against globalization has been brewing, especially in advanced economies. Despite this backlash being only partly determined by trade, we observe an increasing demand for transparency on procedures, methodologies, and results. Impact assessments (IAs) aim at identifying expected effects of trade agreements and at highlighting policymakers' concerns, thus representing an important tool to foster public acceptance. To help us identify spillovers of trade liberalization, we construct a country and sector-specific database of impact assessments. This database provides an overview of the evolution of the coverage and methodological approaches taken by the EU and US for their IAs. We rely on official EU and US sources over the period 1990–2023. We first observe differences in terms of methodology and institutional framework within and between the two regions. Secondly, the coverage of non-trade outcomes has evolved over time both for the EU and the US, with the inclusion of more labour, environmental, and human rights indicators as well as cross-cutting issues. We observe that the depth of the evaluation is correlated with the partner country's social protection and environmental performance. Lastly, we find that the inclusion of a sector in the analysis is driven by economic reasons in the EU but by political reasons in the US.