Value capture mechanisms and willingness to pay for urban sustainability: an international systematic review and analysis

Cities worldwide face increasing fiscal pressure as aging infrastructure and rising sustainability demands outpace traditional municipal revenue sources. Value capture mechanisms have emerged as an important approach to financing urban sustainability investments, yet their effectiveness depends on public acceptance of the underlying revenue instruments. This article presents an international systematic review examining how value capture tools, including impact fees, special assessments, tax-increment financing, and joint development agreements, are applied in sustainability contexts and how public attitudes shape willingness to pay (WTP) for and acceptance of these mechanisms. Following PRISMA-2020 guidelines, a systematic search identified 86 studies published between 2000 and 2024 spanning value capture finance, environmental valuation, legal frameworks, and behavioral research. The review finds that most studies estimate WTP for sustainability outcomes or analyze institutional and legal conditions, while only a small subset directly examines public acceptance of value capture instruments themselves. Across the sampled literature, public acceptance of value capture mechanisms is driven more by perceived fairness and transparency than by WTP for sustainability outcomes, with recent studies favoring discrete choice experiments and advanced modeling but offering limited insight into instrument-level acceptance. The findings highlight a persistent gap between the valuation of sustainability benefits and empirical understanding of public willingness to participate in fee-based financing systems, with implications for the design, communication, and governance of value capture mechanisms in sustainable urban finance.