The Paradox of Urban Environmental Paradigms: A Theory of Legitimacy, Dominance, and Operational Divergence

Why do some urban environmental paradigms become globally dominant while others remain marginal despite substantial convergence in their environmental foundations? This question captures a central paradox in contemporary urban environmental planning: sustainable, resilient, low-carbon, circular, regenerative, and related formulations continue to proliferate, yet their institutional trajectories differ markedly. This study addresses that paradox by developing a theory explaining how urban environmental paradigms are defined, institutionally produced, legitimated, diffused, and operationalized across planning, policy, certification, and development systems. Rather than treating environmental labels as equivalent to paradigms, the study conceptualizes urban environmental paradigms as institutionally recognized organizing frames that structure problem interpretations, normative priorities, legitimate interventions, and evaluative expectations. Drawing on institutional theory, legitimacy theory, diffusion of innovations, policy mobility, market signaling, experimental governance, and bounded rationality, the analysis integrates scholarly and institutional evidence to develop a four-pillar institutional ecosystem operating through six cross-cutting mechanisms and self-reinforcing diffusion architectures. It further identifies configurational conditions associated with institutional dominance and advances the proposition that paradigms converge upstream in shared environmental logic families while diverging downstream through heterogeneous governance, implementation, and operational conditions. The resulting theory explains why conceptually convergent paradigms follow markedly different institutional and operational trajectories across contexts.