From green transition to local sustainability: The role of locality and territorial embeddedness

The green transition is increasingly framed through decarbonisation, technological innovation and regulatory change, yet these approaches do not by themselves explain why comparable sustainability policies generate different outcomes across territories. This paper develops locality as an analytical dimension of sustainability. Locality is defined here not simply as the local administrative scale, but as the territorial embeddedness of sustainability processes: the way place-specific environmental conditions, institutions, knowledge, social relations and actor capacities shape how sustainability objectives are interpreted, coordinated and implemented. The study asks two questions: through which mechanisms does locality affect sustainability transitions, and how are these mechanisms reflected in contemporary climate-adaptation governance and territorial evidence? The argument integrates regional science, institutional economics, social capital theory and the geography of sustainability transitions. It identifies local knowledge, stakeholder participation, social capital, transaction-cost reduction, territorial learning and adaptive capacity as the principal mechanisms linking territorial embeddedness to sustainability outcomes. Empirically, the paper uses a layered exploratory design. It first examines ISO 14092 as an institutional framework for local climate adaptation. It then codes 65 projects from the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change using six locality-related dimensions and compares their territorial patterns. Finally, a Hungarian survey of 100 valid ICT-sector SME responses is used as a limited territorial illustration, focusing on regional differences in planned sustainability and climate innovation. The evidence does not establish locality as a causal determinant; rather, it shows convergence across conceptual, institutional and empirical levels. Place-specific conditions systematically enter adaptation through knowledge, participation, learning and governance capacity, while European projects display differentiated territorial pathways rather than a uniform transition model. The Hungarian evidence similarly indicates regional variation, although the survey was not designed to measure locality directly. The paper therefore proposes locality as a complementary fifth dimension of sustainability: a relational and multi-scalar condition that connects universal sustainability goals with the territorial capacities through which they are realised. For international policy and research, the implication is not to privilege the local over higher scales, but to design multi-level sustainability governance that is sensitive to territorial diversity while enabling learning and coordination across places.