Evaluating Legal and Governance Frameworks in Environmental Disasters: A Mixed-Methods Simulation of Response Efficiency, Compliance, and Stakeholder Engagement Sarah Ali Abdulkareem, Aws Hamid Mohammed, Samer Adel Abd Hussein, Nazar F. Hassan, Waleed Nassar, Ruslan Frosiniak Environment and Social Psychology, 2025 Addressing the effects of environmental disasters and their consequences, which can be solved through effective governance structures, legal frameworks, and mechanisms that indicate disaster preparedness, response, and recovery, is challenging for societies right now. The study reviews the impact of governance strategies and regulatory frameworks on response efficiency, resource allocation, legal compliance, and stakeholder engagement during environmental crises. However, existing research often examines these elements separately, leaving limited understanding of how legal, governance, and behavioral factors interact during disasters. This study aims to address that gap by evaluating their combined influence within a unified analytical framework. The article used a structured mixed-methods approach combining quantitative statistical analysis with qualitative thematic evaluations. This approach also incorporates scenario-based simulations across five disaster types to test governance performance under controlled assumptions, allowing both qualitative and quantitative insights to be integrated consistently. In each of the disaster simulations Response times indicated by 40% and resource allocation indicated in efficiency by 25–56%, indicating potential improvements under the simulated conditions. These values reflect modeled tendencies rather than predictions and should therefore be interpreted as indicative estimates within the boundaries of the simulation design. Additionally, high rates of legal compliance across all categories suggesting a positive association between enforcement mechanisms and compliance within the model. Future research should examine comparative governance across countries and the longer-term effects of legal frameworks on disaster risk reduction. Additional empirical work using multi-country datasets and real-time environmental indicators, such as: emerging contaminants, biological assessments, and climate-driven water-quality changes, will be essential for validating and expanding these results.
