Institutionalizing urban agriculture in urban sustainability: A nexus framework and indicator compatibility assessment

Urban agriculture (UA) delivers multifunctional benefits, yet its contributions remain marginally incorporated into the planning and evaluation systems that guide sustainable urban development (SUD). This disconnect persists because contribution aims, measurement practices, and contextual conditions are often considered separately, leaving much of UA’s value only partially visible to governance systems and therefore inconsistently supported. To address this gap, we develop an integrated analytical architecture that links indicator translation and contextualized outcome interpretation. Drawing on a systematic review of 139 studies and expert-validated mapping, we evaluate 40 UA indicators against 234 Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicators using unified diagnostic criteria. Nearly 80% of contributions fall outside the category of immediate alignment, requiring either methodological adaptation or expansion of current monitoring frameworks. The UA–SUD Nexus framework then explains why similar interventions yield divergent outcomes across contexts by showing how goals, measurement strategies, and enabling conditions co-evolve through adaptive feedback. These insights inform context-aligned implementation conditions rather than universal intervention sequences. For example, where land tenure security is weak, governance stabilization must precede infrastructure investment to avoid misaligned or short-lived outcomes. By joining compatibility assessment with a mechanism-based explanatory framework, this approach provides a coherent basis for institutionalizing UA within urban sustainability planning, enabling its socio-ecological value to be more systematically recognized, measured, and governed.