The construction of a new provincial stadium in Jambi, Indonesia, coincides with mounting global pressure on the sport sector to decarbonise, democratise, and demonstrate developmental value. This article asks how green stadium development can operate as a deliberate policy instrument for sustainable football governance rather than as an isolated infrastructure event. Drawing on a qualitative systematic literature review and interpretive meta-analysis of peer reviewed scholarship, institutional reports, and official data published between 2015 and 2025, the study synthesises evidence across public policy, international relations, public administration, green economy and business innovation, and science and technology for nature-positive development. The analysis is organised through a three-dimensional theoretical framework that integrates Hood's tools of government, collaborative governance theory, and a nature-positive socio-technical transitions perspective. Findings indicate that stadiums frequently become fiscal and political liabilities when treated as symbolic endpoints, yet they can generate durable public value when embedded in instrument mixes that align authority, treasure, nodality, and organisation with grassroots development and ecological restoration. The study advances three contributions: it reframes the stadium as an instrument rather than an outcome, it repositions green design as a governance lever rather than a technical add-on, and it locates football governance within a nature-positive development agenda relevant to the global South. The article concludes with a strategic policy architecture for Jambi that couples participatory governance, blended finance, and measurable ecological performance. The argument is that legacy is manufactured through institutional design, not inherited from concrete.
Affiliations come from OpenAlex; journal OAI-PMH metadata carries none. Authors without an OpenAlex ID are matched by name, which can merge or split people.