A sustainable built and non-built-up environment is obviously crucial for humankind and Planet Earth (United Nations 1987). The world community released and endorsed a series of agreements that shall guide humankind in planning, building and managing its environment accordingly – taking the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a prominent one amongst these agreements (United Nations 2015). All persons and institutions involved seem to acknowledge that a multi-level approach is required to successfully implement this obviously necessary task of planning, building and managing (United Nations 2017; Independent Group of Scientists 2023). With regard to analysing a respectively given situation embedded in a broader geographical context, the multi-level analytical approach as developed by Hox et al. (2017) and tested by Milbert et al. (2023) seems to be an appropriate tool. In that respect, the United Nations Services (UN-HABITAT 2025) propose a monitoring instrument – so-called Voluntary Local Reviews (VLRs) – seemingly suitable for local and regional administrations as well as national and supranational authorities but also major stakeholder groups to compose the respectively cross-disciplinary perspective and deliver reports, based on respective reporting mechanisms and compatible across scales of governance, spanning from the single building to an urban neighbourhood, a city and an urban-regional context as well as a respective national and supranational setting. UN-HABITAT (2025) additionally proposes Voluntary National Reviews (VNRs) and Voluntary Subnational Reviews (VSRs) as possible syntheses and overall framework documents. The paper cross-analyses a set of VLRs, VNRs and VSRs, developed and published in Germany and Europe (BBSR 2025; Difu 2025; Nordregio 2024), to understand in a traceable format the probably prominent role of these reviews as a decision-support tool, an educational method and a basis of acting in built and non-built-up environment practices – now and beyond 2030.