Local Sustainability Initiatives Research Articles

Do local government sustainability initiatives impact corporate social sustainability practices?

AbstractThis study quantifies the initiatives of local governments' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and examines their impacts on regional corporate social sustainability practices. Our analysis reveals statistically significant results for corporate action on the following government initiatives on SDGs: BOD/COD effluent standard (6. clean water and sanitation and 14. life below water); number of students per personal computer (PC) (4. quality education); percent of female prefectural assembly members (5. gender equality and 16. peace, justice, and strong institutions); and minimum wage (1. no poverty and 2. zero hunger). These results are robust after controlling for peer effects by other firms in the surrounding regions. The evidence also indicates that these trends are more pronounced in footloose industries than in heavy industries.

Evaluation of solar and biomass perspectives using geographic information system - The case of Iraq regions

The study provides a comprehensive assessment of strategic zoning for biomass energy development across various regions in Iraq through GIS-based analysis. It delves into the energy surplus factor a pivotal metric indicating a region capacity to produce energy beyond its consumption needs. Results indicate a significant disparity in energy production-consumption balance across the regions, impacting local and national energy sustainability initiatives. A notable proportion of the study areas exceed a surplus factor of 3.5, showcasing the possibility of regions to not only meet their own energy needs but to also contribute to a surplus, thanks to effective renewable energy use and other energy-efficient practices. Conversely, a considerable number of cities have surplus factors below 1, signaling energy deficits and a dependence on external energy sources due to high consumption, underdeveloped local energy infrastructure, or other inefficiencies. Meanwhile, other regions achieve a balance, with surplus factors ranging from 1.5 to 4, indicating a more sustainable alignment of energy production with consumption. The study segments regions into tiers based on their surplus factors, suggesting that those with higher factors have greater CO2 reduction potential, thereby offering a nuanced strategy for resource management and environmental policy-making. These insights establish a nuanced framework for optimizing energy production, managing consumption, and reducing emissions, tailored to the diverse energy landscapes of Iraq regions.

Brazilian Forest-Based Sector Perceptions and Contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—Developing Strategies Using the Strategic Options Development and Analysis (SODA) Approach

The Brazilian forest-based sector (FBS) has a complex and important role in leading local and global bioeconomy and sustainable development initiatives. Among these tasks is the improvement and achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, key actors in the FBS still have different perspectives regarding their contributions to the implementation and achievement of the SDGs, and this shortage of understanding and complex problem structure may result in misleading strategic planning, which must be improved to increase and strengthen their participation. This study proposes a participatory assessment to comprehend the perceptions of the Brazilian forest-based sector’s key actors and their contributions to achieving the SDGs by using a problem structuring method (PSM). Strategic Options Development and Analysis (SODA), a method from PSM and soft operational research, was used to support the strategic decisions and assist in formulating the strategies. Following the SODA approach, this study interviewed 13 key actors from different forest sector institutions in Brazil and listed strategies to improve their contributions to the SDGs. As a result, 29 main goals and 68 strategic options were mapped. The goals reflect the key actor’s understanding of the main contributions of the Brazilian FBS to the SDGs, and the strategic options represent the main strategies that can be implemented to strengthen the participation and positioning of these institutions in Agenda 2030.

Shall we dance? How systemic intermediaries coordinate interaction within local sustainability initiatives over time

Local sustainability transition projects are often coordinated by systemic intermediaries. In this context, previous research identified an extensive list of systemic intermediary roles and functions in the acceleration phase of these initiatives. However, little is known about the interplay between systemic intermediary activities and emerging collaboration patterns over time. This paper analyses the innovation journeys of six case studies to explore interaction dynamics and collaboration activities that emerge between systemic intermediaries, niche and regime actors over the course of time. Based on this, it develops a conceptual framework that visualizes design patterns that underlie a certain choreography of the systemic intermediaries and complements earlier research with in‐depth insights into temporal aspects of multiple‐actor mobilization and coordination processes in sustainability transition initiatives.

A participatory approach for empowering community engagement in data governance: The Monash Net Zero Precinct

Abstract Data governance is an emerging field of study concerned with how a range of actors can successfully manage data assets according to rules of engagement, decision rights, and accountabilities. Urban studies scholarship has continued to demonstrate and criticize lack of community engagement in smart city development and urban data governance projects, including in local sustainability initiatives. However, few move beyond critique to unpack in more detail what community engagement should look like. To overcome this gap, we develop and test a participatory methodology to identify approaches to empowering community engagement in data governance in the context of the Monash Net Zero Precinct in Melbourne, Australia. Our approach uses design for social innovation to enable a small group of “precinct citizens” to co-design prototypes and multicriteria mapping as a participatory appraisal method to open up and reveal a diversity of perspectives and uncertainties on data governance approaches. The findings reveal the importance of creating deliberative spaces for pluralising community engagement in data governance that consider the diverse values and interests of precinct citizens. This research points toward new ways to conceptualize and design enabling processes of community engagement in data governance and reflects on implementation strategies attuned to the politics of participation to support the embedding of these innovations within specific socio-institutional contexts.

Repair and reuse: Misalignments between stakeholders and possible users

As part of the circular economy, grassroots initiatives from the social and solidarity economy (SSE) that promote reuse, reemployment and repair could be seen as ‘local sustainable initiatives’ and as citizen-based contributions to sustainability transitions that require favorable conditions to emerge. Despite a diversity of existing solutions, repair and reuse activities remain limited due to social, institutional and technical lock-ins.This study relies on two French case studies and mobilizes a theoretical framework that combines pragmatic sociology and science technology studies. The study illustrates that there are different modes of commitment to repair and that repair initiatives appeal primarily to people of the militant mode of commitment. Even though a rather broad range of citizens is somehow committed to the practice of repairing, repair initiatives generally fail to attract this broad range of citizens because the type of citizen commitment that they assume occurs only at marginal levels.

Assembling sustainability reporting in Singapore

Sustainability reporting has seen increased adoption as more businesses are recognizing wider societal and environmental obligations outside of traditional shareholder commitments. Several jurisdictions such as Malaysia and Hong Kong have passed regulations to encourage or mandate sustainability reporting. Likewise, Singapore has instituted mandatory sustainability reporting for all listed companies since 2016. The development of sustainability reporting in Singapore is explored using material from government agencies, company sustainability reports, conference speeches and newspaper articles. Viewing sustainability reporting as a socio-material assemblage of heterogeneous actors, discursive practices and other policy artefacts, local corporate sustainability initiatives are framed heavily in business logics such as the ‘triple bottom line’, while being anchored to broader national sustainability campaigns and commitments under international agreements. Such an economistic framing may limit the effectiveness of efforts to drive genuine changes in corporate sustainability, as companies may merely engage in a ‘checkbox ticking’ exercise to fulfil regulatory obligations. This paper highlights the multisited nature of policymaking and the tensions that may arise in a top-down approach to implementation.

What Motivates Local Sustainability Policy Action in China? The Case of Low-Carbon City Pilot Program

An increasing volume of literature has sought to identify factors that motivate cities to pursue sustainability and adopt climate policies. However, most empirical studies were done in Western countries, where relatively high local autonomy and low pressure on industrial growth create conditions for spontaneous policy innovations in sustainability. This paper uses China’s Low-Carbon City Pilot Program as a case to investigate motivations for local sustainability actions in an authoritarian context. Our event history analyses confirm the effects of multi-level governance on local sustainability initiatives in China, particularly horizontal competition across jurisdictions, priorities and preferences of upper-level authorities, as well as local determinants including leadership, capacity, politics, and environmental stress. The findings contribute to the comparative urban governance scholarship by highlighting the unique feature of “experimentation under hierarchy” in shaping urban sustainability policymaking in China.

Lifestyle Migration on the Southern Jalisco Coast: Sustainability and Cosmopolitanism in Community-Led Development

This article expands understandings about the effects of lifestyle migration on local communities through an analysis of the relationship between lifestyle migration and local sustainable development initiatives. La Manzanilla is a small town with a large population of foreign residents whom I designate as “lifestyle migrants,” a category of consumption-driven mobility delineated in a growing field of scholarship about migrants moving primarily from the North to the South. I describe community development in the context of the shifting social and material landscape of the southern Jalisco coast of Mexico, with ethnographic attention to local sustainable development agendas that intersect with local conceptions of cosmopolitanism. In a community inhabited by lifestyle migrants for an entire generation of local residents, I analyze the influence of lifestyle migrant capital and ideology on an expanding local middle class youth, and suggest youth-initiated sustainable development is diminishing community vulnerability to displacement.

Lifestyle Migration Dynamics on the Southern Jalisco Coast: Local Manifestations of Sustainability and Cosmopolitanism in Community-Led Development

This article expands understandings about the effects of lifestyle migration on local communities through an analysis of the relationship between lifestyle migration and local sustainable development initiatives. La Manzanilla is a small town with a large population of foreign residents whom I designate as “lifestyle migrants,” a category of consumption-driven mobility delineated in a growing field of scholarship about migrants moving primarily from the North to the South. I describe community development in the context of the shifting social and material landscape of the southern Jalisco coast of Mexico, with ethnographic attention to local sustainable development agendas that intersect with local conceptions of cosmopolitanism. In a community inhabited by lifestyle migrants for an entire generation of local residents, I analyze the influence of lifestyle migrant capital and ideology on an expanding local middle class youth, and suggest youth-initiated sustainable development is diminishing community vulnerability to displacement.

Exploring the landscape of sustainability performance management systems in U.S. local governments

Municipalities around the globe are increasingly adopting and integrating sustainability goals into their service functions. As with many public programs, local sustainability initiatives benefit from regular and systematic assessment aimed at determining the extent to which efforts are achieving their performance goals. However, there currently is little understanding of how local governments are collecting and tracking data on their sustainability-related performance and to what extent they integrate its lessons into their sustainability management practice. This study helps fill this gap by investigating U.S. local governments’ sustainability performance management systems and provides empirical evidence on some of their key institutional and system characteristics. Our findings indicate that a significant number of U.S. local governments are engaged in sustainability performance assessment, but they vary in their ability to establish appropriate indicators as well as supporting mechanisms, indicating significant room for improvement in local sustainability performance management.

Rethinking theories of change in the light of enactive cognitive science: Contributions to community‐scale local sustainability initiatives

AbstractSocial innovation projects commonly refer to operationalized theories of change to inform strategy and to deliver intended outcomes. Community‐based sustainability campaigns, as one example, emphasize the elicitation of pro‐environmental activities and decision‐making among members of a host community, drawing on mainstream psychological theories of behaviour, motivation and cognitive (mental) processes. Locating an argument within the neurobiological base of structure determinism, this paper explores how theories of change for sustainability campaigns might be reimagined through the lens of enactive theory. Following a brief introduction to the enactive model of embodied cognition, implications associated with trying to operationalize the model to inform how theories of change are mapped out and used in sustainability initiatives are discussed. The paper concludes by drawing on insights from approaches to psychotherapy, which also endeavoured to apply this model of mind, and considers these within the strategic context of sustainability initiatives and public engagement.

The role of higher education institutions in sustainability initiatives at the local level

Universities are central players and important economic actors in many regions, and many of them are, in general, nationally and internationally active in respect of matters related to sustainable development. But there is a paucity of research which examines their contributions towards sustainability efforts at the local level, i.e. in the places they are situated. This paper addresses this need, by reporting on a qualitative study deploying a Matrix, which allows an analysis and reporting of regional sustainable development initiatives of a set of 22 universities in industrialised and developing countries. Recommendations to enhance their role are provided, including the importance of pursuing partnerships and joint initiatives, understanding the need of local communities, and making their know-how more widely available. The scientific value of this research is related to the understanding of how the interaction between universities and local communities happens and by shedding light to this topic, it supports universities to improve their own actions. Its implications are two-fold: it demonstrates the potential of universities as local players and outlines the range of activities they may engage with, and which may allow them to act as pillars to local sustainability initiatives.

Balancing diversity and connectivity in multi-level governance settings for urban transformative capacity

Transformation towards sustainable development is about findings new ways of thinking, organising and doing to navigate wicked challenges such as climate change and urbanisation. Such challenges call for new governance modes that match the complexity of the systems to be handled, where multi-level governance and collaborative approaches have been suggested to contribute to such transformative capacity building. This in-depth, trans-disciplinary study investigates how the multi-level governance context in Stockholm, Sweden, influences the transformative capacity from the perspective of local sustainability initiatives. It was found that even though the decentralized governance of the Stockholm region hosts a great potential in supporting city wide transformation, it is hampered by disconnect between actors, levels and sectors and the short-term funding structure. The suggested interventions highlight the tension between enabling collaborations, while safeguarding a high local diversity of initiatives and flexibility to ensure sustained space for innovation and learning.

Local initiatives and global regimes – Multi-scalar transition dynamics in the chemical industry

The breaking with regime logics is one of the key leverage points to enable a socio-technical transition. Understanding how, and under what conditions, this may happen is thus an important task for transition studies. Recent research on socio-technical regimes has shown that they may be less geographically bound than previously assumed. Regimes may instead be replicated and reinforced globally through networks of multi-national companies (MNCs), international interest organizations, and other actor groups. This paper studies the dynamics of such multi-scalar transitions by focusing on the interrelation of local sustainability initiatives and global regimes. Using the case of the chemical industry, we illustrate how sustainability initiatives taken by a few subsidiaries of global corporations in Sweden are closely intertwined with the global regime and vice versa. We show that global regimes are locally embedded as well as globally institutionalized and that sustainability initiatives must therefore challenge both, highly institutionalized local as well as global socio-technical configurations at once. Four main multi-scalar transition dynamics are identified; institutional contradictions, internal competition, inadequate networks, and inconsistent aims and expectations. Each of these dimensions contributes to shaping pathways for local transitions in industries that are dependent on developments outside their immediate boundaries.

Can Learned Experiences Accelerate the Implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 11? A Framework to Evaluate the Contributions of Local Sustainable Initiatives to delivery SDG 11 in Brazilian Municipalities

The adoption of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the UN General Assembly in September 2015, particularly SDG 11, reiterated the importance of sustainable planning in cities. This study evaluates the contribution of four pre-existing major local planning initiatives towards increasing the capacity of Brazilian cities to deliver sustainable development. A conceptual framework was designed to evaluate four dimensions of sustainable development: social, environmental, economic and political. This evaluation draws lessons to develop an action framework to facilitate the implementation of SDG 11 at the local city level. The evaluation of planning initiatives in 15 Brazilian municipalities was based on a mixed methods and triangulation approach and seems to be helpful for enhancing and facilitating implementation of SDG 11 in Brazilian municipalities. In contrast, due to lack of systematic data from Brazilian municipalities it will be necessary to foster the development of adequate indicators to evaluate the effectiveness of SDG 11. Despite this, SDG 11 can become a referential goal to enhance sustainability in some cities and create opportunity to influence the Brazilian municipalities about the importance of sustainable planning. Keywords: sustainable planning in cities; NVivo

The institutionalisation of sustainable practices in cities: how initiatives shape local selection environments

The ways in which institutions are reconfigured to change mainstream selection pressures to favour sustainability is central to research on sustainability transitions but has only recently begun to receive more attention. Of this existing work, empirical attention has mainly focused on the national level with less attention to local dynamics. Attending to this gap, we mobilise theory on institutionalisation processes and insights from the politics of transitions literature and take an actor perspective to investigate the agency of local sustainability initiatives to navigate local governance processes and reconfigure selection environments at the urban scale. Our work subsequently demonstrates the importance of diverse actor tactics, of networking for advocacy and of networking for the creation of informal, ad hoc governance arenas.

Local sustainability initiatives: innovation and civic engagement in societal experiments

ABSTRACTLocal sustainability initiatives are studied from two scholarly perspectives: the perspective of sociotechnical innovation, which relates to the capacity of bottom-up initiatives to contribute to the development of sociotechnical alternatives; and the perspective of civic engagement which relates to the capacity of citizens to organize themselves in order to pursue community goals. This paper argues that taking both these perspectives into account overcomes the problem of being too instrumental or the problem of neglecting the role of technology and innovation in local initiatives. The perspective of sociotechnical innovation presents different types of innovation pursued by local initiatives: the creation of new technology, the application of existing technology and the development of social innovation. Furthermore, innovations might diffuse over wider society by: replication, scaling up, and translation. In turn, civic engagement may take the shape of: the strengthening of social capital, the formation of social movements, and the substitution of functions and services. The insights from literature are illustrated and qualified by applying them in the context of concrete local initiatives. Finally, local initiatives will be portrayed as social contexts that are successful in gathering actors with different motivations and world views and that may contribute to the democratization of innovation.

A Tale of Two Neighbourhoods: Some Evidence of Leadership, Learning, and Liveability

Research on community-based organisations’ potentials and capacities to mobilise community at grassroots levels are emerging rapidly. Yet, inadequacy in terms of understanding how these grassroots institutions participate within Local Agenda 21 processes persists. Despite the establishment of Local Agenda 21 for sixteen years in Malaysia, research on the development of community leadership and learning in mobilising community remains scarce. This paper thus attempts to assess community leadership and learning through participation in Local Agenda 21 programs. Triangulated data collection methods comprising document analysis, experts’ interviews, and case study approach were undertaken to evaluate the development of local sustainable initiatives implemented by two community-based organisations within the platform of community participation facilitated by the City Council of Petaling Jaya. Building on Purdue’s leadership and trust framework as well as instrumental and communicative learning concepts, this qualitative study finds that continuous participation resulting from a continuous charismatic leadership has caused the local neighbourhoods to keep learning. This finding suggests that neighbourhoods participating actively in sustainability platform may substantially contribute to social dimensions of neighbourhood liveability, depending on the extent of community leadership and learning.

The administration and management of environmental sustainability initiatives: a collaborative perspective

Local climate and energy issues provide fertile ground for collaboration in pursuit of shared goals, yet coordination problems can stymie their achievement. Collaborative networks enable integration of local sustainability initiatives across regions and are one mechanism available to mitigate coordination problems and expand the access of resources to local governments. Building on the Institutional Collective Action framework, we examine the scope of the collaborative networks formed by US cities around issues of climate and energy sustainability. Drawing data from the integrated city sustainability database, our analysis finds that the number of partners a city collaborates with on climate and energy issues is influenced by city administrative capacity and community stakeholder support; on average, cities with greater capacity and more interest group support engage a larger number of partners. These findings have theoretical and practical implications for understanding the use of collaborative networks to resolve coordination and cooperation problems.