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To effectively address the sustainability crises our planet faces, decision-makers at different levels of government worldwide will have to get a handle on three key challenges: learning from Global North and South initiatives in tandem, taking stock of social innovations alongside technological fixes, and nurturing grassroots sustainable development initiatives next to, or in place of, top-down corporate and government interventions. Current scientific literature and grant-making institutions have often reinforced the compartmentalized fashion in which we learn and draw policy lessons from North/South, social/technical, and bottom-up/top-down sustainability initiatives, including local food system innovations. The strategic levers for global sustainable development lying in-between are thus left out. This paper uses exploratory, multiple case study analysis to address this omission. By concurrently drawing lessons from grassroots innovations in Brazil, New York, and Senegal—three profoundly different socioeconomic and geographic contexts—we identify common pressure points that have enabled local communities to drive system-wide transformations toward climate adaptation, resilience, and sustainability in the agri-food system. The findings of this paper would be of value to scholars, government officials, and community groups engaged in agri-food systems sustainability and interested in the processes of change that have allowed budding innovations to stabilize and scale up.

The objectives of this study are to: estimate African countries’ Government Openness Index (AGOI) to see the updated progress of open government in those countries, examine which areas African countries should further improve for sustainable development, and compare the performance of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) member countries to that of non-OGP countries in forming AGOI. This study developed the AGOI with 32 selected countries and four factors (ACC (accountability), TRA (transparency), CPF (citizen participation and freedom) and ICT (information and communication technology)) for the period of 2006–2019. The results show that African countries have continuously increased the values of AGOI for the period. ACC has barely changed, but TRA has increased slightly. Both CPF and ICT have increased at higher growth rates during the period. The OGP group reached much better scores than their non-OGP counterparts, with positive differences in AGOI, ICT, CPF, and TRA, except ACC. The results of this study suggest that the constantly increasing CPF and ICT levels in countries that have similar conditions as African countries should be further improved to function well enough to build accountability and transparency. It is also recommended that countries join the OGP in order to move towards improving government openness and creating sustainable development.

In this study, the Transit Network Design Problem (TNDP) is studied to determine the set of routes and frequency on each route for public transportation systems. To ensure the important concerns of planners like route length, route configuration, demand satisfaction, and attractiveness of the transit routes, the TNDP is solved to generate a set of routes by proposing an initial route set generation (IRSG) procedure embedded into the NSGA-II algorithm. The proposed IRSG algorithm aims to produce high-quality initial route set solutions to reach better optimization procedures. Moreover, the Multi-Objective Mixed-Integer Non-Linear Programming (MOMINLP) model is proposed to formulate the frequency setting problem on each route by minimizing the total travel time of passengers (user costs) and operator costs simultaneously, while maximizing the service coverage area near all the bus stops. The MOMINLP model is solved by applying the NSGA-II algorithm to produce a Pareto front between the first and the second objective functions. The model was applied to the Fargo-Moorhead Area (FMA), a small urban area. Results were compared with the existing transit network to measure the efficiency of the NSGA-II solution methodology. The proposed algorithm was found to considerably decrease the total travel time of passengers.

This paper provides an initial analysis of the EU ETS based on the installation-level data for verified emissions and allowance allocations in the first trading year. Those data, released on May 15, 2006, and subsequent updates revealed that CO2 emissions were about 4% lower than the allocated allowances. The main objective of the paper is to shed light on the extent to which over-allocation and abatement have taken place in 2005. We propose a measure by which over-allocation can be judged and provide estimates of abatement based on emissions data and indicators of economic activity as well as trends in energy and carbon intensity. Finally, we discuss the insights and implications that emerge from this tentative assessment.

This study hypothesizes that employees’ positive perceptions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities at the individual level have a negative effect on employee deviance—a negative job-related behavior—and that anomie plays a mediating role in this relationship. In order to verify the relationship, this study conducts an empirical analysis with a questionnaire survey on employees of firms that implement CSR activities at the company level. Based on Social identity theory, this study examines the causal relationship between the employees’ perceptions of CSR activities and their deviance, and mechanisms by which anomie decreases in the process. The findings are as follows. First, employees’ perceptions of CSR activities had a negative effect on employee deviance. Second, employees’ perceptions of CSR activities had a negative effect on anomie. Third, anomie had a positive effect on employee deviance. Fourth, anomie fully mediated the relationship between employees’ perceptions of CSR activities and employee deviance. This study is the first to document this relationship, which has great practical and academic significance, as it indicates the importance for companies to consider employees’ perceptions of CSR activities. In addition, the study identifies the mediating role of anomie as mentioned above. The results suggest that methodological considerations of CSR awareness enhancement at the company level be discussed more in depth, helping top management and middle managers understand that enhancing employees’ positive perceptions of CSR activities should be the first priority for reducing collective normlessness under the pressure of goal attainment and resolving ethical conflicts among employees.

This study examines the World Heritage List inscription’s tourism impact continuity through Hahoe Village’s tourists’ perception changes between 2014 and 2018, and it tries to verify the direction of future management and development plans for a sustainable community. Of all the perceptions verified in this study, two noteworthy issues, such as (1) World Heritage as a tourists’ brand and (2) future management of Hahoe Village as a World Heritage Site for maintaining brand equity, are discussed. In conclusion, the title “World Heritage” has excelled in its role as a tourism brand. Based on this role, the immediate outburst of tourism after the World Heritage List inscription affected Hahoe Village. However, even though the title World Heritage is a powerful brand that has great effect on the tourism industry, it still needs appropriate management to maintain brand equity. In the case of World Heritage, the target object of management is located at a trade-off point of interests between preserving heritage value and improving service convenience for tourists.

This research proposes technical performance over time as a fourth pillar of sustainability theory for infrastructure. It also describes a method that allows us to discover how changes in the technical pillar (operationalized as reduced breakage rates) may moderate the influence of the social pillar (operationalized as repair rates) on sanitation infrastructure outcomes. Oral histories were used to develop a history of sanitation for each of 152 poor households in four rural communities in Bangladesh that have gained access to sanitation in the past decade. Transcriptions and qualitative coding identified reported states of sanitation (for example, broken vs. functional) at three time steps. These were used to develop an initial vector and transition matrix for a Markov chain analysis. The breakage rate in this model was then adjusted to investigate the impact of improved technical durability on sanitation outcomes. For the case analysed here, we found that increasing infrastructure durability by 50% (an ...

Public transportation can have an efficient role ingainingtraveler satisfaction while decreasing operation costs through establishing an integrated public transit system. The main objective of this research is to propose an integrated multimodal transit model to design the best combination of both railway and feeder bus mode transit systems, while minimizing total cost. In this paper, we have proposed a strategy for designing transit networks that provide multimodal services at each stop, and for consecutively assigning optimum demand to the different feeder modes. Optimum transit networks have been achieved using single and multi-objective approaches via metaheuristic optimization algorithms, such as simulated annealing, genetic algorithms, and the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II). The used input data and study area were based on the real transit network of Petaling Jaya, located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Numerical results of the presented model, containing the statistical results, the optimum demand ratio, optimal solution, convergence rate, and comparisons among best solutions have been discussed in detail.