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Multistakeholder Meta-Organisations (MS-MOs) are often perceived as a ‘magic bullet’ that can tackle societal grand challenges in global supply chains. In this paper, we consider the case of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), and we investigate the extent to which an MS-MO reshapes the attribution of responsibility for sustainability in supply chains, especially in relation to underlying power dynamics. We conduct a multimodal critical discourse analysis of a broad range of sources, including videos and interviews. We show that through its discursive strategies, the RSPO allocates the responsibility for social and environmental issues to the two extremes of the supply chain: objectifying consumers at one end and smallholders at the other, hence reproducing and even exacerbating the traditional imbalanced power dynamics in supply chains. Our work contributes to the emerging, more critical strand of research investigating meta-organisations (MOs) and sustainable supply chain management.

Electric power planners in developing countries have the opportunity to anticipate air conditioning-induced demand peaks, rather than merely react to them, as has happened in the United States. Demand-side management activities targeting future air conditioning installations therefore may be warranted, based on economic efficiency considerations, the U.S. experience, and worldwide trends in air conditioning usage. The feasibility of such anticipatory efforts is likely to hinge on local parameters, including domestic energy supplies, foreign exchange and capital constraints, rates of load growth, evidence of impacts on load profiles, and familiarity with demand-side planning concepts.

Abstract International politics affects the oil trade. But do financial and commercial traders who participate in spot oil trading also respond to changes in international politics? We construct a firm-level dataset for all U.S. oil-importing companies over 1986–2008 to examine how these firms respond to increases in “political distance” between the U.S. and her trading partners, measured by divergence in their UN General Assembly voting patterns. Consistent with previous macro evidence, we first show that individual firms diversify their oil imports politically, even after controlling for unobserved firm heterogeneity. However, the political pattern of oil imports is not entirely driven by the concerns of hold-up risks, which exist when oil transactions via term contracts are associated with backward vertical FDI that is subject to expropriation. In particular, our results indicate that even financial and commercial traders significantly reduce their oil imports from U.S. political enemies. Interestingly, while these traders diversify their oil imports politically immediately after changes in international politics, other oil companies reduce their oil imports with a significant time lag. Our findings suggest that in designing regulations to avoid harmful repercussions on commodity and financial assets, policymakers need to understand the nature of political risk.

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.

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.

Although the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) advocate, through SDG 4 and SDG 10, equitable quality education and the reduction of inequalities within and between countries, respectively, few studies have examined how inequalities in regional sustainability influence higher education. Therefore, this study aims to examine the relationship between regional sustainability and higher education in China using fixed-effects panel modelling. A systematic force framework showing how regional sustainability drives higher education was constructed from economic, social, and environmental perspectives, and the endogeneity in the process of how regional sustainability affects higher education was explored by introducing one-year lagged values as instrumental variables. Our results show that regional sustainability has a significant impact on higher educational attainment in China, with differing effects in the eastern, central, and western regions, respectively. In central China, economic sustainability plays a significant positive role in higher educational attainment; in the western region, economic and social sustainability have stronger positive effects, while environmental sustainability has significantly negative effects. In terms of policy implications, our findings can be used to support regional development policies to promote regional higher education.

The aim of this paper is to evaluate some villages in the mountain area of Sibiu County, Romania, as “smart” tourist villages. The research was carried out in two stages: Stage 1 was collection of information on (a) food products registered in different national and international quality schemes and (b) the number of tourist structures by type, comfort category, and accommodation capacity. Stage 2 was a case study conducted among 32 rural tourism entrepreneurs from 3 villages in Mărginimea Sibiului, using a questionnaire with 22 items on the criteria for evaluation of “smart” villages. The answers were systematized, statistically processed, and interpreted. The main results are as follows: (a) Concerning products, producers, and gastronomic points (PGL) registered, there are 9 products in the quality scheme “mountain product”, 10 producers on the platform “Gusturisibiene”, 1 producer of “telemea de Sibiu”, a registered product with protected geographical indication, and 2 PGL. (b) The number of officially registered tourist structures is 93, of which 72% are agritourism guesthouses. (c) The results for the evaluation of villages as “smart” are that 78.2% of locals use the internet, 74% own at least one smart device, 60.16% of energy used is renewable. There are low values of water and air pollution; there are local job and business opportunities (93.75%); future local development activities will target agriculture with all its sectors and agritourism; public administrations have implemented 7 types of activities to increase the attractiveness of localities; and quality of life, services, and social life aspects are perceived to be at high standards.

Abstract Numerous countries have set up strategic petroleum reserves (SPRs) in response to oil disruptions since 1970. While numerous studies model such programs, we found few that evaluate SPRs' historical performance. Thus, we evaluate the U.S. SPR's performance by comparing actual real costs with estimated real benefits. From 1976 to 2014, the real U.S. SPR cost was about $219 billion real (2014$) dollars, whereas the real benefit was only $122 billion. Sensitivity testing suggests such negative net benefits are qualitatively robust. However, if world oil demand is extremely inelastic to oil price or GDP is elastic enough to oil price shocks, the estimated U.S. SPR net benefit is positive. Sensitivity testing around total real costs and benefits range from $380 billion to $80 billion. Limited testing of IEA coordinated drawdowns suggests that total U.S. benefits jump from $122 billion to more than $400 billion putting the SPR strongly in the black. Limited testing of private sector inventory changes was more disappointing and tentatively suggests private activities may at times have offset some of the government drawdowns. With 20-20 hindsight, initial experimentation found that better management could have significantly enhanced the value of the U.S. SPR, especially for the 1990-91 disruption.