Sustainable Failures

Unlike other volumes in the current literature, this book provides insight for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary researchers and practitioners on what doesn’t work. Documenting detailed case studies of project failure matters, not only as an illustration of experienced challenges but also as projects do not always follow step-by-step protocols of preconceived and theorised processes. Bookended by a framing introduction by the editors and a conclusion written by Julie Thompson Klein, each chapter ends with a reflexive section that synthesizes lessons learned and key take-away points for the reader. Drawing on a wide range of international case studies and with a strong environmental thread throughout, the book reveals a range of failure scenarios for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary projects, including: • Projects that did not get off the ground; • Projects that did not have the correct personnel for specified objectives; • Projects that did not reach their original objectives but met other objectives; • Projects that failed to anticipate important differences among collaborators. Illustrating causal links in real life projects, this volume will be of significant relevance to scholars and practitioners looking to overcome the challenges of conducting interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research.

Offers advice for coping with disruptions in everyday life during emergency situations, covering emergency preparedness, first aid, renewable energy, alternative healing, and low-tech methods for securing basic provisions.

Increasingly it is being recognized that consumer behavior may be a key trigger in the march toward sustainable development. Several lines of psychological theory and approaches have been developed relatively independently, each of which may provide major implications and action points on how consumers might be moved toward more sustainable behavior. This book is the first that brings together this variety of perspectives and theoretical angles around the common ambition of sustainable development. The contributors are all leading social scientists in the field of consumer behavior who met the challenge to sketch out their theoretical perspectives, but also to go beyond their normal theorizing and think out of the box in order to show how these theoretical perspectives might be made actionable in terms of key managerial and policy perspectives toward sustainable development. The result is a book that shows a wealth of information and approaches the question of how to encourage sustainable behavior from a myriad of divergent perspectives. This should stimulate scientists and policy-makers alike to find similarities, differences, and synergies between state-of-the-art psychological thinking about how to most effectively stimulate sustainable consumer behavior.

This book focuses on the emergence of the "science of sustainability" and the key concepts in making sustainability operational in an organization. The authors discuss the methods, techniques and tools needed to manage the impact of sustainability and how these can be reformulated into business models and solutions for new growth and applications. They then move onto the reformulation of future thinking processes before ending by looking towards an approach for the measurement of sustainability and competitiveness.

This ground-breaking Handbook uniquely focuses on the business of sustainability, offering a fresh insight and practical solutions to the challenges that businesses face in making human activity sustainable. It is organized into four distinctive themes that cut across levels of analysis and illustrate a rich set of solution contexts that will guide future research.

Market reform promises more environmental protection and more profitable agriculture at lower financial cost. Too good to be true? This book examines numerous empirical examples of policy in action to identify principles for the successful application of market-based policy instruments. Where some market instruments are used to fix market failures by putting a value on environmental protection, others use market-like mechanisms to allocate financial incentives for environmental work. They are promoted as flexible, efficient and politically neutral solutions to the competing demands of social, economic and ecological sustainability. But they also attract criticism for rolling back environmental regulation and privatizing public goods. This book argues that while many market-based instruments have merit, decisions about responsibility cannot be left entirely to the market. Whichever instruments we use, decision-making needs to be embedded in a logic of democratization. Using case studies from around the world, this book investigates how instruments like eco-standards, payments for ecosystem services, pollution trading and community-based natural resource management perform in practice, and what can be learned about applying them more effectively. While the approach is primarily sociological, it is deliberately written to bridge the gap between sociology, economics, environmental sciences and the concerns of environmental policy makers.

Current and future issues in the global accounting/consulting, business opportunity, and credit rating agency (CRA) industries can have significant multiplier-effects on international trade, sustainable growth, and compliance (as physical phenomena). These three industries are among the most international and human-capital-intensive of all service industries. In these industries, analysis of business models and industry dynamics can provide insights about how human-computer interaction (HCI) and contract theory affect the evolution of financial market ecosystems and cross-border information flows, and how business models, work-allocation mechanisms, and liability allocation can evolve to manage change. An often-overlooked issue is that non-performing loans (NPLs), sustainability, and CRA efficiency can be significantly affected by business processes, corporate strategy, and HCI in industry ecosystems, multinational corporations (MNCs), and economic systems. Complex Systems and Sustainability in the Global Auditing, Consulting, and Credit Rating Agency Industries compares these three industries and introduces theories of public policy and “inter-business” processes. The book links industry structure, complex systems (including networks), behavioral game theory, structural changes, and antitrust problems to sustainability and the efficiency of pollution-remediation systems. The book introduces new “informal algorithms” and business/resource-allocation models that solve social-choice problems, and also contravene “impossibility theorems” that are at the core of modern computer science and mechanism design. This book is essential for professors and masters/PhD-level students and employees (in industry, financial services, research institutes, consulting firms, and government agencies) who are interested in industrial mathematics and theoretical computer science.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second IFIP WG 5.5/SOCOLNET Doctoral Conference on Computing, Electrical and Industrial Systems, DoCEIS 2011, held in Costa de Caparica, Portugal, in February 2011. The 67 revised full papers were carefully selected from numerous submissions. They cover a wide spectrum of topics ranging from collaborative enterprise networks to microelectronics. The papers are organized in topical sections on collaborative networks, service-oriented systems, computational intelligence, robotic systems, Petri nets, sensorial and perceptional systems, sensorial systems and decision, signal processing, fault-tolerant systems, control systems, energy systems, electrical machines, and electronics.