Policy sciences contributions to analysis to promote sustainability

The policy sciences, in offering the most comprehensive approach to policy analysis and the sociopolitical processes that shape policy outcomes, is particularly appropriate for guiding the analysis required to promote sustainability. This article presents the main components of the policy sciences framework and demonstrates its potency in the crucial task of deepening the problem definitions required to select and enact policies to promote sustainability. As such, it provides background for the policy sciences articles of this special feature.

Europe–Middle East–North Africa cooperation for sustainable electricity and water

This report summarizes the results of two studies of electricity supply for Europe (EU), the Middle East (ME) and North Africa (NA) up to the year 2050. It shows that a transition to competitive, secure and sustainable supply of electricity and water is possible using renewable energy sources, efficiency gains and fossil fuel backup for balancing power. A strong cooperation between the EU and MENA for the market introduction of renewable energy and the interconnection of the electricity grids by high-voltage direct-current transmission are keys to the success and survival of the whole region. However, the necessary measures will take at least two decades to become effective. Therefore, adequate policy and economic frameworks for their realization must be introduced immediately. The importance of sustainable energy for the security of freshwater supplies in MENA is also described.

Rice–wheat cropping cycle in Punjab: a comparative analysis of sustainability status in different irrigation systems

There is a general contention among scholars that first, wheat–paddy cropping pattern is largely responsible for declining ground water table in Punjab and secondly, that the wheat–paddy cropping system is becoming unsustainable over time as the yield levels of these two major crops are stagnating. However, the existing evidences do not throw adequate insight into the stage of groundwater depletion during which the wheat–paddy cycle becomes unsustainable. The paper strengthens the existing empirical base of sustainability status of this cropping cycle in Punjab. A comparison of irrigation systems in terms of both trends in yield and stability for wheat and paddy has been attempted to arrive at a holistic appraisal of sustainability aspects of crop specialization in Punjab. It is observed that the canal dependent irrigation system has performed better as compared to the overexploited groundwater irrigation system in terms of most of the parameters used in the study.

Social determinants of soil and water conservation in rural Kenya

Soil erosion is a major environmental problem and threat to rural development in Kenya. Numerous attempts to address the problem have apparently had little success. There are however some districts that have been very successful, notably Machakos. In this study we search for the factors that determine successful development in soil conservation such as social capital, human capital and market integration. One of our main results is that social capital measures are significant determinants of investment in soil conservation. A better understanding of the relevant mechanisms is essential for developing policies targeting improvement in natural resource management.

Population, environment and poverty in Pakistan: linkages and empirical evidence

This study explores the interlinkages among population, environment and poverty and presents empirical evidence in a developing country like Pakistan. It gives alternative views on population environment linkages. It explains poverty trap, market based harmony, and dual effect of poverty on the basis of a link between population growth and natural resource degradation. In addition, the paper also highlights social and political instability through population-poverty-environment spiral. It also presents empirical evidence on population-environment-poverty nexus in Pakistan. It also compares environmental sustainability index and human development index for selected Asian countries. The paper also gives scores for different components of environmental sustainability index for Pakistan and compares these with India. The paper concludes that the causal relationship between poverty and environment works in both directions, often through changes in GDP and population. Population stress does not have any significant direct effect on all aspects of environmental status in Pakistan.

Long-term strategy for sustainable development: strategies to promote far-sighted action

Given progress in policies for pursuing sustainable development, promoting commitment to thinking and acting more far-sightedly has become the primary strategic challenge. In the face of impatience, selfishness, uncertainty, analytical limitations, and vulnerability, strategies for promoting far-sightedness can be identified by assessing how these obstacles can be overcome. Strategies for creating or rescheduling tangible and deference rewards, realigning performance evaluations, implementing cognitive exercises, framing communications, altering decision-making processes, using self-restraint devices both to resist temptation and to enhance credibility, altering institutions to empower the patient, and stabilizing living conditions are the major categories for identifying and assessing the many strategies which arise out of both ordinary and constitutive policy initiatives.

Sustainable engineering education in the United States

Sustainable engineering is a conceptual and practical challenge to all engineering disciplines. Although the profession has experience with environmental dimensions of engineering activities that in some cases are quite deep, extending the existing body of practice to sustainable engineering by including social and cultural domains is a significant and non-trivial challenge. Nonetheless, progress is being made, as a recent study undertaken by the Center for Sustainable Engineering in the United States demonstrates.

Innovation for sustainable development: from environmental design to transition management

Society needs to adapt in order to provide the wealth that an increasing part of the world population is getting used to. We are on a track to ecological and resource collapse if actions are not taken soon. Technology will have to play a key role in the process of changing industrial society. But innovation has to be embedded in social and organizational innovation. We need sociotechnical change. Environmentally conscious design has been practiced in engineering design for more than a decade. Its merits are sometimes blamed as futile, as the world has not witnessed a significant contribution to the solution of the larger (global) problems. This paper first sketches a scheme of the various levels of technological change, ranging from: (1) incremental optimizations of single artifacts, to (2) major change of artifacts, (3) systems change, and (4) technological transitions (involving changes in production and consumption). It outlines the stakeholders involved in these types of innovations and the parties that could orchestrate the innovation process. In this paper, It is argued that the most encompassing level of technological innovation, the level of transition, is crucial for achieving long-term sustainable development, as it has the largest potential for improvement. However, transition is not very well manageable. The paper contains a review of the literature regarding the occurrence of technological transitions. After a transition has occurred, the new system is often not efficient. Its gains in terms of diminished resource consumption or pollution have to be enlarged by less encompassing innovation strategies, such as systems innovations and product optimization. Transitions for sustainable development are often impossible, as the new systems have to compete with fully developed and optimized systems that have far advanced at the learning curve, i.e., are optimized by various systems and incremental innovations. Less encompassing levels of innovation, even those that aim at more sustainability, can counteract transitions that have more potential for sustainable development by improving the competing (unsustainable) technology. The paper will give several examples of this dilemma and some guidelines for developing government policies as well as corporate strategies. On the policy level, it is argued that it is especially important to develop (scope for) market niches for new sustainable systems and products as they create scope for experiments that could lead to transitions.

Building a freshman-year foundation for sustainability studies: Terrascope, a case study

Terrascope is a freshman learning community at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in which teams of students work to find solutions to large ‘unsolvable’ problems and to communicate about those problems with a wide variety of audiences in multiple formats. The program strongly promotes students’ autonomy in focusing and structuring their work, and student projects culminate in public presentations, both to general audiences and to panels of technical specialists. Students who have completed the program tend to show strong engagement with environmental and sustainability issues, as well as the skills and experience to work intensively on such issues within multidisciplinary teams. Here, we present the program as a case study, with some discussion of the factors that are key to its operation.

Ten years of international scientific cooperation in fisheries,aquaculture and coastal zones: some preliminary lessons

The paper examines preliminary experiences with international scientific cooperation in fisheries, aquaculture and coastal zone issues through 90 projects in successive European Research Framework Programmes (FP4–FP6: 1994–2006). FPs had increasingly ambitious objectives in response to international commitments, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Millennium Development Goals, the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation and dialogue with partner regions. Sustainable aquatic food production in the context of respect for ecosystems was a central concern. Engagement with different social actors and attention to investment in education, people and institutions enabled uptake of research results in education, innovation and some impact. The emphasis in several recent projects on more integrated analyses and knowledge products in the public domain is an encouraging response to the growing crisis of aquatic resource systems. It is suggested that significant up-scaling will be required. This might be done through institutional internalisation and better translation of research results into policy developments supportive of transitions towards sustainable production systems and ecosystem rehabilitation. Capacity building to use research in novel ways and other enabling mechanisms need to be put in place to increase societal and environmental benefits of the research.

Commentary: the challenge of quantifying susceptibility to drought-related crisis

This paper is a response to a recent special issue of Regional Environmental Change, “Quantifying vulnerability to drought from different disciplinary perspectives” (vol. 8, number 4, 2008). In this paper, we examine some of the challenges facing efforts to understand vulnerability to drought through quantification as they are manifest in some of the articles in this special issue.

Educational initiative of Osaka University in sustainability science: mobilizing science and technology towards sustainability

One of the most important and yet difficult challenges that modern societies face is how to mobilize science and technology (S&T) to minimize the impact of human activities on the Earth’s life support systems. As the establishment of inter-disciplinary education programs is necessary to design a unified vision towards understanding the complexity of human nature, the Research Institute for Sustainability Science (RISS) launched a new program on sustainability science in April 2008. The program expects to address the issue of how to use knowledge more effectively to understand the dynamic interactions between nature and human society. This paper first offers an overview of international and Japanese initiatives on sustainability education in which we highlight the uniqueness of the attempt by the Integrated Research System for Sustainability Science (IR3S). The paper then introduces the RISS program for sustainability science, addressing the principles and curriculum design of the program. The paper discusses the main problems and constraints faced when developing the program, such as institutional barriers in building a curriculum and obtaining cooperation from faculty. To challenge these barriers and limitations, the RISS uses the program as a platform to disseminate the idea of sustainability science across the university. This attempt helps us to obtain the continuing cooperation necessary to improve and maintain the program.

Urban water-related environmental transitions in Southeast Asia

This article reviews water-related urban environmental conditions in Southeast Asia. It argues that the development of urban environmental challenges in the region follows a unique pattern compared with those experienced in the now developed world. The new pattern is defined by the so called time–space telescoping of the development process. The process of time–space telescoping reduces the levels of income at which environmental challenges emerge and forces their appearance in a simultaneous fashion, as sets of problems. During previous eras, cities experienced sequential environmental transitions. Urban water-related environmental burdens emerged on local scales and expanded geographically and temporally in impact, with growing levels of affluence. Moreover, certain environmental challenges appeared later in economic growth because the technologies and practices that induced these problems emerged at higher levels of income. The article has two main findings. First, except for wealthy urban centers, for example Singapore, cities in the region are experiencing multi-scaled water burdens simultaneously. Second, low-income and middle-income cities are experiencing burdens at lower levels of income than did their contemporaries in the north.

Motivation of Japanese companies to take environmental action to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions: an econometric analysis

To analyze the motivations of Japanese companies to take environmental actions to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, we used FY2006 research data and questioned Japanese industries regarding their reduction of GHG emissions. Empirical investigations revealed that voluntary targets set by industry organizations, government requirements, and advance responses to possible future regulations can positively influence environmental actions for GHG emission reduction; however, cost reductions and corporate social responsibility fulfillment cannot.

Watershed development in India. 1. Biophysical and societal impacts

This paper recommends a revision of watershed development policy in India in relation to the planning of development interventions involving agricultural intensification and rainwater harvesting following biophysical and societal impact studies carried out on two watershed development projects in Karnataka. A need for changes in policy has arisen in response to progressive catchments closure at the basin level and declining volumes of water flowing into village level reservoirs (known locally as tanks). Flow reductions have occurred largely as a result of increased agricultural intensification over the past 10–15 years. Field levelling, field bund construction, soil water conservation measures, farm ponds, the increase in areas under horticulture and forestry and the increased abstraction and use of groundwater for irrigation are all contributing factors to reduced flows. Planning methodologies and approaches, which may have been appropriate 20 years ago for planning water harvesting within watershed development projects, are no longer appropriate today. New planning approaches are required which (1) take account of these changed flow conditions and (2) are also able to take account of externalities, which occur when actions of some affect the livelihoods of others who have no control or influence over such activities and which (3) contribute to the maintenance of agreed minimum downstream flows for environmental and other purposes.

The benefits of the Kyoto Protocol to developing countries

The Kyoto Protocol relies on incentive-based regulations layered underneath a global cap on net emissions of greenhouse gases. Within the Kyoto Protocol are opportunities and constraints for signatory nations. Of concern to developing nations are the constraints the Kyoto Protocol could place on future growth. We examine the constraints and the opportunities offered to developing countries within the Kyoto Protocol. By identifying the potential costs and benefits the Kyoto Protocol has to offer to developing countries and by examining the incentives each create, we hope to spark serious investigations into ways to minimize the potential costs of entering the Kyoto Protocol and take full advantage of the potential benefits.

Building sustainable & resilient communities: a balancing of community capital

Working toward sustainable community is a complex task for communities especially given the ambiguous nature of implementing the concept of sustainable development. However, by working to understand the nature of community capital, administrators can begin to move beyond bottom line thinking toward a more comprehensive and collective view of community. This paper presents a theoretical framework that helps municipal decision makers begin collecting information they need to help them build sustainable and resilient communities.

Participatory Integrated Assessment in local level planning

The topic is introduced by a short but critical discussion of criteria and needs of Participatory Integrated Assessment (PIA) and participatory local planning. This paper depicts differences of participation in Integrated Assessment and in local level planning but provides also conditions and ideas how PIA can be used for local planning including implementation. A small review of PIA and participation in planning illustrates the relevance of PIA in a knowledge economy trying to adopt principles of good governance. A better incorporation of participatory research into local level planning seems to be crucial. The applicability of PIA in practices leading to participatory monitoring and evaluations are discussed. The outcomes of the paper show that possibilities exist for integrating PIA and participatory monitoring and evaluation into the implementation of the European Water Framework Directive (WFD). PIA adds local information to water management planning and supports individual learning processes. The setting up of such a monitoring and evaluation system may contribute towards a transparent implementation of the WFD, it enhances commitment of citizens towards local government planning and eventually it increases self-determination of citizens, a major objective of good governance.