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Over the past two decades, transitions research has witnessed rapid development. However, there is still a notable gap in our understanding of sustainability transitions in conflict settings and the role of international organizations in these transitions. Little is known about the dynamics of power, limiting and facilitating factors, and the role of (international) actors in sustainability transitions in conflict settings. This dissertation seeks to make contributions to these discussions by examining energy transitions in Afghanistan, a conflict-affected country, between 2001 and 2021. It specifically focuses on the involvement of international development organizations, shedding light on their role in energy access, institutional change, and imagining Afghanistan's future energy system development. After security, access to affordable energy is frequently reported to be Afghanistan's most pressing need. Following the fall of the first Taliban regime in 2001, billions of dollars and dozens of international development organizations poured into Afghanistan to support the reconstruction of the country including its energy sector. Between 2001 and 2021, the government of Afghanistan and the international development organizations worked on various aspects of energy system development despite on-going insurgency and threats against infrastructural projects. In 2021, the Taliban regained power, resulting in the suspension of operations for most development organizations, with only a few humanitarian agencies remaining active. Within this context, this thesis explores topics such as the country's energy potential and policy, the role of international development organizations in the energy sector, and visions for a future energy system in Afghanistan. The research conducted for this thesis employed a qualitative case study approach, utilizing semi-structured interviews and document analysis.
Despite warnings from scientists and from society starting in the 1970s, we have long overshot our planetary boundaries – eroding biodiversity, changing our landscapes, and polluting our soil and atmosphere. Yes, efforts to change the unsustainable trajectories of our Earth system have increased through, for example, the Millennium Goals, the Sustainable Development Goals, or the Aichi Targets, but to no avail. The interventions to increase sustainability are conflicting on local, national and global levels, and often prioritise quick-fixes and short-term solutions instead of tackling the root causes of the “sustainability gap”. We, hence, need to find “places to intervene in complex systems that bring about transformative change” (Meadows 1999) – a premise and concept that Donella Meadows calls “leverage points”. Based on her seminal work, a team from the Leuphana University has identified three “realms of leverage” in which changes may lead to system transformation (Abson et al. 2017). One of these realms is the reconnection of humans to nature. In this habilitation, I focus on this realm of leverage and aim to (1) enhance the understanding of the influence of landscape change on human-nature relations through empirical, place-based research and comparisons across landscapes in different countries and continents; (2) identify and clarify the new concepts of relational values and leverage points; and (3) highlight empirical evidence on leverage points to foster human-nature relations for sustainability transformation, building mainly on empirical work done in six landscapes in Transylvania, Romania and Lower Saxony, Germany, but also including case studies from Ethiopia and India, systematic literature reviews and conceptual pieces. This thesis showed that cultural landscapes are changing with astonishingly comparable trajectories toward unsustainable futures. Our earth’s current environmental and climate crisis will continue to erode the fundaments of sustainability, hence, re-connecting humans to nature is of outstanding significance for transformative change. Identifying leverage points and implementing an intervention to strengthen human–nature relations will be a great challenge in the coming years. One possible leverage point can be strengthening experiential and emotional dimensions, as they specifically shape the connections people have with cultural landscapes. Further, this thesis highlighted the importance of the interlinkages between shallow and deep leverage points. Our results show that structurally complex landscapes and structurally rich social relations mediated by nature are interlinked and strengthening one, may strengthen the other. Moreover, strengthening sense of place and a sense of agency may enable self- and re-organization of cultural landscapes by opening the possibility to renegotiate people’s values for values and the goals of the social-ecological system, which, in turn, may enhance the structural diversity of landscapes and small-scale agriculture. Our results presented in this thesis also lay the ground for the hypothesis that degrading landscapes might also degrade social relations, which, in turn, can lead to contrasts and conflicts between actors and social groups. Although much work is still necessary to foster transformative change, this thesis offers innovative approaches. This thesis created and popularised the “Leverage points perspective”, including “chains of leverage”, as well as producing novel insights on human-nature relations – such as the distinction of human-nature connectedness and relational values, classifying relational value groups and empirically assessing dimensions of human-nature connectedness and relational values concerning landscape change and landscape features. These novel contributions can have wide-ranging impacts on the scientific discussions and societal implementation of interventions for sustainability.
Leverage points to foster human-nature relations for sustainability transformation
Considering the historical relationship of subordination from the Global South countries to the Global North countries, this research aims to understand how culture is instrumentalized in the Peruvian political arena looking to achieve Western development standards. By focusing on the Commission of Culture and Heritage of the Congress of Peru, period 2016-2017, as its case study, it will do a discourse analysis to try to find the spheres in which developmental ideology is produced and reproduced. Those findings will be later discussed under decolonial thought and dependency theories.
Though the loss of biological diversity is an ecological phenomenon, it also has a social dimension. This makes the study of the social landscape, encompassing the multitude of perspectives and aspirations by different stakeholders, highly relevant for better navigating trade-offs between biodiversity conservation and other land use objectives. Engaging with and addressing contextual understandings of biodiversity is vital to develop socially palatable solutions for biodiversity loss. This dissertation, therefore, takes a place-based approach to studying biodiversity conservation trade-offs and seeks to understand how the perspectives and aspirations of different stakeholders shape them. First, it aims to identify shared viewpoints as ensembles of perceptions and meanings about human-nature relations and biodiversity. Second, it aims to understand how biodiversity is valued and constructed in stakeholders’ aspirations towards their landscape. To this end, a convergent mixed methods approach and case study design are used. Two cases were selected that face different underlying drivers of land-use change, resulting in loss of biodiversity. The Muttama Creek Catchment area is a farming landscape in south-eastern Australia where the ongoing intensification of agricultural production threatens native biodiversity. In the Spreewald Biosphere Reserve in north-eastern Germany, land abandonment and the resulting loss of the biodiversity-rich wet meadows presents a key challenge for biodiversity conservation. Narratives and discourses provide conceptual lenses through which the author studies biodiversity conservation trade-offs. Drawing on Q-methodology, this dissertation identifies biodiversity-production discourses for the first case study and cultural landscape narratives for the second case study. Moreover, based on a participatory futures approach, the Three Horizons Framework, it elicits narratives of change that highlight opportunities for biodiversity conservation in farming landscapes. The findings highlight that despite some overlap in how stakeholders perceive biodiversity, contrasting problem framings and different biodiversity priorities present hindrances to concerted action to protect biodiversity and for collaboration. The findings also identify shared values among stakeholders. However, there is polarity and contestation around the role and importance of biodiversity in rural development.
As human rights evolved to become part of a dominant moral discourse in world politics, regional organisations (ROs) often portray themselves in the language of human rights. Facing growing contestation and politicisation, they have also gradually begun to legitimate their authority drawing on human rights. Yet not all ROs do so to the same extent, in the same manner, or consistently over time. This begs the question: why and how do ROs use human rights for self-legitimation? To answers this research question, I combine a macro analysis using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) on 23 ROs from 1980 to 2019 with a micro analysis via process-tracing in two cases - Arab League (LoAS) and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). Ultimately, ROs use human rights in their legitimation because they strive for congruence. When norms, values, and moral principles purported and embodied by the RO are congruent with those of its core constituency and all relevant audiences, The researcher observes human rights legitimation. She argues that the degree of congruence combines with different degrees of delegitimation stemming from the distinct constellation of agents and audiences of legitimation. Shee circumscribes this via four types of human rights legitimisers. Testing existing theories on legitimacy, legitimation, and human rights, the QCA suggests that "Self-containing Legitimisers" are ROs with a status quo of congruence between the RO and its core constituency. "Signalling Legitimisers" irregularly use human rights legitimation as a signal to respond to additional audiences. Thanks to the case studies, the author further refines existing theory. CARICOM constitutes a case of a "Reviving Legitimisers" where delegitimation towards their core constituency occurs to which it reacts by reviving what it embodies which entails including human rights in its legitimation. With LoAS, the author observes a "Brokering Legitimisers" in which case delegitimation is on the verge of a legitimacy crisis, but its Secretary General manages to broker human rights to two diverging audiences thanks to localisation. Thus, this book provides an explanation of how a distinct norm is used in self-legitimation, nuances our understanding of agents and audiences of legitimation, and introduces the concept of localisation to the study of legitimation.
Tropical ecosystems are critical for biodiversity conservation and local people’s livelihood sustenance. However, these ecosystems are under high pressure from land-use and land cover (LULC) change, which is further projected to intensify and increase rapidly, thereby affecting biodiversity and the provisioning of vital ecosystem services (ES). It is thus important to understand how LULC might change in the future and how such changes could affect biodiversity and ES provisioning in a given landscape of tropical ecosystems. Scenario planning has become an increasingly popular tool and technique to produce narrative scenarios of the future landscape change. Thus, quantifying changes under different land-use scenarios could be a means to elucidate the synergies and trade-offs within the scenarios. In this dissertation, the author examines the future of biodiversity and ES provisioning for different plausible land-use scenarios in southwestern Ethiopia. First, he translates four future plausible narrative social-ecological land-use scenarios ("Gain over grain", "Coffee and conservation", "Mining green gold" and "Food first") developed for southwestern Ethiopia by participatory scenario planning into spatially explicit LULC scenario maps. Results showed distinct LULC changes under each scenario. Second, the author investigates the impact of these land-use scenarios on biodiversity by specifically modelling woody plant species richness in farmland and forest. Both indicators of human disturbance and environmental conditions were used. Third, he also investigates the effect of these land-use scenarios on woody plant-based ES provisioning by combining woody plant species with household surveys on how woody plants were used by the local community. He models and predicts the current and future availability of woody plant-based ES under the four scenarios of landscape change. Overall, the findings of this dissertation show the importance of integrating future land-use mapping with participatory, narrative-based scenarios to assess the social-ecological outcomes of alternative futures. The spatially explicit maps of LULC change, biodiversity and ES (at different scales) could be used as a valuable input to support stakeholders and decision-makers to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of different development trajectories on ecosystems and human well-being and to avoid or minimize future undesirable consequences. To this end, apart from the benefits of coffee production under "Mining green gold" and crop production under "Food first" scenarios, the findings under these scenarios of large-scale agricultural intensification point to a potentially high loss of biodiversity and ES. These two scenarios could have a negative long-term impact on ecosystems and human well-being. Finally, the "Coffee and conservation" scenario, which involves the creation of a new biosphere reserve, appears to be the most sustainable scenario. This scenario could result in a sustainably managed, diversified landscape which could make major contributions to biodiversity conservation and human well-being in the region and beyond.
This thesis deals with sustainability in African Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and the influence of language in achieving sustainable development. Several authors highlight the existing imbalance of sustainability research in higher education, with most publications focusing on the so-called Global North. Little is known about sustainability in the so-called Global South, and in African educational institutions in particular. The first article of this thesis investigated existing sustainability activities in African HEIs. Rather than focusing on the shortcomings, the paper took a positive stance, opposing the predominant language of deficits in research on Africa. In the Delphi study conducted, 32 experts from 29 HEIs in 16 African countries described the sustainability activities they are engaging in. Experts provided information about their experiences in their respective HEI, while language and culture emerged as areas in need of further research. The second article therefore focused on the relationship between language and education for sustainable development in African educational institutions, and systematically reviewed scholarly literature regarding this connection. Authors of the reviewed 33 papers approached this connection mainly on a theoretical and philosophical level, focusing on education and Africa as a whole rather than specified forms of education in specific countries. The third article examined the views of Tanzanian higher education students and graduates regarding language and sustainability. Participants explained how they integrate sustainability and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into their research and how they approach translations in the process. In the ensuing interviews, participants estimated that only a fraction of people outside of academia are aware of sustainability and the SDGs, rendering the achievement of target 4.7 unlikely. This thesis therefore contributes to a better understanding of the current challenges in implementing sustainability and the SDGs in African educational institutions. It highlights the need to integrate (local) African languages in order for sustainability activities as well as the SDGs to be successful.
The ethical apparatus: The material-discursive shaping of ethics, autonomy, and the driverless car
(2023)
This research argues that the emergent driverless car, as a kind of autonomous vehicle, is a Foucault-ian "ethical apparatus", working as an epistemic device to materially embody and enable discursive power by generating notions of "autonomy" and "ethical decision-making". The ethical implications of AI, algorithmic, and autonomous technologies are topics of current regulatory and academic concern. This concern relates to the lack of meaningful oversight of black boxes inside AI systems, liabilities for manufacturers, and inadequate frameworks to hold AI-based socio-technical systems to account. One recent artefact, the driverless car, has taken on these concerns quite literally in the shaping of a niche discourse of the "ethics of autonomous driving". Ambitions to produce a fully autonomous vehicle based on AI technologies are constrained by speculative concerns that its decision-making in unexpected accident situations cannot be assumed to protect humans. "The ethics of autonomous driving" evaluates proposals to build "ethical machines" by examining the relationship between structures of human values and moral decision-making, and how they comport to computational architectures for decision-making. This is the first case this work takes up, chiefly organised around an analysis of a thought experiment, the Trolley Problem, and the online game, Moral Machine, that crowdsourced values to suggest approaches to an "ethics of autonomous driving". Rather than evaluate the feasibility or appropriateness of these two approaches, this work attends to the more critical issue that ethics is being proposed in terms of technologies turning on the logics of risk, speculation, and probabilistic correlations that are fundamental to how machine learning makes decisions. The concern in this work is less a normative framework or approach for a better or more appropriate ethics of autonomous driving. Rather, this work argues that what we understand as "the ethical" is being transformed when architected by, through, and for Artificial Intelligence / autonomous technologies to become their own regulators. Hence the production of autonomous driving necessitates computational infrastructures that are creating a world legible to and for the navigation of a driverless car. The author argues that this is fostering computational governance that has implications for human bodies and social relations, chiefly that conventional approaches to regulation and accountability attend to human values and decision-making rather than computational ones. A second case that this research examines is that of driverless car crashes, to examine how "autonomous" driving requires substantial embodied human knowledge and micro-work. Taken together, these two cases make an argument for how myriad practices of knowledge-production are translating the human world into something legible to the navigational needs of the car, producing changes in the human world through the actions of the car on that basis, and advancing notions of "autonomy". This work concludes with arguments for a critical reconceptualisation of ethics and ethical decision-making in AI / autonomous systems.
Companies are invited to contribute to the United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and sustainability management accounting (SMA) has an important role to play in achieving them. However, if companies are to address the SDGs and linkages beyond organizational boundaries, SMA needs a broader scope than is conventionally assumed. Therefore, the author advances a multi-level framework that addresses context, action-formation, and transformative contributions (CAT) in the following directions: first, an innovative systematic method that allows screening company-related SDGs and assessing corporate contributions to selected SDGs is introduced; second, management control systems are integrated to support managers in guiding employee behavior to make contributions to the SDGs; and, third, self-reinforcing mechanisms of the path-dependence theory are incorporated to serve as a guide to identifying barriers to individuals and groups becoming involved in SMA. This advanced CAT framework contributes to corporate practice and research by providing a multilevel framework that offers concrete management guidance for SMA to address the SDGs. It also facilitates analysis of both enabling and inhibiting factors at the organizational level. The advanced CAT framework has several implications for SMA: it promotes backcasting from the SDGs for benchmarking purposes, integrates different social, environmental, and economic issues, facilitates future-oriented action and transformation planning, addresses different layers such as the company as well as individuals and groups within it and enables to identify barriers hindering individuals and groups from becoming involved in SMA.
This dissertation deals with the increasingly recognized role of incumbent firms in advancing sustainability-oriented industry transitions. Incumbent firms are understood as firms-in-industries, which are embedded in established market structures and thereby contrast new entrant firms. The purpose of this research is twofold. First, to provide empirical evidence of barriers to and success factors of incumbent-driven industry transitions. Second, to unify hitherto dispersed descriptions of transition-related firm behaviour in a new understanding of incumbent firms in industry transitions. To this end, theoretical concepts are discussed and extended on the basis of different empirical studies in the German meat industry. The meat industry serves as suitable research setting due to its diverse sustainability challenges, ranging from climate change and pollution to animal welfare and public health, as well as its current developments towards sustainable protein alternatives. The meat context also offers opportunities to delve into individual-level processes influencing transition-related behaviour. The main contribution of this dissertation is a Multi Embeddedness Framework (MEF) that details processes and outcomes of integrated incumbent firm behaviour, including passive, reactive and proactive behaviors. The framework acknowledges the diversity in incumbent firm behaviors within industries and firms and provides new insights into transition-related behaviors at firm and individual level. With regard to the latter, the potential of learning about and from innovative start-up firms as well as shared sensemaking processes are discussed. The contents of this dissertation provide valuable contributions to the transition literature as well as important management implications with regard to the stimulation and promotion of proactive behaviors