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The emergence of sustainability as a guiding principle for tourism development came along with needs to introduce instruments that can monitor the actual impacts of tourism. Sustainability assessments in tourism (SAT) have gained popularity in recent years with a range of measurement schemes being introduced for national and subnational tourism destinations. With the help of sustainability indicators these schemes intend to guide decision-makers in making better evidence-informed decisions and to improve the overall sustainability performance of tourism. With this dissertation, the author aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the implementation and performance of sustainability assessments, by linking transformative needs of tourism with necessary assessment approaches that can serve as effective instruments for a shift towards a more sustainable tourism development. Thus, the research is part of recent efforts to establish profound and effective measurement approaches for sustainable tourism. The author employs a mixed-methods approach combining qualitative, quantitative, set-theoretic, and review methods, with the aim of maximising the validity of results. First, he explores the general progress and current state of research on sustainability assessments in tourism, with the intention to identify patterns, key elements and research gaps within assessment approaches This is followed by subsequent detailed analyses that examine specific environmental and socio-economic sustainability issues with the aim of providing conceptual, methodological and empirical solutions for assessing them in detail. The dissertation highlights that concrete assessment tools are needed for evidence-informed decision-making and the establishment of effective actions in destination management. The findings indicate that assessments will be more successful in terms of serving as tools for decision-making, if they tackle main drivers of change and encourage management or policymakers to take decisions that affect multiple sustainability issues. It also reviews different concepts and accounting principles and rises awareness of a cautious selection of methods and measurement approaches, as this may affect overall results. The thesis empirically evaluates and applies different measurement approaches in specific destinations, with the help of quantitative and qualitative data collection methodologies. In general, my thesis provides further clarification about key environmental and socio-economic measurement methodologies, which supports ongoing debates about sustainability impacts of tourism. Thus, the research contributes to knowledge, frameworks, methodologies and practical application for tourism governance and tourism sustainability science.
Artificial intelligence, most prominently in the form of machine learning, is shaping up to be one of the most transformational technologies of the 21st century. Auditors are among the professions forecasted to be the most affected by artificial intelligence, as the profession encompasses many highly structured and repetitive tasks. Automating such tasks would naturally increase the efficiency of financial statement audits. By allowing auditors to focus on higher value-added tasks, and the capability to analyze large volumes of data at a fracture of the time a human would need, artificial intelligence would also benefit the effectiveness of auditing. Despite these benefits, to this day, the actual adoption of artificial intelligence in the audit domain remains rather limited. The audit profession is highly regulated and has to consider requirements regarding, e.g. the application of professional standards, codes of conduct, and data protection obligations. Hence, the question arises of how audit firms can be supported in their efforts to adopt artificial intelligence and how machine learning systems can be designed to comply with the specific demands of the audit domain. The goal of this dissertation is to better understand the adoption of artificial intelligence in the audit domain and to actively support the adoption of artificial intelligence in auditing based on this understanding. To this end, we employ a mixture of research methods. On the one hand, the research presented here adopts a qualitative approach, examining the adoption of artificial intelligence and other advanced analytical technologies of the audit domain through taxonomy development and grounded theory. The findings of these studies inspire the second stream of work within this dissertation, which adopts a quantitative and design-oriented approach: It focuses on using machine learning to extract information from invoices for tests of details. Tests of details are essential substantive audit procedures used in nearly every audit. This dissertation proposes a new machine learning model architecture for information extraction from invoices, compares different machine learning models, and proposes design principles for machine learning pipelines for an audit application addressing the test of details through action design research.
Since its establishment, the African Union (AU) has assumed an important role in matters of peace and security on the continent. This doctoral dissertation is dedicated to its conflict and crisis interventions and seeks to identify as well as subsequently explain the broader patterns that have emerged. The dissertation posits that neither the AU's regime-serving roots, which emphasize the primacy of incumbents' parochial interests, nor the AU's problem-solving commitment, which emphasizes the pursuit of its declared organizational mission, can convincingly explain these patterns on their own. Instead, we should understand the AU as being driven by two different logics of cooperation at the same time: a problem-solving and a regime-serving logic. Across its three constitutive articles, the dissertation makes empirical as well as theoretical contributions to the existing literature. Empirically, it offers a broad and systematic analysis of AU interventions over time, across different intervention types, and without bias towards high-profile cases. The novel dataset, on which the dissertation builds, constitutes the hitherto most comprehensive effort to capture the AU's responses to crises and conflicts. Theoretically, the dissertation develops a set of testable theory-driven expectations based on the notion of two different logics of cooperation. While identifiable in the literature on the AU and linking to broader existing debates on international cooperation, the dissertation breaks ground by clearly outlining the implications of each logic and bringing them together under a single theoretical framework. Jointly, the articles provided strong evidence that the AU is indeed driven by both a problem-solving and a regime-serving logic of cooperation, and that this serves as the foundation for explaining the AU's broader intervention patterns. This contributes not only to a better understanding of AU interventions but also has a chance to enrich other important debates, including the debates on African regionalism, comparative regionalism, and multilateral interventions.
Environmental governance beyond borders: Governing telecoupled systems towards sustainability
(2023)
This doctoral dissertation analyses the environmental governance of long-distance social-ecological interactions in telecoupled systems in two issue domains: global commodity chains and infrastructure projects as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Although both domains involve different governance actors, institutions and processes, they both concern the question of how the involved actors develop governance structures and institutional responses to telecoupling. This dissertation aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of how to govern environmental problems that are associated with global flows. Since many multilateral environmental governance initiatives have not yet produced the desired solutions to global problems, particular attention is directed at unilateral state-led governance approaches. This dissertation addresses the questions of (1) how to achieve a spatial fit between the scale of telecoupled systems and the scale of governance institutions, (2) how governance actors exercise agency in governing telecoupled systems, and (3) how state actors can govern the domestic and foreign environmental effects of telecoupled flows. The results show that creating a spatial fit in the governance of global commodity flows is challenging because boundary and resolution mismatches can emerge. Boundary mismatches denote situations where social-ecological problems transcend established jurisdictional boundaries, whereas resolution mismatches refer to governance institutions that have too coarse a spatial resolution to allow them to address the specific aspects of social-ecological problems effectively. No single governance institution is likely to avoid all mismatches, which highlights the need to align multiple governance approaches to effectively govern telecoupled systems.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) recognize the importance of the inextricable link between social and ecological systems and human quality of life (QoL) and biodiversity. Therefore, understanding the feedback and interactions between biodiversity, nature’s contributions to people (NCP), and QoL plays a central role in advancing toward sustainability. In this context, the social-ecological systems (SES) approach has advanced on the subject, particularly in recent decades; however, much remains to be done to comprehensively understand these relationships and interactions, especially at local decision-making scales. In this thesis, through the lenses of the SES approach, the researcher investigates connections between biodiversity, NCP, and QoL in a tropical dry forest (TDF) on the Western coast of Mexico. This place is one of the best-known Neotropical TDF and has been the focus of SES research in the past 20 years, making it an excellent case study for exploring these connections. First, to approach the need for dialogue among different global and local scales and between global and local frameworks, the thesis identifies five key components of the SES dynamics-(1) ecological supply, (2) co-production of NCP, (3) management, (4) demand, and (5) benefits - and three local decision-making scales of analysis: individual plot, smallholder, and land tenure or governance units. A literature review was performed on the social-ecological indicators for the last 11 years in the Chamela-Cuixmala region to operationalize this framework. Second, this thesis uses social-ecological information to identify social-ecological systems units (SESU) spatially explicitly. A methodology was provided to spatially identify the components of social-ecological systems that environmental conditions and management practices have shaped at three previously stated relevant decision-making scales: plots owned by individuals, plot owners, and governance units. To do so, the research group identified and characterized: (1) ecological clusters (EC), (2) social-management clusters (SC), and (3) SESU in a TDF in western Mexico. The findings suggested that decision-makers (ejidatarios, i.e., type of ownership (related to agrarian reform), that in most cases the land allocated is small-smallholders) are bounded by the topographical characteristics and the public policies that determine communal (or private) governance and the number of resources available to them. Finally, the thesis examines the self-perceived QoL across the different SESU, finding 48 QoL items, which were grouped into six categories: 1) social capital, 2) economic capital, 3) agency, 4) nature, 5) peasant non-work activities, and 6) government and services; and two additional dimensions referred to obstacles and enablers of QoL. The researchers found that the more land cover transformation, the more enablers, and obstacles of QoL are identified; emphasis was put on economic capital to achieve QoL. As management is intensified and governance fosters individualism across SES, the higher the Current Welfare Index, and the lower the self-perceived material and non-material satisfaction.
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
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.