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Space-related science and technologies affect our daily life. Many countries have already formulated national space regulations to regulate their space activities. China, as one space-faring country, has obtained several achievements in space science and technologies. In recent years, Chinese private space companies have sprung up quickly, which requires a stable and foreseeable legal framework to ensure development. However, compared to the other space powers, China is the only one that has not enacted any formal national space laws. Against the background of strengthening the rule of law in China, research on China's domestic space legislation is valuable and significant. The purpose of this thesis is two-fold. First, to find the legal basis and necessity of national space legislation and to extract the basic content of the existing national space legislation, simultaneously, to identify the new developments in the content of other States´ legislative practices. Second, based on the study of national space legislation, to propose the essential content of China's space legislation.
"Sustainable development" evolves along the resolutions, declarations, and reports from international processes in the framework of the United Nations (UN). The consensual outputs from such processes feature global-generalised and context-free perspectives. However, implementation requires action at diverse and context-rich local levels as well. Moreover, while in such UN processes national states are the only contractual parties, it is increasingly recognised that other ("nonstate") actors are crucial to sustainability. The research presented here places the attention on bottom-up initiatives that are advancing innovative ways to tackle universal access to clean energy and to strengthen small-scale family farmers. This means, the focus is on bottom-up initiatives advancing local implementation of global sustainability targets, more precisely, targets that make part of the Sustainable Development Goals 2 and 7 (SDG 2 and SDG7). The research asks how such bottom-up initiatives can contribute to the diffusion of sustainability innovations, thereby also contributing to social change. Three aims are derived out of that central question: (1) To understand the role of bottom-up initiatives in the diffusion of sustainability innovations and in the thereby involved social changes. (2) To contribute with my research to the actual diffusion of sustainability innovations. (3) To outline a research approach that provides a solid conceptual and methodological framework for attaining the analytical and transformative aims. The doctoral research comprises four single studies, in which the notion of diffusion is explored at different scopes of social scales. It begins with a thorough analysis of diffusion programs of domestic biodigesters to rural households in countries of the global south. The focus is on the process by which this specific technical inno0vation results integrated (or not) into the daily realities of single rural households, that is, the adoption process. In the second study, the attention is on energy supply models based on different decentralised renewable technologies. Central to these models is the building of new (or strengthening of existing) local socioeconomic structures that can assume and ensure the proper operation and supply of energy services. The interest in this study is on the strategies that organisations implementing community-based energy projects apply to support the realisation of such local structures. The third study focuses on a network of bottom-up initiatives that have been advancing alternative approaches to family farming in Colombia. The network mainly comprises farmers associations, other organisations from civil society, and researchers who had been collaborating and experimenting with innovations in different innovation fields such as technical, organisational, financial, and commercialisation schemes. The aim of this third study is to provide insights into the challenges and difficulties faced by these actors in broadening the diffusion of the innovations they have been advancing. To perform this study, a methodological strategy is applied that combines a transdisciplinary mutual learning format with qualitative content analysis techniques. The fourth and last study is a conceptual disquisition. It develops a conceptual framework that (a) provides better accounts for the particularities of endeavours aimed at the diffusion of knowledge and practices from the bottom-up across local contexts and social scales, and (b) advances first conceptual steps towards an explicit account for the role that innovation research (and innovation researchers) can assume for the actual realisation of diffusion. The main findings or contributions of the doctoral research can be categorised into four subjects: 1) Bottom-up initiatives contribute to the diffusion of sustainable innovations by mobilising transformative resources for inducing diffusion in their scope of action and creating spaces for experimentation in which interventions can be tested (and if necessary adjusted) in order to ensure the proper deployment of innovations. 2) In their efforts to advance the diffusion of sustainability innovations, bottom-up initiatives contribute to social changes for ensuring the effective deployment of the innovations and building local available storage of transformative resources. 3) A conceptualisation of innovation diffusion, in which the work of academic researchers studying innovation is a constitutive part of transdisciplinary knowledge articulations that promote diffusion. In this way transdisciplinary research alliances can be envisioned in which researchers investigate about, with, and for bottom-up initiatives. 4) Contributions to the consolidation, systematisation, and dissemination of strategies that are applied by farmers associations in order to strength the economic, social, environmental, and cultural dimensions of Colombian family farmers.
In sub-Saharan Africa, women own or partly own one third of all businesses, thereby having a large potential to contribute to the economic development and societal well-being in this region. However, women-owned businesses tend to lag behind men-owned businesses in that they make lower profits, grow more slowly, and create fewer jobs. To identify reasons for this gap and effective means to promote women entrepreneurs, large parts of the entrepreneurship literature have compared male and female entrepreneurs with regard to individual characteristics, paying only limited attention to the underlying environmental conditions. This is problematic as women entrepreneurs operate under different conditions than men, with particularly pronounced differences in sub-Saharan Africa. Against this backdrop, the goal of this dissertation is to contribute to a more profound understanding of women entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa and its promotion through training by examining critical context factors. Specifically, the author analyzes two context factors that influence women's entrepreneurial performance and the success of training interventions: 1) women entrepreneurs' husbands and 2) the entrepreneurship trainer. These analyses are embedded in considerations of the cultural, social, and economic conditions women entrepreneurs in sub-Saharan Africa are facing. In Chapter 2, the author conducts a systematic literature review on spousal influence in entrepreneurship and identifies six recurrent types of influence. Complementing the literature originating from Western settings, she develops propositions on how the sub-Saharan context affects husbands' influence on women entrepreneurship in this region. In Chapter 3, she builds on a cultural theory and an economic theory of the household to develop and empirically test a theoretical model of husbands' constraining and supportive influences on women entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa. The empirical results point to three distinct types of husbands that differ significantly in their impact on women entrepreneurs' business success. In Chapter 4, the author explores the influence of the trainer on the effectiveness of entrepreneurship training in sub-Saharan Africa by drawing on an unsuccessful training implementation. Qualitative analyses indicate that the use of adequate teaching methods is critical towards training success.
Global climate change and environmental degradation are largely caused by human activity, thus progress towards a sustainable future will require large-scale changes to human behavior. Human-nature connectedness (HNC) - a measure of cognitive, emotional, spiritual and biophysical linkages to natural places - has been identified as a positive predictor of sustainability attitudes and behaviors. While calls to "reconnect to nature" in order to foster sustainability outcomes have become common across science, policy and practice, there remains a great deal of uncertainty, speculation, and conceptual vagueness around how this ought to be implemented. The overarching aim of this thesis is to advance conceptual and empirical understandings of HNC as a leverage point for pro-environmental outcomes and sustainability transformation. In particular, the thesis attempts to assess the nuances of the HNC-PEB (pro-environmental behavior) relationship by investigating the scalar relationships between where someone feels connected to nature and where someone acts pro-environmentally. This research was conducted through conceptual exploration, systematic literature reviews using hierarchical cluster analysis, and empirical case studies relying on structural equation modeling and two-step cluster analysis. The relationship between HNC and pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors was investigated in a small microregion of Transylvania, Romania, where traditional relationships with the land and changing socio-economic characteristics provided an interesting case study in which to explore these connections. The key findings can be organized into three sections: Section A, which addresses HNC and its potential for sustainability transformation; Section B, which addresses HNC as a determinant of PEB outcomes, and Section C, which explores the relationships between human-nature connectedness and energy conservation norms, attitudes, and behaviors. Results cumulatively suggest that HNC is a multidimensional construct that requires greater integration across heterogeneous disciplinary and methodological boundaries in order to reach its potential for meaningful sustainability transformation. Results also highlight the critical need to adopt systemic approaches to understanding how interactions between human-nature connections, norms, attitudes, and behaviors are hindering or promoting sustainability outcomes.
Supporting sustainability transformation through research requires, in equal parts, knowledge about complex problems and knowledge that supports individual and collective action to change the system. Recasting the conditions, characteristics, and modes of research processes that address these needs leads to solution-oriented research in sustainability science. This is supported by systematically analyzing the system’s dynamics, envisioning the desired future target state, and by engaging and designing strategic pathways. In addition, learning and capacity building are important crosscutting processes for co-producing required knowledge. In research, we use sophisticated representations as mediators between theories and objects of interest, depicted as visualizations, models, and simulations. They simplify, idealize, and store large and dense amounts of information. Representations are already employed in the service of sustainability, e.g., in communication about climate change. Understanding them as tools to facilitate processes, dialogue, mutual learning, shared understanding, and communication can yield contributions to knowledge processes of analyzing, envisioning, and engaging, and has implications on the design of the sustainability solution. Therefore I ask, what role do representations and representational practices play in the generation of sustainability solutions in different knowledge processes? Four empirical case studies applying rough set analysis, multivariate statistics, systematic literature review, and expert interviews target this research question. The overall aim of this dissertation is to contribute to a stronger foundation and the role of representation in sustainability science. This includes: (i) to explore and conceptualize representations for the three knowledge processes along selected characteristics and mechanisms; (ii) to understand representational practices as tools and embedded into larger methodological frameworks; (iii) to understand the connection between representation and (mutual) learning in sustainability science. Results point toward crosscutting mechanisms of representations for knowledge processes and the need to build representational literacy to responsible design and participate in representational practices for sustainability.
Neither market income nor consumption expenditure provides an adequate picture of individual standard of living. It is time which enables and restricts individual activities and is a further brick to a more comprehensive picture of individual wellbeing. In our study we focus on a prominent part of time use in non-market services: it is parental child care which contributes not only to individual but also to societal well-being. Within a novel approach we ask for multidimensional polarization effects of parental child care where compensation/ substitution of time for parental child care versus income is interdependently evaluated by panel estimates of societys subjective well-being. The new interdependent 2DGAP measure thereby provides multidimensional polarization intensity information for the poor and the rich and disentangles the single time and income contribution to subjective well-being ensuring at the same time the interdependence of the polarization dimensions. Socio-economic influences on the polarization pole risk and intensity will be quantified by two stage Heckman estimates. The analyses are based on the German Socio-Economic Panel with 21 waves and robust fixed effects estimates of subjective well-being as well as the German Time Use Surveys 1991/92 and actual 2012/13 with detailed diary time use data. The empirical results discover the interdependent relations between parental child care and income under a common evaluation frame and contribute to the question of dimension specific targeted policies in a multidimensional polarization approach. Prominent result: compensation between parental child care time and income proved to be significant, but there are multidimensional regions with no compensation, where parental child care time deficit is not compensated by income. Interdependent multidimensional polarization by headcount and intensity increased significantly over the twenty years under investigation with remarkable risk and intensity differences between the polarization poles with different disentangled parental child care time and income contributions to subjective well-being.
This dissertation examines how smallholder farming livelihoods may be more effectively leveraged to address food security. It is based on empirical research in three woredas (districts) in the Jimma Zone of southwestern Ethiopia. Findings in the chapters that follow draw on quantitative and qualitative data. In this research, the author focuses on local actors to investigate how they can be better supported in their roles as agents who have the ability to improve their livelihoods and achieve food security. This general aim is operationalized through three research questions: (i) How do livelihood strategies influence food security?; (ii) What livelihood challenges are common and how do households cope with these?; and (iii) How do social institutions, in which livelihoods are embedded, influence people's abilities to undertake livelihoods and be food secure? Using quantitative data from a survey of randomly selected households, the author applied a number of multivariate statistical analysis to determine types of livelihood strategies and to establish how these strategies are associated with capital assets and food security. Here she views livelihood strategies as a portfolio of livelihood activities that households undertake to make a living. The predominant livelihood in the study area was diversified smallholder farming involving mainly the production of crops. Based on their analyses, the authors found five types of livelihood strategies to be present along a gradient of crop diversity. Food security generally decreased with less crops being part of the livelihood strategy. The livelihood strategies were associated with households' capital assets. The status of food (in)security of each household during the lean season was measured using the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS). A generalized linear model established that the type of livelihood strategy a household undertook significantly influenced their food security. Other significant variables were educational attainment and gender of household head. The findings contribute evidence to the benefits of diversified livelihoods for food security. Smallholder farming in southwest Ethiopia is beset with process-related and outcome-related challenges. Here, a process-related challenge pertains to the lack of different types of capital assets that people need to be able to undertake their livelihoods, while an outcome-related challenge pertains to lack of food. The most frequently mentioned process-related challenges were associated with the natural capital either as lack in necessary ecosystem services or high levels of ecosystem disservices. Farming households typically faced the combined challenges of decreasing soil fertility, land scarcity, die-off of oxen due to diseases, and wild animal pests. Lack of cash was also common. The findings indicate that when households liquidate a physical asset in order to gain cash, the common outcome is an erosion of their capital asset base. On the other hand, when households drew on their social capital, they tended to maintain their capital asset base. Human capital, for example, in the form of available labor was also important for coping. Protecting and enhancing natural capital is needed to strengthen the basis of livelihoods in the study area, and maintaining social and human capitals is important to enable farming households to cope with challenges without eroding their capital asset base. Smallholder farming in southwest Ethiopia is embedded in a social context that creates differentiated challenges and opportunities. Gender is an axis of social differentiation on which many of the differences are based. The currently ruling Ethiopian political coalition has put important policy reforms in place to empower women. Local residents reported notable changes related to gender in the last ten years. To make sense of the changes, the authors adapted the leverage points concept. Using this concept, the authors classified the reported changes as belonging to the domains of visible gaps, social structures, and attitudes. Importantly, changes within these domains interacted. The most prominent driver of the changes observed was the government's emphasis on empowering women and government-organized interventions including gender sensitization trainings. The changes toward more egalitarian relationships at the household level were perceived by local residents to lead to better implementation of livelihoods, and better ability to be food secure. The study offers the insight that while changing deep, underlying drivers (e. g. attitudes) of systemic inequalities is critical, other leverage points such as formal institutional change and closing of certain visible gaps can facilitate deeper changes (e. g. attitudes) through interaction between different leverage points. This can inform gender transformative approaches. While positive gender-related changes have been observed, highly unequal gender norms still persist that lead to women as well as poor men being disadvantaged. Social norms which provide the basis for collective understanding of acceptable attitudes and behaviors are entrenched in people's ways of being and doing and can therefore significantly lag behind formal institutional changes. Norms influenced practices around access and control of capital assets, decision-making, and allocation of activities with important implications for who gets to participate, how, and who gets to benefit. To more effectively leverage smallholder farming for a food secure future, this dissertation closes with four key insights namely: (1) Diversified livelihoods combining food and cash crops result in better food security; (2) Enhancing natural and social capital is a requisite for viable smallholder farming; (3) Social and gender equality are strategically important in improving livelihoods and food security; and (4) Institutions particularly social norms are key to achieving gender and social equality.
Decoding the psychological dimensions of human odor perception has long been a central issue of olfactory research. As odor percepts could not be linked to a few measurable physicochemical features of odorous compounds or physiological characteristics of the olfactory system, odor qualities have often been assessed by perception–based ratings. Although these approaches have been promising, none of the proposed system has sustained empirical validation. In a review of 28 studies, the authors assessed how basic characteristics of study design have been biasing perception–based classification systems: (1) interindividual differences in perceptual and verbal abilities of subjects, (2) stimuli characteristics, (3) approaches of data collection, and (4) methods of data analysis. Remarkably, many of the difficulties in establishing these systems have been rooted in one underlying issue: the puzzling relationship between language and olfaction in general. While the reference from odors to language is weak, the reverse impact of verbal processing on olfaction seems powerful. Odor perception is biased by verbal–semantic processes when cues of an odor's source are readily available from the context. At the same time, olfaction has been characterized as basically sensation driven when this information is absent. The authors examined whether language effects occur when verbal cues are absent and how expectations about an odor's identity shape odor evaluations. Subjects were asked to rate 20 unlabeled odor samples on perceptual dimensions as well as quality attributes and to eventually provide an odor source name. In a subsequent session, they performed the same rating tasks on a set of written odor labels that was compiled individually for each participant. It included both the 20 correct odor names (true labels) and – in any case of incorrect odor naming in the first session – the self–generated labels (identified labels). The authors compared odor ratings to ratings of both types of labels and found higher consistencies between the evaluation of an odor and its identified label than between the description of an odor and its true (yet not associated) label. These results indicate that basic perceptual as well as quality ratings are affected by semantic information about an odor's source – even in absence of source cues. That is, odor sensation may activate a semantic mental representation of an odorous object that affects odor processing and may in turn relate to further multimodal properties. That means, associations between odors and stimuli from other sensory modalities should not only be stable, but these mappings should be mediated by an odor’s identity. The authors asked subjects to visualize their odor associations on a drawing tablet, freely deciding on color and shape. Additionally, they provided a verbal label for each sample. Color mappings were odor-specific, they reflected the imagery of a natural source and seemed to change with assumed odor identity. Shape mappings changed with odor identifications as well, as drawings frequently displayed concrete objects that reflected visual features of an odor's source. The influence of verbal identity codes on quality ratings or crossmodal mappings is rooted in the very same problem that perception–based classification systems have tried to solve – a terminology that relates to abstract mental categories. The less specific we communicate, the more we need to resort to source–related analogies – in scientific endeavors and everyday life alike.
The research presented here examines the ways the products and practices of digital game-based language learning (DGBLL) shape access to foreign language learning. Three different studies with different methodologies and foci were carried out to examine the affordances of various aspects of DGBLL. The emphasis in all three cases, two of which are empirical and one of which is a theoretical investigation, is on developing a better understanding of the affordances of DGBLL to derive implications for English Foreign Language (EFL) teacher education. In the first study, the focus is on constructing and implementing an evaluative framework to examine the pedagogical, linguistic, and ludic affordances of DGBLL tools. Analysis reveals that many dedicated DGBLL applications incorporate content, pedagogy, and game elements that are limited in their ability to reflect contemporary understandings of foreign language learning or generate motivation to pursue game-related goals. As such, they call into question existing typologies of DGBLL and emphasize the need for competent educators who can effectively align the selection of specific DGBLL tools with given language learning objectives. In order to understand the preexisting knowledge and attitudes that need to be addressed to develop such competence, the second study examines pre-service English foreign language (EFL) teachers’ beliefs and behaviors regarding DGBLL. The quantitative analysis reveals positive correlations between gameplaying and EFL skills and language learning strategies, and between gaming behaviors and beliefs about DGBLL. At the same time, low rates of gameplaying behaviors and negative correlations between prior digital media usage and attitudes towards DGBLL suggest the need for substantial theoretical and practical teacher preparation that takes into account underlying assumptions about gameplaying and foreign language learning. The third study examines the basis of these assumptions, relying on Bourdieu's notion of habitus to illuminate the foundation of these beliefs and his notion of linguistic capital to consider the potential impact of a non-gameplaying habitus on some language learners. Such differential acceptance of efficacious DGBLL in formal school settings may inhibit access to significant forms of capital, and requisite linguistic and digital competencies. While all three studies are limited in their scope, they hold important implications for teacher education. Given the nature of the applications analyzed, it becomes clear that, not only are particular applications appropriate for specific objectives; it must also be the role of teacher education to enhance pre-service teachers' (PST) abilities to understand these nuances and select media accordingly. This can only take place when PSTs' situated existing beliefs and behaviors, as illuminated by this research, are taken into account and addressed accordingly. Finally, this education must necessarily include initiatives to develop an understanding of issues of equity in access, participation, and outcomes as regards DGBLL.