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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.
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.
Whereas the extant literature discusses what Sustainability-Oriented Innovations (SOIs) are and why firms develop them, little is known about how they are developed. To enable firms to innovate for sustainability, it is essential to know more about the processes underlying SOI development, which are considered as very difficult, with many firms failing. Drawing on several academic papers and relying on qualitative research methods, the thesis uses the Fireworks model to examine how innovation processes unfold at established small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The main contribution of the thesis is to advance the Fireworks model to the context of SOIs unfolding at SMEs. The findings reveal that SOIs unfold in an emergent, somewhat chaotic way, that duration and outcome are uncertain, that the overall journey is composed of multiple intertwined innovation paths, of which several will likely lead to setbacks. To manage this complex process, the thesis suggests to set four management foci: (1) to create a dedicated organizational unit for exploration, (2) to create conditions allowing intelligent learning for efficient exploration, (3) to carry out in-depth investigation of the related technological innovation systems, and (4) to plan carefully the re-integration of the innovation into the core business for commercialization.
This paper-based dissertation deals with capital structures and tax policies of German family businesses. Family firms as the predominant company form in Germany are mainly characterized by the overlapping of the two spheres family and business, both having different goal systems and preferences. This also has an impact on decision making with regard to corporate finance including the application of tax avoidance policies. In Germany, bank finance is the dominant financing source for family firms but there is a preference for internal finance since it comes along with more external independency. Extant research usually bases its results on samples of publicly listed companies. These studies come up with different results regarding family firms' actual financing preferences and capture their heterogeneity only to a very little extent. In this light, the present dissertation and its three papers examine different research questions in the context of capital structure decisions and tax avoidance in family firms. All the three papers apply a quantitative empirical research design. The first paper is a comparison between capital structures of family firms and non-family firms. The paper examines differences in bank debt and trade credit ratios. Overall, the findings show that family firms have significantly higher overall and long-term debt levels compared to their non-family counterparts. The identity as a family firm, which leads to a leap of faith by banks, can be a possible explanation for these results. The second paper is an in-depth examination of drivers of bank debt levels within the group of family firms. Further, it addresses heterogeneity amongst family firms and combines survey results and corresponding financial information. This represents a first attempt to capture family firm heterogeneity and its link to financial issues. The study shows that the more power in the company is exerted via management or supervisory board by the family, the less bank debt is used. Paper three is an extension of the previous two studies as it sheds light on tax avoidance, a significant instrument to strengthen the internal financing capability of a firm. This also takes up a research gap as there is very little research on taxation in family firms. Contrary to the expectation, the study reveals that private family firms might pay less tax than their non-family peers.
Metals fulfill crucial functions in areas as diverse as renewable energy, digitization and life style appliances, mobility, communication, or medicine. In the context of sustainability, achieving a more sustainable metal use means (i) minimizing the adverse effects associated with metal production and use and (ii) sustaining the availability of metals in a way that benefits present and future generations. Urgent need to act to avoid bottlenecks as well as meeting the challenge of possible conflicts of use among those areas of application calls for appropriate strategy making to intervene in the complex field of metal production and use that involves various, often interlinked operating levels, actors, and spatial and temporal scales. This dissertation focuses on strategies as a means to intervene in a system. It pursues the question, which design features could guide future strategy making to foster sustainability along the whole metal life cycle, and especially, how a better understanding of temporalities, i.e. understanding time in a diverse sense, could improve strategy design and help to bridge the assumed "transformation-material gap". This research converges the results from four research studies. A conceptual part explores the role of temporalities for interventions in complex and interlinked systems, which adds to the conceptual basis, on which the empirical part builds up to explore present and future interventions in metal production and use. The research revealed three essential needs that future strategies must tackle: (i) managing the complex interlinkages of processes and activities on various operational levels and spatial and temporal scales, (ii) providing clear guidance concerning the operationalization of sustainability principles, and (iii) keeping activities within the planet’s carrying capacity and embracing constant change as an inherent system characteristic. In response to these needs, the author developed three guidelines with two design features each (one relating to content, and one to the process of formulating and implementing the strategy) to guide future strategy making. The results show that time matters in this respect. If considered in close relation to space and diversely understood in the sense of temporalities, it serves to (i) understand the impact (duration and magnitude) of an intervention, (ii) recognize patterns of change that go beyond establishing linear, one-dimensional connections, and (iii) design interventions in a way that considers the resilience of a system. These findings can contribute to closer considering our understanding of transformation processes towards sustainability in future interventions in metal production and use.
A central aspect of sustainability governance is collaboration, which has been lauded for its benefits but also criticized for its challenges. The potential benefits of collaboration have apparently been recognized also in the context of EU agriculture. Yet, there has been a lack of holistic consideration of how collaboration can be systematically integrated and promoted in the governance of EU agriculture. Sustainable agriculture cannot only be encouraged through changes in the overall governance system but also through the support of existing and emerging small-scale collaborative initiatives for sustainable agriculture. Indeed, there has been substantial research on the conditions that influence success of similar collaborative initiatives. However, the knowledge resulting from this research remains rather scattered and does not allow for the identification of overall patterns. Additionally, little of this research specifically focuses on sustainable agriculture. What is more, the promotion of collaboration for sustainable agriculture is further complicated by the lack of clarity of the meaning of sustainable agriculture, which is an inherently ambiguous and contested concept. This cumulative dissertation aims to address these gaps by contributing to a better understanding of how collaboration can be facilitated and designed as a means to govern for and advance sustainable agriculture. For this purpose, the dissertation addresses three sub-aims: 1) Advancing the understanding of the concept of sustainable agriculture; 2) scrutinizing the current governance system regarding its potential to facilitate or hamper collaboration; 3) assessing conceptually and empirically how actor collaboration can be facilitated as a means to govern for sustainable agriculture, both from a top-down and a bottom-up perspective. In doing so, this dissertation focuses on EU agriculture and applies a mix of methods, ranging from qualitative to quantitative dominant. The findings of this dissertation highlight that collaboration has been underappreciated and even hampered as an approach to governing for sustainable agriculture. In contrast, this dissertation argues that collaboration offers one promising way to promoting and realizing agriculture and emphasizes the need to integrate different approaches to collaboration and to sustainable agriculture.
This thesis deals with the influence of sustainability communication on the purchase decision of sustainable tourism products involving German specialist tour operators. Sustainability communication is a challenge, because sustainable tourism is an abstract and vague concept which consumers find it difficult to grasp and about which they are sceptical. The service characteristics of tourism products complicate the decision making stage, which is a high-involvement situation of uncertainty to which sustainable product attributes add complexity. As an introduction, an interdisciplinary theory discussion reveals knowledge gaps in terms of the value-belief-norm theory and the elaboration likelihood model (ELM). The first article, which is the first systematic literature review on the topic, reveals that there is a limited theoretical understanding of sustainability communication, a lack of practical understanding of how to design sustainability messages, and an inadequate set of methodologies for its research. It identifies knowledge gaps concerning: the holistic approach to sustainability communication; its role in the attitude-behaviour gap; an interdisciplinary theoretical understanding focusing on belief-based social psychological theories and theories of persuasion; qualitative methods; and experimental design. The second article investigates the role of sustainability communication in the attitude-behaviour gap, employing the value-belief-norm theory to explain how information is processed by special interest customers. Interview findings show that ineffective sustainability communication is the reason for the gap and that customers unintentionally booked sustainably. The study identifies eight groups of beliefs which explain the processing of sustainability attributes. Sustainability information is effective when it is value-congruent, that is, when customers perceive they can make a difference, they begin to ascribe a responsibility to themselves. The third article investigates how to design an effective sustainability message in tour operator advertising. Drawing on the ELM, the study shows that appeal type does not significantly influence persuasion but the topic presented is important. Cultural sustainability is the sustainability topic that is most persuasive for cultural tourists, while consumer prior knowledge and issue-involvement with the topic promote successful information processing.
In response to the challenges of the energy transition, the German electricity network is subjected to a process of substantial transformation. Considering the long latency periods and lifetimes of electricity grid infrastructure projects, it is more cost-efficient to combine this need for transformation with the need to adapt the grid to future climate conditions. This study proposes the spatially varying risk of electricity grid outages as a guiding principle to determine optimal levels of security of electricity supply. Therefore, not only projections of future changes in the likelihood of impacts on the grid infrastructure were analyzed, but also the monetary consequences of an interruption. Since the windthrow of trees was identified a major source for atmospherically induced grid outages, a windthrow index was developed, to regionally assess the climatic conditions for windthrow. Further, a concept referred to as Value of Lost Grid was proposed to quantify the impacts related to interruptions of the distribution grid. In combination, the two approaches enabled to identify grid entities, which are of comparably high economic value and subjected to a comparably high likelihood of windthrow under future climate conditions. These are primarily located in the mid-range mountain areas of North-Rhine Westphalia, Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria. In comparison to other areas of less risk, the higher risk in these areas should be reflected in comparably more resilient network structures, such as buried lines instead of overheadlines, or more comprehensive efforts to prevent grid interruptions, such as structural reinforcements of pylons or improved vegetation management along the power lines. In addition, the outcomes provide the basis for a selection of regions which should be subjected to a more regionally focused analysis inquiring spatial differences (with respect to the identified coincidence of high windthrow likelihoods and high economic importance of the grid) among individual power lines or sections of a distribution network.
The smallholder-dominated landscapes of southwestern Ethiopia support a unique biodiversity with great importance to local livelihoods and high global conservation value. These landscapes, however, are severely threatened by deforestation, forest degradation and the adverse effects of farmland management regimes. These changes have fundamentally altered the structure of the landscapes and threaten their biodiversity and ecosystem services. Managing biodiversity and related services in such rapidly changing landscapes requires a thorough understanding of the effects of land use change and the reliance of local communities on biodiversity. This dissertation examines woody plant biodiversity patterns and services and presents several recommendations regarding biodiversity and multiple ecosystem services in smallholder-dominated landscapes of southwestern Ethiopia. Using a social-ecological systems approach, the author conducted four studies on the complex interactions of local people and woody plant diversity. First, he investigated the effects of human-induced forest degradation on woody plant species. His results suggest that forest biodiversity has been affected by the combined effects of coffee management intensity, landscape context and history at the local and landscape level. Specifically, richness of forest specialist species significantly has decreased with coffee management intensity and in secondary compared to old growth forests, but increased with current distance from forest edge in both primary and secondary forests. These findings highlight the need to maintain undisturbed forest sites to conserve forest biodiversity. Second, the author examined legacy effects of past agricultural land use on woody plant biodiversity. The results show that historical distance seems to be the most important variable affecting woody plant composition and distribution in farmland sections of the landscapes. The author found evidence for immigration credits for generalist and pioneer species but not for extinction debts for forest specialist species which might be rapidly paid off in farmland. The results suggest not only an unrecognized conservation value of old farmland but also a disturbing loss of forest specialist species. To slow this trend, it is necessary to shift to a cultural landscape development approach and to restore forest specialist species in the landscapes. Third, the author evaluated the supply of potential multiple ecosystem services and the relationships between the diversity of woody plant and ecosystem service in the three major land use types, namely forests with and without coffee management and farmland. The results revealed a high multifunctionality of landscapes and showed that ecosystem services significantly increase with woody plant diversity in all types of land use. These findings suggest that the woody plant diversity and multifunctionality in southwestern Ethiopian landscapes has to be maintained. Fourth, the author explored farmers' woody plant use to assess their dependency on and maintenance of woody plants and also considered the influence of property rights and management in this context. He found that local farmers used 95 species for eleven major purposes from all major land uses across the landscapes. He also found that most of the widely used tree species regenerated successfully throughout the landscapes, including in farmland. Local people felt, however, that their property and tree use rights were limited, especially in forests, and that some of the most widely used plant species, including important timber species, appeared to have been overharvested in forests. The results suggest that many species are important for local livelihoods, but a perceived low sense of property rights also seems to adversely affect the management of woody plants, particularly in forests. By focusing on woody plants and their ecosystem services to local people, this dissertation documents a dramatic loss of native forest biodiversity and rapid changes in the cultural landscapes of southwestern Ethiopia. Overall, the findings suggest the need for preservation of intact forest sites and for cultural landscapes development to safeguard biodiversity and multifunctionality of the landscapes in the future. This, in turn, requires holistic and integrated approaches that involve local people and recognize their basic needs of woody plants and their property rights to foster the management of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Maintaining primary forests in and using cultural landscape approaches to the rapidly changing rural setting of southwestern Ethiopia would also contribute to the global effort to halt biodiversity loss.
Wind energy is expected to become the largest source of electricity generation in Europe's future energy mix. As a consequence, future electricity generation will be exposed to an increasing degree to weather and climate. With planning and operational lifetimes of wind energy infrastructure reaching climate time scales, adaptation to changing climate conditions is of relevance to support secure and sustainable energy supply. Premise for success of wind energy projects is the ability to service financial obligations over the project lifetime. Though, revenues(viaelectricity generation) are exposed to changing climate conditions affecting the wind resource, operating conditions or hazardous events interfering with the wind energy infrastructure. For the first time, a procedure is presented to assess such climate change impacts specifically for wind energy financing. At first, a generalised financing chain for wind energy is prepared to (qualitatively) trace the exposure of individual cost elements to physical climate change. In this regard, the revenue through wind power production is identified as the essential component within wind energy financing being exposed to changing climate conditions. This implies the wind resource to be of crucial interest for an assessment of climate change impacts on the financing of wind energy. Therefore, secondly, a novel high-resolution experimental modelling framework with the non-hydrostatic extension of the regional climate model REMO is set up to generate physically consistent climate and climate change information of the wind resource across wind turbine operating altitudes. With this setup, enhanced simulated intra-annual and inter-annual variability across the lower planetary boundary layer is achieved, being beneficial for wind energy applications, compared to state-of-the-art regional climate model configurations. In addition, surrogate climate change experiments with this setup disclose vertical wind speed changes in the lower planetary boundary layer to be indirectly affected by temperature changes through thermodynamically-induced atmospheric stability alterations. Moreover, air density changes are identified to occasionally exceed the net impact of wind energy density changes originating from changes in wind speed. This supports the consideration of air density information (in addition to wind speed) for wind energy yiel assumptions. Thirdly, the generated climate and climate change information of the wind resource are transferred to a simplified but fully-fledged financial model to assess the financial risk of wind energy project financing with respect to changing climate conditions. Sensitivity experiments for an imaginary offshore wind farm located in the German Bight reveal the long-term profitability of wind energy project financing not to be substantially affected by changing wind resource conditions, but incidents with insufficient servicing of financial obligations experience changes exceeding -10% to 14%. The integration of wind energy-specific climate and climate change information into existing financial risk assessment procedures would illustrate a valuable contribution to enable climate change adaptation for wind energy.
This thesis aims to provide a quantitative, cross-nationally comparative, longitudinal and multilevel study of the drivers and hindrances of national governments' anti-trafficking measures. In this research, both macro-level determinants of anti-trafficking enforcement and micro-level foundations of human trafficking are explored. In the manuscript, large-N comparative research examines how characteristics of countries interact with people's attitudes towards violence to better understand what creates environments that are more or less supportive of governments' anti-trafficking efforts. The results presented in the thesis speak not only in favor of studying this topic systematically and cross-nationally, addressing existing gaps in the literature but also in favor of combining macro- and micro-level evidence for developing more effective policy responses against human trafficking.
"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.
Essays on Say-on-Pay: theoretical analysis, literature review and empirical evidence from Germany
(2019)
The dissertation contains four journal articles together with a framework manuscript. The overall subject is the so-called Say-on-Pay (SOP) vote. SOP is a law that enables shareholders to vote on the appropriateness of executive compensation during the firms’ annual general meeting. The dissertation investigates SOP votes from different angles. While the framework provides a background for the relevance of the work, outlines existing research gaps, covers an in-depth discussion and concludes relevant research questions, the four articles present the essence of the dissertation. The first article is a theoretical paper on the recent advances of behavioural agency theory. It serves as a theoretical foundation for the empirical work of the dissertation. Although principal-agent theory has gained a prominent place in research, its negative image of self-serving managers is frequently criticized. Consequently, scholars advocate the utilization of positive management theories, such as stewardship theory. This paper reviews the literature of both theoretical concepts and describes how behavioural characteristics allow for a mutually beneficial symbiosis of the two theories. The second article establishes the foundation of the scholarly knowledge in the field by systematically reviewing the empirical literature. The review covers 71 empirical articles published between January 1995 and September 2017. The studies are reviewed within an empirical research framework that separates the reasons for shareholder activism and SOP voting dissent as input factor on the one hand and the consequences of shareholder pressure as output factor on the other. The implications are analysed, and new directions for further research are discussed by proposing 19 different research questions. Building on the research gaps defined in the literature review, the third article is an empirical manuscript. In this paper, a hand-selected sample of 1,676 annual general meetings with 268 management-sponsored SOP votes in 164 different companies between 2010 and 2015 in Germany is analysed. The analysis focused on the structure, rather than the level, of executive compensation by applying a sample-selection model and panel data regression. Finally, the fourth paper investigates the rare setting of voluntary SOP votes. Using 1,841 annual general meetings of listed firms in Germany between 2010 and 2016, the effects of financial and non-financial (sustainable) performance on SOP voting likelihood and voting results are tested.
To counteract species loss and preserve the remaining biodiversity, with its important ecosystem functioning and services essential to human well-being, there is an urgent need to develop promising and long-term conservation strategies. In order to achieve these goals, extensive research to gain a better understanding of the general mechanisms underlying community diversity is of greatest importance. Especially, the identification of intrinsic ecological and distributional species traits is receiving increased attention in ecology and conservation biology research. Depending on the expression of their traits, species perform particular ecosystem functions and respond in a specific manner to environmental conditions. Although insects make up the largest part of animal diversity, the majority of studies on extinctions have mainly focused on vertebrates. Among invertebrates either charismatic taxa or those targeted by conservation laws have been investigated until now (e.g. butterflies or saproxylic beetles). Being highly species-rich and trait-diverse, ground beetles (Coleoptera: Carabidae) should be even more suitable for conducting trait-based analyses. Thus, using ground beetles as a model taxon, four case studies focusing on the analyses of traits form the basis of this doctoral thesis. The work of this thesis was conducted with the aim of gaining general insights on the influence of species traits on ground beetle community compositions, such as habitat occupancy and species vulnerability to extinction, for instance. An important aspect when investigating species traits is the consideration of confounding factors, such as dependent relations between the different traits. Compiling a large dataset of 555 Central European species, the author identified that dependent relations between the six tested traits of ground beetles (distribution range size, habitat specialization, body size, hind-wing morphology, breeding season and trophic level) are highly common. Across all identified dependent trait relations, the relation between body size and hind wing morphology or range size and hind wing morphology showed the strongest significant dependencies. Since the consideration of trait relations is necessary to provide reliable interpretations, all analyses of this thesis tested several traits simultaneously and considered possible trait interactions. Studies on local communities found specific traits characterizing the local species pools of certain habitat types. Here, the species pools of seven different habitat types (coastal, forest, mountain, open, riparian, wetland and special habitat) were used to determine habitat-specific trait filters. The identified traits, characteristic for certain habitat types, were in most cases in accordance with the previous findings on local communities. Across Germany, the species of frequently disturbed habitat types, namely coastal, riparian and wetland habitats were characterized by small body size, high amount of macroptery, intermediate to high habitat specialization, spring breeding, and predatory feeding behavior. The species of stable habitat types (forest, mountain, and open habitats), however, were found to be generally larger in body size and more frequently breeding in autumn, further displaying greater variations in the other traits. The gained knowledge on the habitat-specific filtering of traits improve our understanding of the organization and assembly of communities, and can thereby help to detect alterations in the habitat-specific species pool due to natural or human-induced environmental changes. Furthermore, traits can provide evidence on species occurrences and vulnerability to extinction. Three case studies of this thesis aimed to gain new insights on this topic, through the investigations on the following research questions: (1) Which traits drive species extinction risks of Central European ground beetle species? (2) How traits influence the species occurrences of 28 forest species within a large area in Central Europe? (3) Whether certain traits are related to long-term population trends of the species pool from an ancient forest in northern Germany? The results indicated, that depending on the habitat type and tested species pool, different traits prove to be good predictors for the vulnerability of species. Nevertheless, across different geographical and taxonomical scales, especially species with small range sizes and high habitat specialization faced a greater risk of extinction. Therefore, the two traits distributional range size and habitat specialization emerge as reliable predictors of ground beetles vulnerability to extinction. Interestingly, body size did not display a consistent response; while increasing body size led to higher extinction risk in riparian, wetland and open habitats and large macropterous species showed higher extinction risks across the entire species pool, smaller species showed long-term population declines in an ancient forest.
The energy sector is regarded as one of the decisive subsystems influencing the future of sustainable development. Consequently, there is a need for a comprehensive transformation of energy generation, conversion and use. The importance of building capacities for energy policy development in developing countries is bound up with the need to formulate global strategies to meet the challenges that humanity face, especially to achieve the targets manifested in the Agenda 2030 and Paris Agreement. The aim of this research is to better understand how to empower marginalised key societal actors, co-produce alternative discourses about energy futures and articulate those discourses to influence policy change within a context of illiberal democracies in Latin America. The research concerns the design, function and effectiveness of scientifically grounded participatory process, which has been justified theoretically and tested empirically. The process presupposes theoretical perspectives relating to theory, method and empirical application. The first draws on theories of sustainability transition and transformation, including transition management. The second draws on ideas taken from the knowledge co-production and transdisciplinary sustainability research. The empirical application, concerns the implementation of a Transdisciplinary Transition Management Arena (TTMA) and its effectiveness, measured by potential for the co-production of knowledge and for stimulating collective action. As result of the process, a conceptual model of the energy system, long-term visions and transformation strategies were developed. The TTMA processes demonstrated that cross-sectoral and inter-institutional, combined efforts, can help actors visualize possible, future alternatives for sustainable energy development and how to realize such alternatives. The structures provided were helpful for the emergence and empowerment of new sustainable-energy-transition coalitions in both Ecuador and Peru. Chapter 1 describes the general context in which this scientific project is developed and presents a synthesis of the processes and its main outcomes. The research results are described in detail in the scientific papers presented in chapters 2, 3 and 4.
On 25 October 2016, the European Commission presented a proposal for a directive on a Common Corporate Tax Base (CCTB Proposal), which contains a comprehensive concept for the harmonisation of profit calculation regulations within the EU. Against this current background, the objective of the present work is to contribute to the implementation of the CCTB by identifying ambiguities and conceptual weaknesses in the design of the profit determination system of the CCTB Proposal and developing concrete recommendations for action for adjustments in the course of the further legislative procedure. In the first article, selected profit calculation rules of the CCTB Proposal will be analysed in detail and compared with the provisions on profit calculation under German commercial and tax law and the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) recognised across member states. Based on the legal comparison, questions of interpretation and inadequacies of the profit calculation system will be considered and proposals for adjustments to various regulatory areas will be submitted. Furthermore, in the second article, within the framework of a holistic study, expert interviews will be used as an empirical-qualitative research design to generate reliable assessments on the part of the various stakeholder groups affected by the implementation of the future directive or involved in its elaboration. The results show the extent to which the profit determination rules of the CCTB Proposal in their current form are suitable for national and EU-wide implementation and in which areas the various expert groups still see concrete need for adaptation. Based on these expert assessments, the third article finally develops a proposal to reduce the threat of legal uncertainty in interpretation issues criticised by the experts. Based on economic maxims developed by the European Commission and existing accounting principles of the current CCTB Proposal, the EU Accounting Directive and IFRS, a system of specific European tax principles will be developed which could be implemented within the framework of the CCTB Proposal.
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.
When Libet and colleagues published their results on the temporal order of movement preparation and the reported time of conscious will to move in 1983, they shed some doubt on the existence of free will. This marked the beginning of a controversial and still ongoing debate, not only about the existence of free will, but also about the appropriateness of methods and validity of results from research on free will. Belief in free will was also discovered as psychological research topic. Literature on belief in free will shows some evidence that most laypersons across different cultural backgrounds believe that they have free will and that a person's belief in free will might have an impact on cognition and behavior, tending to positive outcomes with a greater belief in free will. Empirical findings from the German-speaking area are sparse, probably due to a lack of validated measurements assessing belief in free will available in the German language. The aim of this dissertation is to critically examine some aspects in psychological research on free will and the belief in free will. Two studies are reported that aim to generalize the Libet paradigm for a free and voluntary decision with consequences for the acting person, as this was never reported to have been researched in literature before, and to test the critical objection that the measurement of reporting the conscious intention to move has a direct effect on the result in the Libet paradigm. Furthermore, the construction of the first inventory measuring belief in free will in the German language is described. This inventory was also created with the aim of overcoming some methodological problems in the existing instruments in English language. Furthermore, studies on the experimental manipulability of the belief in free will are reported. These findings provide implications in view of the current state of research on free will and belief in free will and its reliability.
The timber shortage led to large scale afforestations on previously agriculturally used land in Central Europe during the 19th and 20th century. Widespread afforestation programs created recent forest ecosystems (i.e. young forest systems in terms of their development history). Despite the positive effect of increasing the forest area of Central Europe, the ecological effects of these land-use changes on forest ecosystems remain poorly understood. In order to increase the understanding of ecosystem processes in forests, an assessment of conceivable shifts in ecosystem functions caused by former land-use changes and forest management is required. By analysing aboveground growth rates of European beech (Fagus sylvatica L.) in response to environmental change drivers, such as climate extremes and nitrogen (N) deposition, the presented thesis aims to assess the role of land-use and management legacies in modulating present responses to drivers of environmental change. To this end, annual radial growth rates of individual trees were measured in mature beech stands. The investigated stands differed either in their land-use history (i.e. ancient forest sites versus recent forests) or their forest management history (i.e. managed forest sites versus short-term and long-term unmanaged forest sites). Measurements of radial growth rates were complemented by analyses of the fine root systems, soil chemical properties and crown projection areas to gain insights into the mechanisms underlying alterations in tree growth. Within the projects of the presented thesis, shifts in the climate-growth relationships driven by land-use and management legacies were analysed. In addition, land-use legacy mediated differences in the climate-nitrogen-growth relationships were assessed. The key findings are: (I) Soil legacy driven alterations in the fine root systems cause a higher sensitivity of radial increment rates to water deficits in summer for trees growing on recent forest sites than for trees growing on ancient forest sites. (II) Management legacies (in terms of tree release) enhance the sensitivity of beech’s radial growth to water deficits in spring through changes in crown sizes. (III) Interacting effects of spring water deficits and co-occurring high deposition of reactive N compounds lead to stronger radial growth declines in trees growing in ancient forests. This is likely caused by resource allocation processes towards seed production, which is, in turn, mirrored by decreasing radial growth rates. In this context, high N deposition likely boosts mass fructification in beech trees. Overall, it has been demonstrated that the ecological continuity plays a crucial role in modulating both climate sensitivity and the growth response to interacting effects of water deficits and nitrogen deposition in beech trees. The presented thesis identified a trade-off between the climate sensitivity and maximised growth rates within beech trees, depending on forest history. The results show that the growth of beech in ancient, unmanaged beech forests is less sensitive to water deficits than in recent and managed beech forests. Additionally, interacting effects of spring water deficits and N deposition likely increase the reproductive effort of beech trees, particularly in ancient forests. Thus, the results of this thesis once again underpin the uniqueness of ancient, unmanaged beech forests, whose importance for the conservation of biodiversity has been widely acknowledged. In summary, the presented thesis highlights the need to consider the "ecological memory" of forest ecosystems when predicting responses to current and future environmental changes.
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.