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Over 25 years after the UNCED conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, agriculture in the European Union (EU) has below the line not come much closer to being sustainable. By now, efforts to promote sustainability in agriculture have predominantly been based on “mainstream science”. This has resulted in strategies directed mainly at agricultural production, measures targeted at individual farms, and a major focus on technology-centered solutions. Yet, there have been many claims emphasizing that such approaches are insufficient to deal with wicked, sustainability-related problems. Rather, it has been argued, we need to question the governance of sustainability issues, i.e. who makes which decisions in which way. 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. Thus, the findings of this dissertation encourage and justify more research, discussion, and action around collaboration in the context of sustainable agriculture. Additionally, the dissertation provides first tangible insights both on principles for systemic change to promote governance for sustainable agriculture and on factors that are crucial for the successful management of small-scale collaborative initiatives. Most importantly, this dissertation advocates an ‘integrative attitude’ among and between scientists and practitioners which could enable more collegial, collaborative and hopefully more constructive research, discussion and action for sustainable agriculture.
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, I focus 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 that are addressed in separate chapters. The research questions are: (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, I 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 I view 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. Food crops such as maize, teff, sorghum, and in smaller quantities – barley and wheat, were primarily produced for subsistence. Cash crops namely coffee and khat were primarily produced for the market. Based on our analyses, we 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. For example, the livelihood strategy with the most number of crops had more access to a wider range of capital assets. They had larger aggregate farm field size, and were more involved in learning with other farmers through informal exchange of information and knowledge. 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, in this case, the combination of diverse food crops and cash crops. 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 that raided their crops and attacked their livestock. Lack of cash was also common and this was associated with an inability to access goods and services that households needed to address other problems. For example, lack of cash prevented households from buying fertilizers or replacing the oxen they lost to diseases. Confronted with multiple and simultaneous challenges, households coped by drawing on more readily accessible capital assets in order to address a lack. This process is here referred to as capital asset substitution. The findings indicate that when households liquidate a physical asset in order to gain cash which they then use to address other challenges, the common outcome is an erosion of their capital asset base. Many households reported having to sell their livestock to buy fertilizers, as required by the government, without seeing an increase in their harvest. The same process of liquidating capital asset to purchase food particularly during the lean season, also led to erosion of capital assets. On the other hand, when households drew on their social capital to address the challenges, they tended to maintain their capital asset base. The local didaro system is one such example in which farming households with adjacent farm fields synchronize their cropping timing and pool their labor together to address the problem of wild animal pests. 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 amongst people. Gender is an axis of social differentiation on which many of the differences are based. Since the coming into power of the currently ruling Ethiopian political coalition, important policy reforms have been put in place to empower women. This includes the formal requirement that wives’ names are included in land certificates. Local residents reported notable changes related to gender in the last ten years. To make sense of the changes, we adapted the leverage points concept which identifies places to intervene in a system with different depths and effectiveness for changing the trajectory of a system. Using this concept, we classified the reported changes as belonging to the domains of visible gaps, social structures, and attitudes. Importantly, changes within these domains interacted, suggesting that changes facilitate further changes. 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. For instance, daughters in southwest Ethiopia continued to be excluded from land inheritance because of long-standing patrilineal inheritance practices. This impacted on women’s abilities to engage in smallholder farming in equal footing as men. 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. Landless men also faced distinct disadvantages in sharecropping arrangements where people involved often have unequal socioeconomic status. Processes that facilitate critical local reflections are needed to begin to change unequal social norms and transform smallholder farming to becoming more inclusive and egalitarian spheres. 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. Because the livelihoods-food security nexus depend on people’s agency in their livelihoods, this dissertation concludes that livelihoods should be recast as critical spheres for expanding human agency and that conceptual development as well as formulation of suitable tools of measurement be pursued.
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, and 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. The thesis has contributed to a target-group specific understanding of effective sustainability product communication and contributes to knowledge in terms of theory, methodology, and practical solutions.
Polen weist insbesondere im Süden und Osten des Landes, aber auch in seinen anderen Landesteilen, eine kleinteilige Agrarstruktur auf. Eine solche kleinteilige Agrarstruktur ist in den Augen der polnischen Agrarpolitik ein unerwünschtes Phänomen. Entsprechend misst sie der Veränderung der kleinteiligen Agrarstruktur Polens zu größeren Einheiten hin eine hohe Priorität bei. Vor dem Hintergrund vielfältiger sozial-ökologischer Krisenphänomene, die oftmals mit einer intensiven, industriellen und großskaligen Landwirtschaft verbunden sind, stellt sich jedoch die Frage, ob solche Bestrebungen im Hinblick auf Nachhaltigkeit, der sich die polnische Agrarpolitik und die Politik für die Entwicklung ländlicher Räume ebenfalls verpflichtet, zielführend sind. Um dieser Frage nachzugehen, wurde für die vorliegende Dissertation in zwei landwirtschaftlich besonders kleinteilig strukturierten Regionen Polens (Wojewodschaft Lubelskie und Wojewodschaft Podkarpackie) eine empirische Studie unter Betreiberinnen und Betreibern von kleinen landwirtschaftlichen Betrieben durchgeführt. Ziel der Studie war es zu untersuchen, welche Lebenswirklichkeiten und Wirtschaftsweisen sich in kleinen landwirtschaftlichen Betrieben finden und ob diese Lebenswirklichkeiten und Wirtschaftsweisen den vielfältigen landwirtschaftsbezogenen sozial-ökologischen Krisenphänomenen entgegenwirken können. Den theoretischen Hintergrund der Arbeit bilden die Nachhaltigkeitsdebatte, das Konzept der gesellschaftlichen Naturverhältnisse der Sozialen Ökologie sowie wachstumskritische Positionen (insbesondere die Ansätze von Suffizienz und Subsistenz). Die Ergebnisse der empirischen Studie zeigen, dass die Lebenswirklichkeiten und Wirtschaftsweisen von Betreiberinnen und Betreibern von kleinen landwirtschaftlichen Betrieben sehr vielfältig sind. Die befragten Landwirtinnen und Landwirte verfolgen in ihren Betrieben unterschiedliche ökonomische Modelle - einige von ihnen sind ökonomisch erfolgreiche Landwirtinnen und Landwirte im Vollerwerb, andere haben sich bewusst für Nebenerwerbslandwirtschaft entschieden, und noch andere schließlich betreiben Landwirtschaft aus einer ökonomischen Notwendigkeit und einem Mangel an Alternativen heraus. Doch trotz der unterschiedlichen ökonomischen Modelle, die die befragten Landwirtinnen und Landwirten in ihren Betrieben verfolgen, liegen ihrem Handeln gleichermaßen der Wunsch nach Existenzsicherung und der Wunsch nach Autonomie als wesentliche Motivation zugrunde. Insgesamt zeigen die Ergebnisse der empirischen Studie einige der Herausforderungen für Betreiberinnen und Betreiber von kleinen landwirtschaftlichen Betrieben auf, die aus den gegenwärtigen institutionellen und politisch-wirtschaftlichen Rahmenbedingungen für die Landwirtschaft resultieren. Ebenso zeigen die Ergebnisse, dass die Wirtschaftsweisen, die in den untersuchten kleinen Betrieben vorgefunden wurden, nur bedingt zu einer nachhaltigen Entwicklung ländlicher Räume beitragen können. Die Ergebnisse der empirischen Studie zeigen insbesondere die Dringlichkeit auf, die gegenwärtigen politisch-wirtschaftlichen Rahmenbedingungen für die Landwirtschaft zu ändern und naturerhaltende Wirtschaftsweisen auch finanziell attraktiv zu machen, wenn diese einen Beitrag zu einer nachhaltigen Entwicklung ländlicher Räume leisten sollen.
The fact that digitalization comes along with a lot of negative effects onto the environment is slightly known in the case of energy consumption by hardware, especially regarding mobile devices, having a limited battery life. However, awareness of environmental issues of software, being the driver of hardware, is mainly missing, even if the research field addressing corresponding issues is growing. Thus, the doctoral thesis at hand addresses the question How to draw (a) developers and (b) usersattention to environmental issues of software? By presenting (a) a calculation method of the carbon footprint of software projects and (b) a concept for an eco-label for software products, evaluated by a user survey, the doctoral thesis provides two strategies how to draw the attention to environmental issues of software. Summarizing, this thesis can act as a basis for further research in bridging from science to society in the context of environmental issues of software. Its findings can be seen as starting points for practical implementations of methods and tools supporting a more environmentally friendly way of developing software and informing about environmental issues of software usage. In order to get the implementation of the research results of the thesis going, it highlights practical implications for diverse groups of stakeholders - researchers, certifiers, public administration and professional purchasers, and environmental associations - that have been identified as being important for the practical implementation of the presented concepts and, thus, represent the target group of the doctoral thesis.
Sustainability transitions research proposes fundamental changes of societal systems' organisation to overcome persistent societal challenges, such as climate change or biodiversity loss, and allowing systems to become more sustainable. This thesis adresses an underlying tension in sustainability transitions research: between transitions as an open-ended process of fundamental change and the normative direction of this change: sustainability. In doing so, three themes are in the focus of the research: individual agency, normativity and transdisciplinary collaboration. Thereby, the thesis aims to strengthen process-oriented and potentially transformative approaches to sustainability transition research, in contrast to primarily descriptive-analitical approaches. Transition management as a recent and salient example of transdisciplinary transition research is chosen to provide research framework and application context. Based on conceptual-theoretic, empirical case study and reflexive work, three main results are contributed: First, a psychologically enriched understanding of individual and sustainability related agency in conceptual and empirical understandings of transition management is developed. This builds on two perspectives: a psychologically enriched capability approach as well as the analysis of social effects (social learning, empowerment and social capital development) of transition management to capture sustainability oriented agency increases. As second main result, normative considerations, namely sustainability, are included into transition management on conceptual and empirical levels. Therein, substantive, procedural and intentional aspects of sustainability are combined: Substantive aspects are covered by proposing capabilities, behavioral freedoms to live a valuable life, as normative yardsticks to measure developments. Procedural aspects include a detailed understanding of facilitating a learning journey towards making sustainability meaningful in the local transition management cases and setting up experiments for its realiziation. Intentional aspects are addressed by linking social effects of transition management to awareness, motivations and feelings of responsibility towards sustainability. As a third main result, the transdisciplinary collaboration in transition management of creating an arena as an interactive learning space is conceptualized and explored, as well as the roles of the researchers therein. Key issues of this learning space, the community arena, are drawn out and ideal-type roles and activities of researchers in addressing these issues are proposed and empirically analysed. As synthesis of thesis results, ten principles of sustainability transition management are proposed.
Agrobiodiversität besitzt vielfältigen ökologischen, ökonomischen und sozio-kulturellen Wert. Sie ist eine grundlegende Voraussetzung für zukünftige Nutzungen und steht gleichzeitig in einem besonderen Verhältnis zu menschlichem Handeln. Zwar basiert Agrobiodiversität auf Natur, sie ist jedoch wesentlich durch landwirtschaftliche Tätigkeiten gestaltet worden und kann ohne weitere Nutzung durch den Menschen nicht erhalten und erneuert werden. Die vorliegende Dissertation analysiert die Gestaltung gesellschaftlicher Naturverhältnisse in der ländlichen Entwicklung am Beispiel der nachhaltigen Nutzung von Agrobiodiversität. Schutz und Nutzung von Agrobiodiversität wird hierfür in einem ersten Schritt als sozial-ökologisches Phänomen konzipiert. Daran schließen sich Analysen auf agrarpolitischer und landwirtschaftlich praktischer Ebene an. Anhand einer Analyse der der Gemeinsamen Agrarpolitik der Europäischen Union (GAP) und im speziellen der Politik zur ländlichen Entwicklung wird deutlich, dass eine programmatische Orientierung an Wettbewerbsfähigkeit und einer nachhaltigen Entwicklung besteht und das Paradigma einer multifunktionalen Landwirtschaft integrierende Ansätze bietet. Diese Ansätze werden jedoch weiterhin vor dem Hintergrund einer unhinterfragten Logik realisiert, die davon ausgeht, dass naturerhaltendes Wirtschaften nicht wettbewerbsfähig sein kann. Die GAP löst somit die hierarchische Trennung zwischen Schutz und Nutzung von Agrobiodiversität nicht auf. Trotz der Wirkmächtigkeit der GAP kann mittels der Fallstudie "Arche-Region Flusslandschaft Elbe" an einem konkreten Beispiel aus der landwirtschaftlichen Praxis dargestellt werden, wie nachhaltige Agrobiodiversitätsnutzung umgesetzt wird. Aus den Ergebnissen der Fallstudie werden abschließend Schlussfolgerungen für eine Weiterentwicklung der Politik zur ländlichen Entwicklung und EU-Agrarpolitik im Allgemeinen abgeleitet.
In der Forschungsarbeit wird ein Rahmenmodell von Kompetenzen nachhaltigkeitsorientierter Verwaltungsführung in Kommunen und ihrer Förderung entwickelt und beschrieben. Methodische Grundlage hierfür bilden eine systematische Literaturrecherche sowie 25 qualitative, leitfadengestützte Interviews mit 13 verwaltungsexternen und 12 verwaltungsinternen Experten aus drei Fallstädten (Freiburg, Wernigerode, Ludwigsburg). Übergeordnetes Ziel des Modells ist der Auf- bzw. Ausbau nachhaltigkeitsorientierter Prozesse in Kommunalverwaltungen, um nachhaltige Entwicklung auf lokaler Ebene insgesamt zu fördern. Aufbauend auf dem Managementmodell Mintzbergs und drei Sustainable-Leadership-Modellen werden hierfür nachhaltigkeitsorientierte Handlungsbereiche von Oberbürgermeistern, Beigeordneten und Fach- bzw. Amtsleitungen im Verwaltungsalltag aufgezeigt. Ob bzw. inwieweit diese Handlungsmöglichkeiten genutzt werden, hängt unter anderem von der Ausprägung zentraler Kompetenzen nachhaltigkeitsorientierter kommunaler Verwaltungsführung ab. Diese werden u. a. basierend auf Ansätzen von Nachhaltigkeitskompetenzen für Führungspersonen aus der Privatwirtschaft herausgearbeitet. Ferner werden Förderungsmöglichkeiten solcher Kompetenzen in Aus- und Fortbildung sowie in der Organisationsentwicklung und im kommunalen Personalmanagement hergeleitet und beschrieben. Potentielle konkrete Förderungsmethoden werden ebenfalls untersucht.
The research aims to assess the sustainability of rural electrification efforts based on off-grid photovoltaic (PV) systems in three Andean countries: Chile, Ecuador, and Peru. Although deployment of off-grid PV solutions for rural electrification began in the early 1990s in the Andean region, most of the projects turned out to be unsustainable and did not last. Prior efforts have addressed the different issues and barriers that plagued these projects and inhibited their sustainability. However, these prior analyses were mostly quantitative; systematic qualitative evaluations have been scarce. In this thesis, the researcher addresses the following research question: "Are the rural electrification programs (based on off-grid PV Systems) in the Andean countries sustainable?" In order to answer this research question, he conducted an exhaustive qualitative document analysis complemented by semi-structured expert interviews. The interviewees included experts from different ministries, project managers from leading Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), public and private companies ' representatives, supervisors, and researchers. Although the author also describes several relevant PV-based electrification efforts in the Andean countries, the research was aimed at providing an overall picture of the rural electrification efforts in these countries, rather than measuring the success or failure of specific projects. The gathered information allowed me to assess the sustainability of rural electrification efforts in the Andean countries. This assessment was based on a set of indicators corresponding to the four dimensions of sustainability considered in this thesis: institutional, economical, environmental, and socio-cultural. It was found that Ecuador and Chile have consistently failed to ensure mechanisms for the operation and maintenance of the deployed off-grid systems, which has made these solutions in poor Chilean and Ecuadorian communities inevitably unsustainable. Although Peru has adopted a cross-tariff scheme, the Peruvian case shows that ensuring the funding of off-grid PV solutions is not enough. Peruvian officials appear to be unaware of the importance of local participation (local values and lifestyles are constantly disregarded) and most of the projects have been designed without the participation and engagement of the communities, which has often led to project failures and payment defaults. Although each country has its particular challenges, it was found that the three Andean countries have consistently neglected the importance of strong formal institutions with a flexible and decentralized structure, which in turn significantly compromised the rural electrification effort in these countries.
This work investigates how managers/consultants (practitioners) of different ranks are engaged in patterns of behavior (practices) in socially situated contexts (practice) attempting to shape preferred shared interpretations of reality to achieve their goals. Following this line of inquiry, the work aims at (1) advancing our understanding of the role of practitioners in shaping managerial realities and (2) investigating how practitioners actually shape managerial realities, particularly focusing on "reality-shaping" practices and their content. The dissertation comprises a set of four complementary articles investigating these research questions empirically based on in-depth, empirical case studies and theoretically within various managerial contexts (client-consultant relationship, CEO post-succession strategic change process, evolutionary initiative development) and considering different actor perspectives (top managers, middle managers, consultants and clients). Resulting from this variety, the articles rely on and contribute to different, at times distant, research fields and therewith scholarly discussions. However, the literature on sensemaking and sensegiving offers a suitable overarching theoretical frame which is used in this work to synthesize the key contributions of the four articles.