ASU Scholarship Showcase

n public planning processes for sustainable urban development, planners and experts often face the challenge of engaging a public that is not familiar with sustainability principles or does not subscribe to sustainability values. Although there are calls to build the public’s sustainability literacy through social learning, such efforts require sufficient time and other resources that are not always available. Alternatively, public participation processes may be realigned with the sustainability literacy the participants possess, and their capacity can modestly be built during the engagement. Asking what tools might successfully align public participation with participants’ sustainability literacy, this article describes and evaluates a public participation process in Phoenix, Arizona, in which researchers, in collaboration with city planners, facilitated sustainability conversations as part of an urban development process. The tool employed for Visually Enhanced Sustainability Conversation (VESC) was specifically designed to better align public participation with stakeholders’ sustainability literacy. We tested and evaluated VESC through interviews with participants, city planners, and members of the research team, as well as an analysis of project reports. We found that the use of VESC successfully facilitated discussions on pertinent sustainability issues and embedded sustainability objectives into the project reports. We close with recommendations for strengthening tools like VESC for future public engagements.

Successful careers in sustainability are determined by positive real-world change towards sustainability. This success depends heavily on professional skills in effective and compassionate communication, collaborative teamwork, or impactful stakeholder engagement, among others. These professional skills extend beyond content knowledge and methodical expertise. Current sustainability programs do not sufficiently facilitate students’ acquisition of such skills. This article presents a brief summary of professional skills, synthesized from the literature, and why they are relevant for sustainability professionals. Second, it presents how these skills have been taught in an undergraduate course in sustainability at Arizona State University, USA. Third, it critically discusses the effectiveness and challenges of that exemplary course. Finally, the article concludes with outlining the lessons learned that should be incorporated into future course offerings.

Resilience can have desirable and undesirable consequences. Thus, resilience should not be viewed as a normative desirable goal, but as a descriptor of complex systems dynamics. From this perspective, we apply resilience thinking concepts to assess the dynamics of inequality, spatial segregation, and sustainability in Chile’s capital city of Santiago. Chile’s economy boosted since democracy was restored in 1990, but continuity of neoliberal reforms and transformations of Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973–1990) seem to have locked Chilean cities in resilient, albeit unsustainable, patterns of uneven development. Socio-economic data from Santiago shows highly resilient patterns of urban inequality and segregation from 1992 to 2009 despite democratic efforts, political agendas and discourses packed with calls for reducing poverty and inequality. We present a conceptual model based on the notion of stability landscapes to explore potential trade-offs between resilience and sustainable development. We mapped Santiago’s spatio-temporal inequality trends and explored if these patterns support an inequality-resilience stability landscape. Analysis of temporal and spatial distribution of development assets across four human development dimensions (i.e., income, education, health, democracy) revealed potential socio-political and spatial feedbacks supporting the resilience of inequality and segregation in Santiago. We argue that urban sustainability may require breaking this resilience, a process where bottom-up stressors such as social movements could play a key role.

In order to improve the efficiency of government spending, it is necessary for the decentralized irrigation management to gain support from local institutions. Efficient institutions take on several distinct configurations in different irrigation districts. In this research, we upgrade Tang’s (1992) framework focusing on incentives, to a framework that includes institutional incentives and coordination. Within the framework, we then classify 5 institutional variables: water pricing reform (P), government funding (F), coordination by administration (C), having formal monitors (M) and self-organized management (S). This article processes the data obtained through a field survey (2009–2011) in 20 of China’s southern counties, where they implement the “Small-scale Irrigation and Water Conservancy Key Counties Construction (Key Counties Construction)”, a national project supported by the central government. Next, it applies Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to measure the efficiency of government spending and uses Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to extract efficient institutional configurations. It concludes that there are generally three types of institutional configurations able to improve the efficiency of government spending, which are respectively: “government funding combined with coordination by administration”, “water pricing reform combined with self-organized management and coordination by administration or water pricing reform combined with self-organized management and government funding and formal monitors” and “self-organized management”. Among these, the second configuration is a mixed governance structure with multiple institutions coexisting, and this configuration occurs in the most efficient key counties. For that reason, it is viewed as the mainstream irrigation management approach, and we expect it to be the development trend in the future. Although Chinese irrigation policies are formalizing effective local institutions, they are still not sufficient. Future policies are needed to 1) promote institutions of government support for water laws in order to build stable expectations for both water user associations (WUAs) and farmers, 2) guide water pricing reform by ensuring farmers’ water rights and regulating water markets, and 3) provide opportunities for hiring professional monitors and crafting formal rules.

Many population centers in the American West rely on water from the Colorado River Basin, which has faced shortages in recent years that are anticipated to be exacerbated by climate change. Shortages to urban water supplies related to climate change will not be limited to cities dependent on the Colorado River. Considering this, addressing sustainable water governance is timely and critical for cities, states, and regions facing supply shortages and pollution problems. Engaging in sustainability transitions of these hydro-social systems will increase the ability of such systems to meet the water needs of urban communities. In this paper, we identify historical transitions in water governance and examine their context for three sites in the Colorado River Basin (Denver, Colorado, Las Vegas, Nevada, and Phoenix, Arizona) to provide insight for intentional transitions towards sustainable, or “water sensitive” cities. The comparative historical approach employed allows us to more fully understand differences in present-day water governance decisions between the sites, identify past catalysts for transitions, and recognize emerging patterns and opportunities that may impact current and future water governance in the Colorado River Basin and beyond.

Sustainable fisheries management is key to restoring and maintaining ecological function and benefits to people, but it requires accurate information about patterns of resource use, particularly fishing pressure. In most coral reef fisheries and other data-poor contexts, obtaining such information is challenging and remains an impediment to effective management. We developed the most comprehensive regional view of shore-based fishing effort and catch published to date, to show detailed fishing patterns from across the main Hawaiian Islands (MHI). We reveal these regional patterns through fisher “creel” surveys conducted by local communities, state agencies, academics, and/or environmental organizations, at 18 sites, comprising >10,000 h of monitoring across a range of habitats and human influences throughout the MHI. All creel surveys included in this study except for one were previously published in some form (peer-reviewed articles or gray literature reports). Here, we synthesize these studies to document spatial patterns in nearshore fisheries catch, effort, catch rates (i.e., catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE)), and catch disposition (i.e., use of fish after catch is landed). This effort provides for a description of general regional patterns based on these location-specific studies. Line fishing was by far the dominant gear type employed. The most efficient gear (i.e., highest CPUE) was spear (0.64 kg h^-1), followed closely by net (0.61 kg h^-1), with CPUE for line (0.16 kg h^-1) substantially lower than the other two methods. Creel surveys also documented illegal fishing activity across the studied locations, although these activities were not consistent across sites. Overall, most of the catch was not sold, but rather retained for home consumption or given away to extended family, which suggests that cultural practices and food security may be stronger drivers of fishing effort than commercial exploitation for coral reef fisheries in Hawai‘i. Increased monitoring of spatial patterns in nearshore fisheries can inform targeted management, and can help communities develop a more informed understanding of the drivers of marine resource harvest and the state of the resources, in order to maintain these fisheries for food security, cultural practices, and ecological value.

Recent infectious outbreaks highlight the need for platform technologies that can be quickly deployed to develop therapeutics needed to contain the outbreak. We present a simple concept for rapid development of new antimicrobials. The goal was to produce in as little as one week thousands of doses of an intervention for a new pathogen. We tested the feasibility of a system based on antimicrobial synbodies. The system involves creating an array of 100 peptides that have been selected for broad capability to bind and/or kill viruses and bacteria. The peptides are pre-screened for low cell toxicity prior to large scale synthesis. Any pathogen is then assayed on the chip to find peptides that bind or kill it. Peptides are combined in pairs as synbodies and further screened for activity and toxicity. The lead synbody can be quickly produced in large scale, with completion of the entire process in one week.

Recently, there has been an increased interest in using behavioral experiments to study hypotheses on the governance of social-ecological systems. A diversity of software tools are used to implement such experiments. We evaluated various publicly available platforms that could be used in research and education on the governance of social-ecological systems. The aims of the various platforms are distinct, and this is noticeable in the differences in their user-friendliness and their adaptability to novel research questions. The more easily accessible platforms are useful for prototyping experiments and for educational purposes to illustrate theoretical concepts. To advance novel research aims, more elaborate programming experience is required to either implement an experiment from scratch or adjust existing experimental software. There is no ideal platform best suited for all possible use cases, but we have provided a menu of options and their associated trade-offs.

Faced with numerous seemingly intractable social and environmental challenges, many scholars and practitioners are increasingly interested in understanding how to actively engage and transform the existing systems holding such problems in place. Although a variety of analytical models have emerged in recent years, most emphasize either the social or ecological elements of such transformations rather than their coupled nature. To address this, first we have presented a definition of the core elements of a social-ecological system (SES) that could potentially be altered in a transformation. Second, we drew on insights about transformation from three branches of literature focused on radical change, i.e., social movements, socio-technical transitions, and social innovation, and gave consideration to the similarities and differences with the current studies by resilience scholars. Drawing on these findings, we have proposed a framework that outlines the process and phases of transformative change in an SES. Future research will be able to utilize the framework as a tool for analyzing the alteration of social-ecological feedbacks, identifying critical barriers and leverage points and assessing the outcome of social-ecological transformations.

One of the gravest dangers facing cancer patients is an extended symptom-free lull between tumor initiation and the first diagnosis. Detection of tumors is critical for effective intervention. Using the body’s immune system to detect and amplify tumor-specific signals may enable detection of cancer using an inexpensive immunoassay. Immunosignatures are one such assay: they provide a map of antibody interactions with random-sequence peptides. They enable detection of disease-specific patterns using classic train/test methods. However, to date, very little effort has gone into extracting information from the sequence of peptides that interact with disease-specific antibodies. Because it is difficult to represent all possible antigen peptides in a microarray format, we chose to synthesize only 330,000 peptides on a single immunosignature microarray. The 330,000 random-sequence peptides on the microarray represent 83% of all tetramers and 27% of all pentamers, creating an unbiased but substantial gap in the coverage of total sequence space. We therefore chose to examine many relatively short motifs from these random-sequence peptides. Time-variant analysis of recurrent subsequences provided a means to dissect amino acid sequences from the peptides while simultaneously retaining the antibody–peptide binding intensities. We first used a simple experiment in which monoclonal antibodies with known linear epitopes were exposed to these random-sequence peptides, and their binding intensities were used to create our algorithm. We then demonstrated the performance of the proposed algorithm by examining immunosignatures from patients with Glioblastoma multiformae (GBM), an aggressive form of brain cancer. Eight different frameshift targets were identified from the random-sequence peptides using this technique. If immune-reactive antigens can be identified using a relatively simple immune assay, it might enable a diagnostic test with sufficient sensitivity to detect tumors in a clinically useful way.