School of Sustainability Graduate Culminating Experiences

Cities with a car-oriented mobility system are significant consumers of energy and require drastic transformations in their structure and function to minimize their harmful impacts on environment and people and to achieve sustainability goals. To promote such sustainable transformations, municipal administrators need to act as change-agents. Because municipal governments are often not agile organizations, they tend toward incrementalism even in the pursuit of transformational goals. Therefore, there is a need in municipal governments to build individual transformative capacity so that municipal administrators can design, test, and implement plans, projects, and policies that are capable of transforming cities toward sustainability. This research presents a game-based workshop, “Stadt-liche Ziele” (AudaCity), that uses a backcasting approach to make municipal administrators build a sustainability strategy. I conducted a pilot study to test the effects of the game on municipal administrators’ confidence in their own ability and power to implement sustainability actions, a key determinant of transformative capacity. Five municipal administrators from Lüneburg, Germany, working on mobility issues, participated in a three-hour-workshop playing the game. Interviews and questionnaires were used before and after the workshop and participants’ contributions during the event were recorded to explore collective changes in confidence. Results indicate that the game increased participant confidence by rewarding collective success, breaking down an ambitious goal into achievable tasks, and acknowledging how administrators’ current actions already contribute to the goal.

The production and consumption of goods is a global phenomenon that has significant social and environmental impacts and challenges. In 2016, the International Labor Organization (ILO) estimated that 25 million people were victims of forced labor. Forced labor is defined as “work that is involuntary and subject to penalty.” It is a subset of modern slavery, and is a complex problem that affects all three pillars of sustainability. Fair labor, on the other hand, is voluntary, requires fair compensation, and is free from penalty. With one in five jobs tied to global supply chains, it is vital that companies and organizations are committed to sustainability within the supply chain (Thorlakson et al., 2018). One critical aspect of this commitment includes a focus on fair labor practices.

ASU’s Trademark Licensing Department currently utilizes third-party vendors to verify that any licensed product, those marked with an ASU logo or trademark, have been sourced and produced under fair labor conditions. Our project focuses on steps that can be taken to elevate fair labor practices across the ASU supply chain for both licensed and unlicensed products. The Fair Labor Solutions Team has developed two primary deliverables: an overarching report and a fair labor problem identification presentation with a script to act as an education tool for ASU staff. The report contains the following elements: a landscape analysis of fair labor, ASU’s current procurement practices, a collection of exemplary case studies, and a tiered vision towards transformational change. Our team understands that ensuring fair labor throughout the ASU supply chain is not a linear process. The goal of our deliverables is to offer a strong foundation for the university's transition to sustainable procurement.

Sustainable purchasing is the integration of sustainability criteria into procurement processes and decisions. A critical element of this is ensuring fair labor practices such as safe working conditions, appropriate pay for work, and the absence of forced labor and child labor. Enforcing fair labor standards throughout the supply chain is challenging. Working directly with the final vendor is not enough as finished products involve multiple inputs and activities from extraction to end use and many associated suppliers. Unfair and forced labor practices are especially prevalent in countries with poor labor laws and lack of enforcement. Reporting and verifying labor practices for these suppliers can be time-consuming and expensive. Moreover, ensuring that a final vendor's products and services observe sustainability standards does not mean that all the suppliers involved in product creation steps observe fair and equitable labor practices. Third-party certifications are helpful, but not always accurate. ASU wishes to (1) strengthen its purchasing practices to increase assurances that sourced products follow fair labor practices across the supply chain of vendors and suppliers, and (2) create scalable solutions that can be implemented at other universities.

Sustainable purchasing is the integration of sustainability criteria into procurement processes and decisions. A critical element of this is ensuring fair labor practices such as safe working conditions, appropriate pay for work, and the absence of forced labor and child labor. Enforcing fair labor standards throughout the supply chain is challenging. Working directly with the final vendor is not enough as finished products involve multiple inputs and activities from extraction to end use and many associated suppliers. Unfair and forced labor practices are especially prevalent in countries with poor labor laws and lack of enforcement. Reporting and verifying labor practices for these suppliers can be time-consuming and expensive. Moreover, ensuring that a final vendor's products and services observe sustainability standards does not mean that all the suppliers involved in product creation steps observe fair and equitable labor practices. Third-party certifications are helpful, but not always accurate. ASU wishes to (1) strengthen its purchasing practices to increase assurances that sourced products follow fair labor practices across the supply chain of vendors and suppliers, and (2) create scalable solutions that can be implemented at other universities.

Sustainable purchasing is the integration of sustainability criteria into procurement processes and decisions. A critical element of this is ensuring fair labor practices such as safe working conditions, appropriate pay for work, and the absence of forced labor and child labor. Enforcing fair labor standards throughout the supply chain is challenging. Working directly with the final vendor is not enough as finished products involve multiple inputs and activities from extraction to end use and many associated suppliers. Unfair and forced labor practices are especially prevalent in countries with poor labor laws and lack of enforcement. Reporting and verifying labor practices for these suppliers can be time-consuming and expensive. Moreover, ensuring that a final vendor's products and services observe sustainability standards does not mean that all the suppliers involved in product creation steps observe fair and equitable labor practices. Third-party certifications are helpful, but not always accurate. ASU wishes to (1) strengthen its purchasing practices to increase assurances that sourced products follow fair labor practices across the supply chain of vendors and suppliers, and (2) create scalable solutions that can be implemented at other universities.

How we divide space in ever growing urban areas in an equitable, efficient and aesthetic fashion is one of the big questions of our time. In Lüneburg, Germany, citizens think more alternative forms of housing will be an important element of a sustainable future (Lüneburg 2030, 2018). Tiny Houses, dwellings that downsize an entire household to its minimum, are currently gaining attention in the country, but legal barriers make their implementation difficult. It has to be decided if legislations should be changed to allow these structures in the housing mix of Lüneburg. It is a difficult task to sift through the glamorization of Tiny Houses past the ideological utopia to see their value for the individual (Ansons, 2015). Therefore, it is of interest to fully understand what Tiny Houses offer for affordable housing stakeholders. Twenty-five evaluations of criticism and praise of the Tiny House Movement are collected by applying Q method, a tool to gather subjective viewpoints (Barry & Proops, 1999). Results indicate, four salient perceptions on that matter. Each viewpoint identifies different opportunities and risks when evaluating Tiny Houses for Lüneburg. This research demonstrates the potential of Tiny Houses to trigger participation by bringing people with diverse backgrounds together.

Globally we are struggling to match the need for development with the available resources. Kate Raworth’s (2012) developed the idea of a “safe and just space” as a balance between the planetary boundary approach and ensuring a level of basic needs satisfaction for everyone. O’Neill et al. (2018) argue that countries are currently not able to provide their populations with basic needs without concurrently exceeding planetary boundary measures. While attempts have been made to get people to change their habits through moral self-sacrifice, this has not been successful. Kate Soper (2008) argues that a change towards sustainability will only be possible if an alternative to high consumption is offered, without trade-offs in well-being. Technological improvements are often thought to end up providing solutions to the problem of overconsumption, but as Jackson (2005) shows convincingly, this is highly unlikely due to the overwhelming scale of changes required.

‘Alternative hedonism’ (Soper 2008) is a philosophical approach that has been proposed to solve this dilemma. By changing what humanity pursues to be less focused on consumption and more linked to community interaction and living healthy, fulfilling lives, we would simultaneously reduce stress on the globally limited resources and sinks. By developing and understanding satiation points – the point beyond which well-being no longer increases because of increased consumption - affluence that wastes resources without improving well-being could be reduced. This paper explores how ‘alternative hedonism’ and the development of ‘satiation points’ could be helpful in getting humanity closer to the ‘safe and just space’. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the challenges that taking up of ‘alternative hedonism’ would entail.