Matching Items (14)
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- All Subjects: Sustainability
- All Subjects: vulnerability
- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
- Creators: Eakin, Hallie
Description
For some time it has been recognized amongst researchers that individual and collective change should be the goal in educating for sustainability, unfortunately education has generally been ineffective in developing pro-environmental behaviors among students. Still, many scholars and practitioners are counting on education to lead us towards sustainability but suggest that in order to do so we must transition away from current information-intensive education methods. In order to develop and test novel sustainability education techniques, this research integrates pedagogical methods with psychological knowledge to target well-established sustainable behaviors. Through integrating education, behavior change, and sustainability research, I aim to answer: How can we motivate sustainable behavioral change through education programs? More specifically: How do diverse knowledge domains (declarative, procedural, effectiveness, and social) influence sustainable behaviors, both in general as well as before and after a sustainability education program? And: What are barriers hindering education approaches to changing behaviors? In answering these questions, this research involved three distinct stages: (1) Developing a theoretical framework for educating for sustainability and transformative change; (2) Implementing a food and waste focused sustainability educational program with K-12 students and teachers while intensively assessing participants' change over the course of one year; (3) Developing and implementing an extensive survey that examines the quantitative relationships between diverse domains of knowledge and behavior among a large sample of K-12 educators. The results from the education program demonstrated that significant changes in knowledge and behaviors were achieved but social knowledge in terms of food was more resistant to change as compared to that of waste. The survey results demonstrated that K-12 educators have high levels of declarative (factual or technical) knowledge regarding anthropocentric impacts on the environment; however, declarative knowledge does not predict their participation in sustainable behaviors. Rather, procedural and social knowledge significantly influence participation in sustainable food behaviors, where as procedural, effectiveness, and social knowledge impact participation in sustainable waste behaviors. Overall, the findings from this research imply that in order to effectively educate for sustainability, we must move away from nature-centric approaches that focus on declarative knowledge and embrace different domains of knowledge (procedural, effectiveness, and social) that emphasis the social implications of change.
ContributorsRedman, Erin (Author) / Larson, Kelli (Thesis advisor) / Eakin, Hallie (Committee member) / Spielmann, Katherine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Sustainable urbanism offers a set of best practice planning and design prescriptions intended to reverse the negative environmental consequences of urban sprawl, which dominates new urban development in the United States. Master planned developments implementing sustainable urbanism are proliferating globally, garnering accolades within the planning community and skepticism among social scientists. Despite attention from supporters and critics alike, little is known about the actual environmental performance of sustainable urbanism. This dissertation addresses the reasons for this paucity of evidence and the capacity of sustainable urbanism to deliver the espoused environmental outcomes through alternative urban design and the conventional master planning framework for development through three manuscripts. The first manuscript considers the reasons why geography, which would appear to be a natural empirical home for research on sustainable urbanism, has yet to accumulate evidence that links design alternatives to environmental outcomes or to explain the social processes that mediate those outcomes. It argues that geography has failed to develop a coherent subfield based on nature-city interactions and suggests interdisciplinary bridging concepts to invigorate greater interaction between the urban and nature-society geographic subfields. The subsequent chapters deploy these bridging concepts to empirically examine case-studies in sustainable urbanism. The second manuscript utilizes fine scale spatial data to quantify differences in ecosystem services delivery across three urban designs in two phases of Civano, a sustainable urbanism planned development in Tucson, Arizona, and an adjacent, typical suburban development comparison community. The third manuscript considers the extent to which conventional master planning processes are fundamentally at odds with urban environmental sustainability through interviews with stakeholders involved in three planned developments: Civano (Tucson, Arizona), Mueller (Austin, Texas), and Prairie Crossing (Grayslake, Illinois). Findings from the three manuscripts reveal deep challenges in conceptualizing an empirical area of inquiry on sustainable urbanism, measuring the outcomes of urban design alternatives, and innovating planning practice within the constraints of existing institutions that facilitate conventional development. Despite these challenges, synthesizing the insights of geography and cognate fields holds promise in building an empirical body of knowledge that complements pioneering efforts of planners to innovate urban planning practice through the sustainable urbanism alternative.
ContributorsTurner, Victoria (Author) / Gober, Patricia (Thesis advisor) / Eakin, Hallie (Committee member) / Kinzig, Ann (Committee member) / Talen, Emily (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Pluvial Flood Risk Modeling, Assessment, and Management under Evolving Urban Climates and Land Cover
Description
Pluvial flooding is a costly, injurious, and even deadly phenomenon with which cities will always contend. However, cities may reduce their risk of flood exposure by changing historically dominant patterns of development that have removed natural landscape features and reduce the damages that flooding causes by identifying and supporting vulnerable populations. Accomplishing either goal requires the development and application of appropriate frameworks for modeling or recording flood exposure. In this dissertation, I used modeling and surveying methods for assessing pluvial flood exposure in two cities, first in Valdivia, Chile, and then in Hermosillo, México. I open with a summary on pluvial flood risk in the present day and the threat it may pose under changing climates. In the second chapter, I explored how a form of urban ecological infrastructure (UEI), the wetland, is being wielded in Valdivia toward pluvial flood mitigation, and found that wetland daily, seasonal, and interannual changes in wetland surface and soil water storage alter pluvial flood risk in the city. In the third chapter, I used a mixed methodology, including projections of future land cover generated by cellular automata models with inputs from visioning workshops conducted by the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN), and found that wetland loss in future land configurations may lead to increased pluvial flood risk. In the fourth chapter, I combined these land cover models from the third chapter with downscaled climate data on precipitation, also generated by the UREx SRN, and found that wetland conservation can help to mitigate the pluvial flood risk posed by changing patterns of rainfall. In the fifth chapter, I applied the Arc-Malstrøm method for pluvial flood assessment in Hermosillo, México, and compared it with the more traditional rational method for flood assessment, and through accompanying surveys found that perception of flood risk is significantly affected by flood dimensions and impacts. This dissertation concludes with a synthesis of pluvial flood risk assessment, suggestions for improvements to modeling, as well as suggestions for future research on pluvial flood risk assessment in cities. This dissertation advances the understanding of the utility of inland wetland UEI in cities under present and future land cover and climate conditions. It also qualifies the utility of common and new pluvial flood risk assessments and offers research directions for future pluvial flood assessments.
ContributorsSauer, Jason R (Author) / Grimm, Nancy B (Thesis advisor) / Chester, Mikhail V (Committee member) / Cook, Elizabeth M (Committee member) / Childers, Daniel L (Committee member) / Eakin, Hallie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Transitioning towards low-carbon energy systems requires participation from a diversity of organizations, governments, and actors. Yet it is still unclear who, when, how much, and what types of participation are needed to realize such transformations. I address this gap by analyzing the role of participation in energy transitions using interviews, participant observation, document analyses, and novel visualization approaches deployed in the USA and Mexican contexts. I offer a framework to explore how engagement in energy transitions unfolds over time and deploy the framework to 1) investigate the role of engagement in decreasing the consumption of gas and electricity at municipal and residential levels in 12 US communities during a three-year competition (2014-2017) organized by Georgetown University; and 2) assess the acceptance and longevity of solar projects that grant electricity access to rural and dispersed Indigenous Ralámuli communities in Chihuahua, México. I found that wider and deeper participation does not always secure lower energy consumption in the US case, which highlights the need to tailor participation for specific goals. Results from Ralámuli communities suggest that the benefits of participation reach a limit; that is, when high participation surpassed the budget (in the form of cash/money and time availability) of solar users, participation became detrimental to user satisfaction and technology acceptance. Lastly, the analysis of how participation occurred in solar home systems with longer longevity (more than five years of use) showed that maintenance and operation costs (e.g. battery replacements) are the greatest barriers to longevity, while knowledge and capacity building might be elements driving longer longevity. Recommendations include: (1) offering clear information in the user’s first language about the costs and maintenance of solar systems, (2) seeking ideas from solar users at the early stages of solar programs, and (3) reducing costs through understanding electricity needs and offering collective forms of ownership. My work expands the theoretical understanding of the role of participation in energy transitions and offers practical resources for practitioners and researchers to facilitate a critical reflection on how participation influences desirable outcomes in different contexts, including communities in the global North and South.
ContributorsMorales Guerrero, Jorge (Author) / Karwat, Darshan (Thesis advisor) / Breetz, Hanna (Committee member) / Larson, Kelli (Committee member) / Berbés-Blázquez, Marta (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Adaptation to climate change is a core sustainability challenge across the Global South. Development and government organizations conceptualize and govern climate adaptation by creating national and sub-national action plans and implementing projects. This dissertation confronts the inherent tensions that arise when formal planned adaptation interventions encounter the complex, often messy realities of the implementation context. In doing so, this research examines how planned adaptation—with its incentives, provisioned resources, prescribed behaviors, and expectations of commitment from target beneficiaries —interacts with individuals and communities already balancing diverse risks while pursuing their livelihood aspirations. Two broad questions guide this dissertation: 1) how is adaptation envisioned by planners and practitioners? and, 2) how do project beneficiaries engage with, and experience planned adaptation interventions? The research employs an exploratory and inductive qualitative research design. Using Foucault’s lens of governmentality, this research utilises document analysis to examine how the first wave of Indian adaptation projects envision goals, conceptualize problems, delineate roles, and frame expectations of intended beneficiaries. Next, using a case study of an adaptation project implemented in Uttarakhand, India, the study examines the motivations and associated trade-offs behind the engagement and disengagement of the intended beneficiaries: smallholder farmers. Insights from gender-differentiated focus group discussions guide this analysis. Both inquiries are supplemented with findings from semi-structured interviews with Indian adaptation experts and project implementers. The analysis finds that: 1) project reports construct identities of the climate vulnerable beneficiary, implicitly assigning roles and transferring responsibilities for sustaining adaptation efforts beyond project timelines, 2) project participants are not default beneficiaries, but instead exercise agency in decision-making by either opting-in or opting-out of planned initiatives, and 3) the implicit and explicit costs of engaging in planned adaptation interventions are substantial, encompassing significant contributions of time, physical labor, and active participation during and post the project period. This dissertation challenges existing notions of whom planned adaptation serves, and to what end, offering new insights into its design and effectiveness. Furthermore, this research suggests that for planned adaptation to be sustainable, a concerted effort to align with evolving needs, aspirations and livelihood shifts of those on the frontlines of climate change is essential.
ContributorsYogya, Yamini (Author) / Eakin, Hallie (Thesis advisor) / Aggarwal, Rimjhim (Committee member) / York, Abigail (Committee member) / Agrawal, Arun (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
The learning journey toward sustainability requires the generation of action-oriented knowledge to understand the progress and potential adaptation of strategies to facilitate collective transformation. One integral area where advancing these strategies is essential is higher education. While efforts in the field have identified relevant learning objectives, pedagogies, and broader contributions for sustainability education to make, the sophistication of approaches to evaluating and enhancing collective learning has remained underdeveloped. This dissertation aimed to address this gap by exploring assessment in sustainability education, with the goal of supporting innovations in transdisciplinary practice by developing distinctive approaches for the field through deliberative processes that articulate design frameworks.The first study, Sustainability-Oriented Assessment, applied a formative intervention within an undergraduate course focused on professional skill development to demonstrate how a student-led rubric co-design process that drew from participative, normative, and integrative approaches contributed to student agency, expansive learning, and self-formation. The study demonstrated how students leveraged challenges and changing perspectives towards development as students and sustainability professionals. The second study, Boundary Crossings and Innovations, applied an exploratory action research approach within a community of practice of program leaders and instructors to identify barriers and possibilities for assessment practices, suggesting conceptual, practical, and logistical innovations. The strategies to enable these innovations focused on defining the field and articulating practice characteristics related to interdisciplinary approaches and transdisciplinary strategies, while meeting demands and facilitating innovations across course, program, and institutional levels. The third study, Assessment-Oriented Sustainability, applied a scoping literature review to develop a framework that integrates problem, solution, and learning orientations to sustainability by infusing educational purposes, processes, and principles to strengthen the efficacy of assessment approaches for transdisciplinary strategies.
Insights from the three studies suggest that the practice of assessment plays multifaceted roles as it facilitates the design, implementation, and evaluation of sustainability endeavors. These roles include evaluative and formative functions as it appraises and advances learning, normative and deliberative functions in encouraging discussion and critical reflection, and adaptive and generative functions by indicating, motivating, and enabling dynamic learning and action for sustainability.
ContributorsKing, Jordan (Author) / Fischer, Daniel (Thesis advisor) / Larson, Kelli (Thesis advisor) / Brundiers, Katja (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
Decarbonizing the energy system is one of the most challenging sustainability transitions that leaders across the globe must tackle. In governing this transition, decision-makers are increasingly pairing together decarbonization efforts with policy measures focused on issues of (in)justice. However, researchers’ understanding of the politics that have given rise to this emerging equitable energy transition agenda is under-developed. The central research question of my dissertation is: How is the energy transition made more attentive to equity through stakeholder advocacy? I examine this using qualitative methods across three analytical chapters. The study of justice in energy transitions has occurred across different lineages of scholarship. To establish a clearer understanding of the state of current research I conducted a systematic literature review. In the literature, I found a diverse advocacy community motivated by many different issues related to the energy system. Advocacy concerning inaccessible decision-making processes, environmental degradation, and energy ownership and control was common. However, there were few studies that explicitly focused on examining the relationship between advocate strategies and governance outcomes.
The remainder of the research presented in this dissertation analyzes two state-level policy processes in New Mexico and Illinois. In both cases, justice-oriented policy instruments were bundled with climate policy. First, using public documents and
interviews, I used process tracing to examine policy development and enactment. I find that different types of learning processes were critical in shaping justice policy provisions and that justice advocacy was instrumental in passing climate policy. Second, I used content analysis to examine the mechanisms within these processes driving and resolving justice conflicts. My findings show that disagreements about justice are rooted in divergent historic experiences of energy production and regulation. I also find that issues of (dis)trust and uncertainty contributed to disagreements and reinforced conflicts that diminished support for energy transition policy.
This dissertation provides empirical evidence of the importance of learning for shaping justice policy provisions and building energy transition coalition power, the nature of uncertainty and (dis)trust in destabilizing justice efforts and reducing
support for climate policy, and the ways in which incremental change may lead to transformative outcomes.
ContributorsShelton, Rebecca (Author) / Eakin, Hallie (Thesis advisor) / Breetz, Hanna (Committee member) / Stevis, Dimitris (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
How can we understand and pursue sustainability transitions that disrupt everyday practices and social norms? This dissertation finds potential answers to this fundamental sustainability governance question in Arizona utilities’ efforts to legitimate wastewater as a drinking water source. Due to widespread public concern regarding the direct potable reuse of wastewater (DPR), utilities and other stakeholders have developed innovative governance approaches. By offering tastings of DPR water (often in the form of beer), utilities create spaces for deliberation within a traditionally top-down policy planning paradigm, and furthermore, invite feelings—emotions and bodily sensations—into policymaking. This dissertation explores and advances Arizona's emerging transition to deliberative water governance through three distinct investigations. The first of these, an institutional analysis based on interviews with 34 regional stakeholders and observations at 56 water industry meetings, identifies direct experiences with DPR (e.g., tastings) as a pivotal strategy to institutionalize new wastewater practices. The second investigation examines utility-sponsored initiatives to promote DPR and finds that, instead of assuming that consumers behave as rational choice or bounded rationality would predict, water utilities’ use of drinking water tastings reflects a new normative assumption, termed embodied rationality. The third investigation applies embodied rationality in action research with skeptical consumers and reuse industry stakeholders to co-design an exhibit about DPR that engaged more than 1,100 people. Drawing insights from the literatures of embodied and enacted cognition, practice theory, organizational institutionalism, sustainability transitions management, and design research, this dissertation proposes an analytical approach, normative framework, and practical tools for collaboratively addressing real-world sustainability challenges.
ContributorsManheim, Marisa (Author) / White, Dave (Thesis advisor) / Spackman, Christy (Committee member) / Eakin, Hallie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
Adaptation and transformation have emerged as a key themes for human-environment research, especially in the context of rapid social-ecological changes. The 2008 global financial crisis constitutes a major driver of change with social-ecological ramifications that have yet to be fully explored. Using Greece, the poster child of the euro-crisis as a case-study, this dissertation examines how adaptive capacity is mobilized and even enhanced in times of crisis, paying particular attention to the role played by natural capital. To do so, I focus on the back-to-land trend whereby urbanites seek to engage in food production post-crisis (2008-onwards). In-depth qualitative analysis of back-to-landers’ motivations, experiences, and challenges is integrated with quantitative data about household demographics, incomes and assets, and land management characteristics. The dissertation is organized in three main result papers (chapters). The first seeks to understand why people turn to the land in times of crisis, and the role played by agency. The second analyzes the various assets that people mobilize in order to go back to the land, paying particular attention to the different mobilities necessary for their livelihood transformation. The third examines environmental safety nets in terms of material and non-material benefits that ecosystems provide to people. This research contributes to a wider social-ecological scholarship that seeks to understand how people adapt and transform when confronted with crises, focusing on how land and associated ecosystem services contribute to the resilience of these households, and the role played by agency in this process.
ContributorsBenessaiah, Karina (Author) / Turner II, Billie L. (Thesis advisor) / Eakin, Hallie (Committee member) / Chan, Kai M.A. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Climate change impacts are evident throughout the world, particularly in the low lying coastal areas. The multidimensional nature and cross-scale impacts of climate change require a concerted effort from different organizations operating at multiple levels of governance. The efficiency and effectiveness of the adaptation actions of these organizations rely on the problem framings, network structure, and power dynamics of the organizations and the challenges they encounter. Nevertheless, knowledge on how organizations within multi-level governance arrangements frame vulnerability, how the adaptation governance structure shapes their roles, how power dynamics affect the governance process, and how barriers emerge in adaptation governance as a result of multi-level interactions is limited. In this dissertation research, a multilevel governance perspective has been adopted to address these knowledge gaps through a case study of flood risk management in coastal Bangladesh. Key-informant interviews, systematic literature review, spatial multi-criteria decision analysis, social network analysis (SNA), and content analysis techniques have been used to collect and analyze data. This research finds that the organizations involved in adaptation governance generally have aligned framings of vulnerability, irrespective of the level at which they are operated, thus facilitating adaptation decision-making. However, this alignment raises concerns of a neglect of socio-economic aspects of vulnerability, potentially undermining adaptation initiatives. This study further finds that the adaptation governance process is elite-pluralistic in nature, but has a coexistence of top-down and bottom-up processes in different phases of adaptation actions. The analysis of power dynamics discloses the dominance of a few national level organizations in the adaptation governance process in Bangladesh. Lastly, four mechanisms have been found that can explain how organizational culture, practices, and preferences dictate the emergence of barriers in the adaptation governance process. This dissertation research overall advances our understanding on the significance of multilevel governance approach in climate change adaptation governance.
ContributorsIshtiaque, Asif (Author) / Chhetri, Netra (Thesis advisor) / Eakin, Hallie (Thesis advisor) / Myint, Soe W (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019