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- All Subjects: Sustainability
- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
- Creators: Eakin, Hallie
- Creators: Janssen, Marcus A
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
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
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
Motivated by the need for cities to prepare and be resilient to unpredictable future weather conditions, this dissertation advances a novel infrastructure development theory of “safe-to-fail” to increase the adaptive capacity of cities to climate change. Current infrastructure development is primarily reliant on identifying probable risks to engineered systems and making infrastructure reliable to maintain its function up to a designed system capacity. However, alterations happening in the earth system (e.g., atmosphere, oceans, land, and ice) and in human systems (e.g., greenhouse gas emission, population, land-use, technology, and natural resource use) are increasing the uncertainties in weather predictions and risk calculations and making it difficult for engineered infrastructure to maintain intended design thresholds in non-stationary future. This dissertation presents a new way to develop safe-to-fail infrastructure that departs from the current practice of risk calculation and is able to manage failure consequences when unpredicted risks overwhelm engineered systems.
This dissertation 1) defines infrastructure failure, refines existing safe-to-fail theory, and compares decision considerations for safe-to-fail vs. fail-safe infrastructure development under non-stationary climate; 2) suggests an approach to integrate the estimation of infrastructure failure impacts with extreme weather risks; 3) provides a decision tool to implement resilience strategies into safe-to-fail infrastructure development; and, 4) recognizes diverse perspectives for adopting safe-to-fail theory into practice in various decision contexts.
Overall, this dissertation advances safe-to-fail theory to help guide climate adaptation decisions that consider infrastructure failure and their consequences. The results of this dissertation demonstrate an emerging need for stakeholders, including policy makers, planners, engineers, and community members, to understand an impending “infrastructure trolley problem”, where the adaptive capacity of some regions is improved at the expense of others. Safe-to-fail further engages stakeholders to bring their knowledge into the prioritization of various failure costs based on their institutional, regional, financial, and social capacity to withstand failures. This approach connects to sustainability, where city practitioners deliberately think of and include the future cost of social, environmental and economic attributes in planning and decision-making.
ContributorsKim, Yeowon (Author) / Chester, Mikhail (Thesis advisor) / Eakin, Hallie (Committee member) / Redman, Charles (Committee member) / Miller, Thaddeus R. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Sustainability depends in part on our capacity to resolve dilemmas of the commons in Coupled Infrastructure Systems (CIS). Thus, we need to know more about how to incentivize individuals to take collective action to manage shared resources. Moreover, given that we will experience new and more extreme weather events due to climate change, we need to learn how to increase the robustness of CIS to those shocks. This dissertation studies irrigation systems to contribute to the development of an empirically based theory of commons governance for robust systems. I first studied the eight institutional design principles (DPs) for long enduring systems of shared resources that the Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom proposed in 1990. I performed a critical literature review of 64 studies that looked at the institutional configuration of CIS, and based on my findings I propose some modifications of their definitions and application in research and policy making. I then studied how the revisited design principles, when analyzed conjointly with biophysical and ethnographic characteristics of CISs, perform to avoid over-appropriation, poverty and critical conflicts among users of an irrigation system. After carrying out a meta-analysis of 28 cases around the world, I found that particular combinations of those variables related to population size, countries corruption, the condition of water storage, monitoring of users behavior, and involving users in the decision making process for the commons governance, were sufficient to obtain the desired outcomes. The two last studies were based on the Peruvian Piura Basin, a CIS that has been exposed to environmental shocks for decades. I used secondary and primary data to carry out a longitudinal study using as guidance the robustness framework, and different hypothesis from prominent collapse theories to draw potential explanations. I then developed a dynamic model that shows how at the current situation it is more effective to invest in rules enforcement than in the improvement of the physical infrastructure (e.g. reservoir). Finally, I explored different strategies to increase the robustness of the system, through enabling collective action in the Basin.
ContributorsRubinos, Cathy (Author) / Anderies, John M (Thesis advisor) / Abbott, Joshua K (Committee member) / Janssen, Marcus A (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
This dissertation seeks to understand and study the process of attention harvesting and knowledge production on typical online Q&A communities. Goals of this study include quantifying the attention harvesting and online knowledge, damping the effect of competition for attention on knowledge production, and examining the diversity of user behaviors on question answering. Project 1 starts with a simplistic discrete time model on a scale-free network and provides the method to measure the attention harvested. Further, project 1 highlights the effect of distractions on harvesting productive attention and in the end concludes which factors are influential and sensitive to the attention harvesting. The main finding is the critical condition to optimize the attention harvesting on the network by reducing network connection. Project 2 extends the scope of the study to quantify the value and quality of knowledge, focusing on the question answering dynamics. This part of research models how attention was distributed under typical answering strategies on a virtual online Q&A community. The final result provides an approach to measure the efficiency of attention transferred into value production and observes the contribution of different scenarios under various computed metrics. Project 3 is an advanced study on the foundation of the virtual question answering community from project 2. With highlights of different user behavioral preferences, algorithm stochastically simulates individual decisions and behavior. Results from sensitivity analysis on different mixtures of user groups gives insight of nonlinear dynamics for the objectives of success. Simulation finding shows reputation rewarding mechanism on Stack Overflow shapes the crowd mixture of behavior to be successful. In addition, project proposed an attention allocation scenario of question answering to improve the success metrics when coupling with a particular selection strategy.
ContributorsYu, Fan, Ph.D (Author) / Janssen, Marcus A (Thesis advisor) / Kang, Yun (Committee member) / Castillo-Chavez, Carlos (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Energy projects have the potential to provide critical services for human well-being and help eradicate poverty. However, too many projects fail because their approach oversimplifies the problem to energy poverty: viewing it as a narrow problem of access to energy services and technologies. This thesis presents an alternative paradigm for energy project development, grounded in theories of socio-energy systems, recognizing that energy and poverty coexist as a social, economic, and technological problem.
First, it shows that social, economic, and energy insecurity creates a complex energy-poverty nexus, undermining equitable, fair, and sustainable energy futures in marginalized communities. Indirect and access-based measures of energy poverty are a mismatch for the complexity of the energy-poverty nexus. The thesis, using the concept of social value of energy, develops a methodology for systematically mapping benefits, burdens and externalities of the energy system, illustrated using empirical investigations in communities in Nepal, India, Brazil, and Philippines. The thesis argues that key determinants of the energy-poverty nexus are the functional and economic capabilities of users, stressors and resulting thresholds of capabilities characterizing the energy and poverty relationship. It proposes ‘energy thriving’ as an alternative standard for evaluating project outcomes, requiring energy systems to not only remedy human well-being deficits but create enabling conditions for discovering higher forms of well-being.
Second, a novel, experimental approach to sustainability interventions is developed, to improve the outcomes of energy projects. The thesis presents results from a test bed for community sustainability interventions established in the village of Rio Claro in Brazil, to test innovative project design strategies and develop a primer for co-producing sustainable solutions. The Sustainable Rio Claro 2020 initiative served as a longitudinal experiment in participatory collective action for sustainable futures.
Finally, results are discussed from a collaborative project with grassroots practitioners to understand the energy-poverty nexus, map the social value of energy and develop energy thriving solutions. Partnering with local private and non-profit organizations in Uganda, Bolivia, Nepal and Philippines, the project evaluated and refined methods for designing and implementing innovative energy projects using the theoretical ideas developed in the thesis, subsequently developing a practitioner toolkit for the purpose.
First, it shows that social, economic, and energy insecurity creates a complex energy-poverty nexus, undermining equitable, fair, and sustainable energy futures in marginalized communities. Indirect and access-based measures of energy poverty are a mismatch for the complexity of the energy-poverty nexus. The thesis, using the concept of social value of energy, develops a methodology for systematically mapping benefits, burdens and externalities of the energy system, illustrated using empirical investigations in communities in Nepal, India, Brazil, and Philippines. The thesis argues that key determinants of the energy-poverty nexus are the functional and economic capabilities of users, stressors and resulting thresholds of capabilities characterizing the energy and poverty relationship. It proposes ‘energy thriving’ as an alternative standard for evaluating project outcomes, requiring energy systems to not only remedy human well-being deficits but create enabling conditions for discovering higher forms of well-being.
Second, a novel, experimental approach to sustainability interventions is developed, to improve the outcomes of energy projects. The thesis presents results from a test bed for community sustainability interventions established in the village of Rio Claro in Brazil, to test innovative project design strategies and develop a primer for co-producing sustainable solutions. The Sustainable Rio Claro 2020 initiative served as a longitudinal experiment in participatory collective action for sustainable futures.
Finally, results are discussed from a collaborative project with grassroots practitioners to understand the energy-poverty nexus, map the social value of energy and develop energy thriving solutions. Partnering with local private and non-profit organizations in Uganda, Bolivia, Nepal and Philippines, the project evaluated and refined methods for designing and implementing innovative energy projects using the theoretical ideas developed in the thesis, subsequently developing a practitioner toolkit for the purpose.
ContributorsBiswas, Saurabh (Author) / Miller, Clark A. (Thesis advisor) / Wiek, Arnim (Committee member) / Janssen, Marcus A (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020