Matching Items (674)
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Sustainability
- Resource Type: Text
Description
An emerging group of services and activities provided by some State Tourism Offices (STO) called Destination Development (DDev) programs coincides with a growing practitioner shift from promotion to tourism product development. These programs are largely unexplored models for how STO and local destinations might effectively collaborate to create and manage sustainable tourism destinations. Local communities are the innate touchpoint of tourism experiences and the scale at which most negative impacts of tourism naturally occur. Yet many communities lack resources, expertise, and capacity to endogenously plan, develop, and manage sustainable tourism destinations, which creates a need for external actor involvement—involvement that creates equity and power concerns. State organizations are well-positioned to provide accountable support, but little is known about what STOs can do to best catalyze, facilitate, and support sustainable community destinations. Are DDev Programs the key? To better understand the concept and design of DDev programs, as well as the precise role they play in supporting community destination success, an exploratory case study of four US State Tourism Offices that operate DDev Programs was conducted via purposive, in-depth interviews. Themes within and between the cases were identified, and it was discovered that DDev programming largely emerged from the field of rural development; is positioned as a key complement to destination marketing; and has engendered a highly collaborative community of practice that desires greater structure and professional support.
ContributorsClasen, Daniel Wesley (Author) / Vogt, Christine A (Thesis advisor) / Andereck, Kathleen L (Committee member) / Vaugeois, Nicole L (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Cities in the Global South face rapid urbanization challenges and often suffer an acute lack of infrastructure and governance capacities. Smart Cities Mission, in India, launched in 2015, aims to offer a novel approach for urban renewal of 100 cities following an area‐based development approach, where the use of ICT and digital technologies is particularly emphasized. This article presents a critical review of the design and implementation framework of this new urban renewal program across selected case‐study cities. The article examines the claims of the so‐called “smart cities” against actual urban transformation on‐ground and evaluates how “inclusive” and “sustainable” these developments are. We quantify the scale and coverage of the smart city urban renewal projects in the cities to highlight who the program includes and excludes. The article also presents a statistical analysis of the sectoral focus and budgetary allocations of the projects under the Smart Cities Mission to find an inherent bias in these smart city initiatives in terms of which types of development they promote and the ones it ignores. The findings indicate that a predominant emphasis on digital urban renewal of selected precincts and enclaves, branded as “smart cities,” leads to deepening social polarization and gentrification. The article offers crucial urban planning lessons for designing ICT‐driven urban renewal projects, while addressing critical questions around inclusion and sustainability in smart city ventures.`
ContributorsPraharaj, Sarbeswar (Author)
Created2021-05-07
Description
This thesis explores conservation of threatened and endangered species in the Phoenix metro area using social media. With increased urbanization, rising temperatures, and other issues occurring in the desert landscape, creatures big and small face devastating losses in their populations. Informing the public about the species currently on the brink of extinction allows people to identify the animals in the wild, and may encourage conservation practices that would allow wildlife to thrive far into the future. Utilizing social media as a tool for spreading awareness permits information about Arizona wildlife to be free and easily accessible. This project consists of interviews with conservationists and social media influencers, a survey to understand online behaviors and identify level of interest in the different species, and the creation of consumable social media infographics about the threatened and endangered species of Phoenix. Instagram was selected by survey respondents as the platform they would follow conservation accounts on, leading to the creation of @phxconservation to post the social media infographics. Best practices found by posting on social media in this project can be useful information for conservationists looking to build engagement and effectively inform people.
ContributorsDavitt, Stephanie (Author) / Larson, Kelli (Thesis director) / Quick, Jazzy (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Comm (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor)
Created2021-12
Description
Social-ecological systems (SES) are replete with hard and soft human-made components (or infrastructures) that are consciously-designed to perform specific functions valued by humans. How these infrastructures mediate human-environment interactions is thus a key determinant of many sustainability problems in present-day SES. This dissertation examines the question of how some of the designed aspects of physical and social infrastructures influence the robustness of SES under global change. Due to the fragility of rural livelihood systems, locally-managed common-pool resource systems that depend on infrastructure, such as irrigated agriculture and community forestry, are of particular importance to address this sustainability question. This dissertation presents three studies that explored the robustness of communal irrigation and forestry systems to economic or environmental shocks. The first study examined how the design of irrigation infrastructure affects the robustness of system performance to an economic shock. Using a stylized dynamic model of an irrigation system as a testing ground, this study shows that changes in infrastructure design can induce fundamental changes in qualitative system behavior (i.e., regime shifts) as well as altered robustness characteristics. The second study explored how connectedness among social units (a kind of social infrastructure) influenced the post-failure transformations of large-N forest commons under economic globalization. Using inferential statistics, the second study argues that some attributes of the social connectedness that helped system robustness in the past made the system more vulnerable to undesirable transformations in the current era. The third study explored the question of how to guide adaptive management of SES for more robustness under uncertainty. This study used an existing laboratory behavioral experiment in which human-subjects tackle a decision problem on collective management of an irrigation system under environmental uncertainty. The contents of group communication and the decisions of individuals were analyzed to understand how configurations of learning-by-doing and other adaptability-related conditions may be causally linked to robustness under environmental uncertainty. The results show that robust systems are characterized by two conditions: active learning-by-doing through outer-loop processes, i.e., frequent updating of shared assumptions or goals that underlie specific group strategies, and frequent monitoring and reflection of past outcomes.
ContributorsYu, Jae Hoon David (Author) / Anderies, John M. (Thesis advisor) / Janssen, Marco A. (Committee member) / Muneepeerakul, Rachata (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
I have been studying both Supply Chain Management and Business Sustainability during my undergraduate at Arizona State University. This paper has allowed me to further explore some of the topics that I was introduced to during my time studying at ASU. For my supply chain alternative thesis, I attended multiple interesting faculty research presentations in the Supply Chain department and wrote reflections on each. The presentations were used to help choose a topic to focus on in the rest of my thesis. It is the third research seminar that I attended by Barbara Flynn, titled Understanding Adaptation to a Sustainability Technology Innovation: Longitudinal Outcome Trajectories, that sparked my interest in further researching sustainability in supply chains. The second portion of this paper contains a literature review of papers and journals on the topic of sustainability within supply chains over the last decade. Studies on this topic are becoming more popular as concerns with global warming increase. My research mainly consisted of reading journals and articles on ways that sustainable practices can be applied to reduce the environmental impact of businesses. This paper focuses on recent sustainability trends found across different areas of the supply chain, including: supplier selection and engagement, manufacturing, building efficiency, and logistics.
ContributorsSchneider, Chris (Author) / Printezis, Antonios (Thesis director) / Vitikas, Stanley (Committee member) / Department of Supply Chain Management (Contributor) / Dean, W.P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
The objective of this study was to evaluate sustainability knowledge and practices in place at university-associated food pantries across the United States. A survey was sent to university- associated food pantries and responses were collected at a rate of 25% (n=84 of 326) to assess the knowledge and practices of this topic. The pantries surveyed were chosen solely based on ability to contact through email (emails were retrieved from online sources) and about 50% of the 680 university-associated pantries in the United States were sent the survey. The data was analyzed by quantifying the qualitative responses to the 9 sustainability- rated questions addressing zero- waste practice, barriers to offering sustainably sourced foods, types of sustainable donations, desire for sustainable products, and client demand for sustainable products and practices were posed to pantries. Results from this study provided insight into awareness of sustainability in these pantries and also assessed what sustainability practices are already being practiced by these pantries. Among those surveyed, a low percentage of university-associated pantries actually provide sustainably sourced foods (9.5%), but given the choice about a third (38.1%) would choose to offer these foods. It was reported that availability and cost were perceived as main barriers to providing sustainably sourced foods and that a small proportion of pantries teach their clients about zero waste practices, compost, and recycling. There is little client concern about this issue. Most pantries reported recycling more often than composting and also reported participating in some zero-waste practices. These results are unique to this study as not much research has been done in this area to assess environmental sustainability awareness in university-associated food pantries. Further research is required to further evaluate pantries across the nation as this sample size is approximately 12% of all university- associated pantries in the United States.
ContributorsCrowe, Alexandra B (Author) / Bruening, Meredith (Thesis director) / Payne-Sturges, Devon (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
Climate change has the potential to reduce the amount of land that is suitable for crop growth. Such changes may cause food shortages, which would most likely disproportionately affect the poorest regions of the world. While GMO crops showed potential to increase crop yield and agricultural efficiency, significant public pushback has led to a search for alternative methods to generate similar results. Compounds produced by bacteria, such as 2,3-butanediol, offer a potential way to change the phenotypes of plants without the deliberate genomic changes involved in the development of GMOs which are often the subject of great controversy. These compounds influence how plants grow and function. Through precise application, the compounds could be used to improve crop yield and stress tolerance. While these effects are not completely understood, they may be due to changes in transcription and translation of certain proteins, the microbiome surrounding the plants and its interactions with the compounds, or other unknown factors. The compound 2,3-butanediol appears to increase biomass, lead to larger root systems and more root hairs, and increase germination rates in a variety of plants. All these traits are favorable for producing higher yields and enduring stress conditions. The phenotypes induced by this compound are similar to plants engineered to over express a type I proton pyrophosphatase. Plants treated with 2,3-butanediol offer a potential option to achieve the benefits of GMO crops without the attached social stigma.
ContributorsOlson, Erik Jon (Co-author) / Olson, Erik (Co-author) / Gaxiola, Roberto (Thesis director) / Mason, Hugh (Committee member) / Riley, James (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-12
Description
Worldwide there are over 50 million people suffering from epilepsy, eighty percent (80%) of whom live in low to middle income countries. Of that eighty percent (80%) of people suffering from this disease, seventy-five percent (75%) do not receive treatment. The current design and treatment methods of epilepsy have many limitations in these specific countries. These limitations include: lack of education about the disease leading to stigmas surrounding it, inability to afford treatment options, and the absence of healthcare practitioners who specialize in the treatment of neurological illnesses. Additionally, the healthcare system worldwide is a large contributor to climate change calling for a need to implement sustainable practices in both the treatment of patients and creation of healthcare centers. This thesis has been developed in order to theorize the design of a clinic that can be beneficial to epileptics in developing countries and to the environment. Through the methodology of case studies and research on existing strategies implemented in specific hospitals, we were able to focus on three main aspects that should be taken into consideration for an epilepsy clinic: the ambient environment, sustainability, and target demographic - developing countries. The idea ambient environment, it was found, plays a large role in the healing process through reduction of stress on patients. From there the most important features specific to epilepsy were able to be considered and synthesized for the best possible theoretical design of a clinic focused on the treatment and diagnosis of epilepsy in a developing country.
ContributorsPenrose, Nicole Ellen Youzhi (Co-author) / Gonzalez, Bianca (Co-author) / Vallerand, Olivier (Thesis director) / Brunner, Lori (Committee member) / School of Human Evolution & Social Change (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
This product was completed under the guidance of LG Electronics and the InnovationSpace team. This report describes the development of a revolutionized idea for smart ventilation referred to as Ciel. Ciel is a smart home comfort device that provides the user with a smart, energy efficient, and easy-to-use way to regulate the room temperature of their home. The planning documentation, problem comprehension, design, functionality, and device specifications are outlined and illustrated within this report. And the discussion and analysis look into the benefits of the technology, outline the prototyping plan and process, look into the materials necessary for construction, and production safety considerations.
ContributorsBeauvais, Cara Marie (Co-author) / Beauvais, Cara (Co-author) / Shin, Dosun (Thesis director) / Hedges, Craig (Committee member) / Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
The M&G Drive is a proposed venture project lead by Barrett seniors, Elijah Smith and Jenna Fitzgerald. This project aims to educate Arizona State University (ASU) students on the issues of food insecurity around the Phoenix valley and facilitate their involvement in helping alleviate this pressing social matter. Scientific research has shown significant inverse relationships between food insecurity and the following: mental and physical health, social skills, and academic achievement. As the largest public university in the nation, Arizona State holds a self-ascribed responsibility for the health of its communities. In order to address this issue on behalf of Arizona State and from the standpoint of college students, this proposed venture will encourage the ASU student population to reallocate their unused M&G Dollars (ASU’s on-campus currency) to go toward this cause. Rather than being absorbed back by the university system, unused M&G Dollars can instead be used to purchase non-perishables that will then be donated to the local Phoenix community in order to help fight against food insecurity.
ContributorsFitzgerald, Jenna Mary (Co-author) / Smith, Elijah (Co-author) / Mokwa, Michael (Thesis director) / Eaton, John (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Department of Marketing (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05