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- All Subjects: Sustainability
- Creators: Department of Finance
- Status: Published
In this research, urban public participation is a collaborative decision-making process between residents, businesses, experts, public officials, and other stakeholders. When processes are not attuned with the local context (participant lifestyles, needs, interests, and capacities) misalignments between process and context arise around living conditions and personal circumstances, stakeholder trust, civic engagement, collaborative capacity, and sustainability literacy, among others.
This dissertation asks (1) what challenges arise when the public participation process does not match the local context, (2) what are key elements of public participation processes that are aligned with the local context, (3) what are ways to design public participation that align with specific local contexts, and (4) what societal qualities and conditions are necessary for meaningful participatory processes?
These questions are answered through four interrelated studies. Study 1 analyzes the current state of the problem by reviewing public participation processes and categorizing common misalignments with the local context. Study 2 envisions a future in which the problem is solved by identifying the features of well-aligned processes. Studies 3 and 4 test interventions for achieving the vision.
This dissertation presents a framework for analyzing the local context in urban development projects and designing public participation processes to meet this context. This work envisions public participation processes aligned with their local context, and it presents directives for designing deliberative decision-making processes for sustainable urban development. The dissertation applies a systems perspective to the social process of public participation, and it provides empirical support for theoretical debates on public participation while creating actionable knowledge for planners and practitioners.
Does school participatory budgeting (SPB) increase students’ political efficacy? SPB, which is implemented in thousands of schools around the world, is a democratic process of deliberation and decision-making in which students determine how to spend a portion of the school’s budget. We examined the impact of SPB on political efficacy in one middle school in Arizona. Our participants’ (n = 28) responses on survey items designed to measure self-perceived growth in political efficacy indicated a large effect size (Cohen’s d = 1.46), suggesting that SPB is an effective approach to civic pedagogy, with promising prospects for developing students’ political efficacy.
The dissertation consists of three studies. Study 1 uses a case study approach to investigate existing sustainability program selection processes in three cities: Avondale, USA; Almere, the Netherlands; and Freiburg, Germany. These cities all express commitment to sustainability but have varying degrees of sustainable development experience, accomplishment, and recognition. Study 2 develops a program selection framework for urban sustainable transformation drawing extensively from the literature on sustainability assessment and related fields, and on participatory input from municipal practitioners in Avondale and Almere. Study 3 assesses the usefulness of the framework in a dual pilot study. Participatory workshops were conducted in which the framework was applied to real-world situations: (i) with the city’s sustainability working group in Avondale; and (ii) with a local energy cooperative in Almere.
Overall, findings suggest cities are not significantly adapting program selection processes in response to the challenges of sustainability. Processes are often haphazard, opportunistic, driven elite actors, and weakly aligned with sustainability principles and goals, which results in selected programs being more incremental than transformational. The proposed framework appears effective at opening up the range of program options considered, stimulating constructive deliberation among participants, and promoting higher order learning. The framework has potential for nudging program selection towards transformational outcomes and more deeply embedding sustainability within institutional culture.
Sources and strategies of finance studied and ultimately included in the tool were Loans, Equity, Membership, Crowdfunding, and Grants. The tool designed was a matrix that takes into account various criteria of the business (e.g. business lifecycle, organizational structure, business performance) and generates a financial plan based on these criteria and how they align with the selected business strategies. After strategies are found, stakeholders can search through an institutional database created in conjunction with the matrix tool to find possible institutional providers of financing that relate to the strategy or strategies found.
The tool has shown promise in identifying sources of finance for micro and small local food enterprises in practical use with hypothetical business cases, however further practical use is necessary to provide further input and revise the tool as needed. Ultimately, the tool will likely become fully user-friendly and stakeholders will not need the assistance of another expert helping them to use it. Finally, despite the promise of the tool itself, the fundamental and underlying problem that many of these businesses face (lack of infrastructure and knowledge) still exists, and while this tool can also help capacity-building efforts towards both those seeking and those providing finance, an institutional attitude adjustment towards social and alternative enterprises is necessary in order to further simplify the process of obtaining finance.
Waste pickers are the victims of harsh economic and social factors that have hurt many developing countries and billions of people around the world. Due to the rise of industrialization since the 19th century, waste and disposable resources have been discarded around the world to provide more resources, products, and services to wealthy countries. This has put developing countries in a precarious position where people have had very few economic opportunities besides taking on the role of waste pickers, who not only face physical health consequences due to the work they do but also face exclusion from society due to the negative views of waste pickers. Many people view waste pickers as scavengers and people who survive off of doing dirty work, which creates tensions between waste pickers and others in society. This even leads to many countries outlawing waste picking and has led to the brutal treatment of waste pickers throughout the world and has even led to thousands of waste pickers being killed by anti-waste picker groups and law enforcement organizations in many countries. <br/> Waste pickers are often at the bottom of supply-chains as they take resources that have been used and discarded, and provide them to recyclers, waste management organizations, and others who are able to turn these resources into usable materials again. Waste pickers do not have many opportunities to rise above the situation they are in as waste picking has become the only option for many people who need to provide for themselves and their families. They are not compensated very well for the work they do, which also contributes to the situation where waste pickers are forced into a position of severe health risks, backlash from society and governments, not being able to seek better opportunities due to a lack of earning potential, and not being connected with end-users. Now is the time to create new business models that solve these large problems in our global society and create a sustainable way to ensure that waste pickers are treated properly around the world.
As temperatures increase across the United States, some populations are more at risk for heat-related death and illness than others. One of these at-risk demographics is mobile home and trailer park inhabitants, who are disproportionately represented among indoor heat-related deaths (Solís, “Heat, Health”). In this paper, we outline a cost-benefit analysis that was used to calculate the net present economic value of projects related to reducing heat burden on mobile home owners and parks in Maricopa County. We use this model to assess solutions developed by student teams under the Knowledge Exchange for Resilience’s Summer Heat Resilience Challenge. We find that one of the seven solutions has a positive net present value (NPV) even in the lowest effectiveness (10%), while three more solutions have a positive NPV in the mid-level (50%) effectiveness scenario, showcasing their economic viability.