Handbook of Sustainability and Social Science Research

This chapter analyzes the complex interplays between and among sustainability, resilience, adaptation and transformation, key paradigms and analytical concepts that have emerged from the human-environmental interactions, social-ecological systems, and global environmental change literatures. Specifically, this chapter provides a summary of how these key paradigms and analytical concepts have evolved over time and synthesizes current debates about their interplays. Our findings reveal certain theoretical synergies between and among sustainability, resilience, adaptation and transformation, as well as epistemological tensions and practical tradeoffs when actions are taken to promote ostensibly desirable attributes of social-ecological systems through on-the-ground actions. These findings highlight the need for scholars, practitioners and policy makers to be explicit about the normative assumptions associated with sustainability, resilience, adaptation and transformation as they complement or contradict each other in local contexts, and how they may affect or be affected by the characteristics of and processes within local communities. Such understanding will be crucial for moving towards developing adaptation or transformation interventions that maximize the achievement of sustainability or resilience policy goals and minimize potential negative outcomes on both human well-being and environmental conditions.

Policymakers have recently looked to the social sciences for effective strategies to address environmental issues, including how to change people’s environmental behaviors. During that time, social scientists have been challenged to improve how they assess, summarize, and convey the state of environmental social science. Meta-analysis, the quantitative review of existing research using data from multiple studies, is one method researchers use to assess the state of knowledge and share best practices. Development of new data reporting standards and systems would improve not only environmental social science, but also the interface between environmental social sciences and policymakers. In particular, dynamic meta-analyses, or frequently updated meta-analyses, would ensure that policymakers have access to up-to-date findings and would allow policymakers to examine subsets of studies that best approximate relevant contexts for new policies. These new standards for conducting and reporting meta-analyses would allow environmental social scientists to more effectively inform policy, and would help policymakers understand and assess the latest developments in the field.

By employing an expanded view of 21st-century communication design as a starting point for research, this paper aims to share with a multidisciplinary audience a brief overview of design research methodologies and intersections with sustainability. The researchers trace this evolution from the 1960 s to present, wherein higher education classrooms frequently integrate ecological and social dimensions into teaching and learning. The literature reveals how design research has developed distinct approaches to working for and with communities to fuel creative action. The researchers utilize grounded theory to review results from a series of initial interviews and survey data collected from a purposive sample of design professionals in the United States, along with an analysis of a range of texts in the intersecting realms of design, education, and sustainability. Professional respondents cite evolving trends in global business interactions, communications, and problem-solving as indicators that higher education should prepare design students to tackle complex sustainability challenges. This paper concludes with a discussion of the importance of integrating intercultural collaboration into higher education curricula to help students realize the intricacies involved in environmental health and cultural vitality.

Teaching Green Buildings (TGBs) are designed to educate building users about green building design and often broader themes about the connection between buildings and their surrounding ecosystems. The outcomes of a well-designed TGB range from increasing knowledge to fostering a sense of place to promoting environmental behavior change. To date, however, these buildings have been weakly theorized in scholarship and haphazardly designed in practice. This chapter draws on an interdisciplinary research base to discuss five potential roles for TGBs as: symbol, science museum, 3D textbook, call to action, and place.

Blockchain technology (aka Distributed Ledger Technology or DLT) is a novel configuration of Peer-to-Peer, cryptographic and distributed computing technologies that have the potential to shift the internet from an internet of information to an internet of value network, with significant disruptive potential. To date, the cryptocurrency ‘bitcoin’ is the application of DLT that has attracted most attention, not all of it favourable. However, DLTs are about much more than cryptocurrencies and, as Kranzberg’s (1986) first law of technology, that ‘Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral’ reminds us, we can ethically frame applications of new technologies. To date, research has tended to focus on the technical characteristics of DLTs, and there has been little reflection on potential socially and environmentally beneficial use cases: Blockchain for Good (B4G). The aim of this this exploratory and descriptive paper is to reflect on innovative B4G applications that could help deliver socially and environmentally beneficial outcomes, framed in terms of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, through challenging existing business models and providing new opportunities for value creation.

Despite the serious threat of climate change to sustainability, people in the United States feel little urgency to address the issue. The goal of this research project was to use psychological methods to better understand why Americans respond to climate change the way they do, and to assess strategies to spur a stronger action-oriented response. Using Construal Level Theory as a foundation, three psychological studies explored the perceived psychological distance of climate change, empathy toward victims of climate change, and people’s willingness to take action. Past research suggests that perceptions of low psychological distance toward climate change are associated with higher concern and willingness to take action. In the current research, participants read short scenarios about climate change and how it impacts specific victims, such as geographically and socially similar people (low psychological distance) or a geographically and socially dissimilar social agent such as an animal (high psychological distance). Using both self-report surveys and implicit methods, our studies examined the relationship between psychological distance and response to climate change. Consistent with other research, we found that psychologically closer framings of climate change do not always effectively ameliorate psychological distance, nor result in greater intention to act. Our results further suggest that people may engage in psychological distancing when faced with climate change suffering. These findings provide important insights for effective communication about challenging sustainability issues.

This study explores the social dimensions of local climate adaptive policies through an Arizona policy, the 2010 Residential Gray Water Ordinance (RGWO). An ecological model of behavior is used as a framework for analyzing the complex relationship between sustainably focused policy initiatives and their success or failure at the individual level. Water cycle fluctuation will be significantly impacted by global climate change in upcoming decades and additional demand for potable water will increase due to growing urban populations. The reuse of residential gray water is an underutilized option for reducing potable water use, municipal energy use, and greenhouse gas emissions, with seemingly little negative impact on public health. The RGWO is a policy passed in Tucson, Arizona, requiring new single family and duplex housing be built with separate graywater plumbing to enable graywater recycling for irrigation. Local adaptations of such policies often depend on a variety of unforeseen factors and few studies have considered the role architects, activists, builders, and citizens play in the success of local climate adaptive initiatives. Data from in-depth guided interviews was used to develop insight into how different stakeholders can impact policy implementation. Eight participants were interviewed through a snowball sampling of local graywater installation professionals, educators, activists and researchers. Data from interviews was transcribed, coded, analyzed for themes presented within an ecological framework. The aim of this paper is to offer new perspectives on integrating sustainably focused policies by evaluating social and political barriers encountered at multiple levels through an ecological model: individual, interpersonal, organizational, community and policy levels.

Organizational literature often points to decentralization as a driving force behind the success of organizations, but centralization can have benefits as well, particularly for energy efficiency initiatives in particular contexts. This paper conceptualizes the multifamily residential building as an organization, and posits that in large, multifamily rental properties a measure of centralization is helpful and even necessary for the effective management of energy conservation. This research relies on qualitative interviews, site visits, and publicly available energy data from a sample of New York City residential properties to examine the organizational characteristics that contribute to the building’s energy consumption. Findings indicate that certain organizational characteristics lend themselves to more centralized building management. These types of residential rental buildings, in turn, performed better than expected in annual energy consumption compared to other properties. This research carries important implications for social science and behavioral researchers, as well as building owner organizations and management firms, who can better craft programs and policies in buildings to capitalize on these organizational characteristics.

Definitions of sustainability in social settings can vary widely across contexts and age groups. The aim of this experiment is to identify actions college students classify as sustainable within their everyday context, how such actions are grouped into behavioral categories, the perceived effort and impact of actions, and ways that public spaces can limit these actions. A card-sort, co-current interview, and ranking task was conducted with ten students (ages 20–27). Student listed sustainable actions and behavioral categories were compared against a researcher-generated list of categorized actions possible within their college environment. Ranking data of perceived effort and impact was used to identify which behaviors would be easy and difficult to encourage in college buildings. Key findings are that students’ perceptions of effort and impact varied widely, students categorized actions based on many types of commonalities, students consistently placed actions appropriately in predetermined categories, and that educational environments contain social and physical norms limiting perceived ability to act. In the future, these methods could be replicated to identify perceptions influencing sustainable behaviors in multiple contexts.

Because it is a carbon-free source of electricity, wind energy is often unquestioned as an environmentally sustainable technology. But is this technology sustainable when considered within the context of the rural communities in which it is often sited? This paper uses survey data from paired rural communities with and without utility-scale wind energy projects to understand the economic and social impacts of wind energy development on these predominantly agricultural communities. It finds clear economic benefits to the communities that host wind turbines—namely, that wind developers’ payments to landowners are largely re-invested in farming operations, leading to economic stability and increasing expectations that a younger generation will want to stay on the farm. The social impacts of wind development are more nuanced, and depend upon the windfarm’s business model. Specifically, windfarms are least disruptive of the social structure in rural communities when wind developers employ a business model that gives more community members a direct financial stake in the project.

The complexity of social transformations requires participative approaches to research. One such approach to meeting this need is the so-called “Living Lab”, in which the participation of all stakeholders lies at the heart of the research process. This article presents a stage model as a way of describing the psychological aspects involved in participatory processes in an environmental context. The purpose of the model is to show the psychological parameters underlying a successful participatory process as a basis for finding suitable participatory measures for different project settings. It is the aim of this article to introduce the elaborated model with its different levels of environmental participation as well as to demonstrate its application. Three case studies demonstrating the application of the model are presented from the “climate-neutral city campus” Living Lab at the University of Applied Sciences Stuttgart. The case studies show participation opportunities using (1) interviews with employees about sustainability measures, (2) the integration of sustainability-related topics into teaching, and (3) the support of mobile apps for achieving climate-neutrality. So far, three important findings have emerged: (1) Depending on the degree of involvement, different forms of participation are appropriate. (2) Participation at higher levels of involvement is difficult to achieve when people’s motivations at the lower levels are not adequately addressed. (3) The participatory process in the environmental context can be described using the proposed model and it provides useful insights how to better implement appropriate measures in order to achieve social transformations.

Across the United States primarily on a town or city basis, the increasing public awareness and understanding of the detrimental impact of human activity on the environment is fostering the development and visibility of grassroots sustainability efforts. This is most readily noted in plastic bag, Styrofoam, and plastic bottle bans. These efforts have been typically facilitated by education campaigns focused on the symbiotic relationship between human life and the planet and the intrinsic or non-market derived value of the ecosystems we inhabit. However, often the communication strategy employed has been limited by an appeal to a like-minded stakeholder constituency, reducing the traction benefit from engaging other stakeholders and the subsequent en masse alignment with regulatory intent. This paper details a grassroots effort and the stakeholder engagement process related to a specific ban. It describes the development and implementation process as carried out through a university-town partnership, where the approach taken includes proactive stakeholder engagement inclusive of a consumer survey instrument. Though survey results reveal interest and even concern for the environment, interestingly the results also highlight a self-evaluation bias among respondents. Results show that respondent perception of environmental concern is inconsistent with their actions, providing an entry point and justification for multi-channel education and communications strategies differentiated by stakeholder grouping.

Empuriabrava is a cosmopolitan neighborhood located in Costa Brava and one of the world’s largest residential marinas. About sixty-five percent of Empuriabrava’s population are foreign residents from dozens of nationalities. Their profile constitutes an intersection of religions, languages, socio-economic statuses, and migratory histories. Previous research rooted in conflict and contact theories as well as studies based on the superdiversity paradigm underscored the contradictory effect that diversity may have on the sustainable development of local communities. This paper analyzes Empuriabrava’s population daily life and community sustainability. The analysis is based on interviews with local key informants, both natives and immigrants, as well as analysis of statistical and documental sources. The results suggest that while superdiversity provides vast possibilities to empower sustainable development, a perceived lack of local authorities’ involvement diminishes this positive effect. The economic downturn has been observed as enhancing conflict and limiting collaborative initiatives. However, the efficient management of superdiversity in tourism–oriented neighborhoods has been found to be a key asset, which may help to experience rejuvenation instead of decline in the resort life cycle model. In this sense, this paper shows practical sustainability lessons to be learnt from Empuriabrava recent history and present situation.

The 1983 La Paz Agreement originally defined the U.S.-Mexico transborder region as 62.15 miles (100 km) on each side of the international border. The La Paz Agreement between the U.S. and Mexico created the first bilateral cooperation program on issues of environmental quality along the U.S.-Mexico border. Prior to La Paz, cities throughout the U.S. adopted and have continued to adopt various sustainability policies to address environmental concerns. However, in the U.S.-Mexico transborder region where cities are fundamentally unique from communities in the interior United States, local sustainability policies and issues of environmental social justice are still in their infancy and deficient environmental conditions continue to exist in some border areas. While sustainability and social justice are two important goals for city governments, harmonizing both values is challenging due to their conflicting policy natures. This study examines if transborder cities pursue social justice and sustainability simultaneously despite the challenge of balancing nebulous goals. This study focuses on factors that influence different levels of environmental sustainability measured by greenhouse gas (GHG) amounts among transborder communities. The results indicate that U.S. transborder cities with densely populated areas and the geographical size of the community contribute to higher levels of GHG emissions and less equitable sustainability.

Recent promotion and development of wood-based bioenergy in the U.S. South have targeted cellulosic liquid fuels for the transportation sector and wood pellets for power generation. Bioenergy development has promised to meet multiple sustainability goals including renewable energy, energy independence, new markets for wood, and rural development. On the other hand, it has garnered opposition from environmental groups for threatening forests and air quality and from conservatives who object to government subsidies and doubt climate science. A team of anthropologists undertook research on narratives, interests, and behaviors of various bioenergy stakeholders. We conducted multi-sited and cross-scale ethnographic research around emerging bioenergy facilities and at extension events, workshops, and conferences attended by landowners, managers, bioenergy industry representatives, and scientists. We also analyzed written materials from websites, news articles, and policy statements. We use the concept of imaginaries to analyze of the promotion of wood-based bioenergy as a new sustainable energy system, while noting the ways the dominant bioenergy imaginary excluded some sustainability goals and voices. As a result, counter-narratives emerged, success was limited, and landowners and communities received few of the expected benefits. This case provides important lessons for envisioning and implementing new sustainability technologies.

For many people, sustainable behavior can be clearly articulated through an array of consumer choices made every day based on: where products come from, the environmental impact of the ingredients in household products, and how products are disposed of at the end of their life cycle. But outside of consumerism, are there other avenues an individual might explore in the pursuit of living a sustainable lifestyle? In an activity called Conceptual Content Cognitive Mapping (3CM) completed by environmentally-concerned academics and professionals, this study asked what it means to be a green citizen. Green citizenship, as understood and lived by our participants, transcends multiple levels of involvement that extend beyond consumer behavior. Green citizens embrace their individual agency to affect change, while recognizing the socially embedded nature of their actions. Beyond the support of community networks, green citizens also identify higher institutional structures as both conduits and barriers to change. Implications for constructing supportive pathways to sustainable participation focusing on the whole citizen, rather than just the consumer, will be discussed.

What does it mean to be a green citizen? To date, discussion of green citizenship has been heavily rooted in theory, drawing largely from political and consumer studies. The scant empirical evidence exploring the behavioral components of this concept has overwhelmingly focused on individuals’ identification as “green” via their role as consumers. However, little empirical research exists exploring participant-driven understandings of what it means to be a green citizen and how this role relates to and expands upon that of the green consumer. This study seeks to resolve these gaps by expanding the definition of green citizenship through a participatory process called the Conceptual Content Cognitive Mapping exercise (3CM). Through this modified card-sorting task, participants are able to visually communicate their lived understandings of green citizenship by arranging and categorizing labeled cards into networks of meaning that reflect their personal understandings of this abstract concept. This chapter will focus on the 3CM exercise as a fruitful methodology to promote participant engagement in social science research on sustainability in general, and green citizenship in particular.

Scenario planning first gained traction within corporations as an energy transition management tool, but recently gained popularity within sustainability. It is a process for exploring potential futures and thinking critically about complex decisions that involve high degrees of uncertainty. It is also effective in shifting mental models and engaging diverse stakeholders, making it ideal for complex sustainability problems. Scenario-planning insights are typically used in strategic planning, further aligning with sustainability’s commitments to action-oriented solutions. However, as a participative process, success hinges on equitable participant engagement that is threatened by power imbalance. The current pilot study uses an experimental design to explore the impact of explicit acknowledgement of status differential and pre-event brainstorming on participation in a small group task. The task was selected based on its parallels to scenario-planning interactions. Twenty-four triads engaged in group deliberation while wearing devices that gather data to measure interactions. Afterward, participants completed a participation perception survey. Despite the popularity of brainstorming, results of the pilot study point to the utility of status concealment over individual-level brainstorming to bolster participation. Ultimately, this work contributes to a more nuanced understanding of participation in service of more robust, pluralistic sustainability decision-making.

The Sustainability Cultural Indicators Program (SCIP) at the University of Michigan is designed to measure and track the university’s progress (Callewaert and Marans 2017) in moving the campus community towards a culture of sustainability. SCIP gathers this data using a web survey conducted annually. Web surveys generally attain lower response rates than other modes of data collection. Web surveys are also at risk of other forms of nonresponse, such as breakoffs, which happen less frequently in other modes. Breakoffs commonly occur very early in a web survey, often on informed consent screens required by Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), before respondents have a chance to get to the survey content. There are many methods used (prenotification, incentives, etc.) to try to increase participation and reduce breakoffs. This paper investigates the efficacy of two experiments designed to increase participation and reduce breakoffs in two SCIP surveys. The first experiment examines the effect of “celebrity endorsement”. As part of the final email reminder, respondents were randomized to receive a reminder with a link to the survey or a reminder that also contained a link to a video of a head coach from the U-M Department of Athletics encouraging non-respondents to participate. The second experiment investigates informed consent screen design. One group was presented a screen appearing as a traditional informed consent form. The other group was presented a screen with the most important items visible and the rest of the information available via a series of accordion menus.

Survey data collection is often utilized to study/gage public perceptions of sustainability, and can use considerable resources to carry out. It seems natural that collecting data about sustainability and the culture of sustainability should be done in a sustainable way, optimizing the use of available resources. This paper strives to investigate and understand respondent engagement with web survey email invitations. This is important because often less sustainable contact methods are used in follow-up to raise response rates. This paper uses data from the Sustainability Cultural Indicators Program (SCIP) survey at the University of Michigan (U-M). During the 2014 and 2015 data collections, email paradata was utilized to understand sample members’ engagement with emails sent asking them to complete a survey. Engagement is determined by using email paradata combined with paradata from the survey about access and completion. Low engagement may mean not receiving (e.g. spam, bad email address, etc.) or never opening the email. High engagement with low survey access (and completion) may mean there are other attributes (e.g. survey length, survey topic, incentive, how the data will be used, etc.) of the design affecting the decision to participate that researchers may need to address. The data also provide insight as to when emails are opened. This has the potential for the survey practitioners to focus on optimal times to attempt contact to try to gain cooperation. Three engagement analyses were conducted. The first analysis looks at the open rate for each email type (prenotification, invitation, reminder 1, etc.). The second analysis looks at the elapsed time (lag) between sending and opening of each email type. The final analysis looks at the optimal day to send an email invitation to elicit response. This information can be used to inform future survey design decisions and provide insight into non-response.

The discussion about sustainable cities mainly focuses on technical solutions such as public transportation systems, resource-efficient buildings, and renewable energy generation. However, most cities don’t take into consideration that the main factors that make a city sustainable are the people who live in the city. Sustainability is not just about using new technologies that make cities and their systems more sustainable by addressing the technical cause of inefficiencies. Sustainability is about changing behavior. The installation of public transportation systems alone doesn’t guarantee that people will actually use them and drive less. Therefore, to create a sustainable city, the factors that make people choose the sustainable option over the unsustainable one need to be addressed in a planning process. Extensive research in European and American cities resulted in five factors that can make a change towards sustainable behavior possible: the accessibility, the affordability, the attractiveness, and the availability of sustainable options and people’s awareness of their existence (the five A’s). This paper explains how these five factors must be incorporated in urban sustainability strategies and how they can create truly sustainable cities by enabling long-term behavior change.

The majority of sustainability related social science research conducted to date has primarily focused on individual level behaviors occurring within the environmental domain. In order to achieve the advancements needed to move towards a truly sustainable society, this interdisciplinary field must grow to not only include the social and economic domains, but also expand in scope to study groups and institutions. Sustainability research has paused at the brink of this needed growth and expansion because it has failed, thus far, to build new theories specifically tailored to the three domain model of sustainability. The purpose of this chapter is to encourage scientists to begin identifying and measuring sustainability latent constructs in order to do just that, and to submit two such measures to the academic community. This chapter introduces a revised Assessment of Sustainability Knowledge (ASK) and the Sustainability Attitudes Scale (SAS), and discusses when and how to use them for applied and theoretical purposes. Building theoretical models using these (and other) latent constructs will allow social scientists to test a new and diverse set of hypotheses and push the field to create cutting edge, sustainability-tailored theories.

As campus sustainability initiatives have expanded over the past decade, related efforts to assess the progress and impact of those initiatives have also developed. These assessments generally fall into two distinct categories, those focused on the assessment of student learning regarding sustainability and those focused on the assessment of campus culture—the sustainability values, behaviors, and awareness of students, faculty and staff. This paper provides an overview of leading examples of these two types of assessments—the Assessment of Student Knowledge (ASK) and the Sustainability Cultural Indicators Program (SCIP). Next, using self-reported assessment data from the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS—a program of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education) an analysis is provided on the number of institutions which are using such assessments. Results indicate that very few institutions are using these assessments and only a very small number are claiming the full STARS credit for this work. Finally, recommendations are provided on strategies for developing assessments and disseminating results which can best drive progress towards advancing campus sustainability.

Universities across the globe are giving increasing priority to the challenges of sustainability, encouraged by a variety of drivers including international and national policy, student and societal pressures. Many extant initiatives focus on a narrow set of activities including curriculum design and operational efficiency, and overlook the importance of cultural change in embedding sustainability. Drawing and building upon previous studies in the cultural change and sustainability literature, the purpose of this article is to propose a conceptual framework for designing interventions and measuring and monitoring progress in building and embedding a university sustainability culture. Our efforts are contextualised in the case of a UK university.