•Increasing land degradation from management is costly and needs to be valued.•All necessary data is available but scattered and needs consolidation.•Measure of human well-being requires measure of ...all the capitals.•Models that include all capitals as well as the human factor should be prioritized.
This review assesses existing data, models, and other knowledge-based methods for valuing the effects of sustainable land management including the cost of land degradation on a global scale. The overall development goal of sustainable human well-being should be to obtain social, ecologic, and economic viability, not merely growth of the market economy. Therefore new and more integrated methods to value sustainable development are needed. There is a huge amount of data and methods currently available to model and analyze land management practices. However, it is scattered and requires consolidation and reformatting to be useful. In this review we collected and evaluated databases and computer models that could be useful for analyzing and valuing land management options for sustaining natural capital and maximizing ecosystem services. The current methods and models are not well equipped to handle large scale transdisciplinary analyses and a major conclusion of this synthesis paper is that there is a need for further development of the integrated approaches, which considers all four types of capital (human, built, natural, and social), and their interaction at spatially explicit, multiple scales. This should be facilitated by adapting existing models and make them and their outcomes more accessible to stakeholders. Other shortcomings and caveats of models should be addressed by adding the ‘human factor’, for instance, in participatory decision-making and scenario testing. For integration of the models themselves, a more participatory approach to model development is also recommended, along with the possibility of adding advanced gaming interfaces to the models to allow them to be “played” by a large number of interested parties and their trade-off decisions to be accumulated and compared.
Harnessing Hope through NGO Activism Courville, Sasha; Piper, Nicola
The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science,
03/2004, Letnik:
592, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article explores the relationship between hope and agency in the contexts of migrant rights activism and alternative trading relationships created through social and environmental certification ...systems. Using interviews with key respondents from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), hope is assigned a positive role in the complex process of social change, providing that common goals can be agreed upon and achieved along the way. Two main layers of analysis emerge in this article. The first explores the relationship between hope and agency, with a particular focus on power, both enabling and coercive. Powerful groups can hijack hope, but also hope can be used to mobilize various marginalized groups to find a collective voice, eventually leading to empowerment. The power relations among groups determine how competing collective hopes play out in action. A second layer to the relationship between hope and action is the way in which hope effects social change. Through conceptualizing hope within the context of the change process, we address the relationship between hope, agency, and time. An important ingredient linking hope, agency, and time in a sustainable manner is the notion of empowerment.
Current criticisms of the role of audit in society have painted a bleak picture about its use as a regulatory tool, highlighting negative consequences for democratic governance. This paper examines ...social accountability audits in light of these concerns. Two case studies of social certification systems are examined in detail: Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International (FLO) and Social Accountability International (SAI). These systems are evaluated using the lenses of accountability, ownership, trust, and reflexivity before concluding that social auditing processes, if done well and situated within stakeholder‐based institutions such as FLO and SAI, can aid democratic and legitimate governance processes.
This paper examines the challenges and considerations in using sustainability indicators for comparison purposes, using coffee supply chains in Mexico and Costa Rica as case studies. The context of ...coffee production and processing in the two countries is outlined followed by a comparison of the two case studies using a ‘fair return’ as an example indicator. The fourth section highlights tensions in sustainability indicator use such as the need for context-specific indicators to ensure meaningful results and the need for widely accepted indicators to provide objective benchmarks for comparison purposes, among others. The paper concludes by proposing that sustainable supply chain management requires convergence of sustainability frameworks and increased flexibility in the implementation.
This paper examines the challenges and considerations in using sustainability indicators for comparison purposes, using coffee supply chains in Mexico and Costa Rica as case studies. The context of ...coffee production and processing in the two countries is outlined followed by a comparison of the two case studies using a 'fair return' as an example indicator. The fourth section highlights tensions in sustainability indicator use such as the need for context-specific indicators to ensure meaningful results and the need for widely accepted indicators to provide objective benchmarks for comparison purposes, among others. The paper concludes by proposing that sustainable supply chain management requires convergence of sustainability frameworks and increased flexibility in the implementation. Reprinted by permission of Greenleaf Publishing
This chapter traces the changes in the organic and social certification regulations involving coffee production. The role of certification organizations such as the International Federation of ...Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM), along with its basic standards in developing the organic coffee movement, are discussed in detail. The chapter examines the certification systems of sustainable initiatives in the coffee sector, along with their standards, operational scope, and organizational structures. It discusses the emergence of sustainability initiatives and their implications for private global regulators, as well as the increasing role of government in regulating and monitoring the organic certification for maintaining credibility of the product for consumers. The chapter presents solutions to the challenges private regulators face, including certification systems for consumers based on the multiple-stakeholder platform and methods for cost reduction and increasing accessibility.
Hope, power, and governance Braithwaite, Valerie; Drahos, Peter; Courville, Sasha ...
The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science,
03/2004, Letnik:
592
Journal Article
In this chapter, the author explains the rise of corporate sustainability, argues for the necessity of a conceptual framework for business and sustainability tools and then outlines such a framework. ...Clearly, new frameworks are needed to make sense of the options. The heuristic outlined she offers a framework for understanding how various tools fit together. Corporate sustainability tools have evolved through different stages over the past few decades of nineteenth century. Frustrated by the lack of government enforcement on environmental and social justice issues since the 1980s, several non-governmental organisations, trade unions and other civil-society actors have questioned, using media and Internet campaigns, the performance of high-profile corporations. With the globalisation of the economy, the power to integrate social and environmental objectives into economic activities is moving out of the realm of the nation-state and into new spheres. Triple bottom line is one common expression used to capture activities that seek to integrate and balance economic, social and environmental objectives.
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