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Attempts to structurally transform segments of the agri-food system inevitably involve trade-offs between the priorities of actors with different incentives, perspectives and values. Trade-offs are context-specific, reflecting different socio-economic and political realities. We investigate the potential of structured boundary objects to facilitate exposing and reconciling these trade-offs within the context of multi-stakeholder social learning processes with pastoral and mixed crop-livestock communities in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and Tanzania. Building on boundary objects as items flexible enough to be understood by all without having one common definition, structured boundary objects visualize actors’ input in a comparable format to facilitate knowledge sharing. Stakeholders in each country used a simulation tool and board game to explore the implications of changing livestock stocking and management practices for the environment and for actors’ future socio-economic priorities. Using structured boundary objects elicited trade-offs between household food and animal feed, and between livestock for income, labour, and/ or cultural functions, reflecting the context-specific and subjective evaluations actors make when attempting to plan livelihood changes. Our findings suggest to policy and decision-makers that sustainable transition plans can be developed when stakeholders in local agri-food systems employ approaches that allow shared understandings of trade-offs inherent to sustainable agriculture to emerge.

Organizational culture, environmental sustainability, and digitalization have an impact on the business development of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SME). Dimensions associated with organizational culture (e.g., attitudes, norms, assumptions) give a sense of identity and determine behavior. The latter include general approaches concerning the organizational impact on the natural environment (environmental sustainability) or the adoption of digital technologies (digitalization), which can cause profound transformations of the business model. These three concepts have been investigated separately and scarce attention has been paid to their relationship. To enable SMEs to successfully manage this complex relationship, our study cumulates existing knowledge, offering the first integrative view on organizational culture, level of environmental sustainability, and level of digitalization and their interactions. Through a systematic literature review protocol supplemented where possible by meta-analysis we selected 80 significant papers out of 811 peer-reviewed papers analyzed. We developed a network map to display the relations between the three concepts. Quantitative path analysis was used on three bidirectional main paths. For qualitative analysis we developed a novel extension to the Belief-Action-Outcome (BAO) framework, presented for the first time in the paper. Our findings reveal thirteen key dimensions and identify ten links between the key constructs. Strategic orientation, internal capabilities, management, and attitudes are the most investigated cultural dimensions. Furthermore, we integrated interchangeably used terms (e.g. Green IT and Green IS) introducing the novel concept of green digitalization tools. The meta-analysis revealed trends in applied research methods, geographical locations of research, top journals, and a growing interest in the relationship. Finally, we identify gaps in existing research and challenges for future research.

The IEA has estimated that over the next four decades US$31 trillion will be required to promote energy efficiency in buildings. However, the opportunities to make such investments are often constrained, particularly in contexts of austerity. We consider the potential of revolving funds as an innovative financing mechanism that could reduce investment requirements and enhance investment impacts by recovering and reinvesting some of the savings generated by early investments. Such funds have been created in various contexts, but there has never been a formal academic evaluation of their potential to contribute to low carbon transitions. To address this, we propose a generic revolving fund model and apply it using data on the costs and benefits of domestic sector retrofit in the UK. We find that a revolving fund could reduce the costs of domestic sector retrofit in the UK by 26%, or £9 billion, whilst also making such a scheme cost-neutral, albeit with significant up-front investments that would only pay for themselves over an extended period of time. We conclude that revolving funds could enable countries with limited resources to invest more heavily and more effectively in low carbon development, even in contexts of austerity.

One of the major challenges decision and policy makers face when trying to introduce sustainable food waste management strategies is to isolate high value waste material. In our paper we assess whether it is logistically, economically and socially feasible to isolate exhaust coffee grounds from the catering industry in one British district and use them as raw material for a novel process to produce alternative high added value products in a near-perfect circular economy cycle making use of reverse logistics and generating near-zero waste. We chose coffee as the product because it is the most traded food commodity in the world, and the second most traded commodity in general, which makes the impact of the outcomes particularly significant. Due to resource and time constraints we had to limit the range of high added value products and to constrain the geographic area, hence we focused on the production of high quality compost for the amateur and professional growers market and on the geographic catchment area of the York municipal waste collection service. To do so, we developed a series of theoretical scenarios corresponding to the different possible logistic and process options that stakeholders could identify and we evaluated the economic indicators. We conclude that the process is technically feasible with available technology within current infrastructure and modest investments and the economic case is very attractive to investors. The outcomes of our research can be used as a model for similar developments in other geographical areas.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are increasingly aware of the benefits of closing loops and improving resource efficiency, such as saving material costs, creating competitive advantages, and accessing new markets. At the same time, however, various barriers pose challenges to small businesses in their transition to a circular economy, namely a lack of financial resources and lack of technical skills. The aim of this paper is to increase knowledge and understanding about the barriers and enablers experienced by SMEs when implementing circular economy business models. Looking first at the barriers that prevent SMEs from realising the benefits of the circular economy, an investigation is carried out in the form of a literature review and an analysis of a sample of SME case studies that are featured on the GreenEcoNet EU-funded web platform. Several enabling factors that help SMEs adopt circular economy practices are then identified. The paper concludes that although various policy instruments are available to help SMEs incorporate circular economy principles into their business models, several barriers remain. The authors recommend that European and national policies strengthen their focus on greening consumer preferences, market value chains and company cultures, and support the recognition of SMEs' green business models. This can be achieved through the creation of dedicated marketplaces and communities of practice, for example..

Cities are major contributors to global emissions, producers of waste and consumers of resources such as energy, water and food: implementing green development strategies is hence a core challenge of modern city-planning. The attention of research has been focusing on the development of energy efficient, low carbon strategies, yet city decision-makers need truly integrated approaches, as the one proposed by the water-energy-food Nexus. The purpose of our paper is to investigate whether it is possible to take one step in this direction by extending existing approaches to energy efficiency strategies to progressively include other priority resources, in particular water. To test this hypothesis we have taken a robust and well accepted methodology, the ELCC (Economics of Low Carbon development strategies for Cities) developed by SEI and CCCEP, and we have extended it to the case of demand side water efficiency strategies for cities. We have then applied the adapted ELCC framework to the case study of the domestic sector of the city of Bologna (Italy), identifying and prioritizing several efficiency measures. Measures were evaluated through their capital investment, annual values of savings, payback period and reduction in consumption, and then aggregated in different scenarios in order to highlight potential urban investments and to showcase a possible approach to the prioritization of demand side water efficiency measures. The results show that, with an upfront investment of € 17 million, a feasible subset of Bologna’s households could be equipped with five selected cost-effective measures, generating annual savings of € 10.2 million and reducing the total domestic water consumption of 34% by 2020 compared to the 2012 initial value. With additional € 28.5 million, households could be equipped with more costly appliances reaching an overall water reduction of 37% by 2020. Our findings confirm that it is possible to successfully extend current approaches to urban energy efficiency strategies to include demand side water efficiency, adding an important building block to the construction of an integrated Nexus-based approach to green development strategies at the city-level. We encourage further tests to confirm the robustness of the methodology.

What is the most effective and efficient way to decarbonize a city? There are hundreds of low carbon options available and although they present a significant opportunity to reduce energy bills and carbon footprints there is often a lack of reliable information on their performance. The higher levels of risk and uncertainty that emerge as a result can be a major barrier to action, making it hard to develop a political, a business or a social case for investment in low carbon options. This in turn makes it harder to set targets, stimulate investment, target interventions, develop new delivery mechanisms and so on. To address this problem, we describe the approach adopted in a city-scale mini-Stern review that reviews the performance and assesses the scope for the deployment of hundreds of low carbon options at the city scale. The review identifies the business case for major scale investments in low carbon options at the city scale, examining the investment needs and payback periods associated with different levels of decarbonization. The results of a case study from the UK are presented. These highlight the presence of very significant and commercially viable opportunities for decarbonization at the city scale – and the potential economic benefits associated with exploiting these. However, it also highlights the scale of the challenge and the need for innovations in a number of areas if major scale investments are to be secured and delivered. To push the debate forward, the chapter concludes by proposing ten key steps to deliver major scale investments in low carbon cities.

No Abstract.Mtafiti Mwafrika Vol. Spec Ed. 2004: pp. 76-94

In recent times, environmental thinking has become a prominent feature in the design of supply chain networks leading to the concepts of low carbon supply chains and green supply chain management. Understanding the sources and levels of emissions within the supply chain is the first step needed to fully design a low carbon supply chain. This paper helps to develop the concept of supply chain carbon map which provides a visual representation of the sources, levels of emissions and hotspots at a whole supply chain level. This is developed within an extended system framework using the hybrid lifecycle assessment methodology to generate carbon emissions for a mono crystalline silicon PV system and using a multi-regional input-output model to ensure system boundary completeness. The paper also discusses how the development of a whole supply chain perspective of carbon maps ensures that collaborative supply chain networks of firms can be mapped hence firms can gain a better understanding of their supply chain impacts and therefore help its sustainable management.

Coherent states for a general Lie superalgebra are defined following the method originally proposed by Perelomov. Algebraic and geometrical properties of the systems of states thus obtained are examined, with particular attention to the possibility of defining a K\"ahler structure over the states supermanifold and to the connection between this supermanifold and the coadjoint orbits of the dynamical supergroup. The theory is then applied to some compact forms of contragradient Lie superalgebras., Comment: 42 pages

The aim of this paper is to highlight new American and Italian interpretation delivered by ‘intermediate places’ (IPs) between practices of social innovation and policies, identifying with the term intermediate both their role as mediators between levels and their scale and impact on the urban environment. Urban agencies, living labs, innovation and community hubs are emerging structures that can feed and orient urban planning towards processes, more likely to meet the socioeconomic, cultural and environmental needs. In order to analyse if and how IPs can be considered a new generation of ‘urban centres’, the authors seek to draw a framework of comparisons, contaminations and drawbacks arising from the assessment of some experiences, in the Boston area (MA, US) and in the city of Bologna (Italy). In the first section an operational definition of intermediate place as open innovation ecosystem is explored. Afterwards, the two cities’ case studies are analysed to highlight their potentiality in orienting and innovating public policies and up-scaling micro scale social innovation practices. The starting hypothesis is that social innovation - in the Deleuzian-inspired description - is strictly path-dependent and occurs in ‘opportunity places’, where local actors engage within the urban space. In this scenario, intermediate places as innovation centres are proving to be successful models because of their physical contiguity; the recovery of direct relationships between different actors can allow them to act as interactive playgrounds in which the practices can be managed together with visions and strategies with an evolutionary long-term perspective. The paper emphasizes the need for a stable global observatory where practices and different methodologies are collected, observed and evaluated, in order to enhance cross-fertilisation between the diverse experiences.