<p> In this dissertation I build theory of the social sustainability of onsite household sanitation infrastructure by leveraging organizational theory, using data collected from rural households in Guatemala and Bangladesh. The overarching research question asks <i>what causes high failure rates in onsite household sanitation systems?</i> This work is important because of the large number of people served by onsite technology types and also because of high observed rates of infrastructure abandonment. Since sanitation technologies are vitally important to public and environmental health, universal coverage is an urgent goal. Unfortunately, it is far from being met. As a first step towards addressing this problem, I use a literature review and expert panel to identify factors important to the sustainability of sanitation infrastructure. This work (Chapter 2) identified the importance of social factors and also showed that interactions between various factors explained the contention regarding the importance of ten factors. As such, the rest of my research focused on the topic of social sustainability, with the methodological goal of retaining attention to complexity. To build theory of social sustainability I use constructs of legitimacy and status from organizational theory. While organizational theory has never before been applied to infrastructure systems, it deals with groups of people using technology to achieve shared goals, and this is precisely what we see with infrastructure. I analyze household level interview data from Bangladesh using crisp set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to describe sanitation abandonment as a form of organizational decoupling (Chapter 3) by contrasting households with socially sustainable or socially unsustainable infrastructure. This research shows that neither a lack of demand nor economic barriers caused sanitation abandonment in the communities selected for this research. Instead the causal mechanism is decoupling, which is founded on perceptions of efficiency (whether or not desired infrastructure services are actually achieved) and competing rational myths (beliefs regarding how and why things ought to be done). This analysis leads us to suggest that, due to the impact on social sustainability, odor management should be required in the updated definition of improved sanitation as we revise and replace the Millennium Development Goals. This research also empirically identifies pathways that Guatemalan households took to achieve socially sustainable sanitation infrastructure (Chapter 4). The most practically useful of these shows that the combination of consequential legitimacy (a moral understanding of outcomes) and comprehensibility legitimacy (a cognitive model connecting outcomes to processes) leads to a socially sustainable outcome in a full 50% of the household cases studied for this work. Taken together, these findings explain and will allow us to better design sanitation infrastructure, technical knowledge mobilization, and educational outreach to support socially sustainable infrastructure.</p>

Sustainable development is now being recognised as a vital component of our society in the environmental, ethical, social, technological, economic, and institutional aspects, or dimensions, so, this thesis develops a framework to quantitatively measure sustainability. This thesis is distinctive in that it focuses on quantitative methods encapsulated in a formal assessment procedure and includes sustainability concepts that have rarely been put into practical use in sustainability reports. The framework is designed along the strategy that the methodology needs to be scale invariant and recursive, meaning the procedure is the same irrespective of the scale the user is interested in, and that different people can focus at different levels of sustainability by following a similar procedure. While the quantification process is aimed to be as unbiased as possible, a configuration of the tools from Total Quality Management (TQM) is adapted to identify sustainability indicators which are then mapped onto a scalar with mathematical functions. The sustainability indices are presented according to the amount of details needed by different users ─ some may need just one overall figure while others may need sustainability indices broken down by the six sustainability dimensions and presented on a spider diagram, while others may need all the details for analysis. This methodology also caters for sustainability analysis by different stakeholders. To fully demonstrate the potential of the methodology, the author has chosen to test it on a large-size industry sector so that it can have the capacity to be scaled up to a country or down to a small business, and on an industry sector that is important on its own right. Furthermore, this sector needs to be illustrative and has nontrivial complex problems. Under these criteria, the electricity sector of New Zealand was selected. The robustness of the methodology was investigated with inputs from three evaluators with different views: a standard view from the author that was made after much research in the sector and in the concepts of sustainability, a view with an environmental bias and one that focuses on commercial interests.

The spatial implications of Global and Australian national trends in economy, society and environment are diverse. At a sub-national level these combine with local trends and issues to create unique regional milieu through which an integrated approach to sustainability may be negotiated. A change in government process may be required for sustainability to be implemented, and sub-national governance mechanisms are increasingly seen as important in enacting sustainability on the ground. Yet in Western Australia, large land mass and low population density means that neither State nor Local Governments are well equipped for this task. Western Australian regional policy and governance structures, as well as Commonwealth economic and regional policy trends, are important influences on regional sustainability. Both the Draft Western Australian State Sustainability Strategy and the Draft Statement of Regional Policy for Western Australia support a regional approach to sustainability planning. Yet models of regional governance organisation for the implementation of regional sustainability in Western Australia, such as regional associations of Local Governments, and Regional Development Commissions need to be further developed. It is at this regional level where partnerships between community, government and business may emerge to enact regionally appropriate initiatives for sustainability. For this to occur, community participation and government process that enables community participation to influence decision making is necessary. Regional approaches to natural resource management provide insight into the way that a regional approach to sustainability planning and organisation may evolve. Trends that influence regional issues and Commonwealth and Western Australian regional policy and structures provide a broad context for the development of regional sustainability strategies. Analysis of these issues and of the insights that may be gained from ideals for enabling governance mechanisms and regional natural resource management projects to facilitate regional sustainability are presented.

We only need to consider public media reports to appreciate that there is growing concern amongst citizens for sustainability. This concern arises from increasing appreciation that the current direction and rate of exploitation of resources is not sustainable and humanity’s actions today are arguably compromising future generations’ ability to meet their living needs. By drawing on the research of scientists, ranging from their evidence of the problems of sustainability to those promising solutions, the same press reports show strong links between sustainability and science. The appearance of such reports in the public media implies that citizens understand the interaction of science and sustainability and that they can engage critically with scientific research, including its applications and implications for sustainability. In this dissertation this understanding and capacity to engage critically is termed scientific literacy. The general question governing the research reported in this dissertation arose from this context and is: What does it mean for citizens to be scientifically literate within the context of sustainability? More specifically, because it is expected that university graduates are well educated in a socially relevant manner, with commensurate responsibilities and influence, the focus question studied in this dissertation is: What does it mean for university graduates to be scientifically literate? It became apparent from the review of the literature, that the concept of scientific literacy was multidimensional. The three key dimensions that emerged were (i) the fundamental and enduring ideas and concepts of science, (ii) the nature of science and (iii) the interaction of science with society. These dimensions provided the framework for the research reported in this dissertation. Within this framework and based on the literature, two relationships amongst these dimensions were proposed. The first relationship was that the dimensions were in a conceptual hierarchal order, with successive dimensions including the previous dimensions and expanding upon them. The second relationship was that students’ scientific literacy developed sequentially along the same hierarchy. It was proposed that development occurred sequentially, with development of concepts of science first, nature of science second and interaction with society last. It was proposed that a scientifically literate person would have reached the level of understanding that includes the interaction of science with society. Specific indicators of the successive dimensions were functional, conceptual/procedural and multidimensional, which at this highest level, includes the relationship between the first two dimensions and society. This framework and the associated indicators were used as a structure and lens for interrogating the development of scientific literacy of 244 first year university students enrolled in Australia’s Murdoch University’s foundation unit, Life and the Universe. This is one of five units from which first year students are required to select one. The units are interdisciplinary in nature with Life and the Universe being a unit that covers generic issues in science. In part because of its content and in part because it allows students from all backgrounds to enrol, it was considered suitable for studying, illustratively, the development of scientific literacy of potential university graduates. The development of scientific literacy was studied in three ways. First, participants responded to open questions about a newspaper report of science, before and after their studying in Life and the Universe, second, they responded to a Likert style questionnaire regarding the nature of science, again before and after studying the unit, and third, a subset of participants were involved in a focus group run over two years. The participants’ responses to the open questions on the questionnaire were analysed for their critical engagement with the news brief, in terms of their ability to give reasons why the text should be accepted or rejected. The nature of requests for extra information about the news brief’s content was also analysed. Analysis of the initial responses to the open questions showed that more than fifty percent of the participants in this study did not demonstrate the ability to critically engage with science reported in the news. The Likert style questionnaire assessed participants’ conception of the nature of science, with one end of the continuum reflecting a traditional view that science was a body of unchanging facts, derived from objective and value free observations, and the other reflecting a more contemporary view, that scientific knowledge was dynamic, open to change, had subjective components, and had scientists socially located so that their work was not free of values. Analysis of the initial responses to the Nature of Science questionnaire showed that more than fifty percent of the participants were located on the continuum towards the contemporary, socially located end. However, it also showed that the majority were still not sufficiently located towards the contemporary end of the continuum to view science as dynamic, with a changing body of knowledge. There was no statistically significant difference in these analyses in relation to participants’ gender, time out of school, course of enrolment or science background. Unexpectedly, the comparison in the analysis of the news brief pre and post Life and the Universe showed that the number of participants engaging critically did not increase. More expectedly, the comparison of the pre and post Life and the Universe responses to the Likert scale showed that there was overall a statistically significant increase in the group’s contemporary, socially located, perspective of the nature of science during their participation in the foundation unit. Specifically, the participants demonstrated raised awareness of the tentative and subjective nature of science and that scientists study a world in which they are a part and, as such, their work is not objective or value free. Nevertheless, there was substantial possibility of higher locations on the scale which the majority of participants did not reach. This statistically significant increase, but possibility for further improvement, is compatible with the lack of increase in critical engagement with the news brief and suggests that the statistical increase was not educationally significant. The focus group data contributed greater depth of understanding to the researcher about the range in participants’ conceptions of the nature of science. The conceptions evident were consistent with the conclusions from the open questions and Likert style questionnaire and also highlighted limited understandings of scientific processes or scientific methods. It was evident that misconceptions and naïve understandings of the contemporary nature of science were present at the beginning and retained throughout the foundation unit learning experience. These limitations helped explain participants’ inability to engage meaningfully and to question critically the science news briefs contained in the questionnaires. Data from the focus group also suggested that a limited understanding of science terms prevented critical engagement with the content of the news briefs. Following closely the focus group participants’ development of scientific literacy over a two year period, allowed the researcher to gain a greater depth of understanding of the participants’ development of scientific literacy than that which could be gained alone from the large scale administrations of the questionnaire. This experience highlighted that the development of scientific literacy was far more complex than the originally proposed sequential development across the three dimensions. The analysis of converging sources of data challenged this proposition and resulted in a reconstruction of understanding about the development of scientific literacy. It was evident that the ability and disposition to critically question and act scientifically required parallel development of science content, socially located conceptions of the nature of science and understanding of its interaction with society. It was the blended and parallel development of these knowledge dimensions, at any level, that demonstrated scientific literacy. In order to characterise the more complex structure amongst the dimensions in which parallel development occurred, a rope metaphor was used. This metaphor effectively represented the observed development of scientific literacy, as it made concrete the interwoven threads of multidimensional knowledge. It represented more realistically the complex, intertwining and multidimensional aspects of participants’ development of scientific literacy. Re-thinking the development of scientific literacy and representing the construct with the rope metaphor offered possibilities for effective pedagogy in higher education. The interaction of multidimensional threads of knowledge seems an integral part of the development of scientific literacy and suggests the need for teaching and learning experiences that are holistic in nature and driven by socially relevant contexts.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2008. / Principal faculty advisor: David L. Ames, School of Urban Affairs & Public Policy. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis--Auburn University, 2008. / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographic references (p.37-40).

Thesis (M. S.)--Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009. / Committee Chair: Meyer, Michael; Committee Member: Amekudzi, Adjo; Committee Member: Bergin, Michael.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Canterbury, 2010. / Typescript (photocopy). "March 2010." Includes bibliographical references (p. 221-231).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Adelaide, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p., viewed 20 Jan., 2010. "Published online by the Collections Council of Australia Ltd." Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Curatorial and Museum Studies to the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Adelaide. Includes bibliographical references.

<p> Change is one of the few constants in education. How a school views and responds to change may be related to factors deeply embedded in its school culture. This ethnography describes the dissertation project implemented at Desert Vision Public Charter School in Gilbert, Arizona. Using an ethnographic approach, the author studied the aspects of school culture and leadership, which she believes helped contribute to sustainable change at Desert Vision K-8. The author reviews the ever-present need and demand for change in education, describing the need to shift from transmissive to transformative education, the importance of professional development, and the challenge of educating students to be effective 21^st century citizens. Literature on school culture and the role of leadership is explored in the context of sustainable change. Rationale is provided for implementing ethnographic methodology, and methods for collecting data such as participant observation, focus group discussion, artifact collection, and survey analysis are specified in order to uncover significant cultural characteristics, which may have contributed to sustainable educational change. A model for school culture, highlighting significant cultural characteristics, is proposed in the context of the data collected. This model is also explored as a potentially useful tool for schools outside of this study. The implications of the study uncover a new perspective on leadership and the locus of control of school culture. Intentional hiring practices and the use of non-academic school data are highlighted as strengths in creating a culture for change, and a list of dispositions is shared to aid school leaders in identifying potential candidates who would fit well in a culture for change. The impact on the field of education is outlined, focusing on the potential solutions to current issues such as teacher shortages, teacher education enrollment decline, school culture reform, time/need for soft skills and social/emotional learning, and institutional best practices for transformational schools. The ethnography wraps with recommendations for future research in an effort to further validate the conclusions of this study. </p><p>