The concept of sustainability has become a buzzword in today’s business marketplace. Particularly, the incorporation of sustainability into Supply Chain Management (SCM) has received a great deal of attention from companies of all sizes and even involved a wide range of industries in recent years. Meanwhile, Sustainable Supply Chain Management (SSCM) has been highlighted by academic and corporations. With SSCM, more enterprises have benefited from being sustainable in their daily operations. Although research has made contributions, there is still a lack of understanding on how to achieve sustainable development in SCM. Therefore, the overall purpose of this research is to find out the key success factors for implementing the strategic SSCM. To achieve this target, it is necessary to identify appropriate indicators to measure the sustainable activities and figure out the relationship that combined social and environmental dimensions with supply chain activities. This research focused on Swedish global company. Both summaries of literature review and findings of the case company were analyzed to satisfy the research purpose, as a result, definition of sustainability, implementations in SSCM, and the relationship between sustainability and SCM that are based on the actual situations of the case company were presented. After that, five key success factors for implementing the strategic SSCM have been concluded: (1) SSCM needs to be ensured as a strategy within long-term consideration; (2) Standard management system needs to be complied with daily operations; (3) Communication with stakeholders needs to be increased in the supply chain; (4) Respect for human rights, and provide safety working environment; (5) Control resources usage and reduce negative emission to the environment. Accomplish of this research, on the one hand, it clarified the relationship between sustainability and SCM; on the other hand, it also deepened knowledge about how to achieve a strategic SSCM based on an empirical study in wire and cable manufacturing industry.

This PhD thesis looks at the meaning of website effectiveness and their influence on design decision-making. The research is focused within the context of designing by 16+ students and concerning sustainability. Design practice is explored within Advanced level General Certificate of Education (commonly referred to as AS/A2) Design and Technology, in order to define its particular characteristics. The study uses a theoretical position developed from the Assessment of Performance Unit s (APU) discussion document from 1982 as a framework to explore information retrieval within designing. The position of the study within designing and its place within research related to the use of knowledge, skills and values in designing is clarified. A literature review conducted conceived information retrieval as a characteristic of skill in the APU model. This study has established a consensus position on what is good practice in website development and design, and illustrates the structure of selected sustainable design websites, as well as assessing their navigation. The study indicates which types of information AS/A2 level student designers are seeking and how they use websites within their design work. The drivers behind sustainable design decision-making are identified. The understood consensus of sustainable development and sustainable design as an emerging area in designing is defined. The research is situated within the Sustainable Design Award (SDA) scheme that aimed to implement sustainable development into Design and Technology education and also outlines the content embodied in selected sustainable design websites. AS/A2 level Design and Technology education is used as the context for the main study. Action research was used to help develop the SDA website which was created as a primary assessment tool for the research study, concentrating on students aged 16 to 18. The usability of the selected websites was assessed by undergraduate designers from Loughborough University. A framework was developed and the effectiveness of the SDA website was measured before use, during use and after use . Quantitative and qualitative research methods were used to gather data from the students such as questionnaires, folio assessments and interviews. The results indicate a prominence of website use and sustainable design within AS/A2 level design work, however sustainable design is taught as a separate entity and is not fully integrated into design practice. Sustainable design websites were accessed by half of the 72 students questioned, but only 28% had used the SDA website. The information that the student designers sought fell into two categories: specific information and inspiration, supporting Lofthouse (2001a). The use of these decreased dramatically as projects progressed in AS/A2 level and undergraduate level design education, this pattern was consistent in website use, sustainable design and sustainable design website use. Cluster analysis was carried out on the sustainable design websites with the informative cluster identified as representing the appropriate strategy for effective higher level website design. This cluster included characteristics such as comprehensive content information on sustainability, inspirational images and product examples. Appropriate approaches to the detailed design and development of the SDA website are reported. Future recommended work includes a focus on before use, to investigate the affects of increasing awareness of the website. Relating wider sustainability issues to AS/A2 Design and Technology education is discussed, investigating further the use of eco-design tools as the discussion highlights conflicting opinions. An expansion to the cluster analysis to help define further the four website cluster groups. The development of a website that correlates the emerging patterns of website, sustainable design and sustainable design website use, with work on value judgements completed by Trimingham (2007).

The £198M demolition industry sector is part of the construction industry, worth approximately £2.2bn in the UK p.a albeit such a small fraction it is nevertheless the largest provider of secondary building products, handles 32 million tonnes (approximately) of waste each year and is principally responsible for clearing brownfield sites in readiness for new build. Sustainable demolition activities are at the forefront of the UK Government and many NGO s policies on waste reduction, increased recycling and reclamation of waste building products at the end of life cycle. However, there are problems in developing more sustainable demolition processes based on historical methods of working, in particular, those involving manual handling activities. Whilst the UK construction industry boasts reduced accident and incident rates the demolition sectors rates are in the ascendency, rising by 43% overall from 1996 to 2009. That said, it would appear that those working within the sector are unaware of the rise in accidents which has steadily increased by 100% since 2000. Despite the demolition sector s increased use of mechanical applications for structural demolition, the prolonged and prolific method of stripping out buildings by hand remains a major risk and causal factor for injuries. The results of this research have identified the causation of such an increase in accident occurrence and has offered an insight into how the reduction of accident and incident may be accomplished. This research is unique in that practising exponents of the demolition sector have participated in providing exclusive evidence of methodology, accident reporting and waste handling protocols that give clear indications of a gulf in current thinking by government, NGO s and the enforcing authorities. The research has also identified failings in product and building design that create unsustainable conditions for safe, efficient and cost effective demolition, dismantling and handling of materials at end of life. This realisation also opens up the debate on the role of designers and their contribution to a safe and sustainable demolition process.

The engagement of stakeholders in a dialogue on the decommissioning of nuclear facilities and the retrieval and treatment of nuclear waste in the UK has proved challenging. The action orientated research presented here has used a mixed methodological approach to examine participants’ perceptions regarding the nature of dialogue being carried out by the NDA National Stakeholder Group (NSG), with the emancipatory aim of raising participant awareness regarding their role and the nature of the dialogue used. Exploration of the emergent theme of fairness has enabled the researcher to provide a contribution to stakeholder theory. This research adds to the theory of the deliberative institution (Reed, 2008), providing evidence for why the effective influence of stakeholders on decision making, communication about this influence, and the institutionalization of stakeholder participation is as important as the engagement itself. The work also provides an important epistemological contribution regarding the role of dialogue within the concept of social sustainability.

Digital products are an increasingly significant part of the output of museums in the UK, but the rationale behind them and the long term plans for them are not always clear. This thesis argues that to consider such a digital product to be sustainable, the value it creates must justify the resources it requires. The decisions involved in building and supporting these products affect both the value proposition and the resource requirements, but also reflect the way that museums and their stakeholders see the balance between the two. At the same time, this balance is under the influence of a constantly changing environment. The study proposes a model of sustainability as a cycle of value, resources and decision-making, and three case studies are used to examine how decisions are reached in the face of flux and uncertainty. Some ways in which decisions can be biased or distorted are identified, and finally some approaches are offered for museums seeking to improve the balance of value and resources, and increase the quality of the decisions that underlie them.

This research examines the sustainability and participatory objectives of the UK’s planning system in a geographical context. It aims to explore the relationships between communities and place, and the connections between national government, local governments and communities in planning processes and outcomes. It also considers the role of planning in shaping places and communities, and how planning endeavours to include communities in decision-making through encouraging participation in community activities. This thesis argues that there is a gap between planning policy and rhetoric and the implementation of policy within specific community contexts. The research is a piece of collaborative research conducted with the planning department at North Devon Council (NDC). Through developing an original empirical case study of data from parishes within North Devon, planning’s sustainability and participatory agendas are examined through the framework of second homes considered a distinct yet related form of tourism (Jaakson, 1986). The research unpicks popular understandings of second homes through quantitative and qualitative research and argues that there are nuanced existences and experiences of second home properties, compounding the difficulty of defining these properties that produce both non-permanent residents and semi- permanent tourists. Exploration of the socio-economic contributions of second homes within host communities suggests that second homes have potential to contribute unsustainable traits, particularly social impacts, to host communities while also having potential to bring positive, predominantly economic, contributions. The empirical research demonstrates that notions of community from resident and policy maker perspectives illustrate that place is not necessary to understanding or experiencing community but has a key role in framing both policy and North Devon residents’ perceptions of community. Through examining the most recent round of democratic renewal in the planning system, issues of power and responsibility within planning functions are reviewed. It argues that the Conservative – Liberal Democrat Coalition neighbourhood planning obligations reveal a dichotomy between community desire for power and the realism of heightened responsibility.

The purpose of the study Perspektiv på naturen i religionskunskap: en kvalitativ litteraturstudie om ekologisk hållbarhet i religionskunskap i åk 7-9 (Perspectives on nature: a qualitative literature study about ecological sustainability in the subject of religion for grades 7-9) is to contribute to the discourse on nature and environmental issues within the subject of religion in the grades 7-9, in the Swedish elementary schools. Through literary analyses of textbooks used by teachers in the municipality of Umeå. The aim of this study is to investigate whether the teachers are able to meet the goals set by the national curriculum with regard to environmental perspective and sustainability through the text books. Four textbooks have been analysed with the help of three perspectives in environmental ethics (antropocentrism, biocentrism, ekocentrism, teocentrism and deep ecology). The texts analysed were those that explicitly dealt with nature, ecological sustainability and environmental issues. The results show that, from three of the four books had very little material on the environmental issues and ecological sustainability. Only one book dealt directly with ecological sustainability, two books did not mention environmental issues and that all books had texts that referred to views on nature within all the centrisms. The texts that directly mediated a view were anthropocentric, although this was in only conveyed in one of the books. Many texts could not clearly be determined as belonging to one centrism as the length of the texts were too short.

A sustainable design guide has a huge potential to enhance the sustainability of the built environment. This thesis investigates the potentials of a sustainable residential design guide and develops a framework for its actualization in the three climatic regions in Nigeria. These regions are; Highland Climate Region (HCR), Tropical Savannah (TSC) and the Tropical Rainforest Climate Region (TRC). Given that Nigeria is the seventh most populous country in the world, and most populous in Africa, makes any statistical findings from Nigeria relevant to the rest of the world. This sub-Saharan country is also faced with a huge yearly housing shortage of over ten million units and yet little is known on the efforts and actions taken by Nigeria to ensure that expected new buildings are sustainably designed in line with the global concerns. A concurrent embedded strategy was used in the investigation processes which provided both primary and secondary data sources for this research. Tools for the investigation were; literature review, pilot study, questionnaires and interviews. A Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient value of 0.96 was achieved from the survey instrument used. The questionnaire had 283 participants and a total of 30 interviewees were interviewed. The quantitative data from the questionnaire survey were analysed using SPSS 20 software and the NVivo 10 software was used for the qualitative analysis. Findings suggested that the impacts of climate change are evident and significant across all three regions. However, temperature increase recorded a significant value of more than 0.000 significance (p) level at 0.88 across the three regions, an indication that temperature increase is common to all three climatic regions. On the other hand, flooding, desertification/drought and erosion are more prevalent in the HCR, TSC and TRC respectively. This research’s contributions to knowledge includes; identifying the climatic design parameters for each region and the development of a conceptual framework. Hence, this research is a pioneer study in the subject of climate change and buildings in Nigeria. The thesis concludes that, the framework would promote the production of sustainable residential buildings in Nigeria. Also, areas of future research were suggested to include; the use of New technologies, effective collaborations, policy formulation and testing of the framework.

This master thesis aims to examine texts of an international tourism promotional magazine Gotland 2016 to figure out whether it will help or on the contrary hinder sustainable development. Though promoters and writers held the beliefs to sustain tourism by prolonging tourism seasons and attracting international tourists, to our bewilderment, they not only failed to stick to its point as such but also expressed the opposite thoughts and notions among the texts. During the process of the analysis, the author found out that in Gotland 2016, the images of Visby, oceans scenes, summer, nature / tourist scenes and exoticism are strengthened while the opposite of these images are inevitably weakened simultaneously, which obstruct the extension of tourism seasons as well as lowering expectations for international tourists. This, in the long run, will hinder continuous development of local area in economic, environment and social sense. Particularly in this master thesis, social sustainability is discussed with priority since it is always likely to be overlooked and seen as less important than other aspects of sustainable tourism. In consequence, it is suggested that the wellbeing of local communities is equally important as environment protection and economic growth when promoting tourism development.

Despite widespread reports of the benefits of Community-Based Forest Management, there is little empirical evidence regarding socioeconomic outcomes for local communities. The purpose of my research was to consider the extent of innovation and sustainability in Community Forestry approaches in British Columbia, Canada. Data was collected through a qualitative case study focusing on the Lower North Thompson Community Forest Society and the Wells Gray Community Forest Corporation, and involved document review, participant observation and interviews with community members. Key socioeconomic benefits identified were additional silviculture, local employment, local participation, grant distribution, and strategic partnerships. Although increased local control through grants increases quality of life, innovative practices and diversification opportunities are underdeveloped and require greater policy support to ensure continued success. Findings point to community forests as holding potential to increase the socioeconomic sustainability of local communities, which could make them key players in support for rural areas beyond forestry. / May 2017