Development agencies and international policy-makers, such as USAID, the World Bank, and UNAIDS, have shifted their focus in recent years toward health and development initiatives that prioritize local capacity strengthening, in-country ownership of activism and infrastructure, and a move toward systems that will be sustainable once international funding is gone. This shift has corresponded with much of the criticism heard in literature from development and post-development theory. Recent guidance, such as the Millennium Development Goals and PEPFAR II, has underlined a focus on gender and empowering women and girls. However, these interventions frequently fail to address structural constraints that limit the achievement of actual sustainability. This paper will address the problematic nature of using women as instruments of empowerment in these scenarios, whereby structures of disempowerment are not addressed but rather women are discursively and superficially given power while not being provided with tools to achieve upward mobility. These ideas and ideologies cannot not be achieved without first addressing issues that are vital to poverty and oppression, especially the relationship between gender and power, including the issue of cathexis (or personal and emotional investment in a relationship or an idea), access to information, transportation to school and medical facilities, and an attempt to sustainably address gender dynamics, racial, and class issues. The paper will demonstrate that until these concrete barriers are tackled to achieve sustainable well-being of all humans, sustainable development will not be possible.

Local energy initiatives (LEI) are self-supporting participatory energy generation projects in which for example solar energy is produced in the vicinity of the participants. This means that a participant is both the producer and the consumer of the solar electricity (prosumer) and that the electricity is produced in the vicinity of its users. During the last years, the emergence of these initiatives in the Netherlands has shown a substantial growth. Due to their recent emergence little is known about the factors that stimulate or hamper the appearance and development of this phenomenon. In this paper, we investigate whether a LEI based upon active users can drive the diffusion of PV in the Netherlands and in broader view whether these initiatives can foster the transition from a fossil-fuel based system to a more sustainable energy based system. The neighborhood Biesland in Maastricht is used as a case study and shows throught the use of a questionnaire that there is a demand for such a product.

While efforts to integrate Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) at universities have been increasing, said integration has not been occurring fast enough to counteract the unbalanced nature of humanity’s interactions with the planet. A number of studies have delved into the possible barriers slowing this progress and incentives to increasing sustainability initiatives on campus, but rarely have they included the student perspective. This knowledge gap was addressed as part of a study that utilized semi-structured interviews and concept checklists with 27 Canadian university students’ unions’ presidents to investigate their conceptualizations of sustainable development and sustainable universities. Thematic analysis utilizing an inductive approach was employed to discover key themes. While a number of themes emerged, one that was overarching as a general concern and both a barrier and incentive to a more sustainable university was university finances. This in turn is connected to students through enrolment and recruitment efforts as tuition represents a large proportion of university budgets. Participants believed students hold the greatest ability of all university stakeholders to promote sustainability on their campuses and when combined with their ability to impact university finances, the possible impact of empowered students to initiate change for more sustainable campuses is great. In order to harness this energy, this study makes recommendations to further enable students to engage with and mobilize their university campuses and stakeholders. Even potential students could influence universities by demanding deeper commitments to sustainability. This research contributes to scholarly research by presenting the perspectives of an understudied, yet important, university stakeholder group regarding factors influencing campus sustainability and recommendations for student empowerment. This research was part of a larger SSHRC-funded study investigating university stakeholders’ conceptualizations of sustainable development, sustainable universities and the role of universities in the journey towards a more sustainable future.

This paper describes the variety of obstacles that have hindered the success of a latrine program undertaken in Nepal’s Northwestern Humla District 2003-2013. The program has achieved modest success in some villages and has utterly failed in others. The project site is a selection of villages in Humla’s Karnali River Valley, populated by Buddhist ethnic Tibetans in the northern reaches and caste-observing Hindus to the south. The authors have been conducting research in the villages in this valley since 1995, initially on marriage and reproduction and more recently on the community development and hygiene and sanitation issues facing these householders. In this paper, the first and second order collective action problems associated with the latrine project and some ways to address them are presented. The paper draws upon the work of anthropologists and economists who have considered these types of problems across contexts, including in latrine projects elsewhere in the developing world.

Neoliberal development processes are increasingly pervasive across the globe, but they are incorporated unevenly into social systems at the micro-level with varying ramifications for the sustainability of social institutions. This paper investigates how kinship relates to ecology and exposure to development in two villages of Humla District, Nepal. A geospatial analysis using ArcGIS software, combined with ethnographic techniques, offers visual representation of socio-ecological information that could facilitate the application of social scientific knowledge to a variety of issues in sustainable community development. The findings we present suggest that increasing integration with a market economy and other outside influences exaggerated differences in social networks. Specifically, we found that those villages with more development activity had more dispersed households and fewer social resources at home. This was in part the trade-off for increased connections abroad and in cities around Nepal. We explore the potenital impacts of diffused social networks on long-term vulnerability. NGO staff working to maintain the sustainability of development's successes in the region will need to include the dynamics of local social networks in their analyses.

Biofuels production is strongly supported all over the world as a renewable energy source for reducing the dependence with respect to the unstable market of oil import. Bioethanol, the main biofuel produced in the world, is widely used for mobility in Brazil, and also in USA, but with little differences with respect to its sustainability. In Brazil it is produced from a by-product of the sugarcane industry; while, in USA it is manufactured from food crops. Biogas and biodiesel productions are growing fast but lesser than that of bioethanol. The European Union is looking at this issue with great interest and, in 2011, it adopted an extensive strategy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions related to transport by 60% within 2050. In order to achieve this result, a transformation of the current European transport system will be necessary. The ambitious goal will imply complex measures including the fossil fuels limitation in favor of renewable fuels. This program opens several possibilities concerning the development of biofuels (i.e. biogas, bioethanol and biodiesel) and their related technologies, which are still on trial (mainly regarding the bioethanol production) as well as object of economic and social sustainability analysis. The paper deals with the use of biofuels for transport in the European framework, showing that its sustainability could rise relevant negative social effects mainly due to the use of land for energy crops (e.g. change of food price and world food shortage).

Sustainability is a key factor of competitiveness. It is important that sustainability assessments are effectively addressed in a global perspective. Therefore, beside instruments such as, for example, the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and Social Life Cycle Assessment, which analyze the environmental, economic and social impacts throughout the life cycle of a product/process or a service, different tools and approaches are adopted as strategic tools for the management to evaluate more in detail and in an organic manner the impacts in terms of sustainability. Among these, it is particularly significant that the Life Cycle Management, being still in its early stage of development, is not applied by means globally shared, but presents extremely promising methodological features. For these reasons, it seemed interesting to propose an application to tourism activities, for the particular characteristics of service delivery, which better than others lend themselves to the development of data related to sustainability. The main goal of this paper is to present a wide theoretical review in literature for the tourism sector application, characterizing gaps and critical issues and, at the same time, outlining the well-established assumptions and the unexplored themes by the international community about this topic.

Based on a dialectical-materialist methodology transcending the traditional Cartesian dualism, this assay sets out to explore the metabolic relationship between society and nature. Starting from an abstractive level concerning all societies, irrespective of the particular form of production, we proceed to more specifically examine this relationship under capitalism. In this case, the role of technology and the organic composition of capital are further explored. As suggested, technology is non-neutral and socially shaped, essentially constituting a purposive reorganization of nature fused with the imperatives of capitalist production. Analyzing the systemic necessity of a rising organic composition of capital and a secular decline in average profit rates, we explain the long-run and recently exacerbated over-accumulation crisis. As this crisis is inextricably intertwined with a deepening ecological crisis, we suggest a joint treatment within the currently exacerbated socio-ecological crisis. The strategy to face this crisis through capitalization of nature is shown to be counter-productive as it leads to a further ecological degradation, while increasing the organic composition of capital and the cost of production. While this exacerbated crisis implies a rising scarcity, a communist perspective seems to imply an increasing abundance. In this sense, we conclude with a brief exploration of the conditions for a rational reconstitution of the metabolism with nature within a communist perspective.

This paper analyzes the product life cycle of the production of sugar cane for ethanol fuel in Brazil, to determine its sustainability in the long term. I have used a case study methodology and qualitative analysis to break down important elements involved in the production of sugar cane ethanol in Brazil. These elements include renewable energy aspects, agricultural practices, and the consequences of production on society involved in the process. Brazil currently derives 46 percent of its energy from renewable sources, but it is questionable whether they are sustainable in the long run. In order to create this renewable source of energy, the conversion process involves manually burning sugar cane, and creates harmful emissions. The industrialization process of planting and harvesting sugar cane has increased the use of chemical and technology, having a profoundly negative impact on the ecosystem due to the chemical contamination of the waterways, genetic impoverishment, and soil erosion. In addition, workers are exploited, poverty has been exacerbated, and food prices have increased. Although the production of ethanol has many advantages, including the substitution of petroleum, the social consequences remain a matter of grave concern. The process of obtaining renewable energy includes ecological destruction and negative social effects that are externalities of the economic calculations, and the requirements of capital accumulation dominate decision-making.

People will have to rely upon mineral oil for primary energy and this will go on for a few more decades. Other conventional sources of energy may be more enduring, but are not without serious disadvantages. The renewable energy resources are particularly suited for the provision of rural energy supplies. A major advantage of using the renewable energy sources is that equipment such as flat plate solar driers, wind machines, etc., can be constructed using local resources and with the advantage of local maintenance which can encourage local manufacturing that can give a boost to the building of small-scale rural based industries. This article gives a comprehensive review of energy sources, the environment and sustainable development in Sudan. It reviews the renewable energy technologies, energy efficiency systems, energy conservation scenarios, energy savings in greenhouses environment and other mitigation measures necessary to reduce climate change. This article gives some examples of small-scale energy converters, nevertheless it should be noted that small conventional, i.e., engines are currently the major source of power in rural areas and will continue to be so for a long time to come. There is a need for some further development to suit local conditions, to minimise spares holdings, to maximise interchangeability both of engine parts and of the engine application. Emphasis should be placed on full local manufacturing of some of the energy systems. It is concluded that renewable environmentally friendly energy must be encouraged, promoted, implemented and demonstrated by full-scale plan especially for use in remote rural areas of many developing nations.