Today, more than ever, achieving sustainability of business activities, intertwining social, economic, and environmental perspectives, is one of the most challenging objectives for companies. Project management processes are no exception. This paper aims to contribute to the current research knowledge through a systematic review of the literature on the integration of project management and sustainability. Specifically, the aim was to clarify the research domains of sustainable project management, and to understand the current state of development and the future research directions. Results indicate that academic literature about this topic is still in its infancy, but that scholars’ attention is growing, opening new research directions. Based on the literature review results, we propose a new conceptual framework linking five key dimensions of sustainable project management: corporate policies and practices, resource management, life cycle orientation, stakeholders’ engagement, and organizational learning.
Abstract:The world is continuously transforming to supply growing cities and urbanization processes are still driving important changes in our current food systems. Future sustainability constraints are emphasizing that Food Supply and Distribution Systems (FSDS) are deeply embedded in city-region systems with specific technical and socio-ecological characteristics. This paper aims to provide a systemic understanding on FSDS focusing the integration of urban and rural structures considering the system biophysical boundaries and societal targets. A qualitative framework model, based on the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)'s FSDS literature, has been developed by using Systems Thinking (ST) and System Dynamics (SD) approaches. The model analysis suggested that to increase sustainability and resilience of food systems large emphasis has to be maintained on: (i) estimation of local territorial carrying capacities; (ii) land use planning to enhance connections among rural supplies and city needs; (iii) city policies, to regulate emergent market size and local scale of production; (iv) technological efficiency at farm, distribution and market levels; (v) urban, peri-urban and rural functional linkages that considers social metabolic balances; (vi) rural development as a core point for building sustainable food systems and counteracting the urbanization growth. These key areas are relevant to test new paths of cities-regions reconfiguration towards the transition to resilient agri-food systems.
In the last thirty years the role of the government has moved consistently away from services provision to regulation. Society and economy has become more interconnected, unstable and unpredictable than ever, and citizens are keener to engage in complex policy making. Within this context, traditional tools for policy making, based upon the perfectly rational representative agent maximizing its own utility in a general equilibrium framework, have been demonstrated to be unable to predict and cope with some of today's most pressing challenges, such as the financial crisis and climate change. Despite the explosion of data availability, the possibility to analyse them through crowdsourcing and large scale collaboration, the advance in modelling and simulation tools for assessing non-linear impact of policy options, the full potential offered by the new instruments for policy making has yet to be achieved. Therefore policy makers have not yet at their disposal a set of instruments able to cope with the needs stemming from their decision making activities. In order to meet those needs the project CROSSOVER "Bridging Communities for Next Generation Policy-Making" is elaborating a demand/driven "International Research Roadmap on ICT tools for Governance and Policy Modelling", which links the needs and the activities of policy-making with current and future research challenges. Copyright 2012 ACM
The chapter is based on current research conducted by the authors as part of the “CROSSOVER Project – Bridging Communities for Next Generation Policy Making,” an FP7-funded support action of the European Commission, whose main goal is to reach out to and raise the awareness of users, particularly public government practitioners and policymakers, while developing a research roadmap for establishing the scientific and political basis for long-lasting interest and commitment to next generation policymaking. In particular, the chapter identifies the opportunities and benefits resulting from applications of ICT tools for collaborative governance and policy modeling and provides an outline of what technologies are and will be available to meet the needs of policymakers. The project builds on the CROSSROAD model and roadmap with the aim to reach a stronger focus on policy modeling.
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