Motivated by a lack of research on port sustainability performance and assessment, this paper uses a systematic literature review to identify trends, measurement methods, and mechanisms for the implementation of strategy and policy in this area. The paper provides a comprehensive and critical evaluation of port operational sustainability, focusing on ascertaining the impact of its implementation. The study analysed and synthesised established characteristics in the current literature regarding the performance of port sustainability and its evaluation in terms of operations and management. Successful performance measurement in port sustainability is driven by the dependence on establishing accurate indicators as the basis for measurement. Our clustering of analytical sustainability indicators reveals that environmental research is focused on pollution, social research is mainly focused on human resource management, while economic research is mainly on port management and borderline investment. Findings are discussed in four key areas of port sustainability performance and assessment: existing trends, implementation of measures, mechanisms for implementation, and assessment gaps and challenges. For existing trends, attempts to evaluate the applicability and practicality of green operations have improved the awareness and promotion of governmental green policies. Implementation measures relate to the utilisation of techniques that reveal optimal practices for practical sustainable operations while mechanisms largely relate to establishing indicators which increase understanding of performance. Finally, challenges in this field include achieving consistency among ports in how sustainability is measured. Future research should incentivise improvements in port operational practice and encourage self-examination in order to reprioritise activity.

This policy brief argues that the COVID-19 pandemic exposes the fractures in the contemporary global socio-technical order and offers the prospects of several different alternative futures. The policy brief explores the pandemic through the lens of the multi-level perspective on socio-technical transitions. The pandemic is framed as a meta-transition event at the landscape level of unprecedented scale, pace, and pervasiveness such that it permeates all socio-technical regimes simultaneously. The prospects for the future are then defined on a matrix that compares the strength of civil society and that of economic structures. The result is four distinct scenarios that are linked to contemporary discourses on socioeconomic futures: business as usual; managed transition; chaotic transition; and managed degrowth. The scenarios are presented as a starting point for policy discussion and the engagement of societal actors to define social and economic possibilities for the future, and the implications that the different futures would have for ecological burdens. It is concluded that the COVID 19 pandemic can act as a catalytic event in which the legitimacy and efficacy of existing economic and political structures will be challenged and reshaped, and hence is an opportunity to redefine the ecological burdens our activities create.

In this paper, we examine whether the relationship between high-commitment HR practices and two employee outcomes, quit intentions and organisational citizenship behaviours (OCBs), is contingent on organizational identification. Incorporating insights from both social exchange and social identity theories, we propose that the relationship between high-commitment HR systems, intention to quit and OCBs is attenuated when employees strongly identify with their organization. This proposition was tested and supported with employees of a Swedish relocation company and a Greek shipping organization. For high identifiers, as perceptions of HR practices deteriorated from high to low, they were associated with smaller increases in quit intentions, and smaller decreases in citizenship behaviours. But overall, high identifiers always had lower quit intentions and higher citizenship behaviours than low identifiers, which is managerially reassuring.

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This paper draws on socio-technical transitions theory to contextualise recent developments in the technological and operational eco-efficiency of ships, which may ameliorate but not resolve sustainability challenges in shipping. Taking an historical perspective, the paper argues that shipping is fundamentally a derived demand arising out of, but also enabling, the spatial separation of production and consumption that are integrated through global value chains. It is argued that the twin processes of innovation-enabled specialisation (into e.g. container ships; bulk carriers etc.) and increased scale both of ships and of shipping operations have embedded shipping into logistics systems of increasing complexity and reach. The objective of the paper is to demonstrate, using secondary data, the long-run trends in the growth of shipping carbon emissions for bulkers and tankers, as well as the impact of increased scale and vessel speed on such emissions. A fuel-based, top-down, methodology, based on fuel consumption estimates derived from secondary source industry data that are suitable for a macro-level analysis, is used to estimate global shipping carbon emissions. It is argued that technologies or operational innovations that reduce the environmental burdens of shipping, while useful, do not represent the socio-technical system 'regime' shift that international maritime logistics requires in order to contribute to improved sustainability. Rather, in the relative absence of strong governance mechanisms in the maritime field, it is underlying 'landscape' shifts in production and consumption that are likely to act to reduce the demand for shipping and hence to be more significant in the longer run.