Effective Extension Sustainability in the face of COVID-19 Pandemic in Smallholder Agricultural Markets

The effects of COVID-19 have tested and crushed the earlier achievement in sustaining the agricultural and extension delivery system globally. COVID-19 has pressed a reset panel on the extension services more especially among the smallholder farmers who are already underprivileged. Specifically, this review paper aims to analyse studies on the sustainability of agricultural extension delivery systems in face of the COVID-19 crisis. The various theories and factors advanced in discussing sustainable agricultural extension delivery systems, and how they contribute to improved production and productivity to end poverty have been addressed. The COVID-19 mitigation strategies and their effect on agricultural extension sustainability have been laid bare. No single sustainability theory can explain how COVID-19 has disrupted the extension delivery systems. The service providers and farmers have had their effects differently, and all players have followed mitigation to the best of their knowledge. Extension delivery has undergone numerous modifications over the years to better meet the demands of farmers and the changing nature of the markets in which they operate. In order to provide effective service delivery and outcomes to farmers, collective involvement of various stakeholders is necessary since no single player can achieve effective extension sustainability alone due to the diverse nature of the challenges, which are mainly influenced by factors such as geographical location, poverty, and social status among others. Therefore, appropriate approaches should be selected based on the needs of farmers and the market dynamics of a specific economic orientation in a given area. We conclude that effective and sustainable extension delivery systems require many combined theories, support functions, formal and informal rules, and regulations involving all extension-based stakeholders. Keywords: Sustainability, COVID-19, smallholder farmers, agricultural market systems, extension services

Developing a sustainable career through discourse: a qualitative study on a group of Italian project managers

PurposeThe current study makes two main contributions: one theoretical and one methodological. First, it investigated the theoretical prepositions of career sustainability perspective, which appears particularly suitable for examining project managers' careers' dynamics and patterns, featured by explicit and recursive interactions between individual, temporal and contextual factors. Second, the study aimed to adopt a qualitative approach to this topic as to allow a deeper understanding of individual narratives about careers, highlighting underexplored issues and peculiarities that future research could further examine through quantitative methodologies.Design/methodology/approachProject managers' careers are still an under-researched topic, especially through qualitative methods. The study applied career sustainability theory to the realm of project management, moreover, adopting a socio-constructivist perspective. Participants were 50 Italian project managers who were involved through a narrative in-depth interview that focused on career and career success. Their answers were analyzed through thematic analysis of contents and diatextual analysis.FindingsResults showed that project managers' career could be a prototypical example of sustainable career, basically described in terms of four basic constitutive dimensions as follows: time frame, social space, agency and meaning. Implications for both future theoretical expansion of career sustainability theory and project managers' career management interventions were also discussed.Originality/valueThe originality of the paper could be found in the effort to adopt a socio-constructivist perspective to investigate the topic of career sustainability taking the exemplary case of project managers' career.

Determinants of Sustainability of Rural Agricultural Projects in Rwanda: Case of Maize Projects in Budubi Irrigation Scheme in Nyanza District

This study aimed at assessing the influence of financial input on the sustainability of maize projects in Budubi Irrigation Scheme; to investigate influence of Irrigation Scheme management on the sustainability of maize projects in Budubi Irrigation Scheme; to examine influence of benefits from maize on the sustainability of maize projects in Budubi Irrigation Scheme and to assess influence of care for environment on the sustainability of maize projects in Budubi Irrigation Scheme. The study was guided by the sustainability theory and applied a descriptive cross-sectional design, and population of 392 persons out of which a sample of 198 was applied. Document review, questionnaire, interview, and observation methods were used to collect data, while descriptive statistics and content analysis was applied for data analysis. Key words: Irrigation scheme, sustainability, agricultural projects, Maize projects.

Becoming Family Farmers: The Contribution of the Existential Ontological Perspective to the Social Learning for Sustainability Theory

This research examines social learning for sustainability (SLfS), particularly in its social dimension. Few studies have discussed or advanced on the ontological issues of SLfS relating to who social actors are becoming. This study aims to describe and analyze how the process of SLfS facilitates Brazilian families who were at the base of the social pyramid (no income) to change the status from landless campers to family farmers with land moving up four levels in the social pyramid over a decade. The research is qualitative interpretative, based on narratives from semi-structured interviews with 16 social actors and document analysis. The results show the meaning of learning professional ways of being family farmers from an existential ontological perspective.

Resource Scarcity and Sustainability—The Shapes Have Shifted but the Stakes Keep Rising

The objective is to provide an interpretive reading of the literature in resource scarcity and sustainability theory from the nineteenth century to the present time, focusing on shifts that have occurred in problem definition, conceptual framing, research tools applied, findings, and their implications. My reading shows, as one would expect, that the discourse has become more technical and the analysis more sophisticated; special cases have been incorporated into the mainstream of theory; and, where relevant, dynamic formulations have largely supplanted static analysis. However, that is barely scratching the surface. Here, I focus on more fundamental shifts. Exhaustible and renewable resource analyses were incorporated into the mainstream theory of financial and capital markets. Parallels between the resources and environmental spheres were discovered: market failure concepts, fundamental to environmental policy, found applications in the resources sector (e.g., fisheries), and renewable resource management concepts and approaches (e.g., waste assimilation capacity) were adopted in environmental policy. To motivate sustainability theory and assessment, there has been a foundational problem shift from restraining human greed to dealing with risk viewed as chance of harm, and a newfound willingness to look beyond stochastic risk to uncertainty, ambiguity, and gross ignorance. Newtonian dynamics, which seeks a stable equilibrium following a shock, gave way to a new dynamics of complexity that valued resilience in the face of shocks, warned of potential for regime shifts, and focused on the possibility of systemic collapse and recovery, perhaps incomplete. New concepts of sustainability (a safe minimum standard of conservation, the precautionary principle, and planetary boundaries) emerged, along with hybrid approaches such as WS-plus which treats weak sustainability (WS) as the default but may impose strong sustainability restrictions on a few essential but threatened resources. The strong sustainability objective has evolved from maintaining baseline flows of resource services to safety defined as minimizing the chance of irreversible collapse. New tools for management and policy (sustainability indicators and downscaled planetary boundaries) have proliferated, and still struggle to keep up with the emerging understanding of complex systems.

Sustainability Beyond Technology

Current debates on sustainability are largely building on a problematic assumption that increasing technology use and advancement are a desired phenomenon, creating positive change in human organizations. This kind of techno-optimism prevails particularly in the discourses of ecological modernization and green growth, as well as in the attempts to design sustainable modes of production and consumption within growth-driven capitalism. This transdisciplinary book investigates the philosophical underpinnings of technology, presents a culturally sensitive critique of technology, and outlines feasible alternatives for sustainability beyond technology. By examining the conflicts and contradictions between technology and sustainability in human organizations, the book develops a novel way to conceptualize, confront and change technology in modern society. The book draws on a variety of scholarly disciplines, including humanities (philosophy and environmental history), social sciences (ecological economics, political economy, and ecology) and natural sciences (geology and thermodynamics) to contribute to sustainability theory and policy.

Exploring Global Fashion Sustainability Practices through Dictionary-Based Text Mining

Nowadays, more fashion companies have started to adopt various sustainability practices and communicate these practices through their annual public CSR reports. In this study, we aim to provide a holistic perspective of fashion companies’ sustainable development and investigate the sustainability practices of global fashion companies. A total of 181 CSR reports from 29 fashion companies were collected. A Dictionary approach text classification method, combined with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a computer-assisted topic modeling algorithm, was implemented to detect and summarize the themes and keywords of detailed practices disclosed in CSR reports. The findings identified 12 main sustainability practices themes based on the triple bottom line theory and the moral responsibility of corporate sustainability theory. In general, waste management and human rights are the most frequently mentioned themes. The findings also suggest that global fashion companies adopted different sustainability strategies based on their product categories and competitive advantages.

Islamic banking sustainability: theory and evidence using a novel quadruple bottom line framework

PurposeThe study aims to extend the conventional triple bottom line (TBL) framework (prosperity, people and planet) to the quadruple bottom line (QBL) by newly adding a “prophet” dimension for Islamic banks seeking compliance with Islamic law in their pursuit of sustainability.Design/methodology/approachEmploy Chapra's corollaries of maqasid al-shari'ah (the goals of Islamic law) to develop constructs for a survey of 504 Islamic bank stakeholders from five Indonesian provinces to gather primary data to quantitatively verify the dimensions and items in the proposed QBL framework. Categorical principal component analysis (CATPCA) then identifies the sustainability of ten Islamic banks from ten countries as a trial application of the resulting QBL index.FindingsUsing the dimensions and items identified using CATPCA, the authors develop a QBL index to assess the sustainability of the ten Islamic banks. The findings suggest that half of the banks are sufficiently sustainable, with three being proactive (doing more than is required) and two being accommodative (doing all that is required). The remaining five banks are unsustainable, with two banks being defensive (doing the least that is required) and three being reactive (doing less than is required). Most of the banks perform relatively poorly according to the “planet” (38%) and “people” (41%) dimensions and perform better on the “prosperity” (53%) and “prophet” (63%) dimensions. Nonetheless, there is ample room for improvement across all dimensions of sustainability.Research limitations/implicationsThe generalizability of the findings is limited by the small-scale single-country survey used in the CATPCA part of the analysis. Only ten Islamic banks were included in the QBL scoring and ranking exercisesPractical implicationsIslamic banks can improve their sustainability by increasing green financing and reaching out to rural areas and disadvantaged populations. In countries with Islamic banking systems, regulators can support this through training, guidance and incentives.Originality/valuePioneering exploration of TBL from maqasid al-shari'ah perspective. First, we develop a QBL index to assess the sustainability of Islamic banks in line with actual stakeholder expectations.

Supervisor’s Green Commitment as a Predictor of Employee Green Work Behavior

Scant amount of research led to conduct an empirical investigation with the purpose of identifying the effect of supervisor’s green commitment on employee green work behavior. While addressing this gap in the extant literature, the study made a methodological contribution by validating a scale for green work behavior. A sample of 96 machine operators from often ready to wear apparel-manufacturing firms in Katunayake and Pallekele industrial zones in Sri Lanka responded to a survey. The collected data were analyzed with the hierarchical regression analysis. The results reported that the commitment demonstrated by supervisors in terms of their dedication to the environmental sustainability and willingness to engage with pro-environmental behavior fosters employees to engage with green work behavior. The outcomes of the study provide implications to psychological contract theory and the social sustainability theory. In terms of policy implications, the study proposes decision makers to implement green commitment- and green behavior-enhancing human resource management (HRM) practices. The policy makers should introduce green commitment-enhancing HR practices for their employees such as rewards, recognition programs, inclusion of green criteria in performance management, as well as green training. Consequently, managerial and supervisory level employees will commit on achieving environmental sustainability goals and assist other employees to perform their green work. The limitations of the study and directions for future studies are also discussed.