Showing papers by "Rüdiger Hahn published in 2017"

Indicators in Social Life Cycle Assessment: A Review of Frameworks, Theories, and Empirical Experience

Abstract: Summary Industrial ecology (IE) and life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) are increasingly important in research, regulation, and corporate practice. However, the assessment of the social pillar is still at a developmental stage, because social life cycle assessment (SLCA) is fragmented and lacks a foundation on empirical experience. A critical reason is the absence of general standardized indicators that clearly reflect and measure businesses’ social impact along product life cycles and supply chains. Therefore, we systematically review trends, coherences, inconsistencies, and gaps in research on SLCA indicators across industry sectors. Overall, we find that researchers address a broad variety of sectors, but only few sectors receive sufficient empirical attention to draw reasonable conclusions while the field is additionally still largely an a-theoretical one. Furthermore, researchers overlook important social core issues as they concentrate heavily on worker- and health-related indicators. Therefore, we synthetize the most important indicators used in research as a step toward standardization (including critical challenges in applying these indicators and recommendations for their future development), highlight important trends and gaps (e.g., the focus on worker- and health-related indicators and the a-theoretical nature of the SLCA literature), and emphasize critical shortcomings in the SLCA field organized along the key phases of design, implementation, and evolution through which performance measurement approaches such as SLCA typically progress in their development and maturation. With this, we contribute to the maturation and establishment of the social pillar of LCSA and IE.

Sustainable development at the BoP : On integrated approaches beyond trade-off thinking

Abstract: Some of the most significant obstacles encountered when integrating sustainable development at the ‘base of the pyramid’ (BoP) are the limits to growth that restrict the extended development of the poor, especially when applying a resource-intensive Western way of living. Nevertheless, from a normative ethical perspective poverty alleviation is an integral part of sustainable development according to the notion of intragenerational justice in the Brundtland definition. With this in mind, the chapter first strives to highlight possible trade-offs between an improvement of the situation of the poor and the conservation of the Earth’s long-term ecological capacity. It will then discuss potentially positive correlations between these two aims, before offering a theoretical outlook on the combination of the two concepts of sustainable development and BoP. Considering the bilateral interdependencies, the author infers that different ways of sustainable consumption and production need to be found to fully integrate these two concepts. For this purpose, the chapter continues by discussing such a transformation. There has been extensive and controversial debate on the approaches of eco-efficiency, eco-effectiveness and sufficiency in the literature of sustainable development; within the BoP context, these three aspects gain further significance. They will be defined theoretically and extended by their impact on and interdependencies with the BoP. The chapter concludes with thoughts on how all three approaches can contribute to sustainable development at the BoP, proposing that a combination (partly as hybrid forms) needs to be considered to achieve this objective.

Emergence and Selection of Cross-Sector Partnerships for Sustainability

Abstract: Cross-sector partnerships are emerging in companies to help firms tackle sustainability issues. Extant research on cross-sector partnerships explains why partnerships form but little is known how t...