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Purpose – This chapter will examine the role of Central Park in setting in motion certain practices related to park development as well as revolutionizing park financing in the mid-nineteenth century and again in modern times. It will examine the shift from public financing of parks to the development of public–private partnerships to design, build, fund, and administer urban parks.

Design/methodology/approach – The author takes an historical approach to put contemporary park debates vis-à-vis funding and administration in context. Archival materials are used to examine park financing models all over the country.

Findings – Central Park still continues to revolutionize urban park financing. Cities are cutting back on funding for public parks; as a result, there is a greater reliance on private financing options. Not all parks are in a position to rely heavily on private financing, and this raises questions about access to open space in cities.

Originality/value – The chapter raises questions about equity in the shift toward the private financing of urban parks. It extends the environmental justice discourse to examine open space issues. It examines long-term historical trends in helping the reader understand the contemporary state of urban park financing.

This chapter evaluates the impacts of and response measures to COVID-19 pandemic on the practice of tourism in the wildlife conservancy model in Kenya thus proposing response interventions to possible tourism crises in the future.

The study uses the qualitative exploratory experience design and collects data from purposely selected conservancies' leaders and other documented materials from two main wildlife conservancies association in Kenya.

The chapter presents findings on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on wildlife conservancy-based tourism, how conservancies responded to the pandemic and conservancy leadership perspectives on how to model future tourism and related activities in the conservancies based on the lessons they have learnt from the COVID-19 experience.

With the wildlife conservancy-based tourism model in Kenya being a relatively new phenomenon, the study provides important lessons for comparison with other such initiatives in other places in the event of tourism crises in the future.

This chapter argues that better preparedness to crises and uncertainties by various tourism types and models can help mitigate against adverse effects of similar uncertainties in the future. Consequently, the findings offer a glimpse of proposals and solutions to the wildlife conservancy-based tourism models that continue to be established in Kenya and in the region.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the potential for pastoral communities inhabiting Kenyan Masailand to adapt to climate change using conservancies and payments for ecosystem services.

Multiple methods and data sources were used, comprising: a socio‐economic survey of 295 households; informal interviews with pastoralists, conservancy managers, and tourism investors; focus group discussions; a stakeholder workshop. Monthly rainfall data was used to analyse drought frequency and intensity. A framework of the interactions between pastoralists' drought coping and risk mitigation strategies and the conservancy effects was developed, and used to qualitatively assess some interactions across the three study sites. Changes in household livestock holdings and sources of cash income are calculated in relation to the 2008‐09 drought.

The frequency and intensity of droughts are increasing but are localised across the three study sites. The proportion of households with per capita livestock holdings below the 4.5 TLU poverty vulnerability threshold increased by 34 per cent in Kitengela and 5 per cent in the Mara site, mainly due to the drought in 2008‐2009. Payment for ecosystem services was found to buffer households from fluctuating livestock income, but also generates synergies and/or trade‐offs depending on land use restrictions.

The contribution of conservancies to drought coping and risk mitigation strategies of pastoralists is analyzed as a basis for evaluating the potential for ecosystem‐based adaptation.

Tourism development, emerging market entrepreneurship.

This case may be used in lower or upper division courses. Lower division courses may want to focus on the elementary issues of project planning, business plan development, and marketing. Upper division courses will find opportunities to enhance the discussion with ethical dilemmas and more advanced business plan development.

The case takes place in a nature conservancy in Namibia. A local villager wants to open an attraction portraying local customs, traditions, art, and dance for tourists. This case can be used as an introductory strategy case study in at least three types of classes, strategic management, entrepreneurship, or hospitality management. The case presents many opportunities for students to analyze various business topics, including start-up financing, competitive and industry analysis, questions of pricing, product, and promotion, government relations, tourism development, and ethics. It is designed to be taught in either a 1 hour class or a 1.5 hour class with student preparation taking between 2 and 3 hours depending on the questions assigned. If students are asked to complete a business plan the preparation and discussion time will be longer.

Students will demonstrate ability to prepare a business plan, conduct market research, and evaluate potential business idea using Porter's five forces. Students will also demonstrate depth of understanding ethical dilemmas in an emerging and foreign market.

Teaching note.

To better understand how corporate communicators and human resources professionals can champion volunteer activities and youth engagement as evidence of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability commitment, this chapter explores representations of urban youth conservation–environmental empowerment through a textual analysis of three organizations’ websites: Clearwater, the Philadelphia Zoo, and The Nature Conservancy. In addition to identifying common themes across the websites, I compared each program to the Critical Social Theory of Youth Empowerment (CSTYE) framework consisting of six dimensions for maximum success in empowering youth stakeholders (Jennings, Parra-Medina, Hilfinger-Messias, & McLoughlin, 2006). Recommendations are provided for organizations using environmental–conservation programs targeting young people – and other researchers of this phenomenon.

Mega construction projects (MCPs), which play an important role in the economy, society and environment of a country, have developed rapidly in recent years. However, due to frequent social conflicts caused by the negative social impact of MCPs, social risk control has become a major challenge. Exploring the relationship between social risk factors and social risk from the perspective of risk evolution and identifying key factors contribute to social risk control; but few studies have paid enough attention to this. Therefore, this study aims to systematically analyze the impact of social risk factors on social risk based on a social risk evolution path.

This study proposed a social risk evolution path for MCPs explaining how social risk occurs and develops with the impact of social risk factors. To further analyze the impact quantitatively, a social risk analysis model combining structural equation model (SEM) with Bayesian network (BN) was developed. SEM was used to verify the relationship in the social risk evolution path. BN was applied to identify key social risk factors and predict the probabilities of social risk, quantitatively. The feasibility of the proposed model was verified by the case of water conservancy projects.

The results show that negative impact on residents’ living standards, public opinion advantage and emergency management ability were key social risk factors through sensitivity analysis. Then, scenario analysis simulated the risk probability results with the impact of different states of these key factors to obtain management strategies.

This study creatively proposes a social risk evolution path describing the dynamic interaction of the social risk and first applies the hybrid SEM–BN method in the social risk analysis for MCPs to explore effective risk control strategies. This study can facilitate the understanding of social risk from the perspective of risk evolution and provide decision-making support for the government coping with social risk in the implementation of MCPs.

This paper aims to propose that the socio-technical perspective is under-represented when appraising the adoption potential of renewable energy technologies (RETs) in late-industrialising countries and that this results in under-adoption. It also aims to identify a methodological approach that allows the socio-technical perspective to be integrated into management decision-making, alongside the more typical economic appraisal methodology.

A case study and novel mixed-methodology approach is used, which applies the diffusion of innovations framework, innovation system (IS) framework and system dynamics modelling (SDM) alongside traditional economic modelling and appraisal techniques. This approach is used to assess the adoption potential of solar photovoltaic (PV) and diesel water pumping systems in the wildlife conservation sector and surrounding rural communities in Kenya. The case study approach tests the merits of the mixed-methodology approach.

The life-cycle costs of solar PV water pumping systems are lower in nearly all financing and utilisation scenarios; offer additional social, technical and environmental benefits; and the conditions exist for greater adoption. The use of an integrated diffusion of innovations and IS framework generates significant qualitative data that can support management decision-making. The use of SDM techniques aid conceptualisation of the community economic, water and institutional systems into which water pumps may be diffused and provide a starting point for formal SDM simulation. The results suggest that these techniques capture the socio-technical perspective well and, when used alongside traditional project appraisal approaches, produce more complete information with which to support management decision-making.

This mixed-methodology approach could be used by practitioners to increase the diffusion and adoption of RETs in more complex contexts in late-industrialising countries. The emergent theory built through the case-study approach should be tested further to assess the merits of applying these techniques to support RET management decision-making in other contexts and more broadly.

Now that the human-animal distinction is increasingly critiqued from various disciplinary perspectives, to the point where some suggest even letting go of the distinction completely, the purpose of this paper is to argue that organizational ethnography should start to explore in more detail what this means for organizational ethnographic research, theory and analysis to include non-human animals in it.

Revisiting the author’s earlier organizational ethnographic work in Zimbabwe on a private wildlife conservancy, an organization that was specifically set up for and around wildlife. At the same time these non-human animals were not taken into account methodologically nor featured at all in the empirical material or in the analysis. What could it mean for the analysis and conclusions if non-human animals would have been part of the equation?

Since we live in a world shared between human and non-human animals, this also is true for the organizational lives. As scientific research increasingly shows that the distinction between human and non-human animals is more in degree than in kind it is interesting to note that nevertheless non-human animals usually produce deafening “silences” in organizational ethnographic work. Revisiting the author’s earlier organizational ethnographic work in this context the author shows how taking non-human animals on board of the analysis radically alters the outcomes of the research.

This paper reports on revisiting the author’s earlier ethnographic research, without actually doing the research itself again. In that sense it is a hypothetical study.

Organizational ethnography might have to rethink what it would mean in terms of fieldwork methodologies if it would allow non-human animals as actual agentic stakeholders in the research and analysis. It would at least need to also think in terms of “research methodologies without words” as non-human animals cannot be interviewed.

The paper is based on a social justice perspective on human-animal relations. It tries to contribute to an intellectual argument to take non-human animals more seriously as “co-citizens” in the (organizational) life world. This may have wide ranging implications for the life styles, ranging from the types of food we eat, to liquids we drink, to the ways we think about the human superiority in this world.

A highly self-reflexive account of the author’s earlier organizational ethnographic work, showing what it means theoretically if we take non-human animals seriously in organizational ethnographic research and analysis. At the same time it shows quite painfully organizational ethnography’s speciecist approach to research methodologies and processes of organizing.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the support for multi-party collaboration in project construction provided by building information modeling (BIM). Based on the perspective of value co-creation, the research results can provide support for the collaborative application and contract design of BIM platform.

In this paper, an evolutionary game model involving the owner, designer and constructor is constructed by using prospect theory and evolutionary game theory. Through simulation analysis, the evolution law of the strategy choice of each party in the collaborative application of BIM platform is discussed and the key factors affecting the strategy choice of all parties are analyzed.

The results show that there is an ideal local equilibrium point with progressive stability in the evolutionary game between the three parties: “the construction party shares information, the designer receives the information and optimizes the project and the owner does not provide incentives”; in addition, the opportunistic behaviors of the design and construction parties, as well as the probability of such behaviors being detected and the subsequent punishment have a significant impact on the evolutionary outcome.

This method can provide support for the collaborative application and contract design of BIM platform.