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This study aims at understanding how higher education institutions (HEIs) can contribute to sustainable development, by designing their programmes for bringing about a transformative impact on communities and students, and also to examine what alternative pedagogical approaches could be used for that. In the past decades, HEIs have increasingly created social innovation (SI) programmes, as a way to achieve United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. These community-oriented and field-based programmes are difficult to ally with conventional classroom education. This study explores how these programmes could integrate the participatory approach and what would be the benefits. It also investigates the effectiveness of the experiential learning approach for teaching sustainability.

A case study method is used to document SI projects initiated by an HEI programme in rural India.

It was found that the participatory approach contributes to empowering communities and also benefits the students in terms of academic, professional and personal growth. Empirical findings show that experiential learning is an efficient method to teach sustainability. Ultimately, both pedagogical approaches are found to be mutually beneficial.

This study fills a gap in the literature, by providing empirical evidence on how HEI can implement innovative educational strategies such as participatory approach and experiential learning in their programmes towards teaching sustainability. A conceptual model for HEI interested in developing similar programmes is also proposed. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first studies focusing on the context of Indian HEI.

Young people in rural areas often face barriers when accessing participation opportunities in their municipalities. This affects their voices being heard and their ability to create change. Even though almost half the world’s population lives in rural areas, rural young people’s activism is often overlooked in the literature. In addition, when young people’s activism is explored in empirical research, conceptualisations of activism and methods are often not tailored to rural areas. This chapter, thus, adds to our understanding of young people’s activism in rural municipalities by drawing on a mixed methods case study including thirteen focus groups (FGs; n = 35) and a questionnaire (n = 106) with young people aged 13–17, and semi-structured interviews (n = 11) with teachers from one secondary school in a rural municipality in Germany. Five of the FGs were conducted and analysed by Year 10 students, adding unique insights into participants’ experience of activism. In this chapter, activism is conceptualised as one of the multiple dimensions of citizenship. Activism includes demanding systemic change, individually or collectively, which may include refusing to do things, aiming to prevent laws, raising awareness, and making consumer choices. Rather than being full-time activists, the young people in this study were engaged in only a few forms of activism, often carried out ad-hoc, part-time and in connection with other citizenship activities such as volunteering. Spaces for activism included online, the local municipality, everyday spaces such as the supermarket, and school. Participants experienced multiple barriers when engaging in activism including narratives of non-activist young people, age restrictions, power imbalances and few opportunities for creating change, particularly at participants’ school and in their municipalities.

Participatory budgeting's (PB’s) proponents hope that bringing development projects to historically underserved communities will improve well-being by extending infrastructure and services. This article details the logic connecting PB to well-being, describes the evolution of PB programs as they spread around the world and consolidates global evidence from research that tests hypotheses on PB's impact. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues.

Unstructured literature review and comparative case study across five global regions.

The authors find evidence for PB's impact on well-being in several important contexts, mostly not only in Brazil, but also in Peru and South Korea. They also find that very few rigorous, large-N, comparative studies have evaluated the relationship between PB and well-being and that the prospects for social accountability and PB's sustainability for well-being are not equally strong in all contexts. They argue that PB has great potential to improve well-being, but program designs, operational rules and supporting local conditions must be favorable to realize that potential.

This is one of the few efforts to build theory on where and why the authors would expect to observe relationships between PB and well-being. It is also one of the first to consolidate global evidence on PB's impact.

In this chapter, we consider collaborative models of engaged research in comparison to models of team science that include persons with lived experience of the topic area as team members. ‘Co-led’, ‘co-design’ and ‘co-research’ are all terms used in the literature with distinct, but not precise, definitions and approaches. These collaborative models tend to describe methods that allow those with lived experience to be treated differently than other academic members of the research team. Power imbalances between those with lived experiences and researchers persist in such models, in spite of researcher efforts. For example, persons with lived experience are often described as being compensated with gift cards which may be welcomed but can be perceived as diminishing their role and contribution. In contrast, participatory team science involves persons with lived experience as full members of the research team. In the model that we propose, power is balanced through mutual planning and consensus-based decision-making. We contend that using participatory team science advances research through egalitarian consideration of team members' perspectives of the research problem and the designs necessary to knowledge development.

The primacy of commerce in livelihood security cannot be overstated. However, in a rural context defined by involuntary socio-ecological displacement, commerce can assume a sociologically distinct character, with far-reaching implications. Based on first-hand encounters with victims of the devastating 2014 flood in Tokwe-Mukorsi, Zimbabwe, this paper analyses how the processes of “recreating” village markets in the resettlement site of Chingwizi impacted the victims’ experiences of resource provisioning and livelihood security.

Qualitative data were collected through 10 in-depth interviews, 10 key informant interviews and two focus group discussions, five years into the flood victims’ resettlement in Chingwizi. The data analysis focused on the dynamics around the recreation of village markets, and the consequences of this on the household economic standing of the resettled flood victims.

The paper reveals how the formation of village markets in Chingwizi was influenced not primarily by the ethno-commercial and ethno-economic impulses reminiscent of life in their ancestral home but mostly by new, disruptive dynamics and challenges unique to the resettlement site. The paper elucidates the constellation of factors that, together, exacerbated the flood victims’ overall socio-economic dislocation and disadvantage.

The study provides a systematic understanding of the dynamics of ethno-commerce, particularly on the evolution of village market activities and livelihoods, among Zimbabwe’s Chingwizi community over a period of five years into their resettlement. It brings to the fore, the often ignored, but significant nuances that 'village market' formation and livelihoods recreation takes in a resettlement context.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-09-2023-0682

This study aims to examine Musina municipality’s tourism development status and plans with existing documents and respondents’ responses on their envisaged implications on tourism development and sustainability initiatives in Vhembe District, Limpopo Province, South Africa.

Surveys, interviews and focus group discussions, supplemented by field observation and document reviews, gray literature alongside published literature, were applied. Subsequently, Microsoft Excel and cross-tabulation analysis orchestrated the analysis of the data.

The policy and strategy aspects contributing to the previous and actual tourism statuses in Musina municipality are defined. The study concludes that Musina Municipality has rich tourism possibilities but lacks a better tourism strategy to empower local communities. Nonetheless, it dwells in the most tourism-based landscape within the Vhembe District of Limpopo.

Musina Municipality is one of the driest areas in the north of Limpopo Province in South Africa. It is also marked by impoverished rural communities. Studies on sustainable tourism and development have increased in recent years. However, rare studies specialize in synergies within various forms of tourism. Also, significant resources to advance local communities in rural areas are not sufficiently appreciated.

The purpose of the study was to determine the major criteria for a credible integrated development planning (IDP) process in Mbombela municipality, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa.

The study utilizes a combination of sequential exploratory and explanatory mixed methods. About 120 key informants participated in the structured questionnaire, and a further seven interviews were conducted as elite interviews. Four multistakeholder workshop sessions with up to sixty-six participants each were conducted.

To strengthen the integrated planning in local government, the study recommended “stakeholder participation and ownership,” “leadership and accountability,” “impact and outcome-based focus,” “a compact value chain” and “monitoring and evaluation.”

The IDP process is a tactical planning gadget designed to achieve transformation and introduce new systems of governance. IDPs currently tend to lack standard criteria to measure their performance in promoting public leadership and responding to community needs, which is a major challenge in many municipalities across South Africa. Since its introduction in 2000 to fast-track service delivery, concerns have been raised about why there are still constant protests alleged to be caused by poor service delivery.

This paper aims to share how the Centre for Ageing and Dementia Research co-designs research within a national programme of work to improve the lives of older adults and those affected by dementia. Through examples of this work, the authors identify the barriers and enablers to participatory approaches and lessons to inform future involvement activities.

This study reflects on implementing the UK National Standards for Public Involvement into practice. Of international relevance, the observations span the research process from research prioritisation and design to research implementation and knowledge exchange.

This study demonstrates the importance of using a relational approach, working toward a common purpose and engaging in meaningful dialogue. Only through offering choice and flexibility and actively learning from one another can co-design lead to synergistic relationships that benefit everyone.

Key implications for researchers engaged in patient and public involvement are be receptive to other people’s views and acknowledge expertise of those with lived experience alongside those with academic expertise. Training, resources and time are required to effectively support involvement and meaningful relationships. A nominated contact person enables trust and mutual understanding to develop. This is an ongoing collective learning experience that should be embedded throughout the entire research process.

This paper demonstrates how the standards are implemented with people who are often excluded from research to influence a national programme of work.

Recognition that not every climate adaptation policy is a good one has shifted attention to new tools and methods to measure the adequacy and effectiveness of adaptation policies. This study aims to propose and apply and applies an innovative adaptation policy assessment framework to identify the extent to which climate adaptation policies in Vietnam exhibit conditions that are likely to ensure a sufficient, credible and effective adaptation.

In total, 21 conditions, categorized under five normative principles and covering critical issue areas in adaptation domain, form the climate adaptation policy assessment framework. The principles were double-checked and tested in case studies through observations and analyses of policy documents to ensure that each condition should be distinct and not overlapping across principles. To see if the principles and attendant conditions were able to capture all relevant aspects of adaptation, the authors used structured expert judgment. In total, 39 policy documents pertaining to climate change adaptation were selected for qualitative document analysis. In-depth interviews with local officials and experts were conducted to address data gaps.

The study reveals major weaknesses constituting a reasonably worrisome picture of the adaptation policies in Vietnam since several critical conditions were underrepresented. These results shed new light on why some adaptation policies falter or are posing adverse impacts. The findings suggest that a sound policy assessment framework can provide evidence on what effective adaptation policy looks like and how it can be enabled. The framework for climate adaptation policy assessment in this study can be easily adjusted and used for different socio-environmental contexts in which new conditions for policy assessment might emerge.

The findings show underlying weaknesses constituting a reasonably worrisome picture of the adaptation regime in Vietnam. In the absence of mechanisms and measures for accountability and transparency in policy processes, adaptation in Vietnam appears more likely to be prone to maladaptation and corruption. While solving these problems will not be easy for Vietnam, the government needs to evaluate whether the short-term gains in sustaining the existing adaptation policies really make progress and serve its long-term climate-adaptive development goals.

Although interpretations of adaptation effectiveness may be very divergent in different normative views on adaptation outcomes, the authors argue that a common, agreed-upon effectiveness can be reached if it is clearly defined and measurable in adaptation policies. Thus, the climate adaptation policy assessment framework proposed in this study is critical for policymakers, practitioners, donors and stakeholders dealing with adaptation to better understand the weaknesses in policymaking processes, pinpoint priority areas of action and timely prevent or prepare for possible adverse impacts of policies.

This case is the first of a three-part series that follows the managerial, strategic, and communications decisions of the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) or Clean India Mission, the flagship programme of the Government of India to eliminate the practice of open defecation (i.e., not using a toilet) from 2014 to 2019. As of 2014, 550 million people in India practiced open defecation. This problem posed a massive public health hazard and economic drag for the country as well as a threat to global health. Written from an insider's perspective, the cases centre on the decisions made by a new Secretary of the India's Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, who was hired to manage SBM, and the team he assembled. Case A sets the stage for addressing open defecation in rural India and discusses the human resources and strategic challenges to implementing SBM from the vantage point of the new Secretary. It ends with strategic dilemmas related to what the new SBM team should do once they had sized up the challenges to eliminating open defecation by 2019. The case provides an opportunity to deliberate the managerial and strategic decisions of a globally relevant public behaviour change and rural infrastructure development program as well as different forms of public sector implementation in the Indian context.