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Chapter 16 is an introduction to systems thinking and analyzing the system dynamics of relationships within an organization or between organizations. Systems thinking builds on the propositions that (1) all variables or conditions have both dependent and independent relationships, (2) lag effects occur in relationships, (3) feedback relationships occur (e.g., A→B→C→A), and (4) seemingly minor relationships (i.e., “hidden demons”) have huge influence in causing a set of relationships (i.e., a system) to implode or explode. The propositions of building and testing a set of relationships apply in many contexts; this chapter examines systems thinking and system dynamics in one context as an introduction to this stream of case study research. Hall (1976) provides details of an advanced application of systems dynamics research – do not be fooled by the date of the study; Hall (1976) is an exceptional up-to-date case research study using system dynamics modeling. This chapter describes the issues and criticisms concerning golf, tourism, and the environment and considers how golf–tourism–environment relationships might achieve economic well-being for a region while avoiding vicious cycles of destruction to local environments and the quality of life of local residents. The examination proposes the use of systems thinking, cause mapping, and system dynamics modeling and simulations of golf, tourism, and environmental relationships to help achieve workable solutions agreeable to all stakeholders. Sustainable relationships that include golf, tourism, and environmental objectives require crafting government policies via stakeholder participation of all parties that such relationships affect – recognizing and enabling this requirement needs to be done explicitly – to reduce conflicts among stakeholders and avoid system failures.

The purpose of the study is to examine the relationship between air pollution and life expectancy considering the roles of institutional quality, agricultural output, foreign direct investment (FDI) and other socio-economic variables in Nigeria from 1981Q1 to 2019Q4.

The study employed spliced quarterly data from annual series collected from the World Bank development indicators and Central Bank of Nigeria. The dynamic multivariate models were analysed using the vector error correction mechanism (VECM), variance decomposition and Granger causality techniques.

The VECM result indicated a statistically significant adverse effect of air pollution on life expectancy. However, institutional quality, gross domestic product per capita, agricultural output, government social expenditure and school enrolment rate ameliorate the adverse health effects of air pollution, while FDI had mixed effects on life expectancy at different significance levels and at varying lag lengths. The Granger causality result revealed a uni-directional causality from air pollution to life expectancy; bidirectional causal chain between agriculture, FDI, government social expenditure and life expectancy, while a uni-directional causal linkage run from life expectancy to income per head and from school enrolment to life expectancy respectively. However, there is no evidence of causation between institutional quality and life expectancy due to weak institutional quality, but foreign direct invest causes carbon emission in a uni-directional manner in line with pollution haven hypothesis.

The study's modelling is limited by not considering the resource curse variable in the model due to paucity of data. Nigeria is the biggest crude oil exporter in Africa and ranks 13th globally with daily output of about 2.4 m barrels. Thus, the negation of resource curse in air pollution–life expectancy nexus de-emphasises the effectiveness of rich resources on health and environment. Future studies could address this limitation by incorporating resource curse in environmental-health models for Nigeria.

It is imperative for the country to adopt stringent anti-air pollution strategies that would establish a balance between FDI attraction and agricultural expansion to the benefits of her citizens' longevity. Also, education should be considered as a strategic action to enhance life expectancy through expansion in the provision, accessibility and affordability to improved school enrolment rate. The choice of quarterly time series over annual data helped to establish the current relationship between air pollution and life expectancy using efficient estimators.

The study contributes to literature by disaggregating yearly series into quarterly series, which has implications for the efficiency of the estimates, unlike earlier studies which ignored this fundamental process. The result of this study produced reliable policy direction for improvement in life expectancy in an emerging economy since quarterly estimates are more robust and reliable for forecasting than its yearly counterpart. The outcome of the study extended the original tenets of the Grossman's health stock theory using the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) and pollution haven hypotheses (PHH).

This qualitative descriptive research study served to clarify sustained social and economic natures of African business innovation and entrepreneurial development leadership. The research question included interviewed African leader participants (5), “How do you describe your experience in African leadership?” In-depth phone interview responses detailed familiar leadership words and phrases about historic, cultural, and economic environments. African leaders described how they understand, discover, observe, and share perspectives on African leadership experiences for personal hardship, survival, and societal, cultural, physical, and organizational change. Using phenomenological research methods, transcript analysis of interview experience responses integrated common properties. Verbatim transcriptions, and reading, sifting, combining, reducing, and interpreting the data collection resulted in thematic coding and categorizing. Investigation results included interpreted meaning for facilitated interactions in African leadership descriptions. Study conclusions highlighted many, varied, and unusual pathways for African leadership, rather than a single model. Sensitivities to participative, divergent, and non-linear thinking characterized transformational African leadership styles (Green, 2014). Possible research implications contributed to future work, connecting the study findings with Network Theory.

Education is foundational for creating caring sustainable leaders and organizations. This paper aims to investigate whether historically eminent Lebanese universities are integrating sustainability courses and practices in their curriculum, and to discern whether these universities’ administrators are currently providing, or plan to provide, positive educational experience through addressing sustainability concepts and tools in their respective universities.

The authors based their qualitative study on a multimodal design for explorative and recommendation purposes. The review of literature and online search facilitated setting standards and benchmarking. Face-to-face interviews and observation corroborated the findings and provided insight. The information was systematically ordered to tackle sustainability as a product and as a process on different campuses. All research was subject to ethical clearance from the studied subjects.

Compiling the input from all participants revealed that there is an urgent need to reform universities’ products and processes, in addition to a necessary call for support from governmental entities. The seeds of environmental sustainability are present in varying degrees in universities that have been continuously functional in the service of higher education in Lebanon for a period of 50 years or more.

The lack of contextual, comprehensive models, toward which change can be geared, presents a limitation to this work. Another limitation is that this study was restricted to historically prominent universities with the valid assumption that they play a leadership role in higher education. More universities should be investigated to further validate the findings, to complement this project and to allow for generalizability and comparison with initial findings.

More focus is needed to prepare present students and the future community to rely on available resources. The paper outlines the need to change the educational approach in Lebanese universities. It addresses a call to the administrators of all universities to provide the right policies, tools, materials and other resources to help sustainability.

Universities are called to play a major role especially in inspiring and teaching sustainability concepts. It is worth noting that education can be seen as a social good. If education is well served, it can create jobs, generate high revenues and raise standards of living. But serving the education “well” may require disruption of the status quo, which, if done creatively, will lead to novel approaches and solutions that outweigh the disruption itself.

This paper has exposed the status quo of universities vis-à-vis sustainability, but it has also challenged “what is”, and opened up possibilities of what “could be”. Educational projects should be adapted with the participation of the private sector to stimulate innovation, and experience the lived dimension of sustainability. Implementing such a change represents the bridge between current and needed ways of thinking required by the new environment.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, it explores the influencing factors of the government’s trust decision-making in the private sector; second, it explores how these influencing factors affect the government’s trust decisions.

A theoretical model was established, and a questionnaire survey was conducted among 152 professionals. The collected datas were analyzed by the structural equation modeling (SEM) method.

The study identified four critical factors that influence the government’s decision to trust the private sector in public-private-partnership (PPP) projects. All the four factors have a positively correlated impact on the government’s trust decision-making. The structural equation path analysis shows that the most important factor affecting the government’s trust decision-making is the trustee’s (private sector) trustworthy characteristics, and the path coefficient is 0.92. The path coefficients of risk perception and the trustor’s trust tendency are 0.83 and 0.74, respectively. The influence of the legal system environment on government trust decision-making is moderate, with a path coefficient of 0.68.

This paper contributes to the literature in two aspects. First, the factors influencing decision-making to government trust in the private sector in PPP projects have been identified. Second, a comprehensive view of the mechanism of government trust in the private sector in PPP projects has been theorized by the SEM method.

Based on the theoretical background of stakeholder capitalism, the purpose of this paper is to contribute to the scientific debate on the topic of public–private partnerships (PPPs), considering in particular how this governance structure relates to the pursuit of sustainable development. Specifically, this objective will be pursued with a focus on stakeholder relations and governance aspects, to highlight enablers and barriers in change for sustainability.

The systematic literature review is applied starting with the use of keywords in Web of Science, which leads to the extrapolation of 629 articles on the topic of “PPP and sustainability”. Subsequently, through various skimming steps, 75 papers are sampled. A mixed (quantitative-qualitative) approach is then followed: a co-word semantic network to identify the pattern of discourse and a more in-depth and explanatory analysis of the papers. These quantitative and qualitative tools synergistically work together to evidence the main aspects related to the aim of the paper.

With reference to the governance structure and stakeholders of PPPs, the analyses highlight the shift towards a triadic type of relational governance that considers stakeholders (especially the community) in addition to public–private partners. This can improve the partnership's performance (particularly in sustainable development) and social legitimacy. With reference to the role of PPPs in the implementation of sustainable development, they have positive potential in terms of implementing sustainability and raising stakeholder awareness of it. Nevertheless, PPPs may entail risks to the implementation of sustainability. The findings lead to some concluding remarks on future research opportunities.

The research leads to some managerial implications, such as the need to follow a competitive collaboration approach among stakeholders, to develop relational governance skills and related managerial tools and to incorporate sustainability aspects starting from the design of PPPs.

The originality aspect of this research is the consideration of a PPP by relating it to the pursuit of sustainability. Such an inter-organizational structure could be suitable to deal with the complexity inherent in the implementation of sustainability and is peculiar in terms of governance and stakeholder relations, considering that it is characterised by the presence of several partners of different nature (public and private).

The purpose of the present work is to improve the industry performance by identifying and quantifying the risks faced by the Indian pharmaceutical industry (IPI). The risk values for the prominent risks and overall industry are determined based on the four risk parameters, which would help determine the most contributive risks for mitigation.

An extensive literature survey was done to identify the risks, which were also validated by industry experts. The finalized risks were then evaluated using the fuzzy synthetic evaluation (FSE) method, which is the most suitable approach for the risk assessment with parameters having a set of different risk levels.

The three most contributive sub-risks are counterfeit drugs, demand fluctuations and loss of customers due to partners' poor service performance, while the main risks obtained are demand, financial and logistics. Also, the overall risk value indicates that the industry faces medium to high risk.

The study identifies the critical risks which need to be mitigated for an efficient industry. The industry is most vulnerable to the demand risk category. Therefore, the managers should minimize this risk by mitigating its sub-risks, like demand fluctuations, bullwhip effect, etc. Another critical sub-risk, the counterfeit risk, should be managed by adopting advanced technologies like blockchain, artificial intelligence, etc.

There is insufficient literature focusing on risk quantification. Therefore, this work addresses this gap and obtains the industry's most critical risks. It also discusses suitable mitigation strategies for better industry performance.

This study aims to examine the relationship between pollution and life expectancy in oil producing communities, where there is a dearth of empirical evidence on how knowledge and coping strategy, agriculture and foreign capital inflows mediate the relationship between pollution and life expectancy.

The study employed a cross sectional survey design to analyze the roles of knowledge and coping strategy, agriculture and foreign capital inflows in the relationship between pollution and life expectancy in Benekuku and Okpai oil producing communities in the Niger Delta. The study employed the modern structural equation modeling (SEM) estimator.

Estimates show the mediating effect of agriculture on air pollution-longevity (coeff. = 0.398; t-value = 4.425; p < 0.05) and (coeff. = −0.120; t-value = −3.862; p < 0.05) mediating effect of foreign capital. The result revealed that agriculture and foreign capital inflows are significant mediators in pollution-life expectancy relations, affirming the Niger Delta as a pollution haven. However, knowledge and coping strategy with estimate of (coeff. = 0.233; t-value = 6.150; p < 0.05) spurs life expectancy.

The study suggests knowledge of hazard identification and reporting and awareness of coping strategy as the panacea to poor life expectancy rate in these local oil producing communities.

The study departs from existing works by estimating the mediating roles of agriculture and foreign capital inflow in air pollution-Life expectancy by controlling for knowledge and coping strategy using the structural equation model with ethical approval from Health Ethics Research Committee.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-11-2022-0734

Reasonable risk sharing is the key to the smooth implementation of infrastructure public-private partnership (PPP) projects and the optimization of benefit distribution among the participants. This study aims to explore the risk redistribution ratio between the government and the private sector under different degree of fairness concern.

Renegotiation is a mechanism to provide flexibility and make up for incompleteness of PPP contracts. However, the threshold value of risk redistribution ratio and negotiation cost are not explicitly considered in previous studies. In addition, these studies do not consider the influence of the fairness concern psychology on the negotiation process. To address these gaps, based on risk-income equilibrium analysis, this paper established the bargaining optimization model of PPP projects renegotiation considering the fairness concerns of the negotiating parties. Furthermore, this study analyzed the influence of fairness concern degree on negotiation thresholds, negotiation results, and negotiation incomes under three scenarios.

The results showed that excessive focus on the fairness of incomes may exclude the risk redistribution ratio that is most beneficial to project incomes from the negotiation threshold. Moreover, the increase in the fairness concerns of negotiating parties can reduce the negotiation success period, but the net income may not necessarily be improved.

The main contribution of this paper is to propose a new risk renegotiation methodology based on the risk-income equilibrium analysis, which is helpful to develop risk management strategies in the construction field. The research results can provide government with reference about renegotiation in decision making and provide theoretical support for the practice of PPP renegotiation.

Governments in developing countries seeking to meet their infrastructure backlog are increasingly turning to public–private partnerships (PPP) due to a lack of public funds. However, while there are factors which drive the current uptake of projects, there are challenges with attracting private finance, and it is not clear what incentives can be used to attract more private participation, especially in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Therefore, this study aims to examine challenges, drivers and incentives that affect private participation in PPP projects in Zambia.

The study used a qualitative approach with semi-structured interviews with participants who had first-hand experience working on the administration of PPP projects. The participants were predominantly from the public sector, and so the results are largely a public sector perspective on the matter.

The findings show that bureaucracy and a poor business environment emanating from poor policies, long procedures and a poor economic environment are the main challenges affecting PPP projects. The current demand for the projects is being driven by a stable business and economic environment while incentives include enhancing the business environment by improving procedures and policies.

The study contributes to extant literature by proposing an overarching theory about the challenges affecting the implementation of PPP projects in Zambia, in particular, and in SSA, in general. The results show areas where governments and government agencies responsible for PPP projects can focus attention to promote private participation.