Farm productivity and social sustainability are essential to realizing agro-based value chains’ full potential. This paper aims to empirically conduct an analysis of the impact of formal value chain governance practices on farm productivity and social sustainability in Pakistan's potato industry. A multi-stage sampling method was employed from 10 villages to examine growers’ motivations to adopt the contract and its effect on their income and farm employment. The main findings of this study stipulate that buyers’ technical assistance and provision of quality inputs are the growers’ primary motives for contracting, non-contracted farms earned 40% less than contracted farms from each unit invested, contracted farms employed more labor with better wages, and welfare arrangements than the non-contracting farms. The study concluded that formal value chain governance practices significantly affect farm productivity and social sustainability and can spur growth in the agricultural sector in developing countries. The results reveal that any governmental initiative aiming to support formal value chain governance should consider the role that intermediaries play in the value chain and accordingly minimize their risks and food losses and improve social outcomes.

Veterinarians and animal scientists can provide leadership on issues relevant to farm animal welfare, but perceptions of these stakeholders regarding societal expectations for welfare are underexplored. This study involved five focus groups of veterinarians and animal scientists (n = 50 in total), recruited at a European meeting focused on cattle welfare. Participants were invited to discuss topics related to cattle welfare and were prompted with questions to elicit their perspectives of public concerns and how the participants felt public input should be included when developing solutions. Discussions were moderated by trained facilitators, audio-recorded and transcribed, and transcripts analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Ultimately, four primary themes were developed: (1) The public as concerned; (2) The public as ignorant; (3) The public as needing education; and (4) The public as helper or hindrance. Groups identified specific farming practices viewed as concerning to the public, including lack of pasture access, behavioural restriction, and painful procedures. Discussions about these concerns and the role of the public were often framed around the assumption that the public was ignorant about farming, and that this ignorance needed to be rectified through education. Participants were generally ambivalent in their beliefs regarding public contributions to solutions for farm animal welfare but suggested that consumers should pay more for products to help shoulder any costs of welfare improvements.

Although companies increasingly focus on the social dimension in corporate sustainability, there seems to be a lack of understanding how and to what extent disability and accessibility frameworks and activities are integrated in corporate sustainability reports. In this article, we aim to close this gap by (a) analysing the disability and accessibility (D&A) activities from the largest 50 companies in Europe based on their corporate sustainability reports, and (b) advancing a simplified conceptual framework for D&A that can be used in corporate reporting. In particular, we provide an overview about corporate D&A reporting and associated activities according to three identified areas: (a) workforce, (b) workplace, and (c) products and services. Our findings are twofold: First, the majority of the companies address D&A in their corporate sustainability reports mainly under the diversity umbrella, but lack a detailed debate about the three identified areas. Second, we found that existing frameworks for D&A are hardly used because either they are not focused on corporate reporting or seem too difficult or complicated to complete. Thus, our framework not only represents a first opportunity to foster the implementation of a D&A framework within the social dimension of corporate sustainability reports, but also presents a holistic yet flexible management tool that takes into account the most critical elements while shaping implementation, directing evaluation and encouraging future planning of D&A initiatives. As such, this study contributes to and extends the limited amount of research of D&A activities in the social dimension in corporate sustainability reporting.

Sustainable design is often practiced and assessed through the consideration of three essential areas: economic sustainability, environmental sustainability, and social sustainability. For even the simplest of products, the complexities of these three areas and their tradeoffs cause decision-making transparency to be lost in most practical situations. The existing field of multiobjective optimization offers a natural framework to define and explore a given design space. In this paper, a method for defining a product’s sustainability space (defined by economic, environmental, and social sustainability objectives) is outlined and used to explore the tradeoffs within the space, thus offering both the design team and the decision makers a means of better understanding the sustainability tradeoffs. This paper concludes that sustainable product development can indeed benefit from tradeoff characterization using multiobjective optimization techniques – even when using only basic models of sustainability. Interestingly, the unique characteristics of the three essential sustainable development areas lead to an alternative view of some traditional multiobjective optimization concepts, such as weak-Pareto optimality. The sustainable redesign of a machine to drill boreholes for water wells is presented as a practical example for method demonstration and discussion.

There is increased international interest in religiously based restrictions on land and forest stand use. However, the extent to which so-called sacred groves represent earlier forest ecosystems, and their possible role in biodiversity conservation, are interrelated and complex issues, and neglected in the context of Ghanaian savannahs, which are believed to be in transition from a forested past. Geographical information system (GIS) analysis of time-series images, aerial photographs, statistical analysis of ecological field data and social surveys were used to investigate the Ghanaian savannah. Sacred groves were found to be similar in plant species content and structure to the deciduous forest of southern Ghana. Between 1960 and 1996, these groves experienced far fewer forest losses than unprotected tree stands (<20%, as opposed to up to 100%). Non-sacred groves also contained lower plant species richness and higher numbers of invasive species such as neem (Azadirachta indica A. Juss). Sacred groves, while dependent on respect for religion, local cultural structures and individual peer pressure, offer a role that may support and also be supported by official conservation efforts.