Interdisciplinarity in Smart Sustainable City education: exploring educational offerings and competencies worldwide

More and more higher education institutions are offering specialized study programs for current and future managers of Smart Sustainable Cities (SSCs). In the process, they try to reconcile the interdisciplinary nature of such studies, covering at least the technical and social aspects of SSC management, with their own traditionally discipline-based organization. However, there is little guidance on how such interdisciplinarity should be introduced. In order to address this gap, this paper identifies 87 SSC-related study programs from around the world and analyzes their disciplinary and interdisciplinary coverage. The analysis classifies programs and competencies, the former using text mining and clustering algorithms, the latter using Bloom’s taxonomy and correlation analysis

A decision Enhancement Service for Stakeholder Analysis to Achieve Transformations in the Public Sector

Sourcing has become a popular practice for public sector managers aiming for transformations to save costs and improve service delivery. Nevertheless, public sector sourcing often fails due to stakeholder resistance and power struggles, stressing the need for stakeholder analysis. This paper presents a decision enhancement service for STakeholder ANalysis called STAN. The design of STAN is based on sourcing decision issues and observations obtained from public sector sourcing cases, expert interviews and literature. Foundations are derived from the stakeholder and resource dependency theories. STAN enables to identify stakeholder consensus levels that are visualized on sourcing scenario overviews. The assumption is that providing decision-makers insight in stakeholder consensus levels enables them to effectively decide which scenario to pursue and whom to account for. Evaluation results are derived from three public sector sourcing case studies, suggesting that STAN achieves what it is designed for: providing insight in stakeholder consensus levels for decisionmaking

Enhancement of watershed management in Tanzania using PESDES

There is growing awareness that Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) contribute to sustainable development. Integrating PES in watershed interventions has enormous potential to encourage and finance conservation efforts among conservers. The inspiration for this research was prompted by the need to improve watershed management by using PES schemes. The research was conducted in the existing pilot PES schemes in Tanzania (Morogoro and Tanga). Following a design science research philosophy, an engaged scholarship paradigm and the “ways of” framework a Payment for Ecosystem Services Decision Enhancement Studio (PESDES) is developed and evaluated. The PESDES provides actors’ guides as recipes to facilitate stakeholders’ capacities as they collaborate and make their decisions. The PESDES enables stakeholders to collaborate and share knowledge that is useful for enhancing decision making. The studio consists of four suites: membership, awareness, facilitation & incentive and competition suites all of which facilitate watershed stakeholders’ collaboration and decision making. The membership suite enables actors to register and access PESDES website. The awareness suite familiarise PESDES users with PES issues. The facilitation and incentive suite provides identity and accountabilities of various actors and modalities for compensating conservation efforts. The competition suite promotes actors’ interaction and competitions to improve conservation. The PESDES was instantiated and evaluated by stakeholders. Evaluation results indicate that PESDES is perceived as useful and usable in providing support to watershed stakeholders’ collaboration and decision making processes to improve watershed management. This research contributes to both theory and practice