Governing Sustainable Waste Management: Designing sustainable waste management into the housing sector

In seeking to shift municipal waste policy towards sustainability, policy-makers at European, national and local levels are facing the challenge of how to engage householders in reducing, reusing and recycling their waste. This in turn means engaging with the arena within which day to day waste management activities are practiced – the home. In view of this critical relationship between waste policy and household practices, this research project1 has sought to examine: • the ways in which new infrastructures for managing waste are being ‘designed in’ to new housing developments and renovated kitchens in the UK and Europe; • the barriers identified by key actors in the as impending the pursuit of a more integrated approach to housing design and waste management and how these might be overcome; • examples of best practice currently being developed in the UK and their applicability in the context of the North-East of England

How does consumer behaviour change? Examples from energy conservation

A global consumer society is rapidly overshooting ecological limits, there is a dire need to find new ways to change consumer behaviour. Yet history knows few succesful examples of reducing consumption. However, since the 1970s, there is a long legacy of work on energy conservation, which we use to identify three key factors that influence consumer behaviour: consumer awareness, contextual factors and community. Drawing on evidence from a European research project called CHANGING BEHAVIOUR, we discuss where previous efforts to change energy behaviour have succeeded in making a difference. We highlight ways in which sociotechnical systems shaping consumption can be changed and emerging ways in which consumers can join forces to achieve greater power and reach. This analysis has implications for attempts to build a more sustainable consumer society, including, but not limited to, the need to reduce primary energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions

Governance-technology co-evolution and misalignment in the electricity industry

This paper explores some reasons why the alignment between governance and technology in infrastructures may be unstable or not easy to achieve. Focusing on the electricity industry, we claim that the decentralization of governance – an essential step towards a decentralized technical coordination - may be hampered by if deregulation magnifies behavioural uncertainties and asset specificities; and that in a technically decentralized system, political demand for centralized coordination may arise if the players are able to collude and lobby, and if such practices lead to higher electricity rates and lower efficiency. Our claims are supported by insights coming from approaches as diverse as transaction cost economics, the competence-based view of the firm, and political economy.Governance; Technology; Coherence; Competence; Transaction costs; Regulation.

Social Norms as a Cost-Effective Measure of Managing Transport Demand: Evidence from an Experiment on the London Underground

In an effort to cope with increasing passenger demand on its network, Transport for London (TfL) implemented in the second half of 2017 an experiment on one of its busiest metro train platforms. The platform surface was painted to highlight the exact location of the train doors once it comes to a full stop and to direct passengers to wait in parts of the platform that would not obstruct passengers from alighting from the train and leaving the platform. We estimate the effect of this intervention to change passenger behaviour on the platform on train waiting and delay times. We use different sets of assumptions about what the counterfactual change in waiting and delay times would have been in the absence of the intervention. Depending on the assumptions, we find that the intervention has reduced train waiting times between 0 and 6.6%. We also find that this reduction came about mainly through reducing delay times of trains once they are delayed which were cut by between 4.6% and 12.6%. The reductions are not evenly distributed throughout the day, but tend to occur during peak traffic hours. The value of the implied time savings per year are £156,000 at a cost of £25,000, amounting to a return of £6 per £1 investment. If the dwell time reduction could increase train frequency on the affected line by 1 train per hour, however, then TfL could save another £3.6 million

Towards a methodology for the development of integrated IT infrastructures

In this paper, the authors propose and validate a methodology for the development of integrated Information Technology (IT) infrastructures. The motivation for putting forward a new methodology is grounded on the limitations of the various software engineering methodologies (traditional) that exist today. Despite that the traditional methodologies result in the development of Information Systems (IS) from scratch, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) builds integrated IT infrastructures using existing applications. This significant difference is associated with many issues needed to be realised and addressed like: (a) the changes that such an infrastructure brings to organisations, (b) the resistance to change and (c) the extension of IS lifecycle’s. The proposed methodology consist of eight stages and aims at supporting software engineers, organisations and researchers to build integrated IT infrastructures. As a result the methodology seeks to contribute to the body of knowledge

Binge flying: Behavioural addiction and climate change

Recent popular press suggests that ‘binge flying’ constitutes a new site of behavioural addiction. We theoretically appraise and empirically support this proposition through interviews with consumers in Norway and the United Kingdom conducted in 2009. Consistent findings from across two national contexts evidence a growing negative discourse towards frequent short-haul tourist air travel and illustrate strategies of guilt suppression and denial used to span a cognitive dissonance between the short-term personal benefits of tourism and the air travel’s associated long-term consequences for climate change. Tensions between tourism consumption and changing social norms towards acceptable flying practice exemplify how this social group is beginning to (re)frame what constitutes ‘excessive’ holiday flying, despite concomitantly continuing their own frequent air travels

MAlSim Deployment

This report describes the deployment issues related to MAlSim - Mobile Agent Malware Simulator - a mobile agent framework which aims at simulation of malware - malicious software that run on a computer and make the system behaving in a way wanted by an attacker. MAlSim was introduced in our previous report where we described its composition and functions, and provided the details of the simulation environment in which MAlSim is deployed and the auxiliary parts which support the experiments performed with MAlSim. In this report we are providing more technical details related to the installation and use of the framework.JRC.G.6-Sensors, radar technologies and cybersecurit

Extending the enterprise: An evaluation of ERP and EAI technologies within a Case Study organisation

It is widely understood that both Information Technology (IT) and Information Systems (IS), provide great benefits in improving the visibility of supply and value chains within and across organisational boundaries. Those enterprises which can realise the benefits of extending their core business processes outwards to clients and trading partners, will be able to create unique supply chain-dependent products and solutions. Thus, such business infrastructures have enabled organisations to expand and improve the effectiveness of their enterprise. One method to achieve this, has been to integrate Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems with web-based and other IS systems, using Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technologies. This paper seeks to investigate those factors which contributed to a case organisation’s extended enterprise experiences, by using extant ERP and EAI implementation IS evaluation criteria; and by placing the research results within the context of applicable IS research techniques in the area