Effects of sustainable governance to sustainable development

Sustainable development advocates effective and efficient planning of both present and future use of resources. Governance, on the other hand, is based on the joint and coordinated management of multidimensional variables, which is the basis of the sustainability approach. This study aims to determine how much sustainable governance influences the fulfillment of multidimensional sustainable development. Multiple regression analysis was used to determine the variables that reveal the impact of governance on development in terms of sustainability while the gray relational analysis method was used to rank the countries. The results reveal that increases in the number of people using the internet in society, as well as in the levels of developments in e-government and human development, environmental performance, and political reform, all assist countries achieve their SDGs. Furthermore, it was found that governance has a positive and significant impact on SDGs. In addition, an MCDM model consisting of BWM and gray relational analysis was used to evaluate countries based on their performance in sustainable development, the economic, governance and environment. The gray relational analysis results, on the other hand, revealed that developed and wealthy countries ranked first, while underdeveloped countries experiencing instability, such as war and conflict, ranked last. The Nordic countries outperform other countries in terms of governance and sustainability, depending on the strength of their democracy and executive capacity. © 2022 by the authors

Factors Influencing Customer Satisfaction towards E-shopping in Malaysia

Online shopping or e-shopping has changed the world of business and quite a few people have decided to work with these features. What their primary concerns precisely and the responses from the globalisation are the competency of incorporation while doing their businesses. E-shopping has also increased substantially in Malaysia in recent years. The rapid increase in the e-commerce industry in Malaysia has created the demand to emphasize on how to increase customer satisfaction while operating in the e-retailing environment. It is very important that customers are satisfied with the website, or else, they would not return. Therefore, a crucial fact to look into is that companies must ensure that their customers are satisfied with their purchases that are really essential from the ecommerce’s point of view. With is in mind, this study aimed at investigating customer satisfaction towards e-shopping in Malaysia. A total of 400 questionnaires were distributed among students randomly selected from various public and private universities located within Klang valley area. Total 369 questionnaires were returned, out of which 341 questionnaires were found usable for further analysis. Finally, SEM was employed to test the hypotheses. This study found that customer satisfaction towards e-shopping in Malaysia is to a great extent influenced by ease of use, trust, design of the website, online security and e-service quality. Finally, recommendations and future study direction is provided. Keywords: E-shopping, Customer satisfaction, Trust, Online security, E-service quality, Malaysia

Mikro-Wirkung: Dekonstruktion der komplexen Auswirkungsprozesse eines einfachen Mikroversicherungsprodukts in Indonesien

This thesis analyses the social impact of Payung Keluarga, an obligatory enhanced credit life microinsurance product launched by Allianz in Indonesia in 2006. Payung Keluarga automatically insures micro-borrowers who take out microcredits from microfinance institutions. In case of death, the outstanding credit balance is canceled and the beneficiary receives twice the original loan as additional payout. Payung Keluarga was conceived to ameliorate the assumed post-mortem financial crisis of low-asset families. Through qualitative-explorative field research from 2006 until 2008 I investigated if this developmental intention was realized. It is the first impact analysis on microinsurance in Indonesia. In the research process, I took the position of an observing participant. As operational project leader for Allianz in Indonesia I was virtually doing research on my own work. The resulting challenge to research neutrality is primarily mitigated by the sobering to discerning social impact which was eventually revealed. The majority of insured were married female Muslim petty traders in urban and semi-urban areas around Jakarta. Socio-economically these women stand at the upper end of the low-asset stratum. Their husbands were generally the main bread-winners of the family, and it was mostly them who received the insurance payouts. It could therefore be said that Payung Keluarga benefited the main breadwinner instead of insuring him. The study found that norms of a moral economy are still exerting significant clout on the insured. The moral economy aims at providing “subsistence insurance” for all community members through an intricate collective system of balanced exchanges. The corresponding “premium” is a denouncement of self-interested material asset accumulation. Next to structural reasons, it was this moral restriction that saw the businesses of the women stagnate at low and socially inconspicuous levels. Payung Keluarga did not help to overcome the assumed post-mortem financial crisis. In reality, such crisis did not exist since community and family support among low-asset Muslim Indonesians is normally strong enough to largely provide for the bereft family. This support is driven by the perception of death as a collective risk in the light of the moral economy and hinged on principles of balanced reciprocity. For cultural and religious reasons, the beneficiaries used most of the insurance payouts for funeral ceremonies and repayment of informal debt. With the advent of Payung Keluarga familial post-mortem assistance has been reduced. Funeral costs also seem to have been inflated by the product. It has thereby promoted a long-term societal shift from equality-seeking balanced reciprocity towards status-seeking and socially diversifying general reciprocity. In effect, Payung Keluarga has attacked cooperative social cohesion head-on where it is still strongest in a rapidly modernizing Indonesian society. This discerning and unintended impact of Payung Keluarga is hardly offset by a positive increase in financial literacy among the insured. Furthermore, the effect on “peace of mind” on the insured is ambivalent: while most insured stated to feel safer, some declared to feel less secure with their obligatory coverage for fear of interference with divine predetermination. Its overall developmental impact can be literally described as “micro”. Instead of protecting the status-quo of the family, Payung Keluarga has assumed the role of an actor of social change. Not only because it has changed the funeral pattern of the beneficiaries, but also because it promotes a far-reaching conceptual paradigm shift from balanced reciprocity, which forms a core pillar of the insured’s social structure, towards general reciprocity. The thesis hypothesizes that with sufficient insurance coverage provided, the insured will increasingly opt out of the coercively egalitarian “subsistence insurance” system. Such opt out will allow the insured to pursue a more aggressive economic asset accumulation strategy, particularly in combination with micro-credit. For the individual, this can be seen as a “liberating fortune” that would induce more women to grow their businesses to significant sizes. In parallel, it would deal a blow to cooperative social cohesion. I propose to call this the “double fortune / double blow” dilemma of microfinance. Although this thesis is exemplary, some of its findings can be generalized: The impact of microinsurance is highly dependent on cultural, religious and socio-demographic context. Any microinsurance intervention concerned with social impact should be preceded by a thick contextualization going beyond the usual demand assessments. In turn, microinsurance likewise impacts context as an actor of ambivalent social change. The complex influence of context and the role of microinsurance as an actor of social change have so far been hardly discussed in the development discourse

The drivers of Corporate Social Responsibility in the supply chain. A case study.

Purpose: The paper studies the way in which a SME integrates CSR into its corporate strategy, the practices it puts in place and how its CSR strategies reflect on its suppliers and customers relations. Methodology/Research limitations: A qualitative case study methodology is used. The use of a single case study limits the generalizing capacity of these findings. Findings: The entrepreneur’s ethical beliefs and value system play a fundamental role in shaping sustainable corporate strategy. Furthermore, the type of competitive strategy selected based on innovation, quality and responsibility clearly emerges both in terms of well defined management procedures and supply chain relations as a whole aimed at involving partners in the process of sustainable innovation. Originality/value: The paper presents a SME that has devised an original innovative business model. The study pivots on the issues of innovation and eco-sustainability in a context of drivers for CRS and business ethics. These values are considered fundamental at International level; the United Nations has declared 2011 the “International Year of Forestry”

Proceedings of the 19th European Roundtable for Sustainable Consumption and Production Circular Europe for Sustainability: Design, Production and Consumption

Postprint (published version

Proceedings of USM-AUT International Conference 2012 Sustainable Economic Development: Policies and Strategies

This proceedings includes papers presented at the USM-AUT International Conference (UAIC 2012) carrying the theme “Sustainable Economic Development: Policies and Strategies”, held on 17-18 November 2012 at Bayview Beach Resort Penang Malaysia. This conference is jointly organized by the School of Social Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Malaysia, and Faculty of Business and Law, Auckland University of Technology (AUT), New Zealand. We received a total of 167 papers from various institutions and organizations around the world where 82 papers were accepted for inclusion in this proceedings. The proceedings is compiled according to the three sub themes of the conference. It covers both theoretical and empirical works from the scholars globally. It is hoped that the collection of these conference papers will become a valuable reference to the conference participants, researchers, scholars, students, businesses and policy makers. The proceedings will be submitted to Thomson ISI for indexing

Climate Assemblages: Governing the vulnerable in a neoliberal era

In late 2000s Cambodia something strange began to happen – foreigners could be seen in numerous rural provinces milling around organising villagers into community forestry groups and conducting workshops on climate change adaptation and resilience. A series of seemingly never ending workshops on climate change were conducted across the country and a stream of foreign experts came to Phnom Penh and beyond. A climate change bureaucracy was hastily constructed and money from Europe, the US, Japan and Australia began to flow. Over the last few decades Cambodians have been devastated by flood and drought events – in no small part due to the precarious nature of rural livelihoods. There is no doubt that the increasing frequency and severity of these events is a part of global climate change. Yet it is only in the last few years that government officials have taken an interest in climate change, and even more recently since NGOs have enthusiastically taken up the climate change cause. When looking at climate change programs in Cambodia it quickly becomes clear that they did not originate in Cambodia: terms such as ‘resilience’, ‘adaptation’ and ‘risk reduction’ did not come from Cambodia, nor are Cambodians financing these activities. Climate change programming has never specifically had Cambodians in mind; across the global south there has been a remarkable proliferation of western donor funded projects being done in the name of climate change, yet which all seem to employ the same concepts, terminologies and world views. This thesis attempts to come to terms with all of this by looking at climate change programming as part of a broader ‘assemblage’ that is now global in scope. This thesis holds that to understand why it is that experts flow into rural Cambodia and other countries in the global south (and not vice versa), it is crucial to examine how dominant approaches to climate change have been assembled – that is, the material process through which some approaches have been condensed into ‘global designs’ and which now travel across the world. Dominant approaches to climate change do not just come from anywhere. They were specifically assembled in Europe and North America and were shaped by experiences in those places and draw upon European concepts and world views. It should thus not be a surprise that terms such as “adaptation’ and “risk reduction” – which are now ubiquitous in the world of climate change programming - have colonial genealogies and owe a lot to the experiences of western civilisations attempting to assert dominance over tropical lands and people. So too, it should not be a surprise that the neoliberal revolution in North America has deeply shaped the contours of dominant approaches to climate change where climate change programming is becoming increasingly tangled up in western finance’s search for new fields of investment. This thesis briefly explores how a global climate change assemblage came into being and looks at the specific logics and rationalities that the assemblage has become fixated upon in the early 21st century. It argues that to understand climate change programming in Cambodia and elsewhere it is firstly important to appreciate how western liberal democracies have become obsessed with the question of governing over life (biopolitics) as well as the quest to open up environmental and social problems to specifically market approaches (neoliberalism). The second part of this thesis examines the messy and fraught process of actualising ‘global designs’ to solve climate change within contemporary Cambodia. This part of the thesis looks at how patronage politics, rural abandonment and militarisation challenge the orderliness of climate change programming. By examining two particular climate change projects (one adaptation and one mitigation), the thesis shows how the logics and rationalities of climate change programing were stretched to breaking point as they encountered the specificities of local geographies and histories. Yet one of the conclusions of this thesis is that global designs to address climate change do not actually depend upon local successes. Rather, the climate assemblage first and foremost prioritises its own expansion. Behind glossy brochures and optimistic meetings, it is often the case that the people who are supposedly at the centre of climate change programs – namely rural farmers, rarely experience substantial tangible benefits. Yet as the global climate assemblage trudges forward it continues neoliberal experiments throughout the global south which promise to be ever more participatory and effective. Now more than ever, critical scrutiny of the climate assemblage is urgently required – especially as the climate assemblage increasingly turns to resilience and financialisation rather than honest attempts to mutually assist those who disproportionately bear the burden of climate change