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3 articles
Article 25 July 2023
Anastasia-Alithia Seferiadis, Sarah Cummings and George Essegbey
The article considers the extent to which social entrepreneurship of young women is contributing to sustainable development in Ghana, based on field research conducted between October 2018 and April 2019. Data collection involved a review of
The article considers the extent to which social entrepreneurship of young women is contributing to sustainable development in Ghana, based on field research conducted between October 2018 and April 2019. Data collection involved a review of the literature and a questionnaire survey of actors within the social entrepreneurship ecosystem in Ghana but is primarily based on the life histories of 13 women entrepreneurs collected using in-depth semi-structured interviews. Social entrepreneurship is undergoing a boom in Ghana which is characterized as having the most entrepreneurs as a proportion of the population globally and with women outnumbering men. Critical discourse analysis was employed to highlight the potential difference between grand narratives of entrepreneurship for development—how it is supposed to work, and how it is working in practice for young women social entrepreneurs in Ghana. The life histories demonstrate that the social entrepreneurship of young women in Ghana does not appear to be contributing to sustainable development because the enterprises yielded small or non-existent economic benefits for the entrepreneurs, demonstrating the limitations of this framework in the Ghanaian context. Indeed, most of the enterprises do not go beyond the ideation stage while the fame of winning social entrepreneurship competitions is used by individuals to build social and symbolic capital for employment by the public sector and the United Nations. In this way, young women are “hacking” social entrepreneurship for their own purposes as it is one of the opportunities open to them but it does not lead to sustainable enterprises. While the social entrepreneurship sector in Ghana is booming, it appears in reality to be a survival activity for women who are subject to gender inequalities and social-cultural harassment.
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Article 21 July 2023
Nikolaos Partarakis, Effrosini Karouzaki, Stavroula Ntoa, Anastasia Ntagianta, Emmanouil Zidianakis and Constantine Stephanidis
Highlights of Sustainability
Volume 2 (2023), Issue 3, pp. 138–156
Volume 2 (2023), Issue 3, pp. 138–156
1080 Views333 Downloads
Review 8 March 2022
Hwang Yi and Abhishek Mehrotra
Highlights of Sustainability
Volume 1 (2022), Issue 1, pp. 12–40
Volume 1 (2022), Issue 1, pp. 12–40
1434 Views620 Downloads
Review 8 March 2022
Hwang Yi and Abhishek Mehrotra
Sustainable buildings tend to maximize power and information rather than efficiency. The multidimensional concepts and tools provided by systems ecology and thermodynamics aid the understanding of building performance and sustainability as part of the global and
Sustainable buildings tend to maximize power and information rather than efficiency. The multidimensional concepts and tools provided by systems ecology and thermodynamics aid the understanding of building performance and sustainability as part of the global and complex thermodynamic phenomena in living systems—energy is not concentrated, but it flows, increasing the flow rate of useful energy. From such an extended macroscopic perspective, this paper addresses holistic eco-systemic criteria of building performance evaluation, focusing on emergy (spelled with an “m”) and information—the two critical indices of extensive and intensive analysis. Emergy aggregates the utmost and upstream energetic impacts, whereas information evaluates the structural pattern of the energy-flow distribution. These indices are theoretically correlated under the principles of ecological energy transformation and are often practically compatible. To clarify the definitions and appropriate scientific contexts of the new indices for environmental building studies, we review information theory, ecological theorems, and a few pioneering studies. Emergy and information have a great potential for advanced environmental building analysis, but building-scale implementation of emergy, information, and system principles remains a scientific challenge. The findings call for further research into the improvement of building-specific emergy/information data and reliable evidence of the analogy between building and open living systems.
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Highlights of Sustainability
Volume 1 (2022), Issue 1, pp. 12–40
Volume 1 (2022), Issue 1, pp. 12–40
1434 Views620 Downloads
Volume 2 (2023), Issue 3, pp. 157–170