Decision-Making toward the Achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals: Survey Experiments on Stakeholders' Preferences
Year: 2022
Type: dissertation
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Sustainable development has been an important social topic since its emergence in the early 1980s.However, despite the joint international efforts to achieve a sustainable society, the world faces numerous challenges, including poverty, climate change, and inequality.To tackle these challenges, in September 2015, all United Nations' member states agreed on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a collection of 17 global goals and 169 targets requiring governments, businesses, and citizens from both developed and developing countries to work together for a sustainable world by 2030.The SDGs are not legally binding but are viewed as responsibilities that everyone must fulfill.To ensure SDG implementation, societal systems have to make complex and fundamental transformations.Further, to achieve these transformations, global citizens have to change their daily behavior by shifting to more sustainable lifestyles.This takes a long time and is influenced by the political, market, and individual factors.The SDGs can play a vital role in encouraging a norm change toward sustainable development.However, some authors are concerned that the SDGs might be used for "SDGwashing," which can be using the SDGs without actually contributing toward sustainable development, but just to promote a cleaner image.Moreover, some argue that the SDGs lack the precision and clarity needed to meet sustainability challenges.Despite these critical views, we argue that the SDGs can act as norms to promote sustainability.Evidence-based policy-making is required to influence all the stakeholders to implement the SDGs in the right direction.Furthermore, the public needs to be educated and develop an ability to penetrate businesses facade sustainability practices and choose the right course of actions to promote a sustainable future.Therefore, this dissertation aims to explore individuals' decision-making toward the achievement of the SDGs.Furthermore, raising stakeholder awareness of the SDGs may enhance pro-sustainable behavior.Thus, this study also investigates to what extent raising awareness affects individuals' pro-sustainable preferences.Because tackling sustainability challenges requires an interdisciplinary approach, we did not develop this dissertation based on a single discipline, but based it on different disciplines, including sustainability science, management and economics.To offer novel insights into the challenges requiring urgent attention, we combined different methodologies.We collected individuals' survey responses and analyzed them.There are some critical views on using survey data to analyze real-world decision-making because self-reporting data can be biased; for example, respondents' self-reporting attitudes and actual behavior may differ.To overcome the limitation of the survey, we utilized a conjoint survey which was originally designed to study multidimensional voting choice behavior (Hainmueller, Hopkins, & Yamamoto, 2014) and is rigorously being applied to policy analyses in different fields.When a study is drawn from a small sample size dataset, there can be a gap between actual behavior and conjoint survey results.However, when the survey was conducted in large-scale national population distribution, the real-life and the survey
Author: 山根, 友美
Language: English
Subfield: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7027478993