An article co-written by Lei Huang, associate professor of Marketing in the School of Business, has been placed in “Handbook of Sustainability Science and Research,” released by Springer Publishing. "Cross-Sector Partnerships (SDG #17) as a Means of Achieving Sustainable Communities and Cities (SDG #11)" was co-authored with four scholars from Canada and the United Kingdom.
Inspiration for the work was derived from increasing social and ecological problems, where involving stakeholder groups in helping solve these issues becomes critical for reaching solutions. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal No. 17 recognizes the importance of partnerships and collaborative governance. However, organizing large multi-stakeholder groups (or partnerships) requires sophisticated implementation structures for ensuring collaborative action.
In order to design successful partnerships for sustainability, the relationship between implementation structures and the outcomes must be understood.
The larger research project sustainable community plan implementation – focuses on what the book chapter is addressing. The project examines how stakeholders configure to achieve results. To date, the data received come from a survey completed by 111 local governments around the world. The survey, offered in English, French, Spanish and Korean, considered 17 integrated environmental, social and economic topics. Some include climate change, waste, ecological diversity and local economy.
Although sustainable community plan implementation in local jurisdictions around the world is prevalent, it was noted that there is hardly any empirical data on these covered topics internationally, the partners involved in implementation and the costs and savings to the local governments that implement in partnership with their communities.
The book chapter presented its findings and shows that sustainable community plans continue to be created and implemented in a variety of communities around the world. They are integrated in the sustainability topics that they cover, involve local organizations as partners in implementation, act as motivators of resource investment by the local government in community sustainability and result in savings for the local government.
