
Rodrigo LozanoOrganisational Sustainability
Rodrigo Lozano
BSc, MSc, PhD, AMIChemE, FHEA
About
166
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Introduction
Rodrigo Lozano's research and consultancy focuses on Corporate Sustainability, Education for Sustainable Development, Assessment and Reporting, Collaboration, and Organisational Change Management (among others).
Additional affiliations
December 2017 - December 2023
August 2016 - November 2017
December 2012 - October 2016
Publications
Publications (166)
Higher education institutions (HEIs) have been incorporating sustainability into their curricula, which is crucial for providing students with the skills and knowledge to help societies become more sustainable. During the last 15 years, there has been increasing research on sustainability competences and the pedagogical approaches to develop them....
Assessment and reporting has been recognised as one of the key drivers for sustainability in organisations; however, most organisations' reports fall short of sustainability guidelines and the available sustainability assessment and reporting (SAR) frameworks have been limited by several issues. The aim of this paper is to develop and test a rapid...
Sustainable public procurement (SPP) is aimed at using government purchasing power to foster sustainable production and consumption and develop more sustainable business models. The implementation of SPP has been undertaken through several disciplinary approaches, including practical and research efforts based on organisational change management (O...
Organisations, given their goals and contexts, will be driven by different factors in their quest to better contribute to sustainability. The drivers have been categorised as: (1) External, such as requirements of listed corporations to report on sustainability issues, national government, and stakeholder pressure; (2) Connecting, such as reputatio...
Most of the literature on Organisational Change Management for Sustainability (OCMS) has focussed on internal proactive changes and a steady state. There has been limited research focussing on extreme external stimuli or events, such as the COVID-19, that affect organisations and their sustainability efforts which were negatively affected by the pa...
There have been many efforts aimed at how organisations have been addressing sustainability; however, there have been few studies on how organisations have incorporated and how they have been institutionalised. Incorporation refers to the initiation of change and may be driven internally. When change is adopted and put into practice for long enough...
During the last century many radical changes and innovations have taken place. Particularly during the last seven decades, there have been unprecedented advances in development and industrialisation with dramatic economic and technological changes. Such changes have resulted in positive impacts, but also negative ones. A number of milestones have b...
Three mechanisms are instrumental for Organisational change management for sustainability (OCMS): Leadership, Governance, and Assessment and reporting. Leadership plays a key role in organisational changes towards sustainability. Even though leaders are sine qua non in change efforts, they need to be aided by an individual or group, i.e. a champion...
Organisational change aims to move from the current state to one that is more desirable. It is complex, continuous, iterative, and uncertain. The rate of change is dependent on the organisation’s context, nature, and external events. Addressing sustainability issues in organisations is a complex process, where creativity is a precondition for organ...
Organisations are an integral part of modern societies. They are sub-systems of a larger environmental system. Organisations are, usually, divided into civil society, corporations, education, and public sector ones. Organisations are complex, semi-open, social systems with sets of inter-related units engaged in joint problem-solving to accomplish a...
Organisations have the means, and are instrumental, in making societies more sustainable and advance the Sustainable Development Agenda, e.g. by contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), through their strategies, operations, and providing new solutions. During the last decade there has seen an increasing interest in organisational s...
Organisational changes that threaten the status quo, such as moving away from unsustainable practices towards more sustainable ones, are bound to face resistance at the individual, group, and organisation levels. Resistance to change is a common phenomenon to planned changes, which slows and sometimes stops change efforts. It arises when passing fr...
Public participation is crucial for policy-making and can contribute to strengthening democracies and decision-making. Public participation can help to address sustainability challenges and plays a key role in attaining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). While the SDGs are policy concepts, there has been limited research conducted on how the...
Circular economy (CE) is aimed at redressing the negative impacts on the environment from linear economic models. CE should consider the economic and environmental dimensions; however, in most cases, these have been addressed separately. CE discourses have focused mainly on the environmental dimension and assumed that all material loops must be clo...
There has been increasing interest on how organisations address the four dimensions of sustainability. Despite calls for a holistic perspective, empirical research on sustainable organisations has been carried out on (1) engagement efforts, focussing inside the organisation, i.e., the system elements engage with sustainability, or (2) efforts to co...
“Publish or perish” is a well-known aphorism in academia. However, this mantra has often led to excessive pressure to publish increasing numbers of manuscripts without commensurate care for quality. Such pressure has been associated with evaluation systems that push researchers to focus on various scientometrics indicators, such as publishing in jo...
Energy is key in achieving sustainable societies. There have been great efforts towards improving energy access worldwide. Despite the advances in energy access, energy poverty remains a major problem in many parts of the world, particularly in rural communities. Modern energy, in particular electricity, can help rural communities develop through i...
Sustainability is aimed at addressing the environmental and socio-economic issues of this generation and future ones. In this context, sustainable public procurement (SPP) has been proposed to link the consumption side (government) to the production side (companies), whilst addressing the four dimensions of sustainability (economic, environmental,...
Organisations have been driving sustainability, where some efforts have focussed on the organisation itself and some on how organisations contribute to society, such as addressing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Although organisations have been working to address the SDGs, there has been limited integration of the SDGs in organisation sys...
Progress towards more sustainable societies requires moving from reactive responses to immediate problems, towards a more proactive focus on avoiding possible future problems and preparing for potential events. This requires that sustainability is endorsed by a group or opinion leader to be adopted by society. Organisations have been instrumental i...
There has been increasing research on pedagogical approaches, sustainability competences, and how to connect them in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). This paper's aim is to provide deeper insights into the system of pedagogical approaches and sustainability competences, as well as how these interrelate. A survey was developed to investigate su...
Purpose
Government-owned companies (GOCs), such as ports, have engaged in efforts to become more sustainable. Most of such efforts have been technological and policy ones and mainly focusing on the environment, with limited research on organisational change management. This paper aims to provide insights into how ports have been addressing sustaina...
Sustainability has been proposed to address societal challenges. A number of efforts have been undertaken to implement sustainability, particularly through frameworks such as tools, initiatives and approaches (TIAs). Most of the research on the implementation efforts has been in the corporate context. This paper is aimed at analysing the implementa...
Organizations have been integrating sustainability issues into their systems. Employees are a core component of the human dimension of the organizational systems; however, there has been limited research on the factors of employee participation (EP) for organizational sustainability. This article is aimed at investigating the importance of EP facto...
Public sector organisations (PSOs) have an important role in society by providing a variety of services and connecting the government to corporations and civil society organisations. PSOs have engaged with sustainability for a number of years. This chapter provides insights into how PSOs have been engaging and contributing to sustainability through...
During the last century, many radical changes and innovations have taken place. In particular, during the last five decades, there have been unprecedented advances in development and industrialisation with dramatic economic and technological changes. Such changes have resulted in positive impacts (increase of economic activities, improvements in ag...
Organisations are an integral part of modern societies. They are subsystems of a larger system. Organisations are, usually, divided into civil society, corporations, and public sector ones. Organisations are complex, semi-open, social systems with sets of interrelated units engaged in joint problem-solving to accomplish a goal or objective and to c...
In essence, corporations provide products and services in exchange for profit. Corporations have engaged with sustainability for several years. This chapter provides insights on how corporations have been engaging and contributing to sustainability through tools, initiatives, and approaches (TIAs), change management, and collaboration. A corporatio...
Civil society organisations (CSOs) have an important role in society by providing education, spiritual well-being, and other services. CSOs have engaged with sustainability for a number of years, particularly through the efforts of higher education institutions (HEIs) and by some religious organisations. This chapter provides insights on how CSOs h...
Organisational change aims to move from the current state to one that is more desirable, ranging from minor to radical changes. Change represents an opportunity that must be anticipated, prepared for, and managed. Changes in organisations are complex, continuous, iterative, and uncertain. The rate of change is dependent on the organisation’s contex...
From the 1970s, a number of tools, initiatives, and approaches (TIAs) have been developed to foster and implement sustainability. These have evolved from purely “end-of-pipe” solutions (which are usually costly and inefficient) towards whole-system approaches, by changing products, processes, services, and systems, so that waste is minimised and re...
Organisations (civil society, corporations, and public sector) are an integral part of modern societies and are affected by internal and external forces and conditions. Organisations have been instrumental in driving sustainability. There has been considerable research on organisations’ contributions to sustainability, most of it on corporations an...
This chapter provides a discussion on the connections between sustainable development competences and the pedagogical approaches used to develop them. It first reviews the competences and pedagogical approaches. The chapter highlights that a combination of pedagogical approaches is needed to better develop sustainability competences. The combinatio...
Higher education institutions (HEIs) have been at the forefront in creating and breaking paradigms, and educating the future decision‐makers, entrepreneurs, and leaders. In the last decade, there have been many efforts to develop sustainability competences in HEIs to ensure that students are prepared for challenges in making societies more sustaina...
The pandemic caused by COVID-19 affected markets on all continents and resulted in incalculable losses for countries, organizations, and individuals. The crisis quickly set in. Crises can be initiated, among other factors, by economic, military or environmental issues, such as earthquakes, droughts and floods, tsunamis, etc. In general, crises are...
Most research on Corporate Sustainability has focused on large companies sustainability efforts; however, research on a holistic approach on small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) addressing the sustainability dimensions and the system elements, is still limited. The aim of this article is to assess how SMEs embed sustainability into their system...
Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have been incorporating sustainability into education and curricula, where recent research has focussed on sustainability competences, pedagogical approaches, and how to connect them, generally on a single HEI. The process of integrating sustainability into education based on curricula assessment has been explai...
Governance is instrumental to the implementing sustainability in organisations (civil society, companies, and public sector ones). Seven governance factors have been identified to achieve this: vision and mission, policies, reporting, communication, board of directors, department, and person in charge. However, their importance and interrelations a...
Ports have increasingly been addressing sustainability issues; however, gender equality has been a low priority in such efforts. This paper is aimed at providing insights into how ports have been addressing gender equality to contribute to sustainability. Twelve semi-structured interviews were conducted with top-level port managers from six Europea...
The University of Gävle is located in the city of Gävle, Sweden. It has 16,000 students (about 6,500 full time equivalent) and 700 employees. The University of Gävle has been working with sustainability for the last 25 years. The university has extensive experience in working with an environmental management system, certified according to ISO 14001...
There has been considerable progress in the incorporation of sustainability into Higher Education Institutions’ curricula. This chapter discusses sustainability in curricula assessment tools, sustainability competences, pedagogical approaches, and the methods used in the book’s the case studies. A number of tools have been developed, or modified, t...
This book is aimed at developing sustainability competences through pedagogical approaches by comparing 15 case studies from 12 countries in 4 continents (Africa, America, Australia, and Europe) analysing how Sustainable Development (SD) is being taught in their courses, which competences are being developed, and which pedagogical approaches are be...
Purpose
Organisations have been working towards becoming more sustainable; where their efforts have been mainly on a steady state focussing on internal proactive changes. The purpose of this paper is to analyse how external events, e.g. COVID-19, affect organisations and their sustainability efforts.
Design/methodology/approach
A survey was sent t...
Collaboration plays a key role in the contribution of organizations (civil society, corporate , and public sector ones) to sustainability; nonetheless, there has been limited research on collaboration elements, benefits, and challenges. A survey was developed for investigating collaboration for organizational sustainability (through elements, benef...
Corporations and their sustainability efforts are affected by external concerns, such as the COVID-19 outbreak. A survey was developed to investigate this phenomenon, of which 115 responses from corporations were obtained. The results show that COVID-19 changed their sustainability priorities, with the economic ones increasing, followed by the soci...
Circular economy (CE) has been proposed as a concept to help address sustainability issues. CE was first proposed in 1928 as a way of understanding causal relationships in the economic sphere. Recently, CE has been focused, mainly, on environmental issues main typically represented by closing material loops through recovery. Literature on CE has be...
Circular Economy (CE) has become one of the most recent ways to address environmental sustainability. CE activities focus exclusively on one of three levels (macro-level, meso-level, and micro-level). The majority of CE research has focused on the macro- and meso-levels, while research on the micro-level has been limited. This paper focusses on the...
The COVID-19 outbreak has affected societies and organisations in an unprecedented way. This has resulted in negative impacts to economic and social issues, but it is a "blessing in disguise" for environmental issues. This paper analyses how the outbreak has affected organisations' sustainability priorities. Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, such pri...
COVID-19 outbreak impacts on organisations and their sustainability efforts
Organizations (i.e., civil society, corporations, and public sector organizations) have been instrumental in driving sustainability. In the last decade, there has been an increasing interest in organizational sustainability, and an increase of organizational change management for sustainability. Although, there have been many efforts aimed at incor...
Currently, European ports, and the cities within which they are located, face significant changing economic circumstances, together with technological, social and cultural pressures for change, as they seek to become more sustainable. Drivers for change include the global United Nations Sustainable Development Agenda and the European Union Circular...
Ports are under increasing pressure to become more sustainable. While, some ports have been including sustainability into their operations; in general, this has been mainly addressed from economic and environmental perspectives, and technological or policy-related approaches. There has been little research on organisational change management for su...
Seaports have increasingly been pressured by the shipping industry and port communities to increase their sustainability efforts and performance. Sustainability reporting has been proposed as a way to assess performance. Although several frameworks have been developed for sustainability reporting, few focus on performance (for example the Graphical...
Seaports are important players in the world, with a key role in global maritime trade and the movement of people. Historically, many cities grew up alongside ports, gaining economic benefits from the flow of goods and from migration of people seeking work and improved economic circumstances. Port Cities are some of the most economically strong and...
Sustainability reporting is an important tool for the assessment and communication of sustainability performance in the corporate world; however, it is still in its early stages in higher education. Only a limited number of universities around the world have published sustainability reports, and there is still a lack of empirical evidence of how th...
Seaports, as part of urban centers, play a major role in the cultural, social and economic life of the cities in which they are located, and through the links they provide to the outside world. Port-cities in Europe have faced significant change, first with the loss of heavy industry, emergence of Eastern European democracies, and the widening of t...
Interest in sustainability from the corporate sector is evidenced by over 13,000 companies in 160 countries that have signed the United Nations Global Compact. In this context, a number of tools, initiatives, and approaches (TIAs), e.g., circular economy, corporate social responsibility, eco‐efficiency, life cycle assessment, and sustainability rep...
Food waste has formidable detrimental impacts on food security, the environment, and the economy, which makes it a global challenge that requires urgent attention. This study investigates the patterns and causes of food waste generation in the hospitality and food service sector, with the aim of identifying the most promising food waste prevention...
Abstract: Ports are important players in the world, due to their role in global production and distribution systems and as major intermodal transport hubs, linking the sea to the land. For all ports, a key requirement for continued economic viability is to maintain existing or develop new economic approaches and activities, while simultaneously add...
There has been an increase in sustainable development (SD) integration into Higher Education Institutions' (HEIs) curricula. Several tools have been developed to assess SD in HEIs; however, only a few have focussed on curricula assessment, such as the "Sustainability Tool for Assessing UNiversities' Curricula Holistically." Curricula assessment can...
Governments need to decide how to allocate their public expenditure, which is commonly misconstrued as simply targeting social issues. Most scientific literature highlights that the role of public spending is to enhance social welfare and fight poverty and inequality. Nonetheless, public expenditure also includes spending on environmental issues. T...
There has been considerable progress in the incorporation of sustainable development (SD) into higher education institutions' curricula. This has included research on competences for SD and pedagogical approaches used; however, there has been limited research on the connection between how pedagogical approaches are used and how they may develop sus...
Purpose
This paper aims to conceptualize impacts of higher education institutions (HEIs) on sustainable development (SD), complementing previous literature reviews by broadening the perspective from what HEIs do in pursuit of SD to how these activities impact society, the environment and the economy.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper provide...
Many higher education institutions (HEIs) have started to incorporate sustainable development (SD) into their system. A variety of sustainability assessment tools (SATs) have been developed to support HEIs to systematically measure, audit, benchmark, and communicate SD efforts. In recent years, stakeholders have increasingly asked HEIs to demonstra...
Ports are under increasing pressure to become more sustainable. Although some ports have been including sustainability into their operations, this has been mainly done from economic and environmental perspectives and technological or policy‐related approaches, while there has been little research on organisational change management for sustainabili...
Higher education institutions (HEIs) have been steadily progressing towards the integration of sustainable practices in their structures and operations. Several studies have reported the variety of drivers of change and the barriers to change that universities have found in the integration process. The present investigation is aimed at further char...
Purpose-This review conceptualizes impacts of higher education institutions (HEIs) on sustainable development (SD), complementing previous literature reviews by broadening the perspective from what HEIs do in pursuit of SD to how these activities impact society, the environment, and the economy.
Design/methodology/approach-The paper provides a sys...
Although several sustainability drivers have been recognized for different organizations, there has been limited research on analyzing which are considered to be the most important. A survey was sent to more than 1,502 organizations, of which 108 completed all the questions. The survey responses were analyzed using descriptive statistics, rankings...
Organisations (civil society, companies, and public-sector organisations (PSOs)) have been instrumental in driving sustainability. In the last five years, there has been an increasing interest in organisational sustainability, where the importance of sustainability’s dimensions depends on an organisation’s nature and purpose. A large body of litera...
Corporate sustainability has recently been challenging traditional business models that have been based on value proposition, creation and capture. There has been a steady increase in publications using the term “sustainable business models”; however, there have been few that have theoretically defined or characterized the term, and in most cases,...
The overwhelming reliance of modern society based fossil-based non-renewable sources of energy production represent a major challenge to sustainability. Moving towards a new more sustainable generation mix affects investments on electricity utility companies. This presents a dual challenge for companies: 1) the electricity generation mix decision;...
The special volume on green and sustainable chemistry and engineering has fourteen papers that were considered relevant to the present day issues and discussion, such as adequate use of raw materials and efficient energy, besides considering renewable sources for materials and energy; and changing economical canons towards circular economy. Busines...
Ports are an important player in the world, due to their role in global production and distributions systems. They are major intermodal transport hubs, linking the sea to the land. For all ports, a key requirement for commercial and economic viability is to retain ships using them and to remain accessible to those ships. Ports need to find approach...
Sustainability indicators have been extensively used to measure and communicate the state and progress of sustainability issues by covering robust and meaningful information for a variety of stakeholders. Sustainability indicators allow informal and, many times, sporadic actions of sustainability data collection and evaluation that can be conducted...
Research into and practice of Higher Education for Sustainable Development (HESD) have been increasing during the last two decades. These have focused on providing sustainability education to future generations of professionals. In this context, there has been considerable progress in the incorporation of SD in universities' curricula. Most of thes...
For many years, Higher education institutions have been engaging with sustainability, many focussing on environmental ones. In this context, two phenomena have arisen that have, usually, been studied separately: (1) engineering schools have been at the forefront of sustainability efforts; and (2) women have tended to be more concerned about of envi...
This paper provides a literature review on impacts of higher education institutions on sustainable development. The literature search was conducted with the electronic database ProQuest, with a timeframe from 2006 to 2016. The selected articles were analyzed in a systematic way to provide an overview of the existing research and to develop a concep...
In recent years, there have been a considerable number of efforts to integrate sustainability into Higher Education Institutions; however, there are still a number of challenges that need to be overcome. A process that has received an increasing attention has been the Organisational Change Management for Sustainability. This article is aimed at rev...
Sustainability Reporting has become a key element in different organisations. Although there have been a number of academic publications discussing the adoption of sustainability reports in the public sector, their numbers have been quite low when compared to those focussing on corporate reports. Additionally, there has been little research on the...
During the last decade, there has been increasing research on Corporate Sustainability, whereby most of such research was undertaken in the Western world. This paper is aimed at analysing the contribution of Japanese Business terms to Corporate Sustainability. The paper analyses, using Grounded Theory, 28 Japanese business terms through a Corporate...
Crop residues represent more than half of the world’s agricultural phytomass. Residual biomass, from agriculture or forestry, can be converted into synthesis gas (syngas) to generate energy (electrical or thermal) or chemicals. The paper uses eco-efficiency as a tool to compare these two options. A basis of 1,000 kg/hour of residual pecan nut shell...
Collaboration between firms is important to stimulate the transition to a more sustainable society. This special volume shows that collaboration is indeed one of the preferred forms of governance to manage relations between firms in a sustainability context. Collaboration enhances sustainable benefits by creating legitimacy of sustainable technolog...
The large purchasing power of public organisations (up to 19% of GDP in Europe) can promote, demand for sustainable products and services, set trends for other organisations, and enlarge the markets of sustainable products and services. This virtual special issue collates 17 of papers focusing on Sustainable Pubic Procurement (SPP) and related conc...
Samenwerking voor een circulaire economie: de verbinding tussen het duurzaam inkoopproces en duurzamere business modellen Copernicus Instituut voor Duurzame Ontwikkeling, Universiteit Utrecht Sjors Witjes en Rodrigo Lozano Als onderdeel van het ReBus programma van de Europese Unie heeft Rijkswaterstaat het Copernicus Instituut van de Universiteit U...
Sustainability aims at addressing environmental and socio-economic issues in the long term. In general the literature on sustainability has focused mainly on the environmental issues, whereas, more recently, a Circular Economy has been proposed as one of the latest concepts for addressing both the environmental and socio-economic issues. A Circular...
As part of the Life+ REBUS project in the Netherlands, organisations and consultants working on pilot evaluations in the Green Deal on Circular Procurement collaborated to have access to knowledge and experience on sustainable procurement and find the case study companies.Utrecht University researchers Sjors Witjes and Rodrigo Lozano analysed two c...