Editor’s Choice Articles

This paper explores the current state of the social impact measurement (SIM) field to better understand common practices in measuring the post-intervention social impact of a program or project and to identify strategies to improve measurement in practice. This study employed a systematic literature review. Articles were manually coded deductively and inductively in NVivo to complete a descriptive and thematic analysis of the literature. The thematic analysis provided an in-depth understanding of the SIM field. We found that similarities existed across the definitions of social impact (e.g., environmental impact is part of social impact). Additionally, social return on investment (SROI) is the most common measurement model and theory of change was identified as a core concept across SIM literature. Strategies are presented for practitioners to consider when measuring social impact, including: (i) engage stakeholders throughout the process, (ii) mobilize existing operational data, (iii) increase measurement capacity, and (iv) use both qualitative and quantitative data. This study reveals the nuances of SIM based on academic literature published across the globe over the span of a decade. It places emphasis on the post-intervention stage and identifies strategies to improve the application of measurement models in practice. Lastly, it outlines future research directions. Full article

The size of the world’s population has profound implications for demand for food, energy and resources, land use change and greenhouse gas emissions. This study examines why most population projections have underestimated world population growth, and the implications for actions required to achieve sustainable societies. The main determinant of future population is family size choices. Population projections by different research groups embed different assumptions about drivers of fertility decline. The common assumptions that fertility decline is driven by economic betterment, urbanisation or education levels are not well supported in historical evidence. In contrast, voluntary family planning provision and promotion achieved rapid fertility decline, even in poor, rural and illiterate communities. Projections based on education and income as drivers of fertility decline ignore the reverse causation, that lowering fertility through family planning interventions enabled economic advancement and improved women’s education access. In recent decades, support for family planning has waned, and global fertility decline has decelerated as a result. Projections calibrated across the decades of strong family planning support have not acknowledged this change and are consequently underestimating global population growth. Scenarios used to model sustainable futures have used overly optimistic population projections while inferring these outcomes will happen without targeted measures to bring them about. Unless political will is rapidly restored for voluntary family planning programs, the global population will almost certainly exceed 10 billion, rendering sustainable food security and a safe climate unachievable. Full article

Acculturative stress can be a big problem for international students. Among the adaptation difficulties they may face, adjusting to new foods in a new environment is crucial to their well-being. Existing studies related to dietary acculturation point to gender differences, mostly on objective health impacts. Using the information processing approach, this study aims to examine the subjective perception of dietary acculturation difficulties, with a focus on the influence of social connectedness. Using the Bayesian inference approach with the Hamiltonian Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technique on a sample of 268 students from a Japanese international university, we found that female students are more likely to have perceived difficulties in the process of adjusting to new foods, but social connectedness lessens this effect. We also found no significant differences between domestic and international students regarding perceived difficulties of food adjustment in this study site, likely due to its highly multicultural environment. We suggest international universities provide better information about the food situations on campuses, especially for female students, and organize more cultural exchange events and food-related social activities to help students overcome barriers of food stress. Full article

The European Commission’s Long-term Vision for Rural Areas, published in June 2021 and building on a previous report on the Impact of Demographic Change and a Green Paper on Ageing, underlines the importance of population trends as a key issue for EU rural policy. The increasing concern about demographic issues, especially in rural Europe, has been accompanied, and in some cases preceded, by the publication of national population strategies. This renewed interest within the European policy community probably has roots in politics rather than new research or fresh evidence. Rural depopulation is not a new phenomenon, nor is it a new research topic. Nevertheless, to better understand this renewed interest, it is instructive to review recent scholarship and consider whether there is any evidence that the processes and systems of rural and regional (demographic) development are delivering new kinds of challenges, requiring refreshed policy approaches. Having established this context, we present a comparative review of a selection of national strategies, identifying shifting perspectives on goals, the instruments proposed, and implied intervention logics. Arguably, cumulative evidence points to an incremental shift of the policy discourse away from neoliberal, Lisbon-inspired visions of rural competitiveness and cost-effectiveness and towards a quest for rural well-being, rights to basic services, and more (spatially) inclusive rural development. This increasing emphasis on qualitative change may be symptomatic of a wider shift in the zeitgeist of rural policy, reflecting a number of globalised trends, including an awareness of the potentials and limitations associated with changing patterns of inter and intra-regional mobility. Full article

Today, life cycle assessment (LCA) is the most widely used approach to model and calculate the environmental impacts of products and processes. The results of LCAs are often said to be deterministic, even though the real-life applications are uncertain and vague. The uncertainty, which may be simply ignored, is one of the key factors influencing the reliability of LCA outcomes. Numerous sources of uncertainty in LCA are classified in various ways, such as parameter and model uncertainty, choices, spatial variability, temporal variability, variability between sources and objects, etc. Through a scoping review, the present study aims to identify and assess the frequency with which LCA studies reflect the uncertainty and what are the tools to cope with the uncertainty to map the knowledge gaps in the field to reveal the challenges and opportunities to have a robust LCA model. It is also investigated which database, methodology, software, etc., have been used in the life cycle assessment process. The results indicate that the most significant sources of uncertainty were in the model and process parameters, data variability, and the use of different methodologies and databases. The probabilistic approach or stochastic modeling, using numerical methods such as Monte Carlo simulation, was the dominating tool to cope with the uncertainty. There were four dominant LCA methodologies: CML, ReCiPe, IMPACT 2002+, and TRACI. The most commonly used LCA software and databases were SimaPro^® and Ecoinvent^®, respectively. Full article