This book discusses the ways in which procurement can help to provide an ethical and sustainable approach to business and product creation while raising an awareness of unacceptable practices with a view to their eradication. This book demonstrates and explains how to best conduct yourself in a procurement role and what challenges you should be aware of. Factors such as being aware of modern slavery, supply chain’s pollution emissions, and opportunities to recycle and reuse will be explored to create an understanding for the reader in how value should be achieved in today’s way of managing procurement. As you make your way through the book you will learn about tools and techniques that can aid you in making the right decision for you and your organization, to ensure that all ethical and sustainable elements of the procurement process are explored, evaluated, reviewed and documented. This book discusses the ways in which procurement can help to provide an ethical and sustainable approach to business and product creation while raising an awareness of unacceptable practices with a view to their eradication. You, the reader, will learn more about the authors honest experiences of working in procurement as you progress through her literary work. At the end of each chapter, she provides a mini case study exploring and explaining some of her purchasing stories that she has collated over the years.

Government departments are constantly challenged with changing environments, complex socio-economic issues and shifting policy direction. Organizations and their teams need to be agile, resilient and future-proof. Enter Design Thinking! Design Thinking is a human-centered approach that provides the structure and the tools to turn challenges into opportunities. It helps to increase innovation, build resilience and create efficiencies. Design thinking excels at distilling a complicated challenge into clearer, more manageable problems. It also helps to identify and ensure user needs are at the core of each phase of the design process. It stimulates teamwork and collaboration, while mitigating uncertainty and future shocks. This book introduces the key steps of design thinking to give your team confidence in using this systematic design approach to creative problem-solving at work. Equipped with real-world examples, it provides guidance for implementing a user-centric design to deliver the best possible services and solutions. _______________ 'The steps that are covered in this book, especially empathizing with the clients or end users, was a critical success factor in the release of the new digitized application process and has a direct impact on the lives of Canadians.' Jason Mombourquette - Director General, Royal Canadian Mounted Police ‘Super easy to read, loved the examples and the illustrations. The book helps me realize that prototyping is somewhat natural for us and it’s an essential step to create solutions that work.’ Liz McKeown - Executive Director, Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat

Innovative research solutions increasingly require deep engagement with practitioners to manage the complex problems they are attempting to solve. This often project-based research is equipped with finite resources over a limited period without much thought into future-proofing the practice. These projects must face questions of what happens when a product comes to an end and whether there are any lasting positive effects once the IT systems are no longer being actively developed. From a computing perspective, the challenge is to design IT artifacts that contribute to improving the user's work and everyday life in a sustainable way, thereby also contributing to social and ecological sustainability. Future-Proofing: Making Practice-Based IT Design Sustainable documents the experiences made by several leading research groups in Europe, North America, and South Africa. It describes their efforts to achieve sustainable design results, the difficulties that barred the way but also the strategies they adopted to achieve the goal of sustainability. The analysis of these cases has inspired thinking about how to more systematically address and possibly overcome the impediments to sustainability. This book develops a strong future-oriented perspective that conceptualizes sustainability as a complex and highly variegated issue and formulates insights and recommendations with a view to help researchers to better design for sustainability.

As the world accelerates towards a renewable energy transition, the demand for critical raw materials (CRMs) for energy generation, conversion, and storage technologies is seeing a drastic increase. Such materials are not only subject to limited supply and extreme price volatility but can also represent serious burdens to the environment, to human health, and also to socio-political systems. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, this book provides a novel perspective on the discussion about material dependencies of energy technologies. It examines CRMs use in fuel cells, an emerging energy conversion technology, and discusses governance strategies for early-stage fuel cell development to predict and avoid potential issues. This will be an invaluable resource for researchers in energy studies, engineering, sociology and political science as well as those with a general interest in this field looking for an accessible overview.

This book focuses on the challenges facing governments and communities in preparing for and responding to major crises — especially the hard to predict yet unavoidable natural disasters ranging from earthquakes and tsunamis to floods and bushfires, as well as pandemics and global economic crises. Future-proofing the state and our societies involves decision-makers developing capacities to learn from recent ‘disaster’ experiences in order to be better placed to anticipate and prepare for foreseeable challenges. To undertake such futureproofing means taking long-term (and often recurring) problems seriously, managing risks appropriately, investing in preparedness, prevention and mitigation, reducing future vulnerability, building resilience in communities and institutions, and cultivating astute leadership. In the past we have often heard calls for ‘better future-proofing’ in the aftermath of disasters, but then neglected the imperatives of the message. Future-Proofing the State is organised around four key themes: how can we better predict and manage the future; how can we transform the short-term thinking shaped by our political cycles into more effective long-term planning; how can we build learning into our preparations for future policies and management; and how can we successfully build trust and community resilience to meet future challenges more adequately?

Enterprise Risk Management in Today’s World examines enterprise risk management in its past, present and future, exploring the role that directors and leaders in organizations have in devising risk management strategies, analysing values such as trust, resilience, CSR and governance within organizations.

After several decades of increasing global economic integration, the world is facing the risk of policy-driven geoeconomic fragmentation (GEF). This note explores the ramifications. It identifies multiple channels through which the benefits of globalization were earlier transmitted, and along which, conversely, the costs of GEF are likely to fall, including trade, migration, capital flows, technology diffusion and the provision of global public goods. It explores the consequences of GEF for the international monetary system and the global financial safety net. Finally, it suggests a pragmatic path forward for preserving the benefits of global integration and multilateralism