Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: The Role of Supermarkets as Key Agents in Systems of Sustainable Consumption and Production

该奖项为参与由55个国家通过贝尔蒙特论坛发起的全球变化研究项目的美国研究人员提供支持。贝尔蒙特论坛是一个研究资助组织的联盟，致力于支持跨学科方法来应对全球环境变化的挑战和机遇。它的目的是通过协调和调动国际资源，加速提供最迫切需要的国际研究，以消除可持续发展的关键障碍。每个伙伴国在一个联盟中为它们的研究人员提供资金，以减轻对跨越国际边界的资金的需求。这种方法有助于有效利用国家资源，支持对全球相关主题的优秀研究，最好通过多国方法解决，同时认识到全球挑战需要全球解决方案。该奖项为美国研究人员在至少三个参与国的合作伙伴组成的联盟中进行合作提供支持。这些团队将开发和采用新的跨学科方法，将可持续消费和生产作为一个社会技术系统来解决，以帮助为可持续、有弹性和公正的消费和生产系统的决策提供信息。该项目重点关注超市在向可持续消费和生产系统（SSCP）转变过程中发挥的重要作用。这些实体将标准强加给他们的供应商，并影响消费者的行为——不管是好是坏。连锁超市的可持续性行为在可持续性维度、商业模式和国家之间存在很大差异。本项目将观察到的可持续性模式与公司的商业原理联系起来，以了解为什么零售公司的企业可持续性概况差异如此之大，以深入了解企业决策并帮助解释战略差异。该项目通过整合管理科学、价值链研究、社会技术系统研究以及包括商业管理研究、消费者行为经济学和环境影响分析在内的几种方法学方法的创新分析框架来研究决策。本项目将提高政策制定者、民间社会组织、私营部门协会和消费者团体对连锁超市目前采取的行动、机遇和挑战的认识，以提高其食品和服务的可持续性。这些知识将有助于设计更好的可持续发展战略、产品和流程，通过跟踪和监测食品零售商在其社会中的采购和营销行为的环境足迹，直接使消费者和环境受益，并建立长期合作伙伴关系，以维持变革。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 55-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum. The Belmont Forum is a consortium of research funding organizations focused on support for transdisciplinary approaches to global environmental change challenges and opportunities. It aims to accelerate delivery of the international research most urgently needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources. Each partner country provides funding for their researchers within a consortium to alleviate the need for funds to cross international borders. This approach facilitates effective leveraging of national resources to support excellent research on topics of global relevance best tackled through a multinational approach, recognizing that global challenges need global solutions. This award provides support for the U.S. researchers to cooperate in consortia that consist of partners from at least three of the participating countries. The teams will develop and employ new transdisciplinary approaches to address sustainable consumption and production as a socio-technical system to help inform decision-making for sustainable, resilient, and just systems of consumption and production.The project focuses on the highly influential role that supermarkets play in the shift towards Systems of Sustainable Consumption and Production (SSCP). These entities impose standards on their suppliers and shape consumer behavior - for good or bad. Sustainability behavior of supermarket chains differs considerably across sustainability dimensions, business models, and countries. This project links the observed sustainability patterns to the business rationale of firms to understand why corporate sustainability profiles differ so strongly across retail corporations, to gain insight on corporate decision-making and to help explain strategic differences. The project investigates decision-making through an innovative analytical framework integrating management science, value chain research, and socio-technical systems research and several methodological approaches including business management research, consumer behavioral economics, and environmental impact analysis. This project will increase the knowledge of policymakers, civil society organizations, private sector associations, and consumer groups about what are the current actions, opportunities, and challenges for supermarket chains to increase the sustainability of their food products and services. This knowledge will help design better sustainability strategies, and products and processes, directly benefitting consumers and the environment by tracking and monitoring the environmental footprint of food retailers’ sourcing and marketing actions in their societies and build long term partnerships to sustain change.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.