scholarly journals Unpacking the Drivers of Stakeholder Engagement in Sustainable Water Management: NGOs and the Use of Facebook

Water ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 775 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juana Alonso-Cañadas ◽  
Federico Galán-Valdivieso ◽  
Laura Saraite-Sariene ◽  
María del Carmen Caba-Perez

The number of people worldwide without access to safe drinking water or adequate sanitation is an unresolved and growing concern, with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) playing an important role in mitigating the effects of water shortage. These organizations utilize the communication mechanisms at their disposal, such as social media, to help spread their social message and to achieve the commitment of society to their cause. In this context and based on dialogic and the resource dependence theory framework, the main aim of this research is to analyze how organizational structure, resource allocation and communication policies of NGOs focused on water management influence the online commitment of their stakeholders. Exploratory results show that these NGOs are not taking enough advantage of social media to engage with their potential donors and volunteers because of the remarkable difference between the management of Facebook posts and users’ behavior. Using multivariate lineal regression, our findings show that certain structural (namely, size, reputation and board size), economic (fundraising expenses) and social media (number of Facebook fans) characteristics positively influence stakeholder engagement, while administrative spending and a broad presence in many social networks straitens the ability of these type of NGOs to attract and retain stakeholders’ commitment through social media.

Author(s):  
Mete Yildiz ◽  
Kamil Demirhan

This chapter examines the social media use by local governments, and other policy actors (government agencies, non-governmental organizations and citizens) after the 2011 Van Earthquake in Turkey. This study is different from others examining social media use of just one policy actor after a disaster; as it compares and contrasts the performance of different policy actors with that of local governments. To this end, contents of the messages posted on selected Facebook pages after the earthquake are analyzed. The findings include examples of effective social media use for disaster relief and recovery, as well as detailed information about the nature and functioning of “multiple/parallel systems of public service/information delivery”, more than one electronic channel of communication and coordination simultaneously connecting people and organizations. The findings suggest that, if institutional arrangements conducive to collaborations are present, social media platforms can be effective means of disaster relief and recovery, especially for communication among citizens after a disaster.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 592-616
Author(s):  
Linhan Zhang ◽  
Qingliang Tang

Purpose Water management is an emerging practice. This paper aims to propose a theoretical model of a corporate water management system (WMS) and empirically explores whether superior water management improves water use performance. Design/methodology/approach Our model of WMS consists of 10 structural elements. We draw on self-discipline theory to predict the results and use archival data from the Carbon Disclosure Project to measure and evaluate the overall quality and effectiveness of the water management of our sample companies. Findings Companies motivated to adopt self-discipline tend to proactively implement high-quality WMSs. However, further analyses suggest that water management without regulatory sanctions appears insufficient for reducing water usage, at least in the short term. Overall, this study reveals a clear and growing tendency for businesses to manage water risks and a corresponding momentum toward more rigid control of water consumption. Research limitations/implications Corporate participation in the Carbon Disclosure Project survey is voluntary. Thus, the data in this paper are subject to self-selection bias, and what the companies claim concerning their behavior may not reflect the reality of their business practices. In addition, the inferences drawn here are based on data from only large firms. Future researchers could investigate whether and how corporate WMS continued to develop or decline in recent years, and how such practices integrate with other aspects of management (including carbon and energy). Practical implications This paper responds to water scarcity by exploring how the development of corporate WMS is driven by self-discipline motivation. This study sets out an agenda for the future of water accounting and management which can be used to guide research and stimulate extension in practice. Governments and non-governmental organizations may utilize the results to guide and bind corporations to achieve sustainability. Social implications The efficient use of freshwater is essential for sustainability, but limited studies have addressed the issue. The current paper explores this important issue, and our findings suggest regulatory institution is necessary to effectively enhance water usage. Originality/value This paper represents an early attempt to model corporate water management practices. A WMS should facilitate resilience in water management, measurement of water performance, and comparability among firms. This study contributes to the conceptualization and empirical assessment of self-discipline in motivated water management and enhances the validity and applicability of the theory of self-disciplining in sustainability research.


2012 ◽  
Vol 88 (06) ◽  
pp. 686-696 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Spang ◽  
Christopher M. Lemieux ◽  
Silvia Strobl

In southern Ontario, multiple organizations apply various approaches to identifying natural heritage systems (NHS). Natural heritage systems comprise a network of natural features and areas, such as protected areas, forests, wetlands, river corridors, lakes, and meadows, as well as the associated natural processes to be conserved and/or managed for various environmental and public services. The application of a variety of approaches can lead to a lack of connections between natural heritage features across political jurisdictions. To further complicate the situation, not all municipalities have the necessary tools and information available to identify and protect NHS nor do they have the capacity to coordinate designing NHS with neighbouring jurisdictions. To address these challenges, a new approach was developed and tested that engages many stakeholders in the collaborative design of a NHS for an ecologically based landscape that crosses several political boundaries. Engagement is an opportunity to work together on common goals with stakeholders, communities, and citizens to find solutions to complex problems and move beyond the traditional consultation that government has used extensively in the past. We engaged a representative group of stakeholders to design and map a scientifically based, quantitatively derived NHS. The engagement process alternated data preparation and analysis activities with target-setting and decision-making by a diverse group of stakeholders, including municipalities, government agencies, non-governmental organizations, stewardship groups, landowners, and other interests. Throughout the target-setting process, observations and feedback from the stakeholders were collected. This paper both documents a number of lessons learned through the engagement process, and demonstrates that stakeholder engagement in NHS design has great potential to coordinate conservation efforts across political jurisdictions and the varied mandates of several organizations.


First Monday ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodrigo Sandoval-Almazan ◽  
Andrea L. Kavanaugh

The use of social media by public administration has been growing steadily, and fostering important transformations in organization, costs, citizen interaction and efficiency. Citizens are increasingly more informed about government activities, performance, and claims solutions. Citiizens and non-profit organizations are in greater communication with each other about government planning and response to complex and collective problems. Social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and WhatsApp, as well as related tools, such as commenting, liking, tagging and rating, change the distribution of information, power and resources. The growing maturity of public officials in the use of these tools not only creates new opportunities, but also engenders problems. Many politicians, public officials and public servants are seeking ways to adapt their daily operations and practices to make effective use of social media for interaction with non-governmental organizations and with citizens and to provide information and services more efficiently. The papers in this special issue on social media and government capture the current state of some of these opportunities and problems.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-49
Author(s):  
Kehinde Kadijat Kadiri ◽  
Adetola Kehinde ◽  
Adeyinka Tella ◽  
Raji Khalid

There is a growing interest in the ways non-governmental organisations (NGOs) can ensure that electorates have access to information that could improve comprehension of the electoral process and reinforce tranquil relations between the electorates and political stakeholders. This study examined the usage of social media for 2019 electoral peace campaign by NGOs in Kwara State, Nigeria. The study adopted a qualitative research method and multistage sampling technique was adopted as sampling technique. The study focused mainly on four LGAs i.e. Asa, Ilorin South, Ilorin West and Ilorin East Local Government Areas. In these four LGAs, 15 NGOs with vested interest in electoral peace campaigns were purposively selected. Unstructured interview was used to collect data from the social media handlers of theses NGOs. The data collected were recorded and transcribed. The gathered data were arranged in themes following the approach of manual thematic analysis. Findings from this study showed that NGOs in Kwara State used social media for electoral peace campaign during 2019 general elections. Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn were the most used social media platforms among NGOs in Kwara State during 2019 general elections; however, there level of usage is average. The motivation for social media usage among NGOs in Kwara State during 2019 general elections can be attributed to the wider coverage and reach of social media. Lastly, during 2019 general elections, NGOs in Kwara State embarked on peace campaigns before elections, some do it during and few do it post electoral peace campaign. Among several recommendations, the study recommended that the electoral umpire in Nigeria, Independent National Electoral Commission should include training of officers in their electoral briefings on the viability of social media use during elections by officers.


Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (21) ◽  
pp. 4654 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Carlos Pereira-Kohatsu ◽  
Lara Quijano-Sánchez ◽  
Federico Liberatore ◽  
Miguel Camacho-Collados

Social Media are sensors in the real world that can be used to measure the pulse of societies. However, the massive and unfiltered feed of messages posted in social media is a phenomenon that nowadays raises social alarms, especially when these messages contain hate speech targeted to a specific individual or group. In this context, governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are concerned about the possible negative impact that these messages can have on individuals or on the society. In this paper, we present HaterNet, an intelligent system currently being used by the Spanish National Office Against Hate Crimes of the Spanish State Secretariat for Security that identifies and monitors the evolution of hate speech in Twitter. The contributions of this research are many-fold: (1) It introduces the first intelligent system that monitors and visualizes, using social network analysis techniques, hate speech in Social Media. (2) It introduces a novel public dataset on hate speech in Spanish consisting of 6000 expert-labeled tweets. (3) It compares several classification approaches based on different document representation strategies and text classification models. (4) The best approach consists of a combination of a LTSM+MLP neural network that takes as input the tweet’s word, emoji, and expression tokens’ embeddings enriched by the tf-idf, and obtains an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.828 on our dataset, outperforming previous methods presented in the literature.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Saraite-Sariene ◽  
Federico Galán-Valdivieso ◽  
Juana Alonso-Cañadas ◽  
Manuela García-Tabuyo

PurposeThe role of female managers has been of increasing interest among scholars in recent years, especially regarding sustainability issues. The same could be said about the usefulness of social media in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in demonstrating accountability to their stakeholders and attracting and keeping donors and volunteers. This paper aims to meet both research interests by analyzing to what extent women in top positions can foster stakeholders' engagement via social media.Design/methodology/approachOnline engagement can be proxied using data from social media to develop a measure that summarizes the main actions social media users are able to use in order to show their reactions to social media publications. Facebook data were obtained using proprietary software (Facebook data model) developed by the research team to carry out data massive extraction, processing and exploration.FindingsThe results of the multivariate analysis show that female leadership in both top and environmental-specific positions enhance social media engagement, while a higher percentage of women on the board of directors exert the opposite effect.Research limitations/implicationsThis study is not without limitations. First, this research is focused on a specific type of non-governmental organization (environmental NGO). Second, this study does not include economic variables such as donation income or expense structure. Third, data come only from Facebook as the leading social network.Originality/valueThis paper advances in the scarce knowledge about the role of women and the levels of online engagement (interactive conversations) in NGOs focused on sustainability.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 401-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Bloodgood ◽  
Joannie Tremblay-Boire

Prior work suggests that government funding can encourage non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to engage in political advocacy and public policy. We challenge this finding and examine two theoretical explanations for the dampening effect of government funding on NGO lobbying. First, donors are known to discipline NGO activity via an implicit or explicit threat to withdraw funding should the organization become too radical or political. Second, NGOs with more radical political agendas are less willing to seek or accept government funding for fear this will limit or delegitimize their activities. Using data from the European Union’s Transparency Register, we find that the share of government funding in NGO budgets is negatively associated with lobbying expenditure. This effect is statistically significant and substantial, which provides a reason for concern about NGO resource dependence. Even when governments are motivated by honorable intentions, their financial assistance has the (unintended) effect of dampening NGOs’ political activity.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 152
Author(s):  
Rizaldi Parani ◽  
Astrid Pramesuari ◽  
Daffa Muhammad Maldiva ◽  
Edlyn Felicia

The phenomenon of post-truth appears, in which a view believed to be true is inverted and made contradictory as a new form of truth. This phenomenon appears to occur in several countries such as the United States, North Korea, the Philippines and also Indonesia. This can be seen from various actions carried out by radical organizations that question the values of Bhinneka Tunggal Ika with the desire to change these values by referring to religious values. This activity is increasingly growing in terms of followers, and further builds up on the blasphemy case accusations towards former Jakarta Governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama.This research focuses on how the social media has an influence in expanding the spread of hoaxes and hate speech as an effort to destabilize the values of Bhinneka Tunggal Ika. Information and data were obtained from interviews with mass organizations often labeled radical, non-governmental organizations and social observers.The results of this study confirm the need for capacity building both in the form of media literacy and also the socialization of Bhinneka Tunggal Ika values through social institutions and the Government. This is intended to create strong social capital, especially in fostering a sense of trust in the context of a pluralist society in Indonesia.Keywords: Post truth, Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, Social Media, Social Capital, Trust.


Author(s):  
Curtis Martin ◽  
Bertrum H. MacDonald

Social media offer the potential to facilitate two-way conversations needed for effective science communication; however, research communicators often struggle to reach lay audiences on these media. In this study, the Twitter and Instagram activity of four individual scientists in North America and Europe, acting as recognized science communicators, was compared with the activity of three marine-focused non-governmental organizations (NGOs), particularly paying attention to the strategies that encourage audience engagement in two-way conversations. The results show that a combination of interpersonal communication strategies can have an important effect on the level of lay user engagement in two-way conversations over time.


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