Working in partnership

This project capitalised on ISF’s transdisciplinary approach, involving researchers from our Learning and Social Change, Resource Futures, Water Futures and Energy Futures teams.

In 2018, the City of Sydney began development of a strategic vision for 2050. Building on from their Sustainable Sydney 2030 strategy, the 2050 vision incorporates a focus on ‘environmental pathways’ including those pertaining to energy, water and waste management. To assist in planning these pathways, the City required research and modelling of future scenarios for Sydney in 2050.

For this, ISF partnered with urban analytics and modelling specialists Kinesis. The research involved first consultation and a literature review to identify ‘megatrends’, far-reaching, global patterns that can provide a basis for imagining a likely future, as well as the underlying factors that drive change.

The second half of this project required ISF and Kinesis to draw on the megatrends to formulate four plausible scenarios for Sydney in 2050. Scenarios provide a tool to think about the future in a structured way and are designed to challenge current thinking. The Sustainable Sydney 2050 scenarios provide different stories about how Sydney’s future could unfold through to 2050 and illustrate implications across multiple domains. The process of developing these scenarios was largely consultative. ISF and Kinesis led workshops with City of Sydney representatives and expert stakeholders in which participants helped to develop potential scenarios and implications. Kinesis modelled energy/emissions, water and waste targets under each scenario, for both 2050 and 2040 and developed high-level trajectories required to reach the targets under each scenario.

The results of our findings on megatrends and the scenarios are helping to inform the City of Sydney’s considerations for their 2050 vision, which is in development.

To guide the investments of their Sustainable Funds Group, Stewart Investors commissions research into environmental, social and governance factors from a range of research organisations.

ISF/UTS has won a number of tenders to produce research for Stewart Investors since 2016, two of which were completed in 2019.

The first of these projects saw researchers from ISF’s Learning and Social Change team collaborate with colleagues from the UTS Business School to develop a report showcasing workplace gender equality initiatives. Points of enquiry included innovative policies to recruit and retain talent across genders, companies’ commitment to initiatives addressing equal opportunity employment and inclusive workplaces.

As part of the report, our researchers produced a ‘Gender Equality in the Workplace Index’, to help identify initiatives to support the participation of women at all stages of the career progression pipeline. The core of the report was a series of case studies of organisations whose gender-related initiatives are examples of leading practice and which have achieved demonstrated impact.

Read more about this project here.

ISF’s second research project for Stewart Investors in 2019, concerned companies that produce palm oil. The widely used vegetable oil is known to be a major driver of deforestation and habitat loss across Asia and Africa, and there are additional concerns regarding the local communities and workers associated with its production.

In their brief, Stewart Investors asked ISF to assess the sustainability performance of nine palm oil producers and to plot the progress they have made towards more sustainable practice over the past 10 years. ISF developed an assessment framework that included 37 indicators ­­­­– including biodiversity, deforestation, emissions and community impact – against which the companies were scored. ISF undertook this project in partnership with WWF.

Read the final report here.

Since 2013, WaterAid in Timor-Leste has been developing a community dialogue program to increase women’s involvement in water and sanitation programs and promote sharing of household WASH tasks between men and women. The program’s main resource is a manual for facilitators of the community dialogue sessions, which leads participants through a series of ‘modules’ or conversations, which typically occur across a two-year period.

In 2018, WaterAid engaged ISF to help them review and evaluate the manual’s use and its efficacy as a resource and approach to shifting gender norms towards equality. The review would also identify ways in which the program and manual could be improved to maximise their impact.

Researchers from our International Development team worked closely with WaterAid ­– and their in-country partner CARE – to co-design an evaluation process for the program. ISF then led training for WaterAid, CARE staff and project partners, sharing their expertise in analysing the outcomes of gender WASH programs.

Together, WaterAid, CARE and ISF conducted pilot community dialogue sessions with four separate community groups in Timor-Leste, using the action learning evaluation approach designed for the project. These were followed by a series of interviews with community members, government officials and other stakeholders, the results of which informed ISF’s research report.

WaterAid and CARE were closely involved in all stages of the research project, crucially collaborating with ISF to make practical recommendations about ways to improve the community dialogues program and manual, and a plan for their implementation and future expansion of the program. ISF, WaterAid and CARE staff in Timor-Leste continue to share insights via a closed Facebook group, and in 2020 ISF supported one of the key collaborators in Timor-Leste to present on the project at the Australian AID Conference in Canberra. 

ISF is currently working on two additional projects with WaterAid: Investigating how inclusive WASH can be addressed in responses to climate change; and An assessment of gender in WASH partnerships, workforce and impact.