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Public Services and Environmental Sustainability
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Public Services and Environmental Sustainability

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Sustainability and Applications".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (20 January 2022) | Viewed by 4695

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Edivando Vitor do Couto

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Guest Editor
Academic Department of Biodiversity and Nature Conservation, Paraná Federal Technological University, 1233 Via Rosalina Maria dos Santos, CEP, 87301-899 Campo Mourão, PR, Brazil
Interests: geoprocessing; biodiversity and nature conservation

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The uncontrolled growth of urban areas, mainly in developing countries, is considered one of the determining factors in the unequal distribution of resources such as education and sanitation. A lack of urban planning results in inappropriate conditions for maintaining social welfare and environmental sustainability. Sanitation and environmental sustainability are recognized as basic human rights; however, some places face challenges in providing adequate sanitation systems and forest green areas due to their rampant urbanization process. Increasing the quality and adequacy of the system depends on organized information to develop strategies for its improvement and actions of awareness-raising, e.g., public investment in urban infrastructure, sanitation, and environmental education. It is important to understand the different aspects related to public services and environmental sustainability, so that decision-makers focus on higher priority areas for investment in public services, hence ensuring a higher quality of life and preventing environmental degradation. Here, we look for innovative research, reviews, case studies, and successful applications in the evaluation of public services and environmental sustainability for urban and rural spaces, river basins, and all spaces where public services and environmental sustainability are essential for society.

Dr. Edivando Vitor do Couto
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • public services 
  • environmental sanitation 
  • infrastructure 
  • environmental education 
  • urban ecology 
  • strategies for public services improvement 
  • political and management base of the structure 
  • environmental services coverage 
  • environmental sustainability

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

30 pages, 1596 KiB  
Article
The Relationship between Efficiency and Quality of Municipally Owned Corporations: Evidence from Local Public Transport and Waste Management in Poland
by Tomasz Jedynak and Krzysztof Wąsowicz
Sustainability 2021, 13(17), 9804; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13179804 - 31 Aug 2021
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 1959
Abstract
Sustainable development requires the intervention of public authorities in areas where market mechanisms do not guarantee the proper allocation of goods. Some of these goods include public services such as local collective transport and municipal waste management. In many countries, the process of [...] Read more.
Sustainable development requires the intervention of public authorities in areas where market mechanisms do not guarantee the proper allocation of goods. Some of these goods include public services such as local collective transport and municipal waste management. In many countries, the process of remunicipalizing these service provisions is underway and, in the modern model used in providing these services, municipally owned corporations (MOCs) play a special role. The specific nature of these companies (i.e., the duality of their objectives and that they are required to run classic economic calculations while they are assessed in terms of the quality of their services) encouraged the authors to formulate the primary goal of the study, which was to assess the link between the financial and operational efficiency of MOCs and the quality of their services. The present study’s authors developed a method for measuring the financial and operational efficiency of MOCs. In addition, a set of standards for assessing the quality of public service provision were defined, and opinion surveys were carried out to evaluate them. Subsequently, multi-criteria rankings of the efficiency and quality of services of the MOCs tested were drawn up using a synthetic variable based on the zero unitarization method (ZUM). A correlation of the analyzed variables was examined (Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient) and simple line regression models were built. Our research showed that analyses of MOCs, when limited to their financial and operational aspects, are incomplete. According to the empirical analysis carried out, the financial and operational efficiency of MOCs does not translate to the quality of their services. Therefore, we believe that, in assessing the activities of MOCs, it is necessary to take into account criteria that measure the quality of meeting the needs of the local community in addition to financial criteria. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Public Services and Environmental Sustainability)
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18 pages, 1895 KiB  
Article
Spatial-Temporal Integrated Measurement of the Efficiency of Urban Land Use in Yellow River Basin
by Hengji Li, Jiansheng Qu, Dai Wang, Peng Meng, Chenyu Lu and Jingjing Zeng
Sustainability 2021, 13(16), 8902; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13168902 - 9 Aug 2021
Cited by 10 | Viewed by 1893
Abstract
As the product of natural process, land is an essential but nonrenewable resource for humankind. Urban land use efficiency directly reflects the coupling between urban systems and land use systems. It also serves as the key indicator for measuring land productivity and regional [...] Read more.
As the product of natural process, land is an essential but nonrenewable resource for humankind. Urban land use efficiency directly reflects the coupling between urban systems and land use systems. It also serves as the key indicator for measuring land productivity and regional development quality. In this study, the land use efficiency of 65 county-level cities in the Yellow River Basin has been measured by applying the Data Envelope Analysis (DEA) and Spatial Autocorrelation Analysis methods. It makes up for the deficiency and defect of the existing research. The result indicates that in 2000~2018, the overall urban land use efficiency in 65 prefecture-level cities is unbalanced, with significant gaps between cities with high efficiency and low efficiency. In 2000~2018, the average urban land use efficiency in these 65 cities shows a tendency of declining. In 2000~2018, the spatial distribution of land use efficiency of these 65 cities indicates significant positive correlation, featured by the clustering of regions with high (low) efficiency. In terms of the spatial distribution of urban land use efficiency in the Yellow River Basin, it is marked by apparent spatial clustering. Specifically, from east to west, from coastal areas to inland regions, from downstream to upstream, the urban land use efficiency differs from high value areas to low value areas. On the whole, it is featured by high value in the east and low value in the west, while declining from downstream to upstream. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Public Services and Environmental Sustainability)
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