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Government is a very labour intensive enterprise. Public organisations provide services, enforce laws and regulations, solve problems, and have varied missions. Their varied missions include protection of the environment, food safety, elderly and disabled assistance, education of our children, and civil rights enforcement. All of these activities require the use of human resources. The quality of employees in the county directly relates to how well the county performs. Essential tasks of human resource managers are to find qualified employees for these government positions, as well as to promote an attractive work environment for these employees. Failure to use effective human resource management risks low productivity and a lack of commitment to the community. County managers have the challenge of meeting multiple objectives including productivity, staffing and many more.

John D. Wolf has been promoted to the new position of Executive Vice‐President of McDonnell Douglas Electronics Company, it was announced by David C. Arnold, President.

Creating content for the People’s Network (PN) of relevance to users and its effective delivery are critical to its continued success and take‐up of services. Material produced as part of the New Opportunities Fund’s (NOF) digitisation programme is a key component of this but there is a growing body of other materials which must be taken into consideration. Recent experience has demonstrated the need to develop a core framework for content delivery. This article looks at how this is happening with NOF and other content and discusses the potential for further developments in the context of the PN as a service.

This paper aims to explore three operations and supply chain management (OSCM) approaches for meeting the 2 °C targets to counteract climate change: adaptation (adjusting to climatic impacts); mitigation (innovating towards low-carbon practices); and carbon-removing negative emissions technologies (NETs). We suggest that adaptation nor mitigation may be enough to meet the current climate targets, thus calling for NETs, resulting in the following question: How can operations and supply chains be reconceptualized for NETs?

We draw on the sustainable supply chain and transitions discourses along with interview data involving 125 experts gathered from a broad research project focused on geoengineering and NETs. We analyze three case studies of emerging NETs (biochar, direct air carbon capture and storage and ocean alkalinity enhancement), leading to propositions on the link between OSCM and NETs.

Although some NETs are promising, there remains considerable variance and uncertainty over supply chain configurations, efficacy, social acceptability and potential risks of unintended detrimental consequences. We introduce the concept of transformative OSCM, which encompasses policy interventions to foster the emergence of new technologies in industry sectors driven by social mandates but lack clear commercial incentives.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is among the first that studies NETs from an OSCM perspective. It suggests a pathway toward new industry structures and policy support to effectively tackle climate change through carbon removal.

This paper seeks to create the context within which research into how higher education institutions (HEIs) might engage with the goal of sustainable development. In particular, the paper outlines the context in which papers in a special section on this topic might be understood as well as developing propositions for how a research focus might emerge in this area. The paper, therefore, seeks to contribute to discussions about whether, under which circumstances and how social accountability and engagement processes focusing on sustainable development might trigger, frame and/or promote change processes in HEIs. The papers that compose this special section are also introduced and future research avenues offered.

Literature review

Despite a dearth of literature in the area of HEI responsiveness to sustainable development (and leaving side education/learning and research for sustainable development), numerous points of intersection exist. Foremost among these is the role of HEIs as shapers of the values of society (and a place for debates about these values). In addition, HEIs are substantive organisations with sustainable development impacts. The paper suggests, however, that understanding HEIs and self-consciously seeking change in their activities has to seriously engage with the characterisation of these organisations as loosely coupled systems.

The paper discusses the distinctive characteristics of HEIs and considers the higher education context as a challenging case to explore the capacity of social accountability and stakeholder engagement to foster change towards the goal of sustainable development.