Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are one of the latest topics getting attention among companies and universities. This reflects societal representation for gender ratios and many organizations have set goals on gender equality in creating a sustainable and innovative workplace. However, the statistics show that there is sluggish growth for women in managerial positions. This is creating a problem for promoting equity at leadership levels in every organization. Equity and equality are not the same as the former is closer to justice creating the same opportunities for all people with different abilities. Even though organizations can able to promote gender equality and achieve it with a better ratio, there is a struggle to increase women's representation at different leadership levels. The global scenario also shows that the representation of women on board and C-suite (Chief executive level like CEO, CFO, etc) is very low demanding gender equity at leadership levels. Thereby, a case study is performed in Celanese, a materials company that has better gender equality across the organization.

This research is executed as an embedded single case study in both the global and Dutch context to understand this scenario and their gender representation at the management level. This is, in particular, to relate gender equality ratio progress and effectiveness for development programs to promote more women leaders supporting equitable workplace. The embedded case study is performed through ethnography research in terms of observations, qualitative interviews, and focused group discussions inside the organization. This approach helps to understand the existing scenario for women's representation and leadership development opportunities in a typical materials company. This is extended for industrial benchmarks at the global level as a comparison of gender equality ratios against their competitors. The leadership interviews with both genders focusing on women leaders are done and the outputs showed the driving factors, challenges, and future requirements to create equity-focused leadership. Further analysis is done to extract the key elements impacting gender equity for leadership development programs.

Whereas, focused group discussions are aimed at involving employees at different levels and employees who are closely involved in leadership programs. So, focused group discussion is done with the Young professional group that comprises employees at different levels and Human Resources team who drives leadership programs. These discussions acted as data triangulation for qualitative interviews and provided more insights into leadership development programs from different perspectives. As a result, the existing gaps and challenges for the leadership development of women employees in an organization are studied. Facts derived from the organizational level and qualitative results provided enough reasons for ineffective development programs in supporting equity at leadership levels. This is evident that leadership levels demanded more women employees and necessary driving factors to motivate them. This also emphasized how HR policies and role model representation can contribute better in driving more female employees into leadership levels.

However, the missing factor is equitable actions in leadership development programs to create an inclusive environment. Thereby, a leadership development cycle is developed to strengthen various processes making the leadership program as equity-focused and motivating female employees for leadership positions. However, the recommendations are derived using the embedded single case study and explained briefly about a roadmap showing the next future phases for equity at leadership levels and their decision-making impact on innovation. Finally, a leadership development framework is developed showing the possible methods and processes for driving more female employees from the organizational level to the leadership level. This leadership framework shows how women leaders need effective equity-focused development programs using equitable actions considering both social and professional barriers. Using this framework, the practical implications are summarized for promoting women leaders at leadership levels through equity-focused leadership development programs.

What started as a research on Australian Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the circular economy (CE), turned into a much more complex and personal journey of what it means to do respectful and collaborative research with Indigenous communities. In this thesis, I attempted to build an understanding of the very rich and complex tapestry of Australian Indigenous knowledges, to explore how they may inspire alternative designs for a CE. The main assumptions, principles, and limitations of the conventional model of the CE are explored, and an Indigenous-inspired circular economy model is proposed. Alongside this research aim, I also documented my own learning process as I grappled with the challenges of conducting Indigenist research, and confronted the essential question of how we can genuinely value and engage with Indigenous communities in the realm of academic research.

Energy Communities are initiatives ran by members of the same or different communities with the aim of producing, distributing and consuming cleaner energy. The potential of these initiatives, as identified from this clean energy production, to play a key role in the energy transition is assumed to be vital as recognized by the European Commission’s Clean Energy for All package and the provision of a legislative framework for their operation in European countries. In the light of this, European policy makers assume that promoting the engagement of more citizens in such initiatives will lead to a rise in energy justice and a fairer energy transition. However, several researches show that this assumption maybe flawed as the relation between the two is not explicitly verified. Through the acknowledgement of minority groups, this research aims to investigate whether an increased citizen engagement in energy communities could lead to a rise in energy justice. For this, the research is broken down into three key steps involving: 1) investigating what factors could affect the willingness of citizens to engage in energy communities by conducting a literature review and then evaluating potential influence of the identified factors for the city of The Hague as case study area, 2) investigating the distribution of the identified factors around areas with energy communities to find out whether there are any social groups favoured by the distribution of these factors around neighbourhoods with 24 energy communities. This is done by conducting spatial data analysis to investigate whether the engagements of any particular social groups or classes of people might be favoured by the spatial locations of energy communities in specific areas of The Hague 3) finally by conducting one on one interviews with 8 board members of energy communities in The Hague, the research seeks to investigate the relation between the identified factors potentially affecting citizens' desires to engage and the three tenets of energy justice. The results show that in the city of The Hague, although a majority of neighbourhoods in which energy communities are located are characterized by a high number of minority groups, a high majority of the energy communities interviewed (7 out of 8) acknowledge that minority groups are generally less involved. However for the classes of people engaging in such initiatives, a majority seeks to raise their powers and that of other community members in the decision making process. Hence, this allows to conclude that for the case study area, energy communities might only lead to a limited rise in Energy justice due to the partial or non-acknowledgement of minority groups.

The Port of Rotterdam is one of the largest CO2 emitters of the Netherlands. One method to reduce its emissions is by implementing carbon capture and utilization (CCU) technologies. In this research two different CCU routes for industrial-scale n-caproate production are compared. The first route utilizes microbial electrosynthesis (direct route). The second route uses syngas formation via electro-reduction combined with syngas fermentation (indirect route).

Based on the European Union's technology readiness level, the maturity of both routes is ranked as 3 to 4. This indicates that both routes are in the demonstration phase. In this phase scientists play an important role, as the focus is on researching the technology's overall feasibility. It is also the phase in which financial barriers are the most pressing. Early-stage investors can help overcome these barriers, by allocating (financial) resources. Nonetheless, an assessment method taking both scientists' as well as early-stage investors' perspectives into account is missing. This research contributes to filling this knowledge gap.

The methodology applied is bricolage, using a mixture of literature research, simulation data and interviews. Data of the direct route is retrieved from literature research. To obtain data of the indirect route, a simulation is made in Aspen Plus v12. An overview of important assessment parameters are acquired via the conducted interviews.

In total 15 participants are interviewed, of which; 8 scientists working on CCU technologies, 5 early-stage investors, 1 governmental policy executing party and 1 NGO. These interviews, combined with metrics found in literature research, led to an overview of parameters to be assessed for a performance analysis.

Overall, 10 metrics are selected and used for the performance assessment. These include technical, economic, environmental and strategic metrics. The technical assessment showed that the indirect route has a significantly higher energy consumption compared to the direct route (0.35 GJ/kg caproate compared to 0.1 GJ/kg caproate). However, the indirect route has a higher production selectivity towards n-caproate. The economic performance assessment resulted in a lower CAPEX and OPEX for the direct route. Still, for both routes, the minimum n-caproate selling price is below the current n-caproate market price. The net carbon footprint of the indirect route is 7.3 kg CO2 per kg caproate, indicating that a significant amount of CO2 is being emitted during its production.

While an analysis at this maturity stage of the production routes comes with uncertainties, it gives a first sound indication of its performance and bottlenecks. For the indirect route, the energy consumption is dominated by the two electrolyzers used and the downstream processing. This energy consumption is also the main contributor to the OPEX (47%) and the carbon footprint (79%). Another factor largely responsible for the carbon footprint are the emissions during fermentation (19%). The main cost item of the equipment cost is the water alkaline electrolyzer (42% of total cost).

To conclude, the indirect route shows the potential of industrial-scale n-caproate production with a high selectivity. Nonetheless, it is key to reduce its energy consumption and implement more efficient off-gas recycling to improve its techno-economic and environmental performance.

in this research, I study the Nitrogen Crisis by comparing Twitter content to real-life events, answering the following research question: How does the intensity of emotions and discussed topics on social media relate to the characteristics of real-life demonstrations during a sustainability policy crisis? To characterise online events, sentiment analysis and topic modelling are applied to analyse tweets about the nitrogen crisis to paint a picture of what subjects were discussed online, and how people are feeling about them. To characterise offline events, a codebook is developed with categories that reveal information on the scale, intensity and extremism during real-life demonstrations. The most promising finding is that topic models with higher numbers of topics but lower coherence scores prove to be more interesting sources of information on underlying topics and trends on Twitter.