Saudi Cultural Missions Theses & Dissertations
Permanent URI for this communityhttps://drepo.sdl.edu.sa/handle/20.500.14154/10
Browse
2 results
Search Results
Item Restricted BUILDING A SUSTAINABLE GREEN ECONOMY IN SAUDI ARABIA: GREEN ENERGY AND WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT(Saudi Digital Library, 2026) Alzahrani, Faisal Megbas; Göktuğ, MorçölIn this dissertation, I investigate how Saudi Arabia can build a sustainable green economy by focusing on two interrelated pillars: green energy adoption and workforce development. Using a three-paper design, I evaluate literature on sustainability; analyze semi-structured interviews with government, academic, and business leaders to assess opportunities and challenges in the Kingdom’s energy transition under Vision 2030; and analyze semi-structured interviews with government, academic, and business leaders to assess the challenges and opportunities in workforce development in green energy transition. In the first paper, I conduct a thematic review of sustainability’s historical evolution and the interconnection of environmental, economic, and social dimensions, highlighting how renewable energy transitions require not only technological advancement but also policy reform, institutional coordination, and workforce readiness. I identify a critical research gap—the absence of occupation-level workforce indicators linking Saudi Arabia’s solar pipeline to labor market needs—revealing potential misalignments between ambitious project goals and workforce capacity. In the second paper, I employ stakeholder interviews to evaluate the role of solar energy in achieving Vision 2030’s sustainability goals. Findings indicate that solar power reduces carbon emissions, improves public health, drives economic diversification, and fosters social equity through rural electrification, skills development, and women’s empowerment. However, structural challenges such as subsidy distortions, water scarcity, weak awareness, and fragmented implementation hinder progress. The paper underscores the importance of culturally sensitive policy reforms, streamlined regulations, and stronger collaboration across institutions. In the third paper, I examine workforce development as a central enabler of the green transition. Drawing on 24 interviews with officials, experts, and business leaders, I identify challenges such as skills mismatches, reliance on expatriate labor, high costs of training, and cultural barriers to workforce participation. The findings of this study highlight opportunities for youth empowerment, gender inclusion, and technical innovation through coordinated education, training, and industry partnerships. I propose a framework for green workforce development in Saudi Arabia, along with strategies for developing a skilled green workforce in the country, in support of achieving Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030. Together, these papers make a theoretical contribution by integrating the overlapping circles model with human capital theory to demonstrate how environmental sustainability, economic diversification, and social development interact dynamically through workforce readiness in the context of Saudi Arabia’s green transition. Additionally, by applying the triple helix model, the research advances understanding of how coordinated collaboration among government, academia, and industry can serve as a systemic driver of innovation, policy alignment, and human capital formation necessary for a resilient green economy. Collectively, the dissertation contributes to sustainability scholarship by emphasizing the integration of energy policy, economic diversification, and human capital development. It also provides actionable insights for policymakers, stressing that a successful green economy requires alignment between ambitious renewable energy projects and the readiness of a skilled domestic workforce. The conclusion is that Saudi Arabia’s transition is not solely a technological project but a societal transformation in which innovation, culture, and human capital must converge to achieve a resilient and inclusive green economy.15 0Item Restricted Cities and socio-technical transitions: An evaluation of the use of the multi-level perspective for examining the green economy transition in Makkah City, Saudi Arabia(2023-07-06) Alameer, Ali; Farrelly, Lorraine; Dixon, TimThe green economy has been widely advocated by global policy frameworks as a promising concept for accelerating urban sustainability. Its applications and practices have been spatially connected to cities due to their roles and functions as hubs of people, resources, knowledge, and economic activity. This distinction for cities emphasises the importance of examining how cities can accelerate the transition to the green economy by clarifying what influences and inhibits change toward this goal, and what the interrelationship between the city contextual setting and the green economy applications might look and feel like. Thus, the quest to implement this change also needs to analyse and understand the city's physical and functional features as well as its broader socio-technical networks. However, in practice there is a huge gap between real-world practises and contemporary transition research analytical frameworks, which are dominated by ‘acontextual’ approaches and thus fail to represent cities' real-world spatial, functional, and physical challenges. Whilst the multi-level perspective (MLP) provides a useful framework for understanding socio-technical transitions, it falls far short as a means of providing a contextual approach for urban transitions. To address this, in this thesis a modified analytical framework that placed spatial dimensions that shape and influence cities at the heart of MLP was developed for better understanding real-world challenges. Based on an analysis of twenty-six (26) interviews, three (3) focus groups, and secondary sources, this framework is tested using Makkah city as a case study for empirical examination of the nature and characteristics of the national KSA green economy transition, thereby generating valuable insights and evidence that reflect the complexity and fragmented nature of urban transitions. Four overarching dimensions have been identified that affect and shape the city's spatial context and strengths its role in the MLP and socio-technical transitions: (i) city functions and activities, (ii) city spatial and physical features, (iii) local government arrangements, and (iv) local economic structures. This novel MLP spatial technique combined top-down and bottom-up spatial analysis approaches that helped find spatial variability in transition pathways and provided better understanding of how new networks, fluxes, and activities drive developing niches. Additionally, the MLP's analytical framework moves from a descriptive study of the transition to pragmatic, practice-led spatial analysis that better explains city progress, disparities, successes and failures in urban systems reconfiguration as well as change in the built environment. This spatial MLP framework empirically shows that the original three MLP lenses, though useful, cannot provide a complete, detailed, and clear picture of social and technical urban transitions in the real city context and that explicitly including spatial dimensions analysis was a crucial step to understanding and interpreting functional and physical spatial forces and their impact on the city's socio-technical transition to sustainability. However, the findings suggest that unless the city’s existing multi-segmented regimes that drive urban action are re-configured in line with systematic and long-term characteristics of a green economic transition, then progress will be slow and may be limited. It further suggests that top-down ‘green innovation’ and bottom-up ‘project-based approach’ alone will not be enough to accelerate the green economic transition. Thus, future research and policies should focus intensively on destabilizing and unifying the city's existing fragmented regimes, including the integration, replication and expansion of successful experimental initiatives. Furthermore, consistency in both policy and practice is needed across scales and levels. To this end, there is a need for indicators or assessment tools, new business models, capacity buildings and better-integrated leadership at the city level.20 0