Nicole Darnall, a sustainability scholar and professor in the School of Sustainability, has been awarded the Social Science Research Council's 2017-2019 Abe Fellowship for her research on sustainable public procurement.

The fellowship is designed to encourage international multidisciplinary research on policy-related topics of pressing global concern and to support researchers who are willing to become key members of a bilateral and global research network built around such topics. It strives to promote a new level of intellectual cooperation between the Japanese and U.S. academic and professional communities committed to and trained for advancing global understanding and problem solving.

As part of her fellowship, Darnall will extend her sustainable procurement research (with scholars in ASU's Center for Organization Research and Design) to assess the barriers and facilitators of Japanese local governments' green procurement decisions.