  Requirements engineering (RE) is a key area to address sustainability
concerns in system development. Approaches have been proposed to elicit
sustainability requirements from interested stakeholders before system design.
However, existing strategies lack the proper high-level view to deal with the
societal and long-term impacts of the transformation entailed by the
introduction of a new technological solution. This paper proposes to go beyond
the concept of system requirements and stakeholders' goals, and raise the
degree of abstraction by focusing on the notions of drivers, barriers and
impacts that a system can have on the environment in which it is deployed.
Furthermore, we suggest to narrow the perspective to a single domain, as the
effect of a technology is context-dependent. To put this vision into practice,
we interview 30 cross-disciplinary experts in the representative domain of
rural areas, and we analyse the transcripts to identify common themes. As a
result, we provide drivers, barriers and positive or negative impacts
associated to the introduction of novel technical solutions in rural areas.
This RE-relevant information could hardly be identified if interested
stakeholders were interviewed before the development of a single specific
system. This paper contributes to the literature with a fresh perspective on
sustainability requirements, and with a domain-specific framework grounded on
experts' opinions. The conceptual framework resulting from our analysis can be
used as a reference baseline for requirements elicitation endeavours in rural
areas that need to account for sustainability concerns.
