Natural resource-based livelihoods in mountainous regions are subject to new types of development as well as climate related pressures and vulnerabilities. On one hand, the integrity of the mountainous landscape is under pressure from the melting of glaciers, changes in water availability, rainfall patterns, and soil degradation. On the other hand, as mountainous environments become increasingly more important in national growth strategies and development priorities, new avenues for livelihoods and vulnerabilities become more pronounced. Climate change effects are expected to be disproportionately higher in mountainous regions. There is therefore a critical urgency to better comprehend these changes shaping mountainous environments and to better assess future direct and indirect impacts on ecosystem services and livelihoods. This article presents the results of an analysis of ecosystem services and livelihoods in the Upper Mustang region of Nepal. The region was selected for its particular trans-Himalayan location, development diversity, and climatic changes that have placed increasing pressure on local ecosystem services. We examine the central role of ecosystem services for remote mountain regions, particularly for the poor, the existing pressures on the key ecosystem services and local ways of adapting to climate-induced effect to ecosystem services and, cogeneration of the knowledge gaps and co-production of knowledge with communities to support local adaptation strategies. We adopted a combination of qualitative and quantitative analytical approaches. We found significant implications for local livelihoods and adaptation strategies with reference to water for farming, pasture productivity and livestock rearing, as well as tourism development. Additionally, we highlight knowledge gaps in assessing ecosystem services and opportunities for local monitoring that may close in on the gaps with an end goal of overcoming poverty.

Water and sewage (WS) systems are, like most grid based infrastructural systems, often centralised and hierarchical and the end user has almost no possibility to influence the technical standards, business models or system architecture. The preferred method for connecting new areas to the grid are underground water pipes and gravity flow for sewage. Thus, the WS system is “tightly coupled”. It is hard to change and conservative in its system culture, exhibiting a strong “momentum” or “path dependence”. In this article we investigate an unusual case in the development of WS-systems. As a rule, WS-systems, as most infrastructural systems, develop gradually through incremental innovations, and system owners/utilities traditionally build their systems “from the inside out”. In our case, we investigate a situation where the end users took the initiative to connect a residential area, Aspvik, part of the municipality of Värmdö, outside Stockholm, Sweden, to the municipal grid and thus expand the WS-system, not from the inside out, but from the outside in. Furthermore, we highlight another unusual feature: the role of a resident that acted as the “entrepreneur” in this process of WS-system expansion. The entrepreneur had unique trust building abilities in the local community, which the regime actor (the WS utility), could not match. Historically, inventor-entrepreneurs have been common, acting as “system builders” in the establishment phase of new infrastructural systems. However, entrepreneurs outside the regime are not common in the WS sector. Although atypical in mature WS systems in developed countries, these types of local initiatives or hybrid solutions are common in developing countries. In this article, we argue that there are lessons to be learnt from our case, when dealing with system expansion processes both inside and outside the Global North.

The participation of the general public in the research design, data collection and interpretation process together with scientists is often referred to as citizen science. While citizen science itself has existed since the start of scientific practice, developments in sensing technology, data processing and visualization, and communication of ideas and results, are creating a wide range of new opportunities for public participation in scientific research. This paper reviews the state of citizen science in a hydrological context and explores the potential of citizen science to complement more traditional ways of scientific data collection and knowledge generation for hydrological sciences and water resources management. Although hydrological data collection often involves advanced technology, the advent of robust, cheap, and low-maintenance sensing equipment provides unprecedented opportunities for data collection in a citizen science context. These data have a significant potential to create new hydrological knowledge, especially in relation to the characterization of process heterogeneity, remote regions, and human impacts on the water cycle. However, the nature and quality of data collected in citizen science experiments is potentially very different from those of traditional monitoring networks. This poses challenges in terms of their processing, interpretation, and use, especially with regard to assimilation of traditional knowledge, the quantification of uncertainties, and their role in decision support. It also requires care in designing citizen science projects such that the generated data complement optimally other available knowledge. Lastly, using 4 case studies from remote mountain regions we reflect on the challenges and opportunities in the integration of hydrologically-oriented citizen science in water resources management, the role of scientific knowledge in the decision-making process, and the potential contestation to established community institutions posed by co-generation of new knowledge.

This article develops a novel theoretical framework to explain how water's situatedness relates to its political agency. Recent posthuman scholarship emphasizes these qualities but, surprisingly, no sustained analysis has been undertaken of this interrelation. Here we do so by theorizing water as a “time-substance” to reposition human hydrological struggles (including those exacerbated by climate change) around the topologies and temporalities rather than the spatialities of water. This innovative approach opens up new areas of geographical enquiry based on hydrosocial forms, hydrosocial transformations, and hydrosocial information (collectively referred to here as hydrosocialities). We contend that hydrosocialities enable the tracing of human–water relations that transcend times and scales and the matricial categories of subject and object to overcome the situated–agential binary of water. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in Mustang, Nepal, this conceptual framework is deployed to examine hydrosocialities in two remote mountain communities. We show hydrosocialities that comprise diverse water knowledge practices constituted from multiple points of proximity between the social and the hydrological in space and time. In turn, this conceptual framework underscores the importance of boundary objects in mediating water's situated–agential qualities. The article concludes that consequently boundary objects can play a crucial role in producing new practical hydrosocial politics of climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Abstract Since the early work on defining and analyzing resilience in domains such as engineering, ecology and psychology, the concept has gained significant traction in many fields of research and practice. It has also become a very powerful justification for various policy goals in the water sector, evident in terms like flood resilience, river resilience, and water resilience. At the same time, a substantial body of literature has developed that questions the resilience concept's systems ontology, natural science roots and alleged conservatism, and criticizes resilience thinking for not addressing power issues. In this study, we review these critiques with the aim to develop a framework for power-sensitive resilience analysis. We build on the three faces of power to conceptualize the power to define resilience. We structure our discussion of the relevant literature into five questions that need to be reflected upon when applying the resilience concept to social?hydrological systems. These questions address: (a) resilience of what, (b) resilience at what scale, (c) resilience to what, (d) resilience for what purpose, and (e) resilience for whom; and the implications of the political choices involved in defining these parameters for resilience building or analysis. Explicitly considering these questions enables making political choices explicit in order to support negotiation or contestation on how resilience is defined and used. This article is categorized under: Human Water > Water Governance. Engineering Water > Planning Water.

Scale framing makes an important difference to how complex environmental policy issues are defined and understood by different groups of actors. Increasing urban water demand and uncertain future climatic conditions in the Andes present major water governance challenges for the coastal regions of Peru. An understudied dimension of Peruvian water governance is how scale framing shapes the way problems are defined, and solutions are pursued. Here, we aim to strengthen the understanding of scale framing as it relates to highland-coastal interactions in central Peru between 2004 and 2015. By analysing this period of significant water governance reforms, we identify five prominent water-related frame dimensions and three differently scaled policy storylines and reveal how they developed and intersected over time. The storylines, supported by particular visualisations, either foreground 'urbanshed'-level investment in water supply infrastructure, community-level cultural restoration for improved local agricultural production, or nationwide watershed-level financial mechanisms for highland ecosystem conservation. Our study shows how the intersection of these storylines at different moments during the policy process often had a strengthening effect, creating a coalition of actors who were then able to generate sufficient momentum and support within the Peruvian government for the implementation of conservation-based watershed investments.

In semi-arid and sub-humid sub-Saharan Africa highly variable rainfall, frequent droughts and low water productivity are consistently undermining food security. Rainwater harvesting technologies (RWHTs) help utilise water more productively whilst raising yield levels. In this article it is argued that realising the potential of RWHTs for resilience building and climate adaptation requires a better understanding of global and regional processes influencing RWHTs adoption combined with pre-existing analysis at the household scale. On the basis of a systematic literature review, processes of influence in the diffusion and uptake of RWHTs are identified. These relate to shifting ideology associated with food production systems; the scope of investments in agriculture science and technology; emergent actors shaping development assistance; and patterns of farmer mobility. Drawing insights from theory on transformations for sustainability and development, this article adds to the understanding of connectedness between farm-level adoption of RWHTs, and regional to global level actors, institutions and processes.

Globally, there is an increasing consensus around the need to realise deep transformations invital sectors of society such as those related to urban water supply and energy, particularly in cities where the largest share of the global population is living. Taking the example of recent changes in energy requirements for buildings in Sweden, the government has proposed that, by 2021, all new houses shall have” near zero” energy demand, which for a multifamily house in Stockholm translates into a primary energy demand of 85 kWh /m2 per year. This has generated a new kind of niche experimentation in the building sector that cuts across traditionally disconnected domains of innovation around water and energy. For example, technologies around greywater re-use and heat recovery from wastewater have become associated with reduction in water use and important energy gains. These innovations propel private users and organisations - notably in the real estate sector - towards new investments as part of realising ambitious energy and water targets. As end-users of networked water and energy services, actors make technology-decisions that save energy, water and reduce their dependence on centralised network providers. But this also causes negative commercial and physical effects on the established networked configurations of water and energy, in the form of reduced economic revenue, less heat circulation, and colder wastewater causing problems in the treatment plants. In our study we focus on the winnersand losers of energy and water transition in Sweden, to learn about how transition in energy and water is evolving and why it is being negotiated along particular trajectories by a range of relevant actors.

Mountains are dynamic landscapes that are home to rich natural and human heritage. However, climatic variability, globalisation and increasing ecomomic integration are making these landscapes more fragile with implications for present and future development. Using a pathways lens, we examine development trajectories in mountains and relate these to environmental and social-economic change currently taking place. We analyse and compare pathways in three case studies in Peru (Andes); Nepal (Himalayas); and Kyrgyzstan (Tien Shan). The paper highlights that development pathways in fragile mountain regions may be shifting in new directions, but because they emerge out of complex socio-environmental and historical contexts, there are also social risks associated with the articulation of future pathways, particularly in terms of social equity and sustainability. Building on different pathway approaches with their various strengths and weaknesses, this study examines the role of human agency and power, the role of historical and present context and feedbacks between social and ecological features in shaping future development pathways of mountain landscapes.

The modern infrastructure ideal of universal, uniform, networked infrastructure has been challenged across the Global North and South. We therefore observe a growing set of concerns across the North and South about what a more resilient and socially inclusive way of providing basic water infrastructure might entail. A set of transformative processes that vary globally are set in motion that are more about embracing diversity in infrastructure that has been articulated elsewhere as  ‘heterogeneous infrastructure configurations’ (Lawhon et al. 2018). This heterogeneity is also evident in narratives such as ‘working with nature’, which seek to bring into the discussion of infrastructure a different way of thinking about environmental risk and uncertainty. Such narratives may draw attention to the importance of socio-natures that were previously not articulated in water infrastructures. Most of these narratives however have been articulated in Northern contexts and in relation to formal infrastructure. In this paper, we seek to lay out a theoretical framework that brings socio-nature and water infrastructure in conversation with global south literature, science technology studies and urban political ecology. Importantly, we seek to develop a framework that focuses on the importance of heterogeneity as well as political and power related implications of narratives of socio-nature. 

The chapter examines some of the risks and future uncertainties for the Earth and society. It explores different ways in which gnosis may be translated into practice through placing particular attention on the governance and innovation dimensions of how to shape future pathways that place more emphasis on Earth and society interactions. The alteration of the Earth begun with the dawn of human civilizations but has rapidly intensified since the industrial revolution. Deltas are essentially landforms that have historically offered a wider variety of benefits to society; they are, in fact, a good representation of Earth and society interaction. The concept of ecosystem stewardship is strongly related to resilience because it helps to understand how to foster positive human–nature relations as part of re-thinking the links between Earth and society. Earth and society can be understood as a complex adaptive system that has successfully responded to adversity over the millennia.

Development research and interventions were for many years based on the assumption that richcountries had superior knowledge, solutions and expertise that could and should be transferred to"developing" countries. Strengthening capacity, institutions and scientists in low-income countries soonformed part of the agenda in order to increase their "absorptive capacity", create a more level ground forinternational research collaboration, and boost development. There is a growing need of placing theSouthern hemisphere in the forefront in global sustainability research. However, little attention has beengiven to the advantages of collaboration with low-income regions in order to produce new insights withglobal relevance. In the global South, there are experiments and innovations which might well inspirenew practises as well as alternative ways of understanding, and solving, sustainability challenges.Further, juxtaposition and distance may enable those in the north to see phenomena ‘at home’differently. In this paper we explore some distinct aspects of what can be gained from researchcollaboration with the global South.

Historically, flood resilience in large river deltas has been strongly tied to institutional and infrastructural interventions to manage flood risk (such as building of embankments and drainage structures). However, the introduction of infrastructural works has inevitably brought unforeseen, major consequences, such as biodiversity and accelerated land subsidence, endangering the fertile characteristics that made them interesting places to live in in the first place. These ripple effects have sparked, a reconsideration of what deltas are, questioning the very separation and control between nature and culture, and how deltas are to be dealt with. These effects have further sparked changing modalities of power that tend to be overlooked by delta and resilience scholars alike. As a result, there is a real risk that future interventions to increase resilience, will in fact amplify unequal power relations in deltas as opposed to alleviating them. If the system as a whole has achieved some level of flood resilience (partly due to the flood defence mechanisms in place), does infrastructure have a differential effect on people's mobility under flood conditions? Are some groups experiencing less rather than more security, as water accumulates in some places but not others? This paper presents theoretical insights on the relationship between power and resilience in delta regions supported by two case studies, the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna delta in Bangladesh and the Mekong delta in Vietnam.

Science and technology studies and urban political ecology have made important contributions to the understanding of water provision in the Global South. In this article we develop insights from these fields with the aim to understand the blurring boundaries of urban water regimes and their power relations mediated by actors, institutions and technology. Furthermore, we explore how urban water regimes can form a critical interface which is a form of institutional–actor space where formal and informal water regimes encounter each other through conflict and cooperation.

In recent years there has been rising scientific and policy interest in the adaptive governance of social- ecological systems. A systematic literature review of adaptive governance research during the period 2005–2014, demonstrates a vibrant debate taking place that spans a variety of empirical and theoretical approaches. The particular strength of adaptive governance is that it provides a theoretical lens for research that combines the analyses of novel governance capacities such as adaptive capacity, collaboration, scaling, knowledge and learning. As a way to give greater depth and analytical rigour to future studies over the next decade and beyond, we highlight the added value of theoretical multiplicity (i.e., focusing on the combination of theories to address complex problems). We argue that theoretical multiplicity can encourage stronger synergies between adaptive governance and other theoretical approaches and can help address epistemologically grey areas in adaptive governance scholarship, such as power and politics, inclusion and equity, short term and long term change, the relationship between public policy and adaptive governance.

Recent years have witnessed an expanding body of peri-urban and urban scholarship. However, recent scho- larship has yet to adequately address the central role of politics and power shaping water quality decline. The article focuses on the trans-Hindon region which is part of Ghaziabad city, close to India’s capital, Delhi. We draw upon urban political ecology and peri-urban scholarship to explain the role of politics and power shaping water quality decline. We argue in favour of creating stronger synergy between peri-urban and UPE debates as part of conceptualizing water quality decline. The article shows that as a complex socio-political challenge, water quality decline is centrally shaped by the intensifying linkages between urban and peri-urban forms of development and as a result deserves central attention as part of both these debates.

The governance of food-energy-water (FEW) systems presents us with a challenging problem. Due to divergent understandings, this issue cannot be precisely articulated or solved because of inherent complexities associated with the monitoring and evaluation of these interlinked systems. Partly as a response to these challenges, we are witnessing a proliferation of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Examples include the use of the internet and mobile phones as a means of communicating information or as tools for monitoring the delivery of key services. Many of these ‘small infrastructures’ have been implemented through strong public-private sector partnerships as well as direct involvement of citizens in ICT initiatives. However, there is still insufficient understanding of how ICTs can better support the governance of FEW. Drawing upon scholarship on governance capabilities, we explore new theoretical avenues with the aim to better understand the relationship between ICTs and FEW governance. We further draw upon a literature survey to identify key ICT examples to relate our analysis with five main governance capabilities: reflexivity, resilience, responsiveness, revitalisation, and rescaling.

The waterscape is a perspective that has captured the imagination of diverse scholars interested in the interaction of water and society. This includes the way water travels in time and space and is shaped by culture and geography. In this article, we pay particular attention to the study of the waterscape in the political ecology tradition. Scholars following this tradition have placed strong emphasis on understanding the role of power and the contested nature of water in diverse rural, urban, and periurban landscapes. The article provides a brief account of the main strands of literature and serves the purpose of an introductory overview of the waterscape for beginners. We focus both on major works that have helped define the waterscape as a perspective in political ecology and recent studies on the role of unequal power and gender relationships, informal water practices, and local water flows such as ponds and wastewater.

The notion of waterscape has been proposed by urban political ecology (UPE) scholars as a conceptual lens for understanding urban hydro-social flows. So far, however, there has been little attention by UPE scholars to the importance of wastewater in urban waterscapes. This study demonstrates how wastewater is embedded in an arena of social relations of power, defined in this article as the wastewaterscape. Drawing on research conducted in Delhi, the aim of the study is to examine re-occurring problems of wastewater disposal and mismanagement through the lens of knowledge; and the different ways of knowing about wastewater which exist amongst inhabitants of an informal settlement, scientific experts and municipal workers in Delhi. On the basis of our analysis, we argue that the systemic exposure of poorer urban citizens to untreated wastewater cannot be attributed to the shortcomings of service delivery alone, but is more fundamentally associated with how legitimacy is awarded to competing systems of knowledge about wastewater in the urban sphere.

Developments in technologies are shaping information access globally. This presents opportunities and challenges for understanding the role of new technologies in sustainability research. This article focuses on a suite of technologies termed Environmental Virtual Observatories (EVOs) developed for communicating observations and simulation of environmental processes. A strength of EVOs is that they are open and decentralised, thus democratising flow and ownership of information between multiple actors. However, EVOs are discussed rarely beyond their technical aspects. By evaluating the evolution of EVOs, we illustrate why it is timely to engage with policy and societal aspects as well. While first generation EVOs are primed for scientists, second generation EVOs can have broader implications for knowledge co-creation and resilience through their participatory design.

In this paper, we explore co-creative processes between researchers, art institutions and artists and new roles emerging for engineers in that process. The modern infrastructure ideal of universal, uniform, networked infrastructure has dominated the imagination of planners and engineers in the Global North and South for over a century. However, the dawn of the Anthropocene has triggered new concerns and challenges for critical infrastructures (water, electricity roads etc.) disrupting the modernist imagination. Somewhat unsurprisingly, these concerns have been translated into academic and policy discourses about the development of more resilient and socially inclusive critical infrastructures. 

In the ongoing project entitled Examining nature and society through urban infrastructure (NATURE) we develop an art exhibition in collaboration with the art institution Färgfabriken, in south of Stockholm. Sketches from the co-creative dialogues and interviews are used to illustrate how art can have a more central role the intellectual and public policy deliberations that shape new imaginaries of critical infrastructures.  Future development of infrastructure may once again become trapped into a (less resilient and less inclusive) modernist pathway. In other words, today’s infrastructure challenges pose a threat to critical infrastructures but also a window of opportunity for environmental humanities propose strong and novel ideas shaping future infrastructures. In this paper, we will explore how the arts can help draw attention to the importance of the role of previously unarticulated socio-natures and the role of the non-human in infrastructure imaginaries. The aim of the paper is also to initiate a discussion about how arts can become catalytic for translating key insights on critical infrastructures from the environmental humanities into more widely accessible and publicly deliberated. 

Infrastructure has never been a single thing, understood in a universal way. Yet, there has long been a broad overarching orthodox approach in which ‘experts’ create replicable, stable, large, networked systems to control nature and ensure regular, predictable flows of people, materials and information. Within this orthodoxy, infrastructure is narrated as good, contributing to economic and social development. In this paper, we identify environmental, economic, political and social pressures challenging this approach to infrastructure, pushing for it to be understood, enacted and constructed differently. We then show how actors have responded to these pressures through examples of flood mitigation, corridor development and sanitation. Our cases are not pure instances of a new approach. Instead, we use them to tease out emergent efforts (and struggles) to rework infrastructure, to make it more fluid, flexible, sustainable and responsive to democratic demands, as well as to more clearly link infrastructure with well-being. These examples reinforce the importance of differentiating infrastructure, including considering how particular approaches imagine and contribute to sustainability and well-being. In this context, we point towards broader ideas of how infrastructure might be reimagined and remade in the future, and the difficult politics of such new visions.

The idea of the modern city continues to shape urban policies and practices, yet there has long been conflict over its meaning and relevance, particularly in southern cities. Alternative imaginaries, however, are partial and/or insufficiently detailed. In this paper, we first examine the modernness of modern urban infrastructure in the context of ongoing shifts away from modern ideals. Then, inspired by Gibson-Graham’s process of reading for difference, we purposefully look for fragments of what we call an emergent ‘modest sociotechnical imaginary’ in order to contribute to a fuller description of a non-modern imaginary. We examine policies and practices of sanitation in Kampala, where narratives make space for sanitation beyond the grid, seeking to improve sanitation without a predetermined teleological end. What this opening means, however, is the subject of ongoing contestations. Working between modern and anti-modern imaginaries means finding ways to choose technologies and legitimate, permit, govern, regulate, finance and distribute the costs and benefits of them with limited knowledge and control. In Kampala, we find evidence of both i) modest acceptance of limits and uncertainty and ii) efforts to layer modernist urges to create populations, know and control into emergent infrastructures. In this context, Kampala is not framed as an instantiation of a clearly defined alternative to the modern. Instead, we suggest the questions and contestations arising in Kampala are evidence of the coexistence of a modest imaginary, and that such examinations help us to deepen our understanding of ongoing struggles over what infrastructure is and ought to be.

The idea of the modern city continues to inform urban policies and practices, shaping ideas of what infrastructure is and how it ought to work. While there has long been conflict over its meaning and relevance, particularly in southern cities, alternatives remain difficult to identify. In this paper, we ‘read for difference’ in the policies and practices of sanitation in Kampala, purposefully looking for evidence of an alternative imaginary. We find increasing acceptance of and support for heterogeneous technological artefacts and a shift to consider these as part of wider infrastructures. These sanitation configurations are, at times, no longer framed as temporary placeholders while ‘waiting for modernity’, but instead as pathways towards a not yet predetermined end. What this technological change means for policies, permissions and socio-economic relations is also as yet unclear: the roles and responsibilities of the modern infrastructure ideal have limited significance, but new patterns remain in the making. Further, while we find increased attention to limits and uncertainty, we also see efforts to weave modernist practices (creating legible populations, knowing and controlling nature) into emergent infrastructural configurations. In this context, we consider Kampala not as a complete instantiation of a ‘modest’ approach to infrastructure, but as a place where struggles over infrastructure are rooted in competing, dynamic imaginaries about how the world is and what this means for the cities we build. It is also a place from which we might begin articulating a ‘modest imaginary’ that enables rethinking what infrastructure is and ought to be.

Despite growing interest in resilience, there is still significant scope for increasing its conceptual clarity and practical relevance in socio-hydrological contexts. Specifically, questions of how socio-hydrological systems respond to and cope with perturbations and how these connect to resilience remain unanswered. In this paper, we propose a novel conceptual framework for understanding and assessing resilience in coupled socio-hydrological systems. Taking a systems perspective, we argue resilience is a set of systematic properties with three dimensions: absorptive, adaptive and transformative, and contend that socio-hydrological systems can be viewed as various forms of human-water couplings, reflecting different aspects of these interactions. We propose a framework consisting of two parts. The first part addresses the identity of socio-hydrological resilience, answering questions such as ‘resilience of what in relation to what’. We identify three framings of resilience for different types of human-water systems and subsystems: (1) the water subsystem, highlighting hydrological resilience to anthropogenic hazards; (2) the human subsystem, foregrounding social resilience to hydrological hazards; and (3) the coupled human-water system, exhibiting socio-hydrological resilience. We argue that these three system types and resiliences afford new insights into the evaluation of different water management challenges. The first two types address hydrological and social states, while the third type emphasises the feedbacks and interactions between human and water components within complex systems subject to internal or external disturbances. In the second part, we focus on resilience management and develop the notion of the ‘resilience canvas’, a novel heuristic device to identify possible pathways and to facilitate the design of bespoke strategies for enhancing resilience in the socio-hydrological context. The ‘resilience canvas’ is constructed by combining absorptive and adaptive capacities as two axes. At the corners of the resulting two-dimensional space are four quadrants which we conceptualise as representing resilient, vulnerable, susceptible, and resistant system states. To address projected change-induced uncertainties, we recommend effort is now focused on shifting socio-hydrological systems from resistant towards resilient status. In sum, the novel framework proposed here clarifies the ambiguity inherent in socio-hydrological resilience, and provides a viable basis for further theoretical and practical development.

The notion of the waterscape has been proposed to capture the interconnectedness of economic, political, cultural and social processes embedded in water. More recently recognised, yet still relatively under-theorised are waterscapes that are 'in-between' the city and the periphery. This article focuses on peri-urban Delhi, specifically the area around Ghaziabad. We show that peri-urban waterscapes do not fit into existing urban or rural planning models because these same models largely fail to recognise the peri-urban interface as a distinct form of territorial development. As a result a diverse range of mobilisations around water relevant to the peri-urban poor are systematically undermined while power asymmetries that shape access to water remain unrecognised. Peri-urban spaces thus continue to be planned as if in a transition towards urban modernity despite the complex social, political, technological and cultural realities these spaces represent. The failure to address current limits of policy and planning in peri-urban waterscapes has long term implications for the resilience, sustainability and transformative adaptation of both city and periphery.

Water utilities have favoured the modern ideal of piped networks and infrastructure that is reproduced in policies and discourses about achieving ambitious water targets. In this article, using ethnographic insights from an urbanising village of New Delhi called Rawta, we build on work that challenges the myth of formal water as ‘piped’ water and informal water as ‘non-piped’ and explore both piped and non-piped water as dynamic and socially negotiated water regimes. We analyse how water regimes are shaped by complex constellations of formal and informal actors, institutions and technological practices. What constitutes piped water supply in Rawta is in fact largely constituted by an elaborate informal network of underground pipes and water pumps laid down to realise very specific local water needs. We explore what this kind of informality means for drinking water supply in rapidly urbanising peripheries.

Historically, the modern infrastructure ideal has dominated the imagination of urbanists. As a consequence, cities and their infrastructures of pipes, roads, wires and trams, have largely been built in the same way all over world. Or have they? Recent urban scholarship suggests that cities and their modes of service provision needs to be re-envisaged, especially in the global South, not just through the lens of the ’situated’ but through disentangling it from the modernist framing altogether. The multilayered challenges - including new types of vulnerabilities of technology and users - experienced by cityregions worldwide imply that a new thought-model is called for. This paper picks up the concept of ‘Heterogeneous Infrastructure Configuration’ (HIC) suggested by Lawhon, Nilsson, Silver, Erntson and Lwasa (2017). In somewhat speculative fashion we go on to hypothesise that Stockholm, Nairobi and Kampala are at interesting historical junctures in terms of conceiving infrastructures and how they distribute power and risk across user spectrums. Are urban infrastructures across the globe being re-engineered from below, but for different reasons? We sketch at a research agenda where grounded and diverse experiences of global North and South will generate new insights for sustainable transformation of cities globally.

This article deals with ongoing attempts to recover heat and greywater at property level, based on an in-depth study of Stockholm, Sweden. We explore different socio-technical development paths from now up until 2050 using a novel combination of on-property technology case-studies, actor studies and system-level scenario evaluation, based on Artificial Neural Networks modelling. Our results show that the more conservative scenarios work in favour of large-scale actors while the more radical scenarios benefit the property owners. However, in the radical scenarios we identify disruptive effects on a system level due to disturbance on wastewater treatment plants, where incoming wastewater can be critically low for up to 120 days per year. At the same time, net energy savings are relatively modest (7.5% of heat demand) and economic gains for property owners small or uncertain. Current policies at EU and national level around energy-efficient buildings risk being counter-productive in cases when they push property owners to install wastewater heat recovery technology which, in places like Stockholm, can create suboptimal outcomes at the system level.

Despite significant advances in the development of the ecosystem services concept across the science and policy arenas, the valuation of ecosystem services to guide sustainable development remains challenging, especially at a local scale and in data scarce regions. In this paper, we review and compare major past and current valuation approaches and discuss their key strengths and weaknesses for guiding policy decisions. To deal with the complexity of methods used in different valuation approaches, our review uses multiple entry points: data vs simulation, habitat vs system vs place-based, specific vs entire portfolio, local vs regional scale, and monetary vs non-monetary. We find that although most valuation approaches are useful to explain ecosystem services at a macro/system level, an application of locally relevant valuation approaches, which allows for a more integrated valuation relevant to decision making is still hindered by data-scarcity. The advent of spatially explicit policy support systems shows particular promise to make the best use of available data and simulations. Data collection remains crucial for the local scale and in data scarce regions. Leveraging citizen science-based data and knowledge co-generation may support the integrated valuation, while at the same time making the valuation process more inclusive, replicable and policy-oriented.

Creating a just and sustainable planet will require not only small changes, but also systemic transformations in how humans relate to the planet and to each other, i.e., social–ecological transformations. We suggest there is a need for collaborative environments where experimentation with new configurations of social–ecological systems can occur, and we refer to these as transformative spaces. In this paper, we seek a better understanding of how to design and enable the creation of transformative spaces in a development context. We analyse nine case studies from a previous special issue on Designing Transformative Spaces that aimed to collect examples of cutting-edge action-oriented research on transformations from the Global South. The analysis showed five design phases as being essential: Problem Definition Phase; Operationalisation Phase; Tactical Phase; Outcome Phase; and Reflection Phase. From this synthesis, we distilled five key messages that should be considered when designing research, including: (a) there are ethical dilemmas associated with creating a transformative space in a system; (b) it is important to assess the readiness of the system for change before engaging in it; (c) there is a need to balance between ‘safe’ and ‘safe-enough’ spaces for transformation; (d) convening a transformative space requires an assemblage of diverse methodological frameworks and tools; and (e) transformative spaces can act as a starting point for institutionalising transformative change. Many researchers are now engaging in transdisciplinary transformations research, and are finding themselves at the knowledge–action interface contributing to transformative space-making. We hope that by analysing experiences from across different geographies we can contribute towards better understanding of how to navigate the processes needed for the urgent global transformations that are being called for to create a more equitable and sustainable planet Earth.

The need for developing socially just living conditions for the world’s growing population whilst keeping human societies within a ‘safe operating space’ has become a modern imperative. This requires transformative changes in the dominant social norms, behaviours, governance and management regimes that guide human responses in areas such as urban ecology, public health, resource security (e.g., food, water, energy access), economic development and biodiversity conservation. However, such systemic transformations necessitate experimentation in public arenas of exchange and a deepening of processes that can widen multi-stakeholder learning. We argue that there is an emergent potential in bridging the sustainability transitions and resilience approaches to create new scientific capacity that can support large-scale social-ecological transformations (SETs) to sustainability globally, not just in the West. In this article, we elucidate a set of guiding principles for the design of a ‘safe space’ to encourage stronger interactions between these research areas and others that are relevant to the challenges faced. We envisage new opportunities for transdisciplinary collaboration that will develop an adaptive and evolving community of practice. In particular, we emphasise the great opportunity for engaging with the role of emerging economies in facilitating safe space experimentation.

Transformations toward sustainability have recently gained traction, triggered in part by a growing recognition of the dramatic socio-cultural, political, economic, and technological changes required to move societies toward more desirable futures in the Anthropocene. However, there is a dearth of literature that emphasizes the crucial aspects of sustainability transformations in the diverse contexts of the Global South. Contributors to this Special Feature aim to address this gap by weaving together a series of case studies that together form an important navigational tool on the “how to” as well as the “what” and the “where to” of sustainability transformations across diverse challenges, sectors, and geographies. They propose the term “transformative space” as a “safe-enough” collaborative process whereby actors invested in sustainability transformations can experiment with new mental models, ideas, and practices that can help shift social-ecological systems onto more desirable pathways. The authors also highlight the challenges posed to researchers as they become “transformative space-makers,” navigating the power dynamics inherent in these processes. Because researchers and practitioners alike are challenged to provide answers to complex and often ambiguous or incomplete questions around sustainability, the ideas, reflections and learning gathered in this Special Feature provide some guidance on new ways of engaging with the world.

Participatory monitoring allows communities to understand the use and management of local water resources and at the same time develop a sense of ownership of environmental information. The data generated through participatory monitoring of stream flow and rainfall generate evidences to corroborate local people's experiences with changing water resources patterns. In this study we evaluate the potential of participatory monitoring of hydrological variables to improve scarce water supply utilization in agriculture. The case study site is the Mustang district in Nepal, which is located in the upper Kaligandaki river basin in the Himalayas with unique and complex geographical and climatic features. This region is characterized by a semi-arid climate with total annual precipitation of less than 300 mm. Water supply, agricultural land, and livestock grazing are the key ecosystem services that underpin livelihood security of the local population, particularly socio-economically vulnerable groups. An analysis of the measured stream flow data indicate that annual flow of water in the stream can meet the current crop irrigation water needs for the agricultural land of the research site. The data provide local farmers a new way of understanding local water needs. Participatory monitoring would contribute to an optimization of the use of ecosystem services to support economic development and livelihood improvement.

Meeting the demand for food, energy, and water as world population increases is a major goal for the food systems of the future. These future challenges, which are complex, multiscalar, and cross-sectoral in nature, require a food systems approach that recognizes the socio-ecological and socio-technical dimensions of food (Ericksen, 2008; Ingram, 2011; Rivera-Ferre, 2012). The United Nations' Future Earth Program aims to provide a new platform for consolidating the knowledge required for societies to transition to global sustainability (Future Earth Transition Team, 2012). In this paper, we explore how Future Earth could become a vehicle for inspiring the production of new research ideas and collaborations for sustainably transforming the future food system. We do this on the basis of a synthesis of views from 28 young (below 40 years old) food system scientists, representing five continents. Their expertise comes from disciplines including food engineering, agronomy, ecology, geography, psychology, public health, food politics, nutritional science, political science, sociology and sustainability science. This paper begins with an outline of the institutional framework of Future Earth and how it might support innovative transdisciplinary research on food systems, and the position of young scientists within this framework. Secondly, we outline the key insights expressed by the young scientists during the Food Futures Conference in Villa Vigoni, Italy, in April 2013, including the core research questions raised during the meeting as well as some of the challenges involved in realizing their research ambitions within their professional spheres. 

Damming and water regulation creates highly modified rivers with limited ecosystem integrity and resilience. This, coupled with an ongoing global biodiversity crisis, makes river restoration a priority, which requires water reallocation. Coupled human–natural systems research provides a suitable lens for integrated systems’ analysis but offers limited insight into the governance processes of water reallocation. Therefore, we propose an analytical framework, which combines insight from social–hydrological resilience and water reallocation research, and identifies the adaptive capacity in highly modified rivers as the capacity for water reallocation. We test the framework by conducting an analysis of Sweden, pre-and post-2019, a critical juncture in the governance of the country’s hydropower producing rivers. We identify a relative increase in adaptive capacity post-2019 since water reallocation is set to occur in smaller rivers and tributaries, while leaving large-scaled rivers to enjoy limited water reallocation, or even increased allocation to hydropower. We contend that the proposed framework is broad enough to be of general interest, yet sufficiently specific to contribute to the construction of middle-range theories, which could further our understanding of why and how governance processes function, change, and lead to outcomes in terms of modified natural resource management and resilience shifts. 

The challenge for implementing an ecosystems approach to environmental decision-making processes, such as spatial planning, is to understand the range, nature and amount of ecosystem services currently provided and the potential for such service provision in the future. The ability to spatially represent ecosystems services is a critical element of the evidence base on which to make decisions about how physical space is used most effectively and sustainably, and the way people and activities are distributed at different spatial scales. This paper reports on the outcomes of a research project originally undertaken for the UK Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs which developed a methodology for mapping ecosystem services using GIS and readily available, existing land use/land cover datasets. Critical components of the methodology, in order to determine which datasets are appropriate for which services, are network analysis and stakeholder engagement techniques, to define the relevant typology of ecosystem services and their relationship to land use/land cover types. The methodology was developed and tested successfully in the context of green grid (green infrastructure) networks in a major UK regeneration area, the Thames Gateway, to the east of London, and its potential use in impact assessment further explored through a number of case studies.

Disconnects between farming and urban systems are widely seen as impairing the resilience of biobased production systems (BBPSs). However, the institutional mechanisms that underlie these resilience problems are not well understood. In this explorative paper, which integrates elements from institutional and resilience theory, we develop a framework to analyze how institutionally shaped patterns of connects and disconnects affect the resilience of BBPs along the dimensions of robustness, adaptability, and transformability. This framework is applied to the historical case of pig livestock intensification in the Netherlands from 1870 to 2017. The case shows that institutions, successfully established in earlier periods, shape connects and disconnects in subsequent periods, thereby enabling and constraining resilience. A combination of perturbations, institutional layering, and shifts in ideational power is an important institutional mechanism for resilience. We conclude that building resilience requires a variety of reconnecting institutions and refraining from a focus on local reconnects or certification only.

Recent studies that emphasize the contested nature of resource allocation address the politics of periurban development. However, the issue of conflicts and cooperation in periurban contexts continues to remain weakly studied. Based on the study of periurban Gurgaon in North-West India, this paper unravels the different types of conflicts and cooperation that have emerged around land and water, drawing insights from conflict/cooperation studies and urban political ecology. We focus on how changes in land-use bring about changes in water use, access and practices in periurban Gurgaon, giving rise to new forms of conflicts, conflicts of interest and co- operation. Conflicts over land and water are linked to the changing characteristics of land and water appro- priation that has occurred in the aftermath of neoliberal reforms. Drawing insights from urban political ecolog perspective, we show how periurban areas are systematically undermined through the acquisition of land and water to serve urban expansion and growth. We conclude that periurban conflicts are rooted in the issue of land- use change and are fundamentally tied to the politics of urbanization and its impact on periurban areas. These processes give rise to conflicts of interest and explicit conflicts, whilst creating new forms of cooperation. Cooperation is exemplified by emerging forms of collective action over the use of wastewater and groundwater. The paper distinguishes between conflict and cooperation but concludes that these are in fact not mutually exclusive; rather points along a continuum.

Open and decentralized technologies such as the Internet provide increasing opportunities to create knowledge and deliver computer-based decision support for multiple types of users across scales. However, environmental decision support systems/tools (henceforth EDSS) are often strongly science-driven and assuming single types of decision makers, and hence poorly suited for more decentralized and polycentric decision making contexts. In such contexts, EDSS need to be tailored to meet diverse user requirements to ensure that it provides useful (relevant), usable (intuitive), and exchangeable (institutionally unobstructed) information for decision support for different types of actors. To address these issues, we present a participatory framework for designing EDSS that emphasizes a more complete understanding of the decision making structures and iterative design of the user interface. We illustrate the application of the framework through a case study within the context of water-stressed upstream/downstream communities in Lima, Peru.