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Transdisciplinary research, in which academics and actors from outside the academy co-produce knowledge, is an important approach to address urgent sustainability challenges. Indeed, to meet these real-world challenges, governments, universities, development agencies, and civil society organizations have made substantial investments in transdisciplinary partnerships. Yet to date, our understanding of the performance, as well as impacts, of these partnerships for sustainability is limited. Here, we provide a guide to assess the performance and impacts of transdisciplinary partnerships for sustainability. We offer key steps to navigate and examine the partnership process for continuous improvement, and to understand how transdisciplinary partnership is contributing to sustainable futures.

AbstractResponding to disastrous wildfires traversing geographical scales requires multi‐actor collaboration to address a series of interdependent operational tasks. While this type of distributed collective action problem is salient across governance contexts, less is known about if and how collaboration helps individual actors effectively address their tasks. Applying a novel network‐centric method to wildfire responder networks in Canada and Sweden, this study shows that when actors working on the same tasks collaborate, and/or when one actor addresses two interdependent tasks, effectiveness increases. The number of collaborative ties an actor has with others does not enhance effectiveness. Furthermore, when the chain of command is unclear, and/or when actors lack recent disaster management experience and/or pre‐existing collaborative relationships, effectiveness only increases if multiple actors collaborate over multiple interdependent tasks. The results have implications for disaster response agencies, and they provide valuable insights for collaborative responses to significant societal and environmental challenges.

Water has often been the source of crises and their frequency will intensify due to climate change impacts. The Niagara River Watershed provides an ideal case to study water crises as it is an international transboundary system (Canada-United States) and has both historical and current challenges associated with water quantity and quality, which resonates broadly in water basins throughout the world. The aim of this study was to understand how stakeholders perceive ecosystems and the relationship with preferences for governance approaches in the context of water governance. An online survey instrument was employed to assess perceptions of the system in terms of resilience (engineering, ecological, social-ecological, or epistemic), preferences for governance approaches (state, citizen, market, and hybrid forms), and the most pressing issues in the watershed. Responses showed that, despite demographic differences and adherence to different resilience perspectives, support was strongest for governance approaches that focused on state or state-citizen hybrid forms. The validity of the resilience typology as a grouping variable is discussed. The roles of institutional constraints, pragmatism in governance approach preferences, and the influence of multiple crises are explored in relation to the context of the study site, as well as to water governance scholarship more broadly. ; Funding for this work, as part of the Climate Change Adaptation and Water Governance (CADWAGO) project, from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, the Volkswagen Stiftung and Compagnia di San Paolo through the Europe and Global Challenges programme. ; https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/8/6/224

A shift appears to be occurring in thinking about flooding, from a resistance-based approach to one of resilience. Accordingly, how stakeholders in flood-prone regions perceive the system and its governance are salient questions. This study queried stakeholders' internal representations of ecosystems (resistance- or resilience-based), preferences for governance actors and mechanisms for flooding, and the relationship between them in five different regions of the world. The influence of personal experience on these variables was also assessed. Most respondents aligned themselves with a resilience-based approach in relation to system connectedness and response to disturbance; however, respondents were almost evenly split between resistance- and resilience-based approaches when considering system management. Responses generally were considered to hold for other disturbances as well. There was no clear relationship between internal representations and preferences for governance actors or mechanisms. Respondents generally favoured actor combinations that included governments and mechanism combinations that included regulations and policies. Those who had personal experience with flooding tended to align themselves with a resilience-based internal representation of system management, but personal experience showed no clear relationship with governance preferences. The findings support an evolutionary perspective of flood management where emerging paradigms enhance preceding ones, and prompt a critical discussion about the universality of resilience as a framing construct. ; Financial support for the CADWAGO project from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, the Volkswagen Stiftung and Compagnia di San Paolo through the Europe and Global Challenges programme, as well as the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB). ; https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/8/5/191

Stresses on water resources are considerable and will intensify in the future due to climatic and non-climatic drivers. The emerging shift from science-based command and control 'old' water management approach to a dynamic and integrative systems view of water—a 'new' water management approach—was explored using the concept of capacity, operationalized using the livelihoods capitals approach (i.e. physical, natural, financial, human and social capitals), as a conceptual lens in a multiple case study of notable cases of urban flooding from Canada and Australia. The findings show that there are changing conceptualizations of capacity in both cases over time. Physical and financial capitals have been emphasized for decades and are associated with the old water management approach, responding to major flood events with the construction of large control structures. While the importance of these capital inputs persists, the approach to building capacity under the emergence of the new water management approach places an increasing relative emphasis on social and human capitals. The lack of emphasis on natural capital persisted over time and should be considered explicitly in flood management. This study demonstrates how the capitals approach contributes to the very much needed understanding of how the shift from the old to a new water management approach is being expressed for both present-day decisions and long-term trajectories.

The governance of climate adaptation involves the collective efforts of multiple societal actors to address problems, or to reap the benefits, associated with impacts of climate change. Governing involves the creation of institutions, rules and organizations, and the selection of normative principles to guide problem solution and institution building. We argue that actors involved in governing climate change adaptation, as climate change governance regimes evolve, inevitably must engage in making choices, for instance on problem definitions, jurisdictional levels, on modes of governance and policy instruments, and on the timing of interventions. Yet little is known about how and why these choices are made in practice, and how such choices affect the outcomes of our efforts to govern adaptation. In this introduction we review the current state of evidence and the specific contribution of the articles published in this Special Feature, which are aimed at bringing greater clarity in these matters, and thereby informing both governance theory and practice. Collectively, the contributing papers suggest that the way issues are defined has important consequences for the support for governance interventions, and their effectiveness. The articles suggest that currently the emphasis in adaptation governance is on the local and regional levels, while underscoring the benefits of interventions and governance at higher jurisdictional levels in terms of visioning and scaling-up effective approaches. The articles suggest that there is a central role of government agencies in leading governance interventions to address spillover effects, to provide public goods, and to promote the long-term perspectives for planning. They highlight the issue of justice in the governance of adaptation showing how governance measures have wide distributional consequences, including the potential to amplify existing inequalities, access to resources, or generating new injustices through distribution of risks. For several of these findings, future research directions are suggested.

In this policy perspective, we outline several conditions to support effective science–policy interaction, with a particular emphasis on improving water governance in transboundary basins. Key conditions include (1) recognizing that science is a crucial but bounded input into water resource decision-making processes; (2) establishing conditions for collaboration and shared commitment among actors; (3) understanding that social or group-learning processes linked to science–policy interaction are enhanced through greater collaboration; (4) accepting that the collaborative production of knowledge about hydrological issues and associated socioeconomic change and institutional responses is essential to build legitimate decision-making processes; and (5) engaging boundary organizations and informal networks of scientists, policy makers, and civil society. We elaborate on these conditions with a diverse set of international examples drawn from a synthesis of our collective experiences in assessing the opportunities and constraints (including the role of power relations) related to governance for water in transboundary settings.

A convoluted network of different water governance systems exists around the world. Collectively, these systems provide insight into how to build sustainable regimes of water use and management. We argue that the challenge is not tomake the systemless convoluted, but rather to support positive and promising trends in governance, creating a vision for future environmental outcomes. In this paper, we analyse nine water case studies from around the world to help identify potential 'innovative arrangements' for addressing existing dilemmas. We argue that such arrangements can be used as a catalyst for crafting new global water governance futures. The nine case studies were selected for their diversity in terms of location, scale and water dilemma, and through an examination of their contexts, structures and processes we identify key themes to consider in the milieu of adaptive transformation. These themes include the importance of acknowledging socio-ecological entanglements, understanding the political dimensions of environmental dilemmas, the recognition of different constructions of the dillema, and the importance of democratized processes. ; The research for this paper is a part of the "CADWAGO: Climate change adaptation and water governance—reconciling food security, renewable energy and the provision of multiple ecosystem services" project funded as part of the "Europe and Global Challenges programme" by Compagnia di San Paolo, VolkswagenStiftung and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. ; https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/10/1/29