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Public environmental organisations face a Herculean task: to be responsive to public and executive expectations for decentralisation, integration, increasing accountabilities and efficiency savings plus, contemporaneously, managing increasingly complex nature–society systems as exemplified by the water–energy–food nexus. The public-agency innovation literatures and contingency theory offer partial explanations for this challenge. However, this article, which sits at the intersection of public administration and organisational theory, proposes a new analytical framework for framing public-agency responses to nexus complexity. It first outlines the framework and then tests it on the case of Natural Resources Wales, the Welsh national natural environment agency. This case identifies six distinct innovations that have adopted to meet complex nexus pressures. This leads us to characterise the case as an example of a multi-scalar, hybrid, adhocratic organisation designed to meet nexus challenges. These findings have wider impact for the international community of public agencies with socio-environmental remits facing similar nexus pressures and challenges in the 21st century.

AbstractIn this perspectives article, we maintain that the current local to global sustainable development predicaments we face are the result of humanity's impact on the Earth System (ES)—that is to say, on the very systemic fabric of the ES (i.e., its functioning and configuration), combined with an insufficiently coherent application of sustainable development policy to address and resolve this systemic problem. In response to what is an urgent crisis, we propose four foundational guiding principles, which we contend provide an overarching framing that, if implemented, would offer an approach to steer global sustainable development policy in a manner that would be to the benefit of the ES and the securing of a flourishing future for all. Our principles are applicable at the levels from a local business ecosystem, national‐regional networks, to global policy.

AbstractPublic Natural Resource Management (NRM) agencies operate in complex social-ecological domains. These complexities proliferate unpredictably therefore investigating and supporting the ability of public agencies to respond effectively is increasingly important. However, understanding how public NRM agencies innovate and restructure to negotiate the range of particular complexities they face is an under researched field. One particular conceptualisation of the social-ecological complexities facing NRM agencies that is of growing influence is the Water–Energy–Food (WEF) nexus. Yet, as a tool to frame and understand those complexities it has limitations. Specifically, it overlooks how NRMs respond institutionally to these social-ecological complexities in the context of economic and organisational challenges—thus creating a gap in the literature. Current debates in public administration can be brought to bear here. Using an organisational cultures approach, this paper reports on a case study with a national NRM agency to investigate how they are attempting to transform institutionally to respond to complexity in challenging times. The research involved 12 elite interviews with senior leaders from Natural Resources Wales, (NRW) and investigated how cultural narratives are being explicitly and implicitly constructed and mobilised to this end. The research identified four distinct and sequential cultural narratives: collaboration, communication, trust, and empowerment where each narrative supported the delivery of different dimensions of NRW's social-ecological complexity mandate. Counter to the current managerialist approaches in public administration, these results suggest that the empowerment of expert bureaucrats is important in responding effectively to complexity.

Intro -- Preface -- Organization -- Contents -- Feeding and Securing Healthy African and Asian Futures -- Integration of Indigenous Knowledge, Climate Data, Satellite Imagery and Machine Learning to Optimize Cropping Decisions by Small-Scale Farmers. a Case Study of uMgungundlovu District Municipality, South Africa -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Literature Review -- 2.1 Remote Sensing Technology -- 2.2 Satellite Image Segmentation or Classification -- 2.3 Vegetation Indices -- 2.4 Machine Learning (Time Series Analysis) -- 2.5 Indigenous Knowledge -- 3 Methodology -- 4 Implementation -- 4.1 Determine the Season Onset -- 4.2 Crop Monitoring -- 4.3 Crop Health Prediction -- 5 Model Evaluation and Conclusion -- References -- A Multi-level Smart Monitoring System by Combining an E-Nose and Image Processing for Early Detection of FAW Pest in Agriculture -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Current Struggle Methods Against Fall Armyworm -- 2.1 Biological or Biotechnological Approaches -- 2.2 Behavioral Approaches -- 3 Computer Tools Based Approaches for Struggle FAW -- 3.1 FAMEWS: FAW Monitoring and Early Warning System -- 3.2 Nuru -- 4 A Multilevel Architecture of a Smart Monitoring System for Early Detection of FAW -- 4.1 Level of Early Detection of FAW -- 4.2 A Multilevel Monitoring System for Early Detection of FAW -- 5 Experiments and Results -- 6 Conclusion -- References -- Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge of Soil Regulation Services, and Factors Effecting Decision-Making in Agricultural Landscapes in the Terai Plains of Nepal -- 1 Introduction -- 1.1 A Subsection Sample -- 2 Materials and Methods -- 2.1 Study Area -- 2.2 Cropping Systems -- 2.3 Soil Parameters -- 2.4 Perceived Factors Impacting Soil Quality Decline -- 2.5 Strategies to Increase Soil Fertility, and Factors Determining Farmers' Decision-Making -- 2.6 Policy Recommendations -- 3 Results.

The decision of the UK to leave the EU has far‐reaching, and often shared, implications for agriculture and fisheries. To ensure the future sustainability of the UK's agricultural and fisheries systems, we argue that it is essential to grasp the opportunity that Brexit is providing to develop integrated policies that improve the management and protection of the natural environments, upon which these industries rely. This article advances a stakeholder informed vision of the future design of UK agriculture and fisheries policies. We assess how currently emerging UK policy will need to be adapted in order to implement this vision. Our starting point is that Brexit provides the opportunity to redesign current unsustainable practices and can, in principle, deliver a sustainable future for agriculture and fisheries. Underpinning policies with an ecosystem approach, explicit inclusion of public goods provision and social welfare equity were found to be key provisions for environmental, agricultural and fishery sustainability. Recognition of the needs of, and innovative practices in, the devolved UK nations is also required as the new policy and regulatory landscape is established. Achieving the proposed vision will necessitate drawing on best practice and creating more coherent and integrated food, environment and rural and coastal economic policies. Our findings demonstrate that "bottom‐up" and co‐production approaches will be key to the development of more environmentally sustainable agriculture and fisheries policies to underpin prosperous livelihoods. However, delivering this vision will involve overcoming significant challenges. The current uncertainty over the nature and timing of the UK's Brexit agreement hinders forward planning and investment while diverting attention away from further in‐depth consideration of environmental sustainability. In the face of this uncertainty, much of the UK's new policy on the environment, agriculture and fisheries is therefore ambitious in vision but light on detail. Full commitment to co‐production of policy with devolved nations and stakeholders also appears to be lacking, but will be essential for effective policy development and implementation.

© 2019, The Author(s). This paper concludes a special feature of Sustainability Science that explores a broad range of social value theoretical traditions, such as religious studies, social psychology, indigenous knowledge, economics, sociology, and philosophy. We introduce a novel transdisciplinary conceptual framework that revolves around concepts of 'lenses' and 'tensions' to help navigate value diversity. First, we consider the notion of lenses: perspectives on value and valuation along diverse dimensions that describe what values focus on, how their sociality is envisioned, and what epistemic and procedural assumptions are made. We characterise fourteen of such dimensions. This provides a foundation for exploration of seven areas of tension, between: (1) the values of individuals vs collectives; (2) values as discrete and held vs embedded and constructed; (3) value as static or changeable; (4) valuation as descriptive vs normative and transformative; (5) social vs relational values; (6) different rationalities and their relation to value integration; (7) degrees of acknowledgment of the role of power in navigating value conflicts. In doing so, we embrace the 'mess' of diversity, yet also provide a framework to organise this mess and support and encourage active transdisciplinary collaboration. We identify key research areas where such collaborations can be harnessed for sustainability transformation. Here it is crucial to understand how certain social value lenses are privileged over others and build capacity in decision-making for understanding and drawing on multiple value, epistemic and procedural lenses.