Transitioning infrastructure governance for accelerating, increasingly uncertain, and increasingly complex environments is paramount for ensuring that critical and basic services are met during times of stability and instability. Yet the bureaucratic structures that dominate infrastructure organizations and their capacity to respond to increasing complexity remain poorly understood. To change infrastructure governance, it is critical to understand current conditions, the barriers to change, and the strategies needed to shift priorities and leadership strategy. The emergence of modern infrastructure bureaucratic and organizational structure is first explored. The need to rethink infrastructure as knowledge enterprises capable of making sense of changing conditions, and not simply as basic service providers, is discussed. Next, transformation of infrastructure governance is presented as both a challenge of organizational change as identity and power and leadership capacity to shift between stable and unstable conditions. Infrastructure bureaucracies should create capabilities to shift between periods of stability and instability, emphasizing flexibility where ad hoc teams are given power to make sense of changing conditions and steer the organization appropriately. Additionally, several critical factors must be addressed within organizational power structures, identities, and processes to facilitate change. Allowing infrastructure governance to persist in its current form is likely increasingly problematic for the future and may result in an increasing inability to maintain relevance.

The ability of individuals and groups to identify, assess, and pursue alternative possible futures is an essential component of their ability to deliberately and collectively respond to major sustainability challenges rather than experience unguided or forced change. Deliberately engaging in transformation processes inevitably requires imagination. We refer to imagination for transformations as interdependent cognitive and social processes that create representations of present and possible future states of the world that can inform public deliberation, policy, decision making, and behavior from the individual to the global scale. We contend that imagination is an essential capacity for securing ecological, social, economic, and cultural well-being in times of rapid and often unpredictable global change. We sketch an emerging interdisciplinary research agenda on imagination as a transformational capacity and its role in transformation processes, building on contributions to a special issue on this subject. We specifically focus on imagination in relationship to transformative agency, causation, and individual-collective dynamics. Our aim is to identify research questions and challenges that are most pressing with a view to supporting efforts of transformations toward sustainability.

Cuba’s transition to agroecology is perhaps as widely known as it is misunderstood. In response to the economic crisis of the early 1990s, the Cuban agricultural sector largely departed from the industrial model of food production that it had previously pursued. The subsequent transition towards an agroecological model has been a dynamic and uneven process, elevating Cuba on the world stage as a global leader in sustainable agriculture while at the same time producing unique challenges for Cuban farmers, policy makers, researchers and academics. This article synthesizes and updates contemporary literature on the Cuban agricultural system, paying attention to both successes and shortcomings of agroecology in Cuba to date. In particular, it situates these literatures alongside contributions from academics and practitioners alike, bringing a number of data sets, experiences, and perspectives into conversation in the context of changing realities within Cuba and the nation’s evolving geopolitical relationship with the United States. By analyzing both the historical and contemporary processes through which agroecology has taken root in Cuba, we demonstrate that, despite its uneven and incomplete implementation, such a sustainable agroecological transition holds great, untapped potential. Agroecology in Cuba currently faces pressure from normalizing Cuba-US relations, with potentially profound implications for agriculture in both countries. But increasing opportunities are also emerging for investment, collaboration, knowledge exchange, and solidarity. In this paper, we provide an overview of the evolution of the Cuban agroecology movement; analyze the state of food security and challenges to food sovereignty on the island today; outline US-Cuba policy changes occurring since December 2014 that may affect the agrifood sector; and conclude with recommendations for supporting agroecology – for food security, food sovereignty, and sustainability – under this new and evolving relationship. Please refer to Supplementary Materials , Full text Spanish version of this article , for a full text Spanish version of this article .

The resilience of buildings and food, energy, and water systems (FEWS) to natural or manmade disruptions are closely linked. The resilience of a building goes beyond the safety of its structural elements and must include the resilience of its supporting systems and the services they supply. The resilience of FEWS, in turn, can increase through design elements of a building that affect generation and storage of FEW resources. In this commentary, I discuss increasing the resilience of buildings and their linked FEWS—improving their resistance, absorption, restoration, and adaptive capacities—through new integrated systems design practices. I begin with a discussion of the current state of building design at the FEW nexus. I then use the prior establishment and current use of sustainability design objectives as an analogue to developing and implementing resilience design objectives. I review progress and limitations of specific drivers for increasing resilient design practices, including economic incentives, regulations, extralegal programs and initiatives, and societal incentives. My recommendations for leveraging these drivers to increase resilient design include: for economic incentives, quantify the costs and benefits to make the business case for resilience; for formal regulations, specify increased building requirements with performance-based resilience objectives; for extralegal initiatves, integrate these resilience objectives with existing certification programs and award designs that address FEWS as an integrated network rather than as disparate systems; and for societal incentives, demonstrate public benefit to shift societal perceptions of resilience. Together, these actions will motivate the design of more resilient building and FEW systems to increase their longevity, performance, and robustness.

The impacts of climate change are already affecting the production and profitability of agricultural systems, and these trends are expected to continue in the future. Without support from ecosystem functions, an agricultural system designed exclusively to maximize short-term production is vulnerable to extreme weather events such as droughts and floods. This results in high costs for farmers and ultimately for society at large, in economic and ecological terms. Complex agroecosystems that maximize biological interactions and conserve soil are better protected from extreme events, and thus are overall more resilient to climate change. This paper reviews the evidence demonstrating greater resilience on farms that maximize diversity, build soil organic matter, and incorporate other agroecological or ‘sustainable’ practices. We then discuss the current water crisis in California in the context of the vulnerability of our current agricultural systems to climate change, highlighting this as an opportunity to redirect agricultural policies and economic incentives. The projected increase in the frequency and intensity of climate extremes calls for policies that are concerned not only with present crises, but that also encourage a new culture of forward-thinking practices around land and water use. We highlight France’s new Law for the Future of Agriculture, Food and Forestry as an example of national policy supporting agroecology. Applying an agroecological approach to increase resilience will enable the U.S. to tackle the twin challenges of food production and increasing climatic unpredictability.

The prolonged history of industrialization, flood control, and hydropower production has led to the construction of 80,000 dams across the U.S. generating significant hydrologic, ecological, and social adjustments. With the increased ecological attention on re-establishing riverine connectivity, dam removal is becoming an important part of large-scale river restoration nationally, especially in New England, due to its early European settlement and history of waterpower-based industry. To capture the broader dimensions of dam removal, we constructed a GIS database of all inventoried dams in New England irrespective of size and reservoir volume to document the magnitude of fragmentation. We compared the characteristics of these existing dams to the attributes of all removed dams over the last ∼25 years. Our results reveal that the National Inventory of Dams significantly underestimates the actual number of dams (4,000 compared to >14,000). To combat the effects of these ecological barriers, dam removal in New England has been robust with 127 dams having been removed between ca. 1990–2013. These removed dams range in size, with the largest number (30%) ranging between 2–4 m high, but 22% of the removed dams were between 4–6 m. They are not isolated to small drainage basins: most drained watersheds between 100–1,000 km 2 . Regionally, dam removal has re-connected ∼3% (3,770 river km) of the regional river network although primarily through a few select dams where abundant barrier-free river lengths occur, suggesting that a more strategic removal approach has the opportunity to enhance the magnitude and rate of river re-connection. Given the regional-scale restoration of forest cover and water quality over the past century, dam removal offers a significant opportunity to capitalize on these efforts, providing watershed scale restoration and enhancing watershed resilience in the face of significant regional and global anthropogenic changes.

The rapid, directional global changes that characterize the Anthropocene provide unprecedented opportunities for ecologists and other scientists to discover new paradigms that shape our understanding of the ways that the world is changing. These paradigms will likely focus more strongly on interactions, feedbacks, thresholds, and model uncertainty than on steady-state dynamics and statistical uncertainty. We advocate a shift in ecology and other disciplines to a more proactive leadership role in defining problems and possibilities in a rapidly changing world rather than being relegated to a reactive role of trying to fix the problems after the horse has left the barn. This requires not only renewed commitment by ecologists (and other citizens) to a more proactive ethic of environmental citizenship but also institutional changes in education, the scientific review and funding processes, and promotion and tenure processes to encourage and celebrate those who seek to shape trajectories toward greater ecosystem and social resilience and well-being.