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The Segura River basin in South-East Spain is home to aquatic and dry-land ecosystems of regional significance. Pressurised, over the course of the last five decades, by interests of agricultural origin, the basin is caught up in a persistent water crisis traversed by conflict and socio-ecological deterioration. This article presents a socio-ecological-system characterisation of the Segura River basin with a focus on the interactions between institutional performance and expectations on irrigation water supply. The contribution of this research is twofold: first, it provides a model that develops a conceptual articulation of a socio-ecological framework in the idiom of Systems Dynamics; second, it generates (both numerical and qualitative) policy-relevant insights into the basin's crisis, in a way that fully reflects its complexity. Our results indicate that ∼333.100 ha of drylands and agro-natural landscapes were lost to agriculture, and that groundwater overexploitation reached ∼500 Hm3 within the 1960-2021 modelling horizon. Our work accurately models the pervasive impacts of intensive agriculture expansion in the Segura basin and portrays some of the socio-ecological consequences of the hydraulic paradigm in Spain, raising crucial doubts on the dominant forms of water governance in the region.

The role of water resources in conflict has been the centre of a polarized scientific debate on the connections between environmental and social sustainability. We investigate whether and how water availability, also in relation to water demand, increases the likelihood of violent conflict, and we analyse how hydrological factors influence social conflict dynamics involving non-state armed groups in the Lake Chad Basin. We combine hydrological and biophysical factors with information on socio-political processes. We use a novel physically based agro-hydrological model to produce water-availability and water-demand indicators to explore the conflict potential. By coupling a critical modelling perspective with a novel rendition of hydrological dynamics and statistical tools, we explore water–conflict interconnections in a broader hydrosocial framework. Our results show that, although water scarcity alone does not directly drive violent conflict, complex water-related interdependencies exist on multiple space–time scales. Analytical integration of fine-scale hydrological indicators may help deconstruct both mechanistic and relativist narratives, improve understanding of socio-hydrological complexity and move towards a comprehensive vision of socially and environmentally sustainable use of water and land.

Both natural and social science have been debating the existence, nature, and relevance of the interconnections between water and conflict. The intrinsic complexity of these interconnections makes representing them in a quantitative way a challenging task. Yet, there are actors in intra-state conflicts allegedly taking advantage of environmental stress, often in contexts where resources such as water and land have a primal role in the local population’s livelihoods. In this regard, the environmental aspects of conflicts become of special interest. We investigate these aspects and interconnections for conflict events occurring in the Lake Chad Basin from 2000 to 2015. We use custom-made spatially distributed hydrological simulations to construct and quantify water availability indicators explicitly accounting for human dimensions of water demand and water utilization, focusing in particular on agriculture as a key sustenance mean. Then, spatial econometric regression models are employed to test conflict occurrence against a set of covariates including water scarcity, but also other biophysical and social stress variables, and accounting for space- and time-specific conflict mechanisms through ad-hoc modeling structures. As a complement to this analysis, we develop a methodology to spatially cluster conflicts in association to water scarcity and so identify specific patterns of water availability recurring in specific conflict dynamics. While from the spatial econometric analysis we find that, in line with previous literature, the self-feeding mechanisms of conflict play a stronger role as conflict drivers than water scarcity, from the clustering analysis emerge complex, context-specific interconnections between water availability, water scarcity and conflict, with particular water utilization processes and specific conflictual mechanisms as intermediary processes. More in general, advanced hydrological simulations and statistical analyses are combined with a critical approach to how socio-hydrological processes are described, making quantitative results able to support qualitative insights. This approach can contribute to close the gap between biophysical environmental stress modeling and qualitative social stress representations, so to build more comprehensive knowledge frameworks for complex socio-environmental issues.

Humanity’s capacity to live without irreversibly compromising the environmental and biophysical conditions on which it depends is at stake. The expanding societal needs for food and energy add an unsustainable pressure on limited amounts of freshwater resources. In this context, the recent global economic and food security crisis, the adoption of new bioenergy policies, trends of water and land commodification, have been described as the drivers of a fast escalation in transnational land investments. A phenomenon described as a new ‘global land rush’. This process is favoring a strong transformation of the rural landscapes in large parts of Latin America, Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, with small-scale farming, the most diffused system of production, being displaced by large-scale commercial intensified agriculture. Such land deals may result in the dispossession of traditional users, subsistence and small-holder farmers by large-scale commercial agriculture, as well as expansion of agricultural land at the expense of savannas, forests, or other ecosystems. Here, we bring together the insights from distinct studies conducted on these different dimensions using the (to our knowledge) largest available sample of georeferenced global transnational land deals. We synthesize these studies with the objective to identify and highlight the interconnectedness of the phenomenon and how different interdependencies and trade-offs play out. Using data from the Demographic and Health Survey Program we then investigate the livelihood, health and food security dynamics associated with this phenomenon. We identified the main archetypes such large-scale transitions and defined their temporal trajectories (e.g., before and after the deals). We found that a significant portion of such deals, especially located in Southeast Asia, showed strong simultaneous increases in deforestation, crop cover and probability of export/trade, severely undermining the food security in such areas. Our approach offers a robust methodology to understand the multi-sectoral implications of the global land rush in a systematic, multi-dimensional and integrated way that we believe is helpful to inform policy.

Land grabbing typically leads to social and environmental harms

Since 2008, the call to ‘remunicipalise’ water resources has become a key strategy for water movements across Europe. Remunicipalisation aimed at opposing the new wave of privatisation programmes and water commodification incentivised under austerity frameworks. However, the water movements’ lack of direct engagement with questions of re/commoning resulted in under-explored links, in practitioner and scholarly arenas, between demands for water remunicipalisation and practices of commoning. This article brings into dialogue the bodies of literature on commoning and remunicipalisation. It examines the conditions which enable crossing the paradigm threshold from municipal governance, towards more collective and situated models of water governance rooted in practices of commoning. The article operationalises the concept of recommoning water to capture this process, and proposes an analytical definition grounded in a case study of water remunicipalisation in Terrassa, Spain. In 2019, Terrassa achieved remunicipalisation to create a citizen water observatory. The empirical findings demonstrate that water activists in Terassa’s Observatory are reclaiming and reproducing the commons on a daily basis through a process of experimentation with institutional bricolage and (re)negotiation of power and autonomy. This citizen-led observatory is ensuring that resources are shared in common, are used for the common good and are reproducing the commons. The study concludes that water remunicipalisation can act as an important step for enabling processes of recommoning. Nevertheless, the institutionalisation of recommoning water under a public management regime is confronted with multifaceted tensions that merit attention from both activists and policymakers.

Foreign investors have acquired approximately 90 million hectares of land for agriculture over the past two decades. The effects of these investments on local food security remain unknown. While additional cropland and intensified agriculture could potentially increase crop production, preferential targeting of prime agricultural land and transitions toward export-bound crops might affect local access to nutritious foods. We test these hypotheses in a global systematic analysis of the food security implications of existing land concessions. We combine agricultural, remote sensing, and household survey data (available in 11 sub-Saharan African countries) with georeferenced information on 160 land acquisitions in 39 countries. We find that the intended changes in cultivated crop types generally imply transitions toward energy-rich, but nutrient-poor, crops that are predominantly destined for export markets. Specific impacts on food production and access vary substantially across regions. Deals likely have little effect on food security in eastern Europe and Latin America, where they predominantly occur within agricultural areas with current export-oriented crops, and where agriculture would have both expanded and intensified regardless of the land deals. This contrasts with Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where deals are associated with both an expansion and intensification (in Asia) of crop production. Deals in these regions also shift production away from local staples and coincide with a gradually decreasing dietary diversity among the surveyed households in sub-Saharan Africa. Together, these findings point to a paradox, where land deals can simultaneously increase crop production and threaten local food security.

Global palm oil production has greatly increased in recent years with the adoption of renewable energy policies by the E.U. and U.S.A. and growing demand for its use in food, biodiesel, and other commodities. Indonesia, the world's largest oil palm producer, has leased large tracts of forested and tribal lands as new concessions, thereby expanding oil palm plantations. While previous studies have focused on some of the important social and environmental consequences of this process, the full suite of potential environmental impacts from land conversion and cultivation remains poorly understood. Here we quantify these impacts in terms of forest loss and fragmentation, CO 2 emissions from land use change, and freshwater pollution from fertilizer application. Within all concession types, forest cover decreased by 20% and forest fragmentation increased by 44%, both of which are significantly higher than in comparable non-concession areas. We also assess to what extent CO 2 emissions and freshwater pollution are attributable to increasing palm oil demand abroad. We find that four-fifths of Indonesia's palm oil production is for export markets and that 66% of this is destined for just eight countries – India, China, Pakistan, Malaysia, Italy, Egypt, Bangladesh, and the United Kingdom. Examining these multiple impacts highlights the importance of remote policies and consumption patterns in dictating local production decisions in a telecoupled world. This work demonstrates that - in order to be truly sustainable - bioenergy initiatives must ensure that adverse environmental impacts (and the demands that drive them) are reduced globally and not simply displaced elsewhere.

The ongoing agrarian transition from small-holder farming to large-scale commercial agriculture is reshaping systems of production and human well-being in many regions. A fundamental part of this global transition is manifested in large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) by agribusinesses. Its energy implications, however, remain poorly understood. Here, we assess the multi-dimensional changes in fossil-fuel-based energy demand resulting from this agrarian transition. We focus on LSLAs by comparing two scenarios of low-input and high-input agricultural practices, exemplifying systems of production in place before and after the agrarian transition. A shift to high-input crop production requires industrial fertilizer application, mechanization of farming practices and irrigation, which increases by ~5 times fossil-fuel-based energy consumption compared to low-input agriculture. Given the high energy and carbon footprints of LSLAs and concerns over local energy access, our analysis highlights the need for an approach that prioritizes local resource access and incorporates energy-intensity analyses in land use governance., Nature Communications, 12 (1), ISSN:2041-1723

The original version of this Article contained an error in the caption of Fig. 2, where the sentence ‘Yield-gap fractions close to zero show low-yielding croplands with high yield gaps.’ should have been deleted. This has been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the Article.

Tropical forests are vital for global biodiversity, carbon storage and local livelihoods, yet they are increasingly under threat from human activities. Large-scale land acquisitions have emerged as an important mechanism linking global resource demands to forests in the Global South, yet their influence on tropical deforestation remains unclear. Here we perform a multicountry assessment of the links between large-scale land acquisitions and tropical forest loss by combining a new georeferenced database of 82,403 individual land deals—covering 15 countries in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia—with data on annual forest cover and loss between 2000 and 2018. We find that land acquisitions cover between 6% and 59% of study-country land area and between 2% and 79% of their forests. Compared with non-investment areas, large-scale land acquisitions were granted in areas of higher forest cover in 11 countries and had higher forest loss in 52% of cases. Oil palm, wood fibre and tree plantations were consistently linked with enhanced forest loss while logging and mining concessions showed a mix of outcomes. Our findings demonstrate that large-scale land acquisitions can lead to elevated deforestation of tropical forests, highlighting the role of local policies in the sustainable management of these ecosystems. Tropical deforestation rates are linked to large-scale land investments, according to georeferenced land deal records and remote sensing of forest loss over the past two decades.

We advance the notion of agricultural economic water scarcity to identify where irrigation expansion may increase food production., Water scarcity raises major concerns on the sustainable future of humanity and the conservation of important ecosystem functions. To meet the increasing food demand without expanding cultivated areas, agriculture will likely need to introduce irrigation in croplands that are currently rain-fed but where enough water would be available for irrigation. “Agricultural economic water scarcity” is, here, defined as lack of irrigation due to limited institutional and economic capacity instead of hydrologic constraints. To date, the location and productivity potential of economically water scarce croplands remain unknown. We develop a monthly agrohydrological analysis to map agricultural regions affected by agricultural economic water scarcity. We find these regions account for up to 25% of the global croplands, mostly across Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. Sustainable irrigation of economically water scarce croplands could feed an additional 840 million people while preventing further aggravation of blue water scarcity.

With continuing growth in food demand and limited potential for cropland expansion, sustainable irrigation becomes an increasingly important strategy to ensure a reliable and resilient global supply of food in a changing climate. We here define and introduce the original concept of ‘agricultural economic water scarcity’ as the condition whereby croplands exposed to green water scarcity are not irrigated even though a sufficient amount of renewable blue water resources for irrigation is locally available. These conditions occur for instance as a result of a variety of socio-economic and political factors that impede irrigation. To date, little attention has been given to the analysis of this phenomenon and its role in the global geography of water scarcity. Here, we develop and apply a monthly agro-hydrological model to quantify and map croplands affected by agricultural green, blue, and economic water scarcity. By doing so we firstly provide a comprehensive, spatially explicit, global mapping of agricultural economic water scarcity across the global croplands. We then assess the water and food security implications of increased food production from irrigation expansion over economically water scarce croplands. Our results show that up to 25% of global croplands face agricultural economic water scarcity. Two thirds of economically water scarce lands are located in Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. Here, a sustainable irrigation expansion could increase food production and feed an additional 850 million people, while preventing further aggravation of blue water scarcity. The application of the concept of agricultural economic water scarcity has the potential to identify target areas for sustainable water and food security policies at global, regional, national, and local scales.

openaire: EC/H2020/819202/EU//SOS.aquaterra Higher temperatures expected by midcentury increase the risk of shocks to crop production, while the interconnected nature of the current global food system functions to spread the impact of localized production shocks throughout the world. In this study, we analyze the global potential impact of a present-day event of equivalent magnitude to the US Dust Bowl, modeling the ways in which a sudden decline in US wheat production could cascade through the global network of agricultural trade. We use observations of country-level production, reserves, and trade data in a Food Shock Cascade model to explore trade adjustments and country-level inventory changes in response to a major, multiyear production decline. We find that a 4-year decline in wheat production of the same proportional magnitude as occurred during the Dust Bowl greatly reduces both wheat supply and reserves in the United States and propagates through the global trade network. By year 4 of the event, US wheat exports fall from 90.5 trillion kcal before the drought to 48 trillion to 52 trillion kcal, and the United States exhausts 94% of its reserves. As a result of reduced US exports, other countries meet their needs by leveraging their own reserves, leading to a 31% decline in wheat reserves globally. These findings demonstrate that an extreme production decline would lead to substantial supply shortfalls in both the United States and in other countries, where impacts outside the United States strongly depend on a country's reserves and on its relative position in the global trade network.

Smallholder farmers undertake a number of strategies to cope with climate shocks in a community. The sharing of resources across households constitutes one coping mechanism when environmental shocks differentially impact households. This paper investigates commodity sharing dynamics among households in eight communities in an environmentally heterogeneous highland-lowland area in central Kenya. We use survey data and meteorological data to test whether commodity sharing, measured at the household level by net inflow of commodities, varies across a regional precipitation gradient, and we reveal how sharing fluctuates with rainfall over the course of a year. We find both precipitation and income to be significant predictors of households' net value of shared commodities. Specifically, farmers who live in drier areas with less income are more likely to receive more commodities than they give. We also find that the length of time a household has been established in the area is significantly related to commodity sharing. Further, commodity sharing follows the pattern of harvest and food storage over the course of the year, with households giving the most commodities at times when food storage levels are higher, that is, post-harvest. The study sheds light on the relationship between commodity sharing as a coping mechanism and environmental heterogeneity in a region prone to seasonal food insecurity.

This paper investigates how different dimensions of water – water as a public health concern, as an essential prerequisite for producing livelihoods, and as a cultural heritage or an element of spiritual practice – are taken up in international guidelines and certification schemes for the extractive sector. As a notoriously water-intensive economic activity, mining frequently infringes on other forms of water use. Simultaneously, the legal articulations and governance implications of the hydrological aspects of mining are complex, as commercial interactions associated with mining span the globe, governance efforts occur primarily at the national level and negative externalities manifest locally. Increasingly, transnational initiatives play a role in setting rules and norms for ‘responsible’ or ‘sustainable’ mining. We assess to what extent these rules and norms take into account the hydrological implications of mining, looking at eight guideline documents and ten certification schemes for mineral extraction that originate from international organizations, corporate groups, or multi-stakeholder initiatives. We then illustrate the influence of transnational institutions in two cases, one in Mongolia and one in South Africa. Our results show that water as a public health concern receives the most attention while water as a cultural heritage is reflected the least. However, all institutions in our sample that were devised over the last two years refer to the different dimensions of water use comprehensively.

Smallholder agriculturalists employ a range of strategies to adapt to climate variability. These adaptive strategies include decisions to plant different seed varieties, changes to the array of cultivated crops, and shifts in planting dates. Smallholder access to irrigation water is crucial to the adoption of such strategies, and uncertainty of water availability may prove to be a stimulating force in a smallholder’s decision to adjust their on-farm practices. Within smallholder irrigation systems, attributes at multiple levels influence water availability and collective action, and in the process play a role in adaptation: community-level governance institutions may influence trust in others and the ability to overcome appropriation and provisioning dilemmas, and, at the household-level, the availability of irrigation water and socioeconomic and demographic factors may influence farmer willingness to take on the risk of altering their on-farm practices. In this study we investigate smallholder adaptation in Kenya from multiple levels. Specifically, we identify the role of household- and community-level characteristics in shaping smallholder experimentation with different seed varieties. Standard ordinary least squares and logistic regressions are constructed to assess the influence of these interactions on smallholder adaptation. We further discuss the ability of smallholders to respond to poor water provisioning. Among the study’s findings is evidence that smallholders are more willing to employ adaptive measures if they have a limited capacity to irrigate.

©2018. The Authors. Water availability is a major factor constraining humanity's ability to meet the future food and energy needs of a growing and increasingly affluent human population. Water plays an important role in the production of energy, including renewable energy sources and the extraction of unconventional fossil fuels that are expected to become important players in future energy security. The emergent competition for water between the food and energy systems is increasingly recognized in the concept of the “food-energy-water nexus.” The nexus between food and water is made even more complex by the globalization of agriculture and rapid growth in food trade, which results in a massive virtual transfer of water among regions and plays an important role in the food and water security of some regions. This review explores multiple components of the food-energy-water nexus and highlights possible approaches that could be used to meet food and energy security with the limited renewable water resources of the planet. Despite clear tensions inherent in meeting the growing and changing demand for food and energy in the 21st century, the inherent linkages among food, water, and energy systems can offer an opportunity for synergistic strategies aimed at resilient food, water, and energy security, such as the circular economy.

Waterscapes with mining activities are often sites of water resource degradation and contestation. To prevent this, policy-makers deploy an increasing number of measures that purportedly align the interests of different water users. In Mongolia, mining-related protests led to the prohibition of mining in and close to rivers. However, implementation of these regulations has been slow. In this paper, we investigate why that is the case, drawing on an extended elaboration of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework to disentangle the web of formal and informal rules, incentive structures, discourses, and other elements that characterize Mongolian miningscapes. We find that i) a combination of insufficient resources for lower-level actors, large areas to cover and high mobility of extractive operations, ii) a lack of information among implementing entities, combined with time pressure on decision-making and a lack of involvement of local actors, and iii) cultural norms and political context conditions that privilege the pursuit of private interests are key obstacles. Irrespective of these challenges, the prohibition of mining in riverbeds entrenches a social imaginary in the Mongolian governance framework that prioritizes water resources protection over resource extraction, offering a counterweight to dominant discourses that cast mining as a necessary requirement for social and economic development. Our analysis illustrates the usefulness of looking at implementation processes through the lens of mining- and waterscapes to identify how social power is embedded in social-political artifacts and impacts hydro-social outcomes. Strong discrepancies between the formal description of governance processes and interactions on the ground support the need to look at how processes play out in practice in order to understand implementation obstacles.

Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. A growing number of regions in the developing world are targeted by transnational investors who are acquiring large amounts of land and natural resources. Driven by the increasing global demand for agricultural products, such investments are often considered an opportunity for economic development in the target country. However, there are concerns about the social and environmental impacts on local communities. In this brief review, we discuss some key socio-environmental controversies surrounding large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs). LSLAs often target common property systems and lead to privatization and commodification of land through long-term land concessions. There is a debate between supporters of foreign land investments as a means to attract modern agricultural technology that would decrease the yield gap in underperforming agricultural land and those who question such a development model because it is seldom coupled with policy instruments that would ensure that the benefits improve food security in local populations. Large-scale land investments displace a variety of systems of production ranging from small-scale farming to (arguably) “unused” land such as forests and savannas on which local communities often depend. Moreover, LSLAs entail an appropriation of water resources that may negatively impact local farmers or downstream human and natural systems. In most cases, investors keep the land fallow but, when they put it under productive use, they typically change land cover and land use to start intensified commercial farming, often for nonfood crops. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

© 2017 The Authors Since small-scale farmers manage most of the cultivated land worldwide, the ongoing shift in systems of production associated with large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) may dramatically reshape the world's agrarian landscape, significantly impacting rural populations and their livelihoods. The societal, hydrological and environmental implications resulting from the expansion of large-scale agricultural production, through LSLAs, make their ultimate sustainability questionable. This study, through a literature review, analyses the negative impacts of LSLAs, their hydrological dimension and how they may affect the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The core literature on land and water grabbing is reviewed and systematized using the 17 SDGs as a framework, in order to highlight the relationship between LSLAs and the sustainable development agenda. The magnitude of the global land rush phenomenon and the criticism raised in scholarly research highlight the controversial role that transnational land acquisitions may be playing in the global development agenda.

As humanity continues to grow in size, questions related to human rights and the existing unequal distribution of food resources have taken on greater urgency. Is inequality in food access unjust or a regrettable consequence of the geographic distribution of biophysical resources? To what extent are there obligations to redress inequalities in access to food? We draw from a human rights perspective to identify obligations associated with access to food and develop a quantitative framework to evaluate the fulfillment of the human right to food. We discuss the capacity of socioeconomic development to reduce inequalities in per capita food availability with respect to the distribution of biophysical resources among countries. Although, at the country level, international trade shows the capacity to reduce human rights deficits by increasing food availability in countries with limited food production, whether it actually improves the fulfillment of the right to food will depend on within-country inequality.

Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu MdM-2015-0552 Archetypes are increasingly used as a methodological approach to understand recurrent patterns in variables and processes that shape the sustainability of social-ecological systems. The rapid growth and diversification of archetype analyses has generated variations, inconsistencies, and confusion about the meanings, potential, and limitations of archetypes. Based on a systematic review, a survey, and a workshop series, we provide a consolidated perspective on the core features and diverse meanings of archetype analysis in sustainability research, the motivations behind it, and its policy relevance. We identify three core features of archetype analysis: Recurrent patterns, multiple models, and intermediate abstraction. Two gradients help to apprehend the variety of meanings of archetype analysis that sustainability researchers have developed: (1) understanding archetypes as building blocks or as case typologies and (2) using archetypes for pattern recognition, diagnosis, or scenario development. We demonstrate how archetype analysis has been used to synthesize results from case studies, bridge the gap between global narratives and local realities, foster methodological interplay, and transfer knowledge about sustainability strategies across cases. We also critically examine the potential and limitations of archetype analysis in supporting evidence-based policy making through context-sensitive generalizations with case-level empirical validity. Finally, we identify future priorities, with a view to leveraging the full potential of archetype analysis for supporting sustainable development.

Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2019-000940-M The recent phenomenon of large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) is associated with what has been described as a global agrarian transition. New forms of land exploitation and concentration have led to profound socio-environmental transformations of rural production systems in Latin America, South-East Asia and Sub Saharan Africa. Scholars have pointed out that the expansion of transnational land investments is often associated with detrimental social outcomes, has negative environmental impacts and can represent a potential impediment to the achievement of many SDGs. In this paper, our primary concern is on the mounting evidence that LSLAs preferentially target the commons, in the process altering long-standing customary resource governance systems. While it has been shown that in many instances of commons grabbing associated with LSLAs, different types of social conflict emerge, it is less clear what forms of social mobilization and organized collective re-actions are taking place to defend the commons and contest such processes of dispossession and enclosure. The main aim of this contribution is to fill this gap by synthesizing and describing the different typologies of social mobilization and collective re-actions that emerge as a result of commons grabbing associated with the transnational expansion of the agribusiness frontier. In order to do this our research synthesizes information from the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas) shedding light on some of the key characteristics associated with the different forms and dynamics of social mobilization that are organized in reaction to agribusiness-related commons grabbing.

Beginning in 2002, Kenyan water governance transitioned from a monocentric, top-down system to one exhibiting traits of polycentricity. In this paper, we investigate the changes made to water policy following the 2002 reform, outcomes produced in a collection of community- and catchment-level user groups in the Mount Kenya region, and the conformance of these changes and outcomes with principles of polycentricity. A new framework is used to capture the complex institutional arrangements and interactions existing before and after the polycentric transformation. Unlike many previous polycentricity studies, the present research focuses primarily on the outcomes of the polycentric shift and determines if these correspond to predictions from polycentricity theory. We utilize survey data collected in 2013 from water managers, as well as archival research to interrogate congruence with principles of polycentricity. This study contributes to the broader discussion on polycentricity in two fundamental ways: (i) It documents the functioning of a water management system following a top-down imposed polycentric reform, and (ii) It empirically inspects whether these polycentric reforms have produced benefits predicted by polycentricity theorists, such as experimentation by local water users, increased collective action, and improved coordination between levels of management.

Kenyan river basin governance underwent a pioneering reform in the Water Act of 2002, which established new community water-management institutions. This article focuses on community water projects in the Likii Water Resource Users Association in the Upper Ewaso Ng’iro River basin on Mount Kenya, and the extent to which their features are consistent with Ostrom’s design principles of natural resource management. Although the projects have developed solid institutional structures, pressures such as hydroclimatic change, population growth, and water inequality challenge their ability to manage their water resources. Institutional homogeneity across the different water projects and congruence with the design principles is not necessarily a positive factor. Strong differences in household water flows within and among the projects point to the disconnection between apparently successful institutions and their objectives, such as fair and equitable water allocation.

This inaugural World Development Symposium on Development and Poverty Alleviation brings together contributions from a range of disciplines, scholars, practitioners, and countries to mark the recognition of Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer (BDK) through the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Contributors examine how BDK's work has changed the methods and study of Development Economics, and their extended impact in other social science and interdisciplinary fields. Although experimental evaluation has had a profound impact on the conduct of much research and policy making, further development of RCT approaches, and collaboration across methods and disciplines, and between scholarship and practice, remain crucial to address the most pressing challenges of sustainability and development.

Referring to the analytical definition of water wars, several scholars have coherently argued against the “water leads to war thesis.” There are four arguments that have contributed to successfully dispel the myths of water wars: (a) interstate cooperation prevails over conflict; (b) development of new technologies increases freshwater availability; (c) the intrinsic characteristics of water as a resource do not justify interstate military intervention; (d) virtual water trade provides the opportunity to circumvent local water scarcity. These arguments converge demonstrating that rather than water wars in the future, water peace will prevail. While we agree with these arguments on the low likelihood of future water wars, we find that hydropolitical theories have generally neglected the fact that the conditions for interstate water peace come with high socio‐environmental costs. In particular, the central idea that virtual water trade resolve issues of local water scarcity and therefore reduces tensions and escalation of violence among different countries does not fully take into account the fact that dynamics of transnational water appropriation have serious socio‐environmental impacts on the virtual water exporting countries. To conceptualize this phenomenon we introduce the notion of “hidden socio‐environmental costs of virtual water transfer,” which is understood as a specific form of environmental cost‐shifting. The empirical support to our reasoning comes from the study of transnational large‐scale land acquisitions which represent an expanding phenomenon central in the contemporary global agrarian transformation.

The complex and interdisciplinary nature of socio-environmental (SE) problems has led to numerous efforts to develop organizing frameworks to capture the structural and functional elements of SE systems. We evaluate six leading SE frameworks, i.e., human ecosystem framework, resilience, integrated assessment of ecosystem services, vulnerability framework, coupled human-natural systems, and social-ecological systems framework, with the dual goals of (1) investigating the theoretical core of SE systems research emerging across diverse frameworks and (2) highlighting the gaps and research frontiers brought to the fore by a comparative evaluation. The discussion of the emergent theoretical core is centered on four shared structuring elements of SE systems: components, connections, scale, and context. Cross-cutting research frontiers include: moving beyond singular case studies and small-n studies to meta-analytic comparative work on outcomes in related SE systems; combining descriptive and data-driven modeling approaches to SE systems analysis; and promoting the evolution and refinement of frameworks through empirical application and testing, and interframework learning.

Small‐scale irrigation systems are important for agricultural productivity in dryland agroecosystems, particularly in areas where there is significant intra‐ and interannual changes in rainfall patterns. Institutional analysis of common‐pool resources has demonstrated the principles that tend to result in sustained water governance systems. However, previous work did not fully articulate the nested nature of institutions and how polycentric arrangements can play a role in both the formation and the ongoing maintenance of these governance systems. To better understand collective action across water user groups and decision‐makers at multiple governance levels, we undertake a multilevel analysis of Kenya's polycentric approach to water governance, in place since reforms were initiated in 2002. Survey and interview data indicate that in the postreform period, water users in Kenya's Upper Ewaso Ng'iro basin engaged in behaviors associated with collective action, including reduced water use by upstream users to address downstream users' needs. We examine the factors that promote collective action in the region, asking whether features associated with polycentric governance have helped to promote collective action. We find that the presence of multiple decision centers with overlapping authority over water governance functions creates necessary—but not sufficient—conditions for collective action to occur. Regulations and formal conflict resolution mechanisms provide incentives for water users to cooperate, while shared membership in regional Water Resource Users Associations facilitates informal opportunities for users to share information and build trust over time.

Concerns over rapid widespread changes in social-ecological systems and their consequences for biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, food security, and human livelihoods are driving demands for globally comprehensive knowledge to support decision-making and policy development. Claims of regional or global knowledge about the patterns, causes, and significance of changes in social-ecological systems, or ‘generalized knowledge claims’ (GKCs), are generally produced by synthesis of evidence compiled from local and regional case study observations. GKCs now constitute a wide and varied body of research, yet they are also increasingly contested based on disagreements about their geographic, temporal, and/or thematic validity. There are no accepted guidelines for detecting biases or logical gaps between GKC’s and the evidence used to produce them. Here, we propose a typology of GKCs based on their evidence base and the process by which they are produced. The typology is structured by three dimensions: i) the prior state of knowledge about the phenomenon of interest; ii) the logic of generalization underlying the claim; and iii) the methodology for generalization. From this typology, we propose a standardized approach to assess the quality and commensurability of these dimensions for any given GKC, and their ability to produce robust and transparent knowledge based on constituent evidence. We then apply this approach to evaluate two contested GKCs – addressing global biodiversity and large-scale land acquisitions – and in doing so demonstrate a coherent approach to assessing and evaluating the scope and validity of GKCs. With this approach, GKCs can be produced and applied with greater transparency and accuracy, advancing the goal of actionable science on social-ecological systems.