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Sustainability assessments can play several critical roles in initiatives that support real-world problem solving and system transformations towards sustainability (Wiek et al., 2012; Miller et al., 2014). Various approaches to sustainability assessment emphasize different functions and associated procedures (e.g., Devuyst, 1999; Pope, Annandale and Morrison-Saunders, 2004; Gibson, 2006a; Weaver and Rotmans, 2006; Ness et al., 2007). Most often, the products of sustainability assessments act as normative reference points for planning, decision making and actions. They provide guidance on what to address (problem), what to achieve (vision), what the distance to target is and/or what the best course of action (set of interventions) is.

Transitions towards sustainability are urgently needed to address the interconnected challenges of economic development, ecological integrity, and social justice, from local to global scales. Around the world, collaborative science-society initiatives are forming to conduct experiments in support of sustainability transitions. Such experiments, if carefully designed, provide significant learning opportunities for making progress on transition efforts. Yet, there is no broadly applicable evaluative scheme available to capture this critical information across a large number of cases, and to guide the design of transition experiments. To address this gap, the article develops such a scheme, in a tentative form, drawing on evaluative research and sustainability transitions scholarship, alongside insights from empirical cases. We critically discuss the scheme's key features of being generic, comprehensive, operational, and formative. Furthermore, we invite scholars and practitioners to apply, reflect and further develop the proposed tentative scheme e making evaluation and experiments objects of learning.

The future of the American West depends on sustainable water resource governance. A variety of uncertainties associated with limited freshwater supplies, population growth, land use change, drought, and climate change impacts present substantial challenges. To inform decision making, managers are adopting new techniques such as scenario planning to understand how water resources might change and what practices can support economic, environmental, and social sustainability. Scenario planning can be informed by understanding the normative future preferences of a variety of stakeholders, including decision makers, who influence water governance. This article presents a survey of central Arizona decision makers to understand their visions for a desirable future for the water system in terms of supply, delivery, demand, outflow, and crosscutting activities. Principle components analysis is used to identify patterns underlying responses about preferences for each domain of the system and correlation analysis is used to evaluate associations between themes across the domains. The results reveal two distinct visions for water in central Arizona—one in which water experts and policy makers pursue supply augmentation to serve metropolitan development, and another in which broadened public engagement is used in conjunction with policy tools to reduce water consumption, restore ecosystem services, and limit metropolitan expansion. The results of this survey will inform the development of a set of normative scenarios for use in exploratory modeling and anticipatory governance activities.

The civil war raging in Syria at the time of this writing demonstrates the devastating effects of converging extreme drought, population growth and corrupt governance on natural, human and economic systems (Friedman 2013). A recent study on childhood and adult obesity in the United States concludes that prevalence of obesity has not changed significantly over the past ten years, remaining at more than 33 per cent of adults and 17 per cent of youth (Ogden et al. 2014). The detrimental effects of obesity on American society include the cost of individual illnesses, public health and financial burdens, lost worker productivity, and environmental degradation.Climate change has begun to impact cities and regions worldwide through storms and associated flood damages, extensive droughts, sea-level rise, and other disruptions; with impacts expected to increase in frequency and/or severity (Melillo et al. 2014). The above are but a few of the challenges that pertain to sustainability and display features of significant harm, complexity, urgency and contestation. Throughout this chapter,we adhere to the following definition of sustainability (and by exten-sion of sustainable development and sustainability problems) set forth in the literature (e.g. WCED 1987; Kates et al. 2001;Wiek et al. 2012): Sustainability is the collective willingness and ability of a society to reach or maintain its viability, vitality, and integrity over long periods of time, while allowing other societies to reach or maintain their own viability, vitality, and integrity. Sustainability challenges do not seem tractable to business-as-usual solutions; novel approaches are needed, for example, solution-oriented and transformational sustainability research efforts (Lang et al. 2012; Sarewitz et al. 2012;Wiek et al. 2012; Miller et al. 2014). Similarly, a large-scale educational transformation is needed to equip a new generation of professionals (not only sustainability professionals!) to address sustainability challenges through problem-solving approaches that integrate systems thinking, structured anticipation,value-laden deliberation, evidence-supported strategies, and strong collaboration across government, businesses and civil society (Wiek et al. 2011a).

In zwölf Thesen präzisiert der NaWis Verbund die Forschung zu urbaner Resilienz und Reallaboren.

When stakeholders collaborate with researchers in developingsolutions to societal problems, high-quality andimplementable solutions can result. Transdisciplinaryresearch allows researchers, experts, decision makers,and citizens to contribute to solution-oriented research.This research is particularly suitable for complex sustainabilitychallenges, which aff ect the public and requirecollective problem-solving efforts. Transdisciplinaryresearch’s wider adoption depends on the willingness tosecure resources, expertise, and institutional support.