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Participatory scenario planning (PSP) is an increasingly popular tool in place-based environmental research for evaluating alternative futures of social-ecological systems. Although a range of guidelines on PSP methods are available in the scientific and grey literature, there is a need to reflect on existing practices and their appropriate application for different objectives and contexts at the local scale, as well as on their potential perceived outcomes. We contribute to theoretical and empirical frameworks by analyzing how and why researchers assess social-ecological systems using place-based PSP, hence facilitating the appropriate uptake of such scenario tools in the future. We analyzed 23 PSP case studies conducted by the authors in a wide range of social-ecological settings by exploring seven aspects: (1) the context; (2) the original motivations and objectives; (3) the methodological approach; (4) the process; (5) the content of the scenarios; (6) the outputs of the research; and (7) the monitoring and evaluation of the PSP process. This was complemented by a reflection on strengths and weaknesses of using PSP for the place-based social-ecological research. We conclude that the application of PSP, particularly when tailored to shared objectives between local people and researchers, has enriched environmental management and scientific research through building common understanding and fostering learning about future planning of social-ecological systems. However, PSP still requires greater systematic monitoring and evaluation to assess its impact on the promotion of collective action for transitions to sustainability and the adaptation to global environmental change and its challenges.

Community-based conservation programs in developing countries are often based on the assumption that heteronomous motivation (e.g., extrinsic incentives such as economic rewards and pressure or coercion to act) will incite local communities to adopt conservation behaviors. However, this may not be as effective or sustainable as autonomous motivations (e.g., an intrinsic desire to act due to inherent enjoyment or self-identification with a behavior and through freedom of choice). We analyzed the comparative effectiveness of heteronomous versus autonomous approaches to community-based conservation programs through a case study of Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii) conservation in 3 villages in Indonesia. Each village had a different conservation program design. We surveyed people (n = 240) to determine their motivations for and behavior changes relative to orangutan and orangutan habitat (forest) protection. Heteronomous motivations (e.g., income from tourism) led to greater self-reporting of behavior change toward orangutan protection. However, they did not change self-reported behavior toward forest (i.e., orangutan habitat) protection. The most effective approach to creating self-reported behavior change throughout the community was a combination of autonomous and heteronomous motivations. Individuals who were heteronomously motivated to protect the orangutan were more likely to have changed attitudes than to have changed their self-reported behavior. These findings demonstrate that the current paradigm of motivating communities in developing countries to adopt conservation behaviors primarily through monetary incentives and rewards should consider integrating autonomous motivational techniques that promote the intrinsic values of conservation. Such a combination has a greater potential to achieve sustainable and cost-effective conservation outcomes. Our results highlight the importance of using in-depth sociopsychological analyses to inform the design and implementation of community-based conservation programs. Los programas de conservación basados en la comunidad de los países en desarrollo con frecuencia se basan en la suposición de que la motivación heterónoma (por ejemplo, los incentivos extrínsecos como las recompensas económicas y la presión o coerción para actuar) incitará a las comunidades locales a adoptar comportamientos de conservación. Sin embargo, esto puede no ser tan efectivo o sustentable como las motivaciones autónomas (por ejemplo, un deseo intrínseco de actuar debido al disfrute inherente o a la auto-identificación con un comportamiento y mediante la libertad de elección). Analizamos la efectividad comparativa de las estrategias heterónomas versus las autónomas para los programas de conservación basadas en la comunidad por medio de un estudio de caso de la conservación del orangután de Sumatra (Pongo abelii) en tres aldeas en Indonesia. Cada aldea tuvo un programa de conservación con un diseño diferente. Encuestamos a las personas (n = 240) para determinar sus motivaciones para y los cambios de comportamiento en relación a la protección del orangután y de su hábitat (bosque). Las motivaciones heterónomas (por ejemplo, ingresos por turismo) llevaron a un mayor auto-reporte del cambio de comportamiento hacia la protección del orangután. Sin embargo, no cambiaron el comportamiento auto-reportado hacia la protección del bosque (es decir, el hábitat del orangután). La estrategia más efectiva para crear cambios en el comportamiento auto-reportados en toda la comunidad fue la combinación de motivaciones autónomas y heterónomas. Los individuos que estuvieron motivados de manera heterónoma para proteger al orangután tuvieron una mayor probabilidad de haber cambiado su comportamiento auto-reportado. Estos hallazgos demuestran que el paradigma actual de motivación para las comunidades de países en desarrollo para adoptar comportamientos de conservación, principalmente por medio de incentivos monetarios y recompensas, debería considerar integrar las técnicas de motivación autónoma que promueven los valores intrínsecos de la conservación. Dicha combinación tiene un mayor potencial de obtener resultados de conservación asequibles y sustentables. Nuestros resultados resaltan la importancia de utilizar análisis profundos socio-psicológicos para informar en el diseño y la implementación de programas de conservación basados en la comunidad.

In a changing global environment, with increasing pressure on ecosystem goods and services, biodiversity conservation is likely to become increasingly important. However, with the current global financial crisis, governments are increasingly trying to stabilise economies through spending cuts aiming to reduce national deficits. Within such an economic climate, the devolution of governance through public participation is an intrinsically appealing concept. We outline a number of challenges that explain why increased participation in biodiversity management has been and may continue to be problematic. Using as a case study the local stakeholder-driven Moray Firth Seal Management Plan in Scotland, we identify four key conditions that were crucial to the successful participatory management of a biodiversity conflict: a local champion, the emergence of a crisis point, the involvement of decision-makers, and long-term financial and institutional support. Three of the four conditions point to the role of direct government involvement, highlighting the risk of devolving responsibility for biodiversity conflict management to local communities. We argue that without an informed debate, the move towards a more participatory approach could pose a danger to hard-won policy gains in relation to public participation, biodiversity conservation and conflict management.

In the Torres Strait Islands (TSI), Indigenous Australian communities are negotiating the challenge of maintaining their identities and cultures in the face of rapid change. These identities and cultures are seen as vital to the region’s resilience, and yet to be resilient may mean making difficult choices about change, specifying which aspects need changing, under what conditions, and by and for whom. TSI communities have a long history of conceptualizing relationships with change that have enabled them to build resilience to navigate these. As such local, indigenous-led conceptualizations of resilience are needed as alternatives to generic, externally defined ones, and participatory co-research processes can be key to surfacing and probing these. We consider “re-adaptation” as an articulation of resilience that emerged through such a process that we undertook in the TSI to explore and build community and regional stakeholders’ capacities to deal with diverse drivers of change. Re-adaptation was proposed in this process to describe how communities might turn to past cultural practices and knowledge to address contemporary and possible future challenges. The concept suggests connections to resilience theory through three inter-related features: first, it entails a weaving of old and new, or past and future; second, it suggests a dynamic view of resilience, and pathways to achieve it; third, it represents an Indigenous, place-based relationship with change. Existing research on the importance of Indigenous knowledge in decision making for resilience supports this, and recent developments in climate policy and Indigenous rights in the TSI make it timely to give more consideration to meanings of re-adaptation. Re-adaptation reflects the “scaling deep” mode of impact, by enriching the discursive landscape through more pluralistic conversations about resilience.

The claim that in natural resource management (NRM) a change from anthropocentric values and ethics to eco-centric ones is necessary to achieve sustainability leads to the search for eco-centric models of relationship with the environment. Indigenous cultures can provide such models; hence, there is the need for multicultural societies to further include their values in NRM. In this article, we investigate the environmental values placed on a freshwater environment of the Wet Tropics by a community of indigenous Australians. We discuss their environmental values as human values, and so as beliefs that guide communities’ understanding of how the natural world should be viewed and treated by humans. This perspective represents a step forward in our understanding of indigenous environmental values, and a way to overcome the paradigm of indigenous values as valued biophysical attributes of the environment or processes happening in landscapes. Our results show that the participant community holds biospheric values. Restoring these values in the NRM of the Wet Tropics could contribute to sustainability and environmental justice in the area.

Companion animal management in Australian remote Aboriginal communities (rAcs) is a complex problem with multiple stakeholders involved, with differing needs, knowledge, power and resources. The Comm4Unity (Cycle of Multiple Methods for Unity—For Community) approach was designed to address such problems. This study represents the second step of the Comm4Unity framework, where a causal loop analysis (CLA) was adapted and tested as a tool to address the issue of dog overpopulation in Wurrumiyanga, and in particular the systemic causes of the problem and necessary transformational management solutions. Ten focus group discussions (FGDs) were held amongst three of the four stakeholder groups identified during the first step in the analysis. The CLA identified 13 positive feedback loops, which drive vicious cycles and perpetuate the dog overpopulation issue. All three groups agreed and developed 22 solutions to address the causes of dog overpopulation. Despite the differences in the framings of the three groups, “training” and “education” were both the top priority solutions for all three groups. The majority of the solutions discussed by the groups were not only transformational but also social, requiring collaboration. This study was successful in so far as transformational actions were co-developed by all FGDs, which may have also built capacity and agency amongst the local community to implement them as a cohesive group.

Community-based adaptation (CBA) is a common policy response in international development yet often encounters challenges with implementation and longevity. Using a human ecology and systems thinking framework and data from the Climate Change Adaptation Project (CCAP), implemented in Akar Akar village, Indonesia, this study explores the drivers of challenges affecting CBA. Results demonstrate that challenges affecting CBA are numerous, interconnected, and can derive from the disconnect between the world views of implementors and the politics, social structures, and historical processes influencing local activities. Challenges encountered in the CCAP project, for example, were found to derive from the implementors' emphasis on agency, self-organization, and responsibilization of women as a way to alleviate community poverty and improve adaptive capacity and its failure to comprehend the sociopolitical position of women in Akar Akar. With these findings in hand, this study advocates the use of systems thinking in future CBA research and intervention design.

Climate change and its interactions with complex socioeconomic dynamics dictate the need for decision makers to move from incremental adaptation toward transformation as societies try to cope with unprecedented and uncertain change. Developing pathways toward transformation is especially difficult in regions with multiple contested resource uses and rights, with diverse decision makers and rules, and where high uncertainty is generated by differences in stakeholders’ values, understanding of climate change, and ways of adapting. Such a region is the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia, from which we provide insights for developing a process to address these constraints. We present criteria for sequencing actions along adaptation pathways: feasibility of the action within the current decision context, its facilitation of other actions, its role in averting exceedance of a critical threshold, its robustness and resilience under diverse and unexpected shocks, its effect on future options, its lead time, and its effects on equity and social cohesion. These criteria could potentially enable development of multiple stakeholder-specific adaptation pathways through a regional collective action process. The actual implementation of these multiple adaptation pathways will be highly uncertain and politically difficult because of fixity of resource-use rights, unequal distribution of power, value conflicts, and the likely redistribution of benefits and costs. We propose that the approach we outline for building resilient pathways to transformation is a flexible and credible way of negotiating these challenges.

The impacts of free-roaming canids (domestic and wild) on public health have long been a concern in Australian Indigenous communities. We investigated the prevalence of zoonotic helminth diseases in dogs and sympatric dingoes, and used radio telemetry to measure their spatial overlap, in an Aboriginal community in the Wet Tropics of Australia. Samples collected from dingoes and dogs showed high levels of infection with the zoonotic hookworm, Ancylostoma caninum. Dingoes were also positive for A. ceylanicum infection (11.4%), but dogs were infection free. Whipworm, Trichuris vulpis, infection was far more prevalent in necropsies of domestic dogs (78.6%) than dingoes (3.7%). Dogs were free from Dirofilaria immitis infection, while dingoes recorded 46.2% infection. Eleven dingoes and seven free-roaming domestic dogs were fitted with Global Positioning System collars and tracked over an extended period. Dingo home-ranges almost completely overlapped those of the domestic dogs. However, dingoes and dogs did not utilise the same area at the same time, and dogs may have avoided dingoes. This spatial overlap in resource use presents an opportunity for the indirect spill-over and spill-back of parasites between dogs and dingoes. Tracking and camera traps showed that the community rubbish tip and animal carcasses were areas of concentrated activity for dogs and dingoes.

Polyphosphate is an inorganic procoagulant polymer. Here we develop specific inhibitors of polyphosphate and show that this strategy confers thromboprotection in a factor XII-dependent manner. Recombinant Escherichia coli exopolyphosphatase (PPX) specifically degrades polyphosphate, while a PPX variant lacking domains 1 and 2 (PPX_Δ12) binds to the polymer without degrading it. Both PPX and PPX_Δ12 interfere with polyphosphate- but not tissue factor- or nucleic acid-driven thrombin formation. Targeting polyphosphate abolishes procoagulant platelet activity in a factor XII-dependent manner, reduces fibrin accumulation and impedes thrombus formation in blood under flow. PPX and PPX_Δ12 infusions in wild-type mice interfere with arterial thrombosis and protect animals from activated platelet-induced venous thromboembolism without increasing bleeding from injury sites. In contrast, targeting polyphosphate does not provide additional protection from thrombosis in factor XII-deficient animals. Our data provide a proof-of-concept approach for combating thrombotic diseases without increased bleeding risk, indicating that polyphosphate drives thrombosis via factor XII. The inorganic procoagulant polymer polyphosphate participates in thrombosis via factor XII. Here the authors use recombinant probes that specifically bind or degrade circulating polyphosphate to protect mice in arterial and venous thrombosis models without an increased bleeding risk, the primary complication of all currently used anticoagulants.