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Despite eight years of strong national support, Taiwan's Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) has generated limited enthusiasm for sustainable development, and is even turning some policy implementers into ESD skeptics. In one of the first attempts to study the work of policy implementers within Taiwan's ESD initiatives, this study examines links between national policy and practice in educational settings. Drawing on interviews with thirty policy implementers and about seventy hours of observation in the field, we found that Taiwan's nationwide ESD program has failed to prompt meaningful actions that address unsustainable development. Moreover, the government's instrumental approach to promoting a system-wide ESD program in the face of inaction on sustainability concerns in other sectors risks reducing this work to a symbolic, or bureaucratic exercise. Consequently, people's attention has been drawn away from searching and collectively reflecting on the deep leverage points for a sustainability transition. These findings have important implications for future initiatives aimed at reforming education policy and implementing mandatory ESD curricula.

Climate change research is at an impasse. The transformation of economies and everyday practices is more urgent, and yet appears ever more daunting as attempts at behaviour change, regulations, and global agreements confront material and social-political infrastructures that support the status quo. Effective action requires new ways of conceptualizing society, climate and environment and yet current research struggles to break free of established categories. In response, this contribution revisits important insights from the social sciences and humanities on the co-production of political economies, cultures, societies and biophysical relations and shows the possibilities for ontological pluralism to open up for new imaginations. Its intention is to help generate a different framing of socionatural change that goes beyond the current science-policy-behavioural change pathway. It puts forward several moments of inadvertent concealment in contemporary debates that stem directly from the way issues are framed and imagined in contemporary discourses. By placing values, normative commitments, and experiential and plural ways of knowing from around the world at the centre of climate knowledge, we confront climate change with contested politics and the everyday foundations of action rather than just data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adaptation research has changed significantly in recent years as funders and researchers seek to encourage greater impact, ensure value for money and promote interdisciplinarity across the natural and social sciences. While these developments are inherently positive, they also bring fresh challenges. With this in mind, this paper presents an agenda for the next generation of climate adaptation research for development. The agenda is based on insights from a dialogue session held at the 2016 Adaptation Futures conference as well as drawing on the collective experience of the authors. We propose five key areas that need to be changed in order to meet the needs of future adaptation research, namely: increasing transparency and consultation in research design; encouraging innovation in the design and delivery of adaptation research programmes; demonstrating impact on the ground; addressing incentive structures; and promoting more effective brokering, knowledge management and learning. As new international funding initiatives start to take shape, we underscore the importance of learning from past experiences and scaling-up of successful innovations in research funding models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]