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Education is indispensable for the flourishing of people from all backgrounds and stages of life. However, given the accelerating demographic, environmental, economical, socio-political, and technological changes—and their associated risks and opportunities—there is increasing consensus that our current educational systems are falling short and that we need to repurpose education and rethink the organization of learning to meet the challenges of the 21st century. The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) “Futures of Education” initiative was formally launched at the United Nations General Assembly in 2019 to provide such a vision of education for the future. The International Scientific and Evidence-based Education (ISEE) Assessment synthesizes knowledge streams generated by different communities and stakeholders at all levels and scales and will thereby essentially contribute to re-envisioning this future of education. The overall aim of the ISEE Assessment is to pool the expertise from a broad range of knowledge holders and stakeholders to undertake a scientifically robust and evidence-based assessment in an open and inclusive manner of our current educational systems and its necessary reforms. In this commentary, we discuss the aims and goals of the ISEE Assessment. We describe how the ISEE Assessment will address key questions on the purpose of education and what, how, where and when we learn, and evaluate the alignment of today’s education and theory of learning with the current and forthcoming needs and challenges and to inform policymaking for future education.

We contribute to addressing two gaps that reduce the utility of ecosystem sciences for decision-making: lack of standard methods for using stakeholders’ knowledge to co-design ecosystem services science research, and absence of commensurable social valuation metrics that allow effective value comparisons. In two phases, we used co-designed instruments to conduct social valuation of biodiversity, and provisioning, cultural and regulating services. First, we conducted eight participatory fora, where experts and non-experts identified ecosystem aspects to which they ascribe value. We combined knowledge from the fora—expert and non-expert—and the literature to identify 45 ecosystem aspects of value—importance—to people. Second, we organized the valued aspects into four psychometric social valuation instruments that were reviewed and contributed to by experts and non-experts. We used those instruments in a survey questionnaire completed by 968 residents of Deschutes County, USA. Co-design led to high valuation reliabilities. The omission of either expert or non-expert knowledge would have resulted in suboptimal valuation. Unexpectedly, biodiversity was valued more than any category of ecosystem services, and urban sprawl regulation—a novel non-expert-identified function—was valued more than all aspects of climate regulation. These findings—directly resulting from co-design—illustrate that co-designed commensurable metrics are adaptable to various decision contexts; they can provide issue-specific valuations and comparisons, broader valuations, comparisons between specific and broader ecosystem services, and equity-based parameters for addressing distributional concerns vital to decision-making. Co-designed commensurable metrics lead to social valuations that are better suited for decision-making and for persuasive communication of those decisions to enhance social compliance.

Participatory social impact assessments (PSIAs) are most accurate reflections of social impacts. But, effective integration of PSIAs into Environmental Impact Assessments, decision-making and project implementation present drawbacks. Because of its qualitative content, PSIAs outcomes are termed non-technical—allegedly defying reliable and valid quantification, and consequently impeding determination of impact rankings that inform social investment priorities given limited mitigation and enhancement resources. The participatory fora typically used in PSIAs leads to inadequate representation and outcomes that reflect mostly the perspectives of those who can afford to attend. Social impact assessments are also criticized for lacking reliability. We present a mix methods approach for reliable and representative quantification of PSIAs of cellulosic biorefineries. We conducted 35 structured stakeholder deliberative fora. Four main impact dimensions, each with positive and negative sub-dimensions, emerged from those fora: economic, technical, environmental, and socio-cultural and political impacts. We used these results to develop eight psychometric scales used to quantitatively appraise PSIAs of proposed biorefineries. We compared impacts among social groups differentiated by: un/familiarity with other forms of bioenergy operations and industrial activity, and in/activity in the labor force. No nonresponse biases were detected. All PSIA instruments were highly reliable; Cronbach α ranged from 0.73 to 0.93. There were significant differences in impacts based on stated differentiating criteria, the most distinguishing of which were positive economic, and negative socio-political and cultural, impacts. We found evidence of the operation of the familiarity heuristic. We show that PSIAs of cellulosic biorfineries can be reliably quantified while ensuring representation, comparisons and determination of priorities to facilitate decision making. Hence, unreliable quantification may no longer deter effective use of PSIAs in cellulosic biorefinery establishment and operation. We discuss the implications of our findings for the sitting of biorefineries, impact mitigation and enhancement, and for PSIAs of other forms of energy.

Childhood-nature experiences have lifelong effects on environmental citizenship and commitment to nature-based activities. But, it is unclear whether, and to what extent, the different mechanisms through which children and youth experience nature are associated with these outcomes. To test these associations, an online questionnaire assessing mechanisms of childhood exposure to nature, adulthood environmental citizenship and commitment to nature-based activities, and demographic variables was sent to the email addresses of 509 employees of the United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Northern Research Station. The 236 completed surveys indicated four mechanisms of children’s exposure to nature. Children’s self-exposure to nature was the strongest predictor of a number of aspects of adulthood environmental citizenship and of behavioral and attitudinal commitments to nature-based activities. Exposure through school-related programs had less predictive value for these outcomes. Implications for pathways to enhance the benefits of childhood-nature experiences are discussed.

Behavioral sciences can advance conservation by systematically identifying behavioral barriers to conservation and how to best overcome them. Behavioral sciences have informed policy in many other realms (e.g., health, savings), but they are a largely untapped resource for conservation. We propose a set of guiding questions for applying behavioral insights to conservation policy. These questions help define the conservation problem as a behavior change problem, understand behavioral mechanisms and identify appropriate approaches for behavior change (awareness, incentives, nudges), and evaluate and adapt approaches based on new behavioral insights. We provide a foundation for the questions by synthesizing a wide range of behavior change models and evidence related to littering, water and energy conservation, and land management. We also discuss the methodology and data needed to answer these questions. We illustrate how these questions have been answered in practice to inform efforts to promote conservation for climate risk reduction. Although more comprehensive research programs to answer these questions are needed, some insights are emerging. Integrating two or more behavior change approaches that target multiple, context-dependent factors may be most successful; however, caution must be taken to avoid approaches that could undermine one another (e.g., economic incentives crowding out intrinsic incentives).

This Special Issue of Environment and Behavior (E&B) marks the completion of 50 years of publication for the journal; the first issue appeared in June 1969. As you will read in the overview of E&B’s publication history (“Celebrating Half a Century of Environment and Behavior: A Bibliometric Review”), the journal has grown from a publication with just two issues in its first year, to one that now publishes 10 issues per year and attracts a large number of submissions (more than 500 in 2017 and totaling 567 in 2018). The citation impact factor has also continued to rise, reaching 3.549 in 2017 (Journal Citations Report). Judged by these metrics, the journal has contributed to the literature on environment-behavior studies in a substantive way

Although the post-2015 development agenda is commendable in several ways, I content that it pays inadequate attention to human agency and, therefore, to human development and capabilities, which are necessary to meet sustainable development goals. First, I critique the post-2015 UN development agenda and associated sustainable development goals. I focus those critiques on the notions of development as if it were charity and associated illusion of human rationality, and the partial conceptualization and operationalization of human agency as if agency depended only on contexts. Through these critiques, I illustrate human irrationality and the consequent unsustainability of the charity approach to development. I identify and characterize the development architect and the development agent, to facilitate necessary understanding and operationalization of the behavioral attributes of psychological agency, which I argue to be fundamental to human development and capabilities and, therefore, to sustainabl...

The likelihood of conflict and consequent need for cooperation are soaring with increasing pressures on scarce and often exploited water resources in shared hydrologic units. Questions of equitable water allocation and distributions of social-ecological costs and benefits—who gets what, how much, and why—are important for fostering cooperation and managing conflict in transboundary water management. Hydropolitics is an analytic tool for understanding how power shapes water claims and uses in transboundary hydrologic units. Through the lens of hydropolitics, I show how various forms of power explain water claims and uses by riparian nations within the Lake Chad Basin (LCB). I explain how rhetoric, including the rhetoric of climate change, mask local human-driven causes of social-ecological degradation, thereby misappropriating agency and responsibility for sustainable water management within the LCB. I show that water is a security issue within the basin and closely related to other regional security issues, and argue that the inter-linkages of security issues, together with the differential evolution of state capabilities, may facilitate the emergence of a hydro-security complex within the basin. A more nuanced understanding of hydropolitics, including rhetoric and hydrosecurity, is necessary for sustainable transbounadry water management and water use security. WIREs Water 2015, 2:37–45. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1057 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website. Conflict of interest: The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article.

Ecosystem services, fundamental to livelihoods and well-being, are reshaping environmental management and policy. However, the behavioral dimensions of ecosystem services and the responses of ordinary people to the management of those services, is less well understood. The ecosystem services framework lends itself to understanding the relationship between ecosystems and human behavior. Ecosystem services, according to the psychological theory of motivational functionalism, are motivations—the personal and social processes that initiate, direct and sustain human action. Thus, how people perceive, acquire and use ecosystem services influences the initiation, direction, and intensity of their behaviors. Profound understanding of how people perceive, acquire and use ecosystem services can help influence behavioral compliance with management and policy prescriptions. We use focus group interviewing to illustrate how ecosystem services relate to human behavior. Results show that people perceive, acquire and use indirect benefits while acquiring direct ecosystem services. Understanding indirect benefits has implications for the constitution and regulation of human behavior through ecosystem management and policy. Perceived ecosystem benefits, expressed in people׳s own words and from their own frames of reference, can facilitate better valuation of ecosystem services and setting of prices, compliance with ecosystem management and policy directives, recruitment and retention of ecosystem stewards, development of use policies, enhancement of user experiences, and encouragement of pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors.

Nature is perceived and valued in starkly different and oftenconflicting ways. This paper presents the rationale for theinclusive valuation of nature's contributions to people (NCP) indecision making, as well as broad methodological steps fordoing so. While developed within the context of theIntergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), this approach is more widely applicable toinitiatives at the knowledge?policy interface, which require apluralistic approach to recognizing the diversity of values. Weargue that transformative practices aiming at sustainablefutures would benefit from embracing such diversity, which require recognizing and addressing power relationships across stake holder groups that hold different values on human nature relations and NCP Fil: Pascual, Unai. University Of Cambridge; Reino Unido Fil: Balvanera, Patricia. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; México Fil: Díaz, Sandra Myrna. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba. Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Vegetal. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas Físicas y Naturales. Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Vegetal; Argentina Fil: Pataki, György. Corvinus University of Budapest; Hungría Fil: Roth, Eva. University of Southern Denmark; Dinamarca Fil: Stenseke, Marie. University Goteborg; Suecia Fil: Watson, Robert T.. University of East Anglia; Reino Unido Fil: Basak Dessane, Esra. Project House; Turquía Fil: Islar, Mine. Lund University; Suecia Fil: Kelemen, Eszter. Environmental Social Science Research Group; Hungría Fil: Maris, Virginie. Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive; Francia Fil: Quaas, Martin. Kiel University; Alemania Fil: Subramanian, Suneetha M. United Nations University; Japón Fil: Wittmer, Heidi. Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research; Alemania Fil: Adlan, Asia. University of Khartoum; Sudán Fil: Ahn, SoEun. Korea Environment Institute; Corea del Sur Fil: Al-Hafedh, Yousef S. King Abdulaziz City for Science & Technology; Arabia Saudita Fil: Amankwah, Edward. Center for Environmental Governance; Ghana Fil: Berry, Pam. University of Washington; Estados Unidos Fil: Bilgin, Adem. University of Oxford; Reino Unido Fil: Breslow, Sara J. Ministry of Forestry and Water Affairs of Turkey; Turquía Fil: Bullock, Craig. University College Dublin; Reino Unido Fil: Caceres, Daniel Mario. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Agropecuarias. Departamento de Desarrollo Rural; Argentina Fil: Daly-Hassen, Hamed. University of Carthage; Túnez Fil: Figueroa, Eugenio. Universidad de Chile; Chile Fil: van den Belt, Marjan. Victoria University of Wellington; Nueva Zelanda Fil: Verma, Madhu. Indian Institute of Forest Management; India Fil: Wickson, Fern. GenØk Centre for Biosafety, Siva innovasjonssenter; Noruega Fil: Yagi, Noboyuki. The University of Tokyo; Japón

Ecosystem services are the full range of social, ecological, and economic benefits that people obtain from nature (Millennium Assessment 2003; Smith et al. 2011). These services include both biophysical (e.g., water, food, and fiber) and intangible (e.g., cultural or health) benefits. The concept originated in ecological economists’ attempts to assign monetary valuations to the goods and services humans receive from naturally functioning ecosystems, so that the full array of direct and indirect benefits are captured in environmental policy, management, and decision making (Westman 1977). The importance and value of ecosystem services are being recognized internationally (Farley and Costanza 2010; Muradian et al. 2010), as illustrated by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES 2012), which is currently supported by 124 nations. Many US state and federal natural resource agencies have adopted policies that include analyses of ecosystem services in planning and decision making. The US Environmental Protection Agency, US Geological Survey, and US National Park Service all have new initiatives regarding the identification and mapping of ecosystem services. Specific to national forestlands, the US Forest Service’s new planning rule (USDA 2012) requires all 175 national forests to report key ecosystem services for forest plan assessments and revisions.

Researchers exploring the challenges of public intolerance for forest fires in the US predominantly focus on nonmanagers. Forest fire managers have unique perspectives on public perceptions and attitudes towards forest firesbecausemanagersfrequentlyinteractdirectlywiththepublicandarethefaceoftheinstitutionsthatprescribe fire management practicestowhich the public reacts. Therefore, managers’ perspectives deserve more empirical attention. Additionally, a recent review of social science research on wildfire management suggested a need for better understanding of the organizational dimensions of forest fire management. For this study, interviews were used to explore how fire management professionals understand and explain public attitudes towards forest fires and smoke. Interviewees suggested that community‐forest dependence and community‐agency interactions shape public perceptions and attitudes. Interviewees elaborated on how professionals’ personality andperceivedorganizationalobstructionunderminecommunity‐agencyinteractions,provokeunfavourableattitudes towards the agency and fire management practices and ultimately, interfere with the accomplishment of fire management objectives. These findings suggest that, to better understand and more effectively manage public attitudes towards forest fires, we need to paydue attention to the occupational and organizational psychologyoffiremanagementprofessionalsandinstitutions.Organizationalambidexterity,theinwardlookingprocess necessary for organizational effectiveness, could enhance community‐agency relations, favourable attitudes towards forest fires and achievement of fire management objectives.

Hardin in his seminal paper described the management of the commons as a tragedy. Three decades later, Ostrom and colleagues argued that the management of the commons was more of a drama than a tragedy. They identified that the management of common pool resources is dependent on the institutions at play at the specific scale and across scales and the various stakeholders involved in the access and use of these resources. In this paper we go one step further by arguing that the plurality of values within and across individuals coupled with the spatial scales at which different institutions are organized and at which ecosystem services are produced create mismatches in the management of the New Commons. We define the New Commons as the mosaic of land, water, and climate, and their underlying processes that regulate ecosystem structure and functions to maintain a sustainable supply of common pool resources for human well-being. A conceptual framework capturing these mis-matches and the multiple spatial scales at which ecosystems provide services is presented in this paper. This framework sheds new light on the key inter-linkages among nature and human well-being which the newly established Intergovernmental science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is expected to address.

Urban landscape restoration and conservation initiatives are challenged by financial and other constraints. Consequently, these initiatives are increasingly reliant on volunteer stewards. Knowledge of why people volunteer to restore and conserve urban ecosystems can help practitioners enhance volunteering as a social-ecological process that is mutually beneficial to landscapes and people. We included two open-ended questions about why people volunteer and what they perceive as benefits of volunteering, in a survey of volunteers for urban landscape restoration and conservation in Seattle, WA. Thematic and statistical analyses of volunteer motivations showed that volunteers expressed social psychological motivations more frequently than environmental reasons for volunteering. We also found that volunteers are not a monolithic group. There were statistically significant differences in the frequency of expression of volunteer motivations among respondent demographic segments. For example, women expressed the quest for positive emotions, as a motivation to volunteer, more often than men did. We illustrate how understanding volunteers’ motivations, expressed in their own words and from their own points of reference, can enhance voluntary social-ecological processes that mutually benefit people and urban landscapes.

Conservation in urban areas faces growing financial challenges and inadequate stakeholder involvement. Conservation psychology can mitigate these challenges in many ways. One way is through conservation volunteerism, if we attend to and capitalize on volunteers’ motivations. Conservation volunteerism significantly contributes to ecological knowledge acquisition, and public education and awareness of conservation issues. In this study, we explored volunteers’ motivations and how those motivations influence frequency of participation in urban conservation activities. We found that volunteers’ frequency of participation is most motivated by personal and social benefits rather than by environment-related reasons. Environmental motivations, otherwise marginally significant, were more salient predictors of participation to the extent that personal and social motivations were met. We discuss how ecologically focused strategies are likely to be less effective for motivating more frequent participation than motivationally based appeals to personal and social motivations of urban conservation. We discuss implications for urban conservation stewardship initiatives and suggest ways that decision makers can harness volunteers’ personal and social motivations to meet urban conservation practice and policy goals.

Management of all-terrain vehicle (ATV) use on Minnesota state forest lands has a contentious history and land managers are caught between ATV riders, non-motorized recreationists, private landowners, and environmental advocates. In this paper, we demonstrate the usefulness of framing distinct perspectives about ATV management on Minnesota state public forests, understand the structure of these management perspectives, identify areas of consensus and disagreement, specify which stakeholders hold the various perspectives, clarify stakeholder perceptions of other stakeholders, and explore the implications for ATV planning and management. Using Q methodology, three distinct perspectives about how we should or should not manage ATVs resulted from our analysis, labeled Expert Management, Multiple Use, and Enforcement and Balance. A surprising degree of unanimity among the three management perspectives was found. Although some of the areas of agreement would be difficult to implement, others would be relatively simple to put into place. We suggest that land managers focus on widely accepted management actions to ameliorate commonly recognized problems, which may ease tensions between stakeholders and make tackling the tougher issues easier.

A conceptual and operational model examined relationships among childhood participation in nature-based activities, motivations, constraints, mitigation of constraints, and adult visits to Minnesota State Parks. The results support a model in which (a) higher childhood participation in nature-based activities increased motivation and mitigation strategies, (b) constraints decreased state park visitation and also triggered the use of mitigation strategies that in turn increased state park visits, and (c) higher levels of motivation improved efforts to negotiate constraints and visit more. Consistent with the main hypothesis, the more nature-based activities people participate in during childhood, the more they desire such activities and are able to mitigate constraints to participation, and consequently, the higher the level of participation, as an adult. The results suggest a rather indirect association between childhood participation in nature-based activities and adulthood participation in such activities.

The number of family forest owners in the USA has increased continuously in recent decades, and the fate of much of US forests lies in the hands of this diverse and dynamic group of people. The National Woodland Owner Survey (NWOS) is a recurring and comprehensive national survey of US private forest owners, including family forest owners. The NWOS includes an open-ended question that explores forest owners’ motivations and values related to their woodland. The open-ended question format allows respondents to express their own frame of reference in their own words, rather than respond to predetermined, fixed-response categories of motivations. This paper describes the system of values and motivations that emerged from analysis of responses to the open-ended question, and compares these findings to a closed-ended, fixed-response question also included in the NWOS. Diverse and multidimensional motives were expressed by respondents. Eight broad categories and 37 sub-categories of motives and values emerged from analysis of the open-ended question. The fixed categories of the closed-ended question failed to capture many dimensions of forest owner motivations. A more detailed, qualitative understanding of forest owner motivations and values is needed to provide extension foresters and others who work with family forest owners important insights and help guide public policy related to private forestland. Open-ended survey questions can help provide such understanding.

Although the word commitment is prevalent in conservation biology literature and despite the importance of people's commitment to the success of conservation initiatives, commitment as a psychological phenomenon and its operation in specific conservation behaviors remains unexplored. Despite increasing calls for conservation psychology to play a greater role in meeting conservation goals, applications of the psychological sciences to specific conservation behaviors, illustrating their utility to conservation practice, are rare. We examined conservation volunteers' motivations and commitment to urban conservation volunteering. We interviewed key informant volunteers and used interview findings to develop psychometric scales that we used to assess motivations and commitment to volunteer. We surveyed 322 urban conservation volunteers and used factor analysis to reveal how volunteers structure their motivations and commitment to volunteer for urban conservation activities. Six categories of motivations and 2 categories of commitment emerged from factor analysis. Volunteers were motivated by desires to help the environment, defend and enhance the ego, career and learning opportunities, escape and exercise, social interactions, and community building. Two forms of commitment, affective and normative commitment, psychologically bind people to urban conservation volunteerism. We used linear-regression models to examine how these categories of motivations influence volunteers' commitment to conservation volunteerism. Volunteers' tendency to continue to volunteer for urban conservation, even in the face of fluctuating counter urges, was motivated by personal, social, and community functions more than environmental motivations. The environment, otherwise marginally important, was a significant motivator of volunteers' commitment only when volunteering met volunteers' personal, social, and community-building goals. Attention to these personal, social, and community-building motivations may help enhance volunteers' commitment to conservation stewardship and address the pressing challenge of retaining urban conservation volunteers.

Intractable conflicts are omnipresent in environmental management. These conflicts do not necessarily resist resolution but need to be fundamentally transformed in order to reach agreement. Reframing, a process that allows disputants to create new alternative understandings of the problem, is one way of transforming these conflicts. Cognitive and interactional reframing are the two major approaches to conflict transformation. These approaches have some drawbacks. Cognitive reframing does not guarantee commensurate consideration of all disputants' views about the problem. Interactional reframing is prone to inter-disputant influences that interfere with presenting the problems as accurately as they exist in disputants' minds. Inadequate consideration of other disputants' views and inter-disputant influences often lead to inaccurate problem identification and definition. This in turn leads to solving the wrong problem, enabling intractability to persist. Proper problem identification and definition requires commensurate consideration of all sides of the conflict while minimizing inter-disputant influences. From a problem diagnosis perspective, we show how Q methodology is used to reframe environmental problems, rendering them more tractable to analysis while minimizing the influence of who disputants are talking with, and without ignoring the perspectives of other disputants. Using a case of contentious All-Terrain Vehicle (ATV) use in a state-administered public land, conflicting parties reframed the problem by prioritizing issues, outlining areas and levels of consensus and disagreement, and revealing inherent unrecognized and/or unspoken agendas. The reframing process surprisingly revealed several areas of common ground in disputants' diagnosis of the problem, including lack of emphasis on environmental protection and uncoordinated management factions. Emergent frames were misaligned on some issues, such as the behaviors of ATV riders and the role of management, including political and economic influences on decision making. We discuss how the reframing process enhances tractability of multiparty environmental problems. We point to some limitations of Q methodology as a tool for the diagnostic reframing of such problems.

The social-ecological system (SES) approach to natural resource management holds enormous promise towards achieving sustainability. Despite this promise, social-ecological interactions are complex and elusive; they require simplification to guide effective application of the SES approach. The complex, adaptive and place-specific nature of human-environment interactions impedes determination of state and trends in SES parameters of interest to managers and policy makers. Based on a rigorously developed systemic theoretical model, this paper integrates field observations, interviews, surveys, and latent variable modeling to illustrate the development of simplified and easily interpretable indicators of the state of, and trends in, relevant SES processes. Social-agricultural interactions in the Logone floodplain, in the Lake Chad basin, served as case study. This approach is found to generate simplified determinants of the state of SESs, easily communicable across the array of stakeholders common in human-environment interactions. The approach proves to be useful for monitoring SESs, guiding interventions, and assessing the effectiveness of interventions. It incorporates real time responses to biophysical change in understanding coarse scale processes within which finer scales are embedded. This paper emphasizes the importance of merging quantitative and qualitative methods for effective monitoring and assessment of SESs.

"Managing change and uncertainty is important for effective environmental conservation, especially in semi-arid areas. This paper explores farmers' strategies adopted for managing change and uncertainty inherent in social-agricultural interactions in the Logone floodplain of the Lake Chad basin. We do this through ethnographic participant observations, surveys and latent variable modelling. Among four categories of strategies, those adopted to spread risks were shown to negatively impact farmers' efforts to manage change and uncertainty. Risk-spreading strategies relying on social networks, credit, common-pool resources, cultivation of multiple species and varieties, and alternative income-generating activities were seldom ineffective. In part, the ineffectiveness of risk-spreading strategies is explained by the fact that these strategies were subjected to similar human-environment conditions as agriculture. However, development interventions, corruption, democratic reform, re-negotiation of the commons and reluctance to seize risk-spreading opportunities have undesirable consequences for agro-ecological risk manage-ment. We discuss local potential and the role of external agents in enhancing management of change and uncertainty."