Tropical forests and peatlands provide important ecological, climate and socio‐economic benefits from the local to the global scale. However, these ecosystems and their associated benefits are threatened by anthropogenic activities, including agricultural conversion, timber harvesting, peatland drainage and associated fire. Here, we identify key challenges, and provide potential solutions and future directions to meet forest and peatland conservation and restoration goals in Indonesia, with a particular focus on Kalimantan. Through a round‐table, dual‐language workshop discussion and literature evaluation, we recognized 59 political, economic, legal, social, logistical and research challenges, for which five key underlying factors were identified. These challenges relate to the 3Rs adopted by the Indonesian Peatland Restoration Agency (Rewetting, Revegetation and Revitalization), plus a fourth R that we suggest is essential to incorporate into (peatland) conservation planning: Reducing Fires. Our analysis suggests that (a) all challenges have potential for impact on activities under all 4Rs, and many are inter‐dependent and mutually reinforcing, implying that narrowly focused solutions are likely to carry a higher risk of failure; (b) addressing challenges relating to Rewetting and Reducing Fire is critical for achieving goals in all 4Rs, as is considering the local socio‐political situation and acquiring local government and community support; and (c) the suite of challenges faced, and thus conservation interventions required to address these, will be unique to each project, depending on its goals and prevailing local environmental, social and political conditions. With this in mind, we propose an eight‐step adaptive management framework, which could support projects in both Indonesia and other tropical areas to identify and overcome their specific conservation and restoration challenges. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

In this review paper, we aim to describe the potential for, and the key challenges to, applying PES projects to mangroves. By adopting a ''carbocentric approach,'' we show that mangrove forests are strong candidates for PES projects. They are particularly well suited to the generation of carbon credits because of their unrivaled potential as carbon sinks, their resistance and resilience to natural hazards, and their extensive provision of Ecosystem Services other than carbon sequestration, primarily nursery areas for fish, water purification and coastal protection, to the benefit of local communities as well as to the global population. The voluntary carbon market provides opportunities for the development of appropriate protocols and good practice case studies for mangroves at a small scale, and these may influence larger compliance schemes in the future. Mangrove habitats are mostly located in developing countries on communally or state-owned land. This means that issues of national and local governance, land ownership and management, and environmental justice are the main challenges that require careful planning at the early stages of mangrove PES projects to ensure successful outcomes and equitable benefit sharing within local communities.

Social scientists often use the notion of 'transition' to denote diverse trajectories of change in different types of bodies: from individuals, to communities, to nation-states. Yet little work has theorised how transition might occur across, between or beyond these bodies. The aim of this paper is to sketch out a multiple, synthetic and generative (but by no means universal) theory of transition.Primarily drawing on the British context, we explore and exemplify two contentions. Firstly, that the notion of transition is being increasingly deployed to frame and combine discourses in terms of community development, responses to environmental change and the individual lifecourse.Specifically framed as transition, such discourses are gaining increasing purchase in imagining futures that reconfigure, but do not transform, assumed neoliberal futures. Our second contention is that these discourses and policies must try to 'hold the future together' in one or more senses. They must wrestle with a tension between imminent threats (climate change, economic non-productivity) which weigh heavily on the present and its possible futures, and the precarious act of redirecting those futures in ways that might better hold together diverse social groups, communities and places.

This article reviews recent research on contemporary transformations of global land governance. It shows how changes in global governance have facilitated and responded to radical revalorizations of land, together driving the intensified competition and struggles over land observed in many other contributions to this special issue. The rules in place to govern land use are shifting from "territorial" towards "flow-centered" arrangements, the latter referring to governance that targets particular flows of resources or goods, such as certification of agricultural or wood products. The intensifying competition over land coupled with shifts towards flow-centered governance has generated land uses involving new forms of social exclusion, inequity and ecological simplification.

Executive summaryIncreasing exploitation of natural resources, inappropriate land-use practices, and uncoordinated sectoral policies and development activities in lake basins impair the various important functions of lakes throughout the world. New and innovative approaches to the management of lakes and their basins are urgently needed to ensure that these precious freshwater ecosystems continue to deliver their services. Stakeholder participation lies at the heart of the new policy approaches to management of lakes and reservoirs. The stakeholders in lake basin management are individuals or representatives of a group who make use of, have an impact on, or are impacted by the issue of concern. Experience from case studies on 28 lake regions from throughout the world shows that local communities and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are among those stakeholders that can significantly affect the outcome of management efforts in lake basins. The case studies clearly demonstrate that active community participation is vital to sustainable development in lake basin management. Effective participation of local communities in lake basin management depends on the degree of awareness among local communities of the important technical and social considerations. This is why the involvement of local communities needs to be accompanied by public awareness and information campaigns. Moreover, the involvement of local communities must be based on a sound understanding and appreciation of the local cultural beliefs, values and norms.Nevertheless, as the numerous examples from the case studies suggest, changes in peoples' attitudes toward environmental issues happen only after they realize the benefit. The power of community-level participation is evident when the outcomes of participation are clearly and directly linked to the improvement of livelihood of participating communities. Experience with rural water supply, sanitation projects and afforestation projects from the case studies proves that participation of local communities greatly improves the likelihood that project assets will be fully used and properly operated and maintained. Effective participation of local communities depends on social organization that establishes manageable groups within the community. Communities may lack knowledge on how to build community institutions that represent a community's diverse interest groups and the capacity to be involved in collective action.