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 -making evaluation and experiments objects of learning.

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Invasive species are one of the main reasons for the loss of biodiversity. Therefore, national strategies are developed to deal with biological invasions. Economic evaluation as a tool of policy advice has to take into account three challenges: (1) reflecting ecological knowledge, which is characterised by high uncertainty, (2) taking into account the political framework shaped by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and (3) being methodologically sound, e.g. considering all types of values and avoiding general flaws.In this paper we survey and critically analyse economic studies on biological invasions. We test with an evaluation grid whether the studies meet the challenges. We analysed 23 studies generally and 10 in more detail in order to assess their suitability as a policy advice and their methodical quality.As a result we note three main gaps: (1) current studies mostly have methodological shortcomings compared to their theoretical basis; (2) they do not take into account the politically formulated needs of the CBD; and (3) they hardly reflect the high degree of uncertainty associated with biological invasions.

Effectively evaluating the governance of natural resources is a precondition for its improvement in contexts of change. In order to do so, one can use methods for evaluating (1) the outcome of a governance process or (2) the governance process itself. Outcome-oriented and process-oriented approaches have different strengths and weaknesses. This paper explores the challenges associated with both options when applied to European biodiversity and water governance -namely the implementation of the Habitats Directive (Natura 2000 network) and the Water Framework Directive.Current evaluation practice, concerned with governance processes for EU policy implementation, focuses mainly on outcomes. In this paper, we examine the methodology involved and argue that, for three reasons, it makes sense to combine the two approaches: a normative reason, relating to standards of good governance; a substantive reason, relating to the complexity of the system to be governed; and a third, instrumental, reason relating to the task of policy evaluation and implementation itself. Combining outcome-and process-oriented evaluation of governance processes is not without caveats, but it appears a promising approach in the light of current problems in European governance of natural resources.

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