This article presents a theory of administrative work as practice. Building on a rich narrative of a mid-level administrator in the Dutch Immigration Office, four core elements of administrative practice are identified: contextuality, acting, knowing, and interacting. Taking cues from practice theory and ethnomethodology, the author argues that the visible aspects of administrative work (decisions, reports, negotiations, standard operating procedures, and-on a higher level of institutional abstraction-structures, legal rules, lines of authority, and accountability) are effectuations, enactments of the hidden, taken-for-granted routines: the almost unthinking actions, tacit knowledge, fleeting interactions, practical judgments, self-evident understandings and background knowledge, shared meanings, and personal feelings that constitute the core of administrative work. Taken together, contextuality, acting, knowing, and interacting make up a unified account of practical judgment in an administrative environment that is characterized by complexity, indeterminacy, and the necessity to act on the situation at hand.

The topic of the article is practice theory. Using a detailed example from public administration, we first discus the shortcomings of the model of practice as applied knowledge that we have dubbed the Received View. The first half of the article is a chronology of successive adaptations of the Received View. These adaptations have gradually brought the Received View more in accordance with the practice-oriented critique in social theory and research of recent years. These adaptations fall short, however, of offering a theoretical account that explains the relationships among practice, knowledge, and context. These adaptations do not enable us to show, as we wish to do, how knowledge and context can be explained in terms of—and are evoked within—practice, and not the other way round—and that this transpires within real worlds each of which has its own unique constraints and affordances, histories and futures. In the second half of the article, we pick up on a relational conception of practice, knowledge, and context in which practice is distinct and primary. To develop this aspect of practice theory, we make use of some key concepts from modern Japanese philosophy. The nondualist posture of Japanese philosophy gives rise to a useful conceptualization of the dynamic and fluid relationships among practice, the characteristics of the situation at hand, and the epistemic elements of practice itself. In this final section, we introduce three concepts that help capture this dynamic, relational understanding of practice: “actionable understanding,” “ongoing business,” and “the eternally unfolding present.”

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The original publication of this article unfortunately contained a mistake. Map 2 has been replaced. The original article has been corrected. The online version of the original article can be found at https://doi.

The imperative to "link knowledge and action" is widely invoked as a defining characteristic of sustainability research. The complexities of sustainability challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss mean that linear models of knowledge and action, where knowledge is produced first (by researchers) then "applied to" action (by policy actors), are considered insufficient. Researchers have developed more dynamic, open-ended and collaborative forms of policy engagement such as transdisciplinary and coproduction research. Although promising these approaches often remain captive to linear assumptions that hinder their transformative potential. We contribute by providing a relational model of knowledge and action rooted in contemporary practice theory. A practice-based approach suggests the primary task of participants in transdisciplinary interventions is to find workable solutions to situations of dynamic complexity that are fundamentally indeterminate and unpredictable. Knowledge is not "applied to" action, but drawn upon, produced and used from within the situation at hand, allowing researchers and policy actors alike to better harness the emergent character of situational developments and outcomes. A practice-based approach provides a conceptual language that captures the experienced complexities of intervening for sustainability, reconfigures the nature of "actionable knowledge," and identifies appropriate modes of evaluation for transdisciplinary and co-produced research.

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Resilience is an increasingly important urban policy discourse that has been taken up at a rapid pace. Yet there is an apparent gap between the advocacy of socialecological resilience in scientific literature and its take-up in policy discourse on the one hand, and the demonstrated capacity to govern for resilience in practice on the other. This paper explores this gap by developing a performative account of how social-ecological resilience is dealt with in practice through case study analysis of how protection of biodiversity was negotiated in response to Melbourne's recent metropolitan planning initiative. We suggest that a performative account expands the possible opportunities for governing for socialecological resilience beyond the concept's use as a metaphor, measurement, cognitive frame or programmatic statement of adaptive management/comanagement and has the potential to emerge through what Andrew Pickering has called the everyday "mangle of practice" in response to social-ecological feedback inherent to policy processes.Key words: social-ecological resilience, practice, urban governance, strategic spatial planning, biodiversity, strategic environmental assessment, Melbourne INTRODUCTIONResilience is an increasingly important urban policy discourse and has been taken up by international, national and local urban initiatives at a rapid pace (Evans, 2011). Governing for urban resilience informed by a social-ecological resilience perspective means grappling with how to give hand and feet, in real world institutional and ecological environments, to a complex adaptive systems view of the world (Folke, 2006;Wilkinson, 2012a). Social-ecological resilience scholarship urges awareness of this world-view in addressing governance challenges (Folke et al, 2010). However, both the "conceptual clarity" and "practical relevance" of resilience have been questioned (Brand and Jax, 2007). Various efforts have been made to better operationalise a resilience approach (Carpenter et al, 2001;Pickett et al, 2004;Biggs et al, 2009 (eg. Huitema et al, 2009). What we are left with then is an apparent gap between the advocacy of social-ecological resilience in the academic literature and its take-up as a policy discourse on the one hand, and the demonstrated capacity to govern for resilience in practice on the other.The main argument of this paper is that a performative account of how socialecological resilience is enacted in practice provides a useful way to help explore the gap between the ideal and practice of governing for resilience. By practice we mean, in an experiential sense, the hundreds of different activities that everyday actors such as administrators, elected officials, planning officials, conservationists and citizens engage in over time to navigate, as well as they can, the everyday world of urban governance. The practice perspective on social action is a broad stream that is fed by many philosophical and theoretical tributaries (Wagenaar and Cook, 2003). Instead of engaging in a debate with these differe...

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