Sustainable water management (SWM) requires allocating between competing water sector demands, and balancing the financial and social resources required to support necessary water systems. The objective of this review is to assess SWM in three sectors: urban, agricultural, and natural systems. This review explores the following questions: (1) How is SWM defined and evaluated? (2) What are the challenges associated with sustainable development in each sector? (3) What are the areas of greatest potential improvement in urban and agricultural water management systems? And (4) What role does country development status have in SWM practices? The methods for evaluating water management practices range from relatively simple indicator methods to integration of multiple models, depending on the complexity of the problem and resources of the investigators. The two key findings and recommendations for meeting SWM objectives are:(1) all forms of water must be considered usable, and reusable, water resources; and (2) increasing agricultural crop water production represents the largest opportunity for reducing total water consumption, and will be required to meet global food security needs. The level of regional development should not dictate sustainability objectives, however local OPEN ACCESSWater 2014, 6 3935 infrastructure conditions and financial capabilities should inform the details of water system design and evaluation.

The concept of sustainability has come to permeate many spheres of governance, decisionmaking and scientific inquiry. Although current academic conceptualizations of sustainability often acknowledge the conflicts inherent in the pursuit of sustainable development, the present discourse does not explicitly include the concepts of peace and conflict. This omission has been in error, as the pursuits of sustainable environmental governance and sustainable human development are themselves efforts to manage and resolve conflict. Thus, this article advocates for an expanded framework of sustainability that operates at the nexus of conflict, environment and development by exploring current mainstream conceptualizations of sustainability and illustrating the direct connections between sustainability and the fields of peace studies and conflict resolution. It goes on to discuss the utility of applying a complex systems approach to the expanded conceptualization of sustainability, including aspects of both coupled systems and dynamical systems theory, in order to provide an analytical framework for studying mechanisms that enable sustainable development by dealing explicitly with conflicting needs and interests among actors in social-ecological systems. Copyright

Given the linkages between natural resources and social conflicts, evidence increasingly shows that successful natural resource management requires conflict mitigation and prevention. However, there may be a gap in practice between knowing what processes and tools need to be used to manage conservation conflicts and how to actually implement them. We present learning from a practice-based case study of conflict management in the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve in the Peruvian Amazon that aimed to develop natural resource governance institutions and build stakeholder capacity, including of indigenous groups, to navigate existing conflict resolution mechanisms. Through applying good practices in conservation conflict management and collaborative governance, we generated important lessons on the practical considerations involved in collaborative conservation. These lessons, while specific to our case, could be applied to a variety of protected areas facing complex socialecological systems dynamics and wicked problems. ARTICLE HISTORY

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The sustainability agenda has evolved around a set of interconnected dilemmas regarding economic, social, and environmental goals. Progress has been made in establishing thresholds and targets that must be achieved to enable life to continue to thrive on the planet. However, much work remains to be done in articulating coherent theoretical frameworks that adequately describe the mechanisms through which sustainability outcomes are achieved. This paper reviews core concepts in the sustainability agenda to develop four propositions on integrated sustainability that collectively describe the underlying mechanisms of sustainable development. We then advance a framework for integrated sustainability and assess its viability through linear regression and principal components analysis of key selected indicators. The results provide preliminary evidence that countries with institutions that enable cooperation and regulate competition perform better in attaining integrated sustainability indicators. Our findings suggest that institutional design is important to sustainability outcomes and that further research into process-oriented mechanisms and institutional characteristics can yield substantial dividends in enabling effective sustainability policy.

Scholarly research on peace has overwhelmingly focused on negative peace, or the absence of conflict, aggression, violence, and war. We seek to understand holistic peace systems, the political, economic, and social systems that sustain peaceful societies. We show how two methods can help us understand the properties and dynamics of such complex peace systems. Each method provides insights from different perspectives to help understand sustaining peace. The causal loop diagram helps us to identify the peace factors and the connections between them. The mathematical model helps us determine the quantitative results of the interactions between all the peace factors. Using these methods, we found that there is no single “leverage” factor that is the lynchpin in creating sustainable peace. Rather, the small effects of a large number of positive peace factors that support peace can collectively overcome the stronger emotional response to the negative conflict factors that jeopardize peace.

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The recent United Nation Secretary General's report on sustaining peace speaks to an urgent crisis of complexity in global affairs, where a wide assortment of nonstate actors wields more political power than ever before. In this context, the international community's traditional ways of forecasting, planning, policymaking, and assessing impact are becoming rapidly obsolete. In response, policymakers are calling for more holistic or systemic approaches to peace and development. Unfortunately, these proposed changes are merely ‘systems light’, essentially a metaphorical characterization of peace systems where their component parts are seen as interconnected and complicated. This form of systems thinking is insufficiently informed by more sophisticated methods from complexity science. This article will illustrate how two methods derived from complexity science, causal loop diagramming and mathematical modeling, can help us understand the properties and dynamics of intervention in complex peace systems. Causal loop diagrams help us to identify the peace factors and the connections between them. Mathematical modeling helps us determine the quantitative results of the interactions between all the peace factors. Using these methods together can lead to new insights for peacebuilding and for mitigating the unintended consequences of well intended policies.