Monitoring and evaluation are central to ensuring that innovative, multi-scale, and interdisciplinary approaches to sustainability are effective. The development of relevant indicators for local sustainable management outcomes, and the ability to link these to broader national and international policy targets, are key challenges for resource managers, policymakers, and scientists. Sets of indicators that capture both ecological and social-cultural factors, and the feedbacks between them, can underpin cross-scale linkages that help bridge local and global scale initiatives to increase resilience of both humans and ecosystems. Here we argue that biocultural approaches, in combination with methods for synthesizing across evidence from multiple sources, are critical to developing metrics that facilitate linkages across scales and dimensions. Biocultural approaches explicitly start with and build on local cultural perspectives - encompassing values, knowledges, and needs - and recognize feedbacks between ecosystems and human well-being. Adoption of these approaches can encourage exchange between local and global actors, and facilitate identification of crucial problems and solutions that are missing from many regional and international framings of sustainability. Resource managers, scientists, and policymakers need to be thoughtful about not only what kinds of indicators are measured, but also how indicators are designed, implemented, measured, and ultimately combined to evaluate resource use and well-being. We conclude by providing suggestions for translating between local and global indicator efforts.

n AbstrAct: Measuring progress toward sustainability goals is a multifaceted task. International, regional, and national organizations and agencies seek to promote resilience and capacity for adaptation at local levels. However, their measurement systems may be poorly aligned with local contexts, cultures, and needs. Understanding how to build effective, culturally grounded measurement systems is a fundamental step toward supporting adaptive management and resilience in the face of environmental, social, and economic change. To identify patterns and inform future efforts, we review seven case studies and one framework regarding the development of culturally grounded indicator sets. Additionally, we explore ways to bridge locally relevant indicators and those of use at national and international levels. The process of identifying and setting criteria for appropriate indicators of resilience in social-ecological systems needs further documentation, discussion, and refinement, particularly regarding capturing feedbacks between biological and social-cultural elements of systems.n Keywords: biocultural indicators, indicator sets, Indigenous Peoples, local communities, resilience, sustainability, well-being Indigenous and other place-based, local communities increasingly face an assortment of externally codified development and sustainability goals, regional commitments, and national policies and actions that are designed, in part, to foster adaptation and resilience at the local level. Resilience refers to the capacity of a system to absorb shocks and disturbances and to catalyze renewal, adaptation, transformation, and innovation (Béné et al. 2013). Identifying and setting criteria for the underlying factors that confer resilience to a community are the first steps toward effectively aligning external sustainability-seeking processes, often associated with resourcing mechanisms, with locally relevant and locally embraced approaches to sustaining environmental health and community well-being in the face of environmental, social, and economic change (Fazey et al. 2011;Folke et al. 2003).

Socio-ecological resilience is vital for the long-term sustainability of communities in production landscapes and seascapes, but community members often find it difficult to understand and assess their own resilience in the face of changes that affect them over time due to economic and natural drivers, demographic changes, and market forces among others, due to the complexity of the concept of resilience and the many factors influencing the landscape or seascape. This chapter provides an overview of a project and its resilience assessment process using an indicator-based approach, which has been implemented under the International Partnership for the Satoyama Initiative (IPSI). In this project, a set of 20 indicators were identified to capture different aspects of resilience in SEPLS, and examples are included from various contexts around the world, with the purpose of identifying lessons learned and good practices for resilience assessment. These indicators have now been used by communities in many countries, often with the guidance of project implementers, with the goal of assessing, considering, and monitoring their landscape or seascape's circumstances, identifying important issues, and ultimately improving their resilience. While this particular approach is limited in that it cannot be used for comparison of different landscapes and seascapes, as it relies on community members' individual perceptions, it is found useful to understand multiple aspects of resilience and changes over time within a landscape or seascape.

Agroecology is gaining ground as a movement, science, and set of practices designed to advance a food systems transformation which subverts the patterns of farmer exploitation currently entrenched in dominant agricultural models. In order for agroecology to achieve its espoused twin aims of social and ecological wellbeing, women and other historically marginalized stakeholders must be empowered and centered as the movement’s protagonists. The importance of gender and social considerations is not limited to patently social aspects of the agroecological agenda, but bears relevance in every dimension of agroecology. Yet, issues related to gender have commanded relatively little attention in the agroeocological literature. In this paper, we review HLPE’s 13 defining principles of agroecology through a feminist lens to demonstrate the ways in which human dimensions and power dynamics are interwoven in every principle. Through this analysis, we demonstrate that a feminist approach is instrumental to establish a socially just and ecologically sustainable agroecological transition.

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Governments are updating national strategies to meet global goals on biodiversity, climate change and food systems proposed in the Convention on Biological Diversity post-2020 framework and agreed at the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference (COP26) and Food Systems Summit (UNFSS). This represents a unique and crucial opportunity to integrate and accelerate food system actions to tackle interconnected global challenges. In this context, agroecology is a game-changing approach that can provide the world’s growing population with nutritious, healthy affordable food, ensure fair incomes to farmers and halt and reverse the degradation of the natural environment. Here, we explore agroecological transition pathways in four case studies from low- and middle- income countries and identify catalysts for change. We find that enabling policy and market environments, participatory action research and local socio-technical support each plays a critical role in stimulating transitions towards agroecology. We propose strategies and priorities for research to better support agroecological transitions using these catalysts of change as entry points. Engagement of governments, private sector, civil society, farmers and farm workers in this research agenda is essential.

Passive restoration (without any intervention) has been proposed as an effective strategy for degraded cropland restoration.However, whether the vegetation in abandoned cropland can change towards the desired state and the time needed to reach a stable state are still uncertain. We investigated three abandoned croplands with different recovery times (5, 15 and 20 years) and one natural grassland in each of two different types of grassland (desert steppe and typical steppe) in the agro-pastoral ecotone of northern China to assess the restoration potential of abandoned cultivated grassland. Above-and below-ground productivity as well as species biodiversity increased gradually with increasing recovery time. After 20 years of restoration there was no significant difference between abandoned cropland and natural grassland in the typical grassland site, but aboveand below-ground productivity and species biodiversity were still lower in abandoned cropland in the desert steppe site. At the beginning of restoration, the communities were dominated mainly by annual species, especially in the desert steppe. As recovery time increased, the biomass and richness of perennial grasses and forbs increased significantly and replaced annual species as the dominant species. In both desert steppe and typical grassland, species similarity between restored and natural grassland increased over time, suggesting that previously cultivated grassland recovered towards the desired state. Our results indicate that 20 years was long enough for the restoration of previously cultivated grassland in the typical steppe, but more time may be needed in the desert steppe.

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