The UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development stresses the fundamental role science should play in implementing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals endorsed by the global community. But how can and should researchers respond to this societal demand on science? We argue that answering this question requires systematic engagement with the fundamental normative dimensions of the 2030 Agenda and those of the scientific community-and with the implications these dimensions have for research and practice. We suggest that the production of knowledge relevant to sustainable development entails analytic engagement with norms and values through four tasks. First, to unravel and critically reflect on the ethical values involved in sustainability, values should increasingly become an empirical and theoretical object of sustainability research. Second, to ensure that research on social-ecological systems is related to sustainability values, researchers should reflect on and spell out what sustainability values guide their research, taking into account possible interdependencies, synergies, and trade-offs. Third, to find common ground on what sustainability means for specific situations, scientists should engage in deliberative learning processes with societal actors, with a view to jointly reflecting on existing development visions and creating new, contextualized ones. Fourth, this implies that researchers and scientific disciplines must clarify their own ethical and epistemic values, as this defines accountability and shapes identification of problems, research questions, and results. We believe that ignoring these tasks, whether one is in favor or critical of the 2030 Agenda, will undermine the credibility and relevance of scientific contributions for sustainable development.

Stakeholder interactions are increasingly viewed as an important element of research for sustainable development. But to what extent, how, and for which goals should stakeholders be involved? In this article, we explore what degrees of stakeholder interaction show the most promise in research for sustainable development. For this purpose, we examine 16 research projects from the transdisciplinary research programme NRP 61 on sustainable water management in Switzerland. The results suggest that various degrees of stakeholder interaction can be beneficial depending on each project’s intended contribution to sustainability, the form of knowledge desired, how contested the issues are, the level of actor diversity, actors’ interests, and existing collaborations between actors. We argue that systematic reflection about these six criteria can enable tailoring stakeholder interaction processes according specific project goals and context conditions.

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Transdisciplinary (TD) approaches have increasingly been promoted in the field of land-use research. However, the theoretical discourse about transdisciplinarity is far more advanced than its implementation in practice. In particular, empirical studies about the effects of concrete TD projects on the participants are rare. We evaluated joint knowledge generation among researchers and non-academics in a TD research programme on urban and landscape development. For the assessment we used standardised questionnaires, our own observations, and a simplified implementation of the 'most significant change' method. The evaluation revealed that the participants gained considerable TD knowledge through encountering different thought-styles and problem owners. They together developed a feeling of companionship, broadened their views on the issue and, consequently, attributed increased legitimacy to it. The following aspects of TD research were found to be successful as the programme: offered opportunities for enthusiasm; used a form of communication that promotes mutual trust; and provided boundary objects. Similar to other studies, we observed the creation of hybrid spaces and communities of research and practice where the participants could build up mutual trust, interact with other thought-styles, and jointly develop their TD knowledge.

Research on visualization during participatory planning workshops is widespread, but there are hardly any studies comparing workshops with and without visualization. We conducted four workshops with local stakeholders to develop landscape visions for the year 2030. In three workshops we used different techniques to support the visioning process with real-time visualization: drawings by hand, a town planning computer-aided design software, and a combination of GIS, Google Earth, and SketchUp with Cinema 4D. In the fourth workshop the participants developed their visions without any visualization. In all cases the participants evaluated the workshops expost by means of a standardized questionnaire.The comparative analysis of the data revealed that visualization supports the participants consistently but only moderately in imagining future landscape conditions. In particular, visualization provided a better common basis for communication, whereas it only marginally inspired the viewers to develop new ideas. The main trade-off of using visualizations that we found was that the participants assessed their influence on the discussion as too strong as they focused the discussion on visual aspects. Among the visualization techniques tested, drawings by hand appeared to be particularly useful for creating long-term (more than fifteen years) landscape visions. Future research on the use of visualization during workshops should concentrate on the perceptions and requirements of the viewers.

One significant challenge for the operationalization of water justice arises from the many dynamic scales involved. In this paper we explore the scalar dimension of justice in water governance through the insights derived from empirical research on hydropower production in the Swiss Alps and the application of the geographical concept of politics of scale. More specifically, we investigate how different actors frame the justice problem, the scales that they invoke and which actors consequently get included or excluded in their justice assessments. This study shows that there is no ideal scale for justice evaluations; whichever scale is used, some actors and justice claims are included whereas others are excluded. This is particularly true when using Fraser's trivalent concept of justice, taking into account issues of distribution, recognition and participation where each calls for its own set of scales. Moreover, focusing on the politics of scale framing, our study reveals that the justice claim itself can become a power element. Consequently, to achieve more just water governance, there is not only a need for debate and negotiations about the conceptions and meanings of justice in a specific context, there is also a need for debate about the relevance and implications of divergent scales involved in justice claims.

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