Call for Paper: Special Issue on Stakeholder Engagement and Participatory Modelling for Sustainable Land-Water Interactions

UDVL director, Professor Moira Zellner is the guest editor for the special issue: Towards Sustainable Land-Water Interactions in the Anthropocene: The Role of Stakeholder Engagement and Participatory Modelling

Special Issue "Towards Sustainable Land-Water Interactions in the Anthropocene: The Role of Stakeholder Engagement and Participatory Modelling"
For more detail visit: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/land/special_issues/land_water

Land, water, and society are intrinsically interconnected through the metabolism of human activity, influenced by demographic shifts and economic development, urbanization and agricultural expansion, the extraction of natural resources and the production of waste. Human activities are capable of altering how water flows through the landscape, affecting its quantity and quality at an unprecedented scale. To understand the full dimension of land-water interactions in the Anthropocene, and to use this understanding to inform management, it is therefore, necessary to integrate knowledge from fields as diverse as hydrology, soil science, human geography, economics, anthropology, law, and human behavior. There is also an increasing awareness that early and meaningful engagement of stakeholders in decision-making is essential to find successful and implementable pathways supportive of sustainable and resilient futures. Our ability to tackle this multifaceted theme in a comprehensive, robust, and systematic manner is still limited. To move forward, the following questions need to be answered:
(Understanding the system) How can we integrate and/or extend frameworks such as socio-hydrology, telecoupling, collaborative rationality, and adaptive management to support fair, responsible, and sustainable relationships among people, land, and water?
(The role of biases, beliefs, values, heuristics) Who are the key actors and governing institutions? What services do these actors extract from land and water systems? What are the actors’ goals, objectives, and strategies, and what resources do they have to pursue them? How can we elicit and identify the biases, beliefs, values, and heuristics (BBVH) that either hinder or enable transitions towards sustainable land–water interactions? How can we steer BBHV to achieve better outcomes? How do stakeholders quantify and decide among trade-offs attached to various land and water management strategies? Who are the winners and losers, and how are any imbalances addressed?
(Modelling the system) What theories, tools, and techniques are needed to conceptualize land–water–human interactions? What are their key strengths and weaknesses, particularly when brought into a stakeholder engagement or participatory modelling process?
(The role of modelling) What is the role of modelling in developing a collaborative land–water science program? How does early engagement of stakeholders with scientific models of land–water interactions improve decision-making? What are the potential benefits and drawbacks of gamification?
(The role of model-enhanced stakeholder engagement) How should we design and facilitate participatory processes to improve sustainability outcomes in land-water-human systems? Which participatory modelling methods are more or less amenable to different types of stakeholders involved in land–water interactions? What are the best tools for the job in different geographical and cultural contexts? How should we follow-through on action plans?
We highly encourage submission of integrative studies that combine insights from environmental modelling and behavioral science. In doing so, this Special Issue aims to shed light on how stakeholder engagement and collaborative approaches can help disentangle the complexity of land–water–human interactions at local, national, and global levels.
Dr. Moira Zellner
Dr. Juan Carlos Castilla-Rho
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Land is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords
Anthropocene
LULCC
socio-hydrology
telecoupling
nexus
human behaviour
collaborative governance
participatory modelling
coupling human-natural systems
Published Papers
This special issue is now open for submission.