Background and Aims Grapegrowers often trial alternative practices to meet business goals. Our aim was to investigate why and how experiments are conducted during grape production, the perceived value of current approaches and opportunities for change. Methods and Results Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 35 growers and eight consultants with diverse demographic and business attributes across Australia. Growers and consultants conduct experiments, often over several seasons, to learn about alternative viticultural practices, to gain knowledge, to enhance confidence in changing practice and to solve problems. Trial approaches are diverse and not associated with business or personal attributes. Growers value conclusive results for confident decision‐making; however, they are constrained by available time, labour and lack of efficient, objective measures of crop responses. Spatial variability in land is viewed as a contributor to non‐uniform fruit yield and composition and recognised as a factor confounding trial results. Conclusions Growers value their experimentation despite facing challenges during the process. They also expressed a desire for robust results which could be addressed by efficient approaches to experimentation that incorporate spatial information and generate results for more informed decision‐making. Significance of the Study The empirical evidence of growers' experimental behaviours highlights the importance of experimentation to wine businesses and identifies the need for new approaches that generate more useful information to support growers' decisions.

. 2017. Ways forward for resilience thinking: lessons from the field for those exploring social-ecological systems in agriculture and natural resource management. Ecology and Society 22 (4) ABSTRACT. Resilience thinking appears to offer a holistic approach that can be used by social researchers to interpret past and contemporary conditions and identify possible futures for social-ecological systems (SES). Resilience thinking is shaping contemporary environmental policy and its implementation in Australia, Europe, and North America. At the same time, social researchers have raised concerns about the limitations of resilience thinking, particularly in its handling of human agency, power relationships, social thresholds, and the social construction of SES definitions. We argue for a reflexive turn in resilience thinking as a way to address these concerns. We draw on lessons from three Australian case studies where a reflexive application of resilience thinking generated insights for research and practice. We propose six areas for reflexive inquiry: (1) focal scale and level, (2) SES definition, (3) narratives of change, (4) processes of knowledge production, (5) social transition trajectories, and ( 6) social thresholds. In so doing, the assumptions of resilience thinking are politicized and problematized, which improves its theoretical analytical utility, and in practice generates new insights into social processes. Reflexivity offers opportunity for greater cross-disciplinary dialogue between resilience thinking and the social sciences, while allowing methodologies with differing ontologies and epistemologies to be applied in a complementary manner.

Efforts to reverse groundwater depletion in hard-rock regions by enhancing aquifer recharge with valuable surface water present complex challenges and trade-offs related to upstream-downstream interactions and equity. Here, groundwater modelling is used in combination with economic valuation techniques to assess the effectiveness of alternative supply and demand measures under different climate change scenarios in an upper sub-basin of the Krishna River basin in India. It is found that aquifer recharge provides benefits for the sub-basin that are not apparent at the basin scale.Water recharged or crops selected in upper catchments should aim to generate economic benefits that outweigh losses faced downstream

Irrigation systems face unforeseeable changes in climate, technologies, and societal preferences during their lifetime, potentially rendering them obsolete or inadequate. To remain functional, irrigation systems need to be adaptive to changes as the future unfolds.Past approaches to irrigation system design were largely informed by engineering or economic criteria. This is increasingly recognised as insufficient. We provide examples of contemporary irrigation systems in Australia to highlight the need for planning and design approaches that recognise the complex interactions between human and water systems and embrace unknowns. We review literature on hydro-social interactions and dynamic adaptive pathways to provide insights for the development of adaptive irrigation systems. Highlights• Long lasting irrigation infrastructure faces unforeseeable natural and societal unknowns.• Adaptive design approaches need to incorporate the coupled nature of humanwater interactions.• Adaptive design is a process of ongoing social learning.

Participatory water valuation workshops are useful for their valuation outcomes, but can they also foster social learning? Social learning involves changes in understanding through social interactions between actors, which go beyond the individual to become situated within wider social units. Participatory water valuation workshops involve dialoguing about knowledge, perspectives, and preferences, which may be conducive to social learning. In this paper, we assess the social learning potential of a participatory valuation workshop, based on a case study in Tasmania, where farmers, water managers, and a policy maker shared their personal perspectives on the past, current and future values of irrigation water. To assess the social learning potential of a single participatory valuation workshop, we analyzed drivers-that is, factors positively influencing social learning-and outcomes-that is, indications that social learning occurred. Data were collected through an exit survey, in-workshop reflections and semistructured interviews following 3 weeks and 6 months after the actual workshop. The results indicate that the workshop provided the drivers for social learning to occur. In addition, participants indicated to have learned from and with others, and that the workshop provided improved and extended networks. According to the participants, the workshop led to a shared concern about increasing prices for water licences and induced substantive outcomes related to the use, management, and governance of irrigation water. We conclude that participatory valuation workshops, such as the one analyzed here, can foster social learning.