Urban agriculture is a significant driver of urban sustainability and resilience, yet the contribution of urban agriculture to resilience is complicated by governance systems that require further investigation. This study deploys a mixed-methods approach to investigate the agricultural values and understandings of urban agricultural governance among farmers, garden leaders, and other actors in urban agriculture in Lansing, Michigan. Drawing from semistructured interviews and Q-methodology, agricultural values are used to identify four types of urban agriculture stakeholders: urban agricultural stewards, risk managers, food desert irrigators, and urban agricultural contextualists. These groups differ in terms of their agricultural values as well as their participation in local governance and general understandings of the purpose of governance. Urban agricultural stewards place comparatively higher priority on community building, environmental sustainability, and food sovereignty; they participate in the city's formal governance systems and view governance as an opportunity to codify shared norms. Risk managers place comparatively higher priority on safety, and they largely view governance in the traditional mold of state-legislated regulations to which stakeholders should comply. Food desert irrigators place comparatively higher priority on environmental sustainability, health, food access, and convenience; they expect governance to support stakeholders with the greatest needs, and though not active in formal governance, work to craft empathetic policies in their particular organizations. Urban agricultural contextualists place comparatively higher priority on community building and health, and hold that the prioritization of additional values should be determined through local and inclusive governance. The coupling of agricultural values with understandings of governance can support effective and legitimate policy making attentive to the process through which, and scale at which, stakeholders expect their values to inform decision making.Ecology and Society 24(2): 18 https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol24/iss2/art18/ recognition of communities' diverse values and identities (Walker et al. 2002, Anderies et al. 2004).

Sustainability is commonly recognized as an important goal, but there is little agreement on what sustainability is, or what it requires. This paper looks at some common approaches to sustainability, and while acknowledging the ways in which they are useful, points out an important lacuna: that for something to be sustainable, people must be willing to work to sustain it. The paper presents a framework for thinking about and assessing sustainability which highlights people working to sustain. It also briefly discusses Integrated Water Resource Management and the example of the California Water Plan to explore what such a perspective brings that is overlooked in other approaches, and how this approach might be pursued. Ultimately, this framework argues that a system can only be described as sustainable if people's work to sustain the system is biophysically possible, socially possible, and if people would freely choose to do the sustaining work.

The contours of sustainable systems are defined according to communities' goals and values. As researchers shift from sustainability-in-the-abstract to sustainability-as-a-concrete-research-challenge, democratic deliberation is essential for ensuring that communities determine what systems ought to be sustained. Discourse analysis of dialogue with Michigan direct marketing farmers suggests eight sustainability values -economic efficiency, community connectedness, stewardship, justice, ecologism, self-reliance, preservationism and health -which informed the practices of these farmers. Whereas common heuristics of sustainability suggest values can be pursued harmoniously, we discuss how this typology reflects the more intricate project of balancing values in tension with one another.

This article discusses a formal evaluation of new curricular materials and activities designed to foster understanding of three key issues–expertise, risk, and sociopolitical constraints–related to values and policy in transdisciplinary environmental science. We begin by describing the three issues, along with current thinking about the most appropriate ways to address them in the context of transdisciplinary environmental science. We then describe how we created curricular materials and activities focusing on these three issues that could be tailored for use in a wide range of graduate environmental science programs. The curriculum was adapted by instructors for use in five graduate classes at two US universities, and we used a pre-test, post-test mixed methods design to evaluate its effects on students’ ethical reasoning about values and policy. The results of this evaluation suggest that our semi-structured, dialogue-based curriculum enhances student awareness of and reasoning about values and policy in environmental research. We close with several educational recommendations for transdisciplinary environmental science programs that are grounded in our experience with this curriculum.

One way to articulate the promise of interdisciplinary research is in terms of the relationship between knowledge and ignorance. Disciplinary research yields deep knowledge of a circumscribed range of issues, but remains ignorant of those issues that stretch outside its purview. Because complex problems such as climate change do not respect disciplinary boundaries, disciplinary research responses to such problems are limited and partial. Interdisciplinary research responses, by contrast, integrate disciplinary perspectives by combining knowledge about different issues and as a result reduce ignorance about more aspects of the problem. In this paper, we develop this idea and argue that while interdisciplinary research can help remediate damaging ignorance about complex problems, it also creates conditions in which other damaging forms of ignorance can arise. We illustrate this point in detail with three case studies before discussing three implications of our analysis for identifying and managing deleterious ignorance in the context of interdisciplinary research.