“How the world deals with large and serious problems is almost certainly going to shape our collective future” is the second line – and a promising start – in this edited Springer volume titled “Rethinking resilience, adaptation and transformation in a time of change”. The volume is edited by Wanglin Yan and Will Galloway, both based in Japan, and many of the contributors were in Japan during the massive disaster that struct...

You can’t have your cake and eat it, too. At least that’s what we’ve always been told. Having finished the Evaluation of the Multiple Benefits of GEF’s Multifocal Area Portfolio, now we know it’s not that simple – and thankfully, not that bleak!

They say multitasking is counterproductive. But what about trying to achieve multiple environmental and socioeconomic objectives in one project?

My name is Jeneen R. Garcia. I’ve been a full-time evaluator at the Independent Evaluation Office of the Global Environment Facility (GEF IEO) for the last seven years. The GEF is the largest multilateral funder of environmental programs worldwide. Because the programs we evaluate almost all take place in complex social-ecological systems, we constantly need to seek out new methods for dealing with complexity.

One of the methods we’ve used is Social Network Analysis (SNA). In one evaluation,...

One of the underlying assumptions of urban resilience oriented interventions is that cities control policies and vital systems, such as system-level management of infrastructure development, natural resource management, and setting environmental standards.