In recent years, numerous studies have explored the opportunities and challenges for emerging decentralized energy systems and business models. However, few studies have focussed specifically on the economic and social value associated with three emerging models: peer-to-peer energy trading (P2P), community self-consumption (CSC) and transactive energy (TE). This article presents the findings of a systematic literature review to address this gap. The paper makes two main contributions to the literature. Firstly, it offers a synthesis of research on the social and economic value of P2P, CSC and TE systems, concluding that there is evidence for a variety of sources of social value (including energy independence, local benefits, social relationships, environmental responsibility and participation and purpose) and economic value (including via self-consumption of renewable electricity, reduced electricity import costs, and improved electricity export prices). Secondly, it identifies factors and conditions necessary for the success of these models, which include willingness to participate, participant engagement with technology, and project engagement of households and communities, among other factors. Finally, it discusses conflicts and trade-offs in the value propositions of the models, how the three models differ from one another in terms of the value they aim to deliver and some of the open challenges that require further attention by researchers and practitioners.

Participatory modelling seeks to foster stakeholder engagement to better attune models to their decision-making and policy contexts. Such approaches are increasingly advocated for use in the field of health. We review the instrumental and epistemological claims made in support of participatory modelling approaches. These accentuate participatory models as offering a better evidence-base for health policy decisions. By drawing attention to recent modelling experiments in a sector outside of health, that of water management, we outline a different way of thinking about participation and modelling. Here, the participatory model is configured in relation to matters of ‘knowledge controversy’, with modelling constituted as an ‘evidence-making intervention’ in relation to the making of science and expertise. Rather than presenting participatory models as an improved technical solution to addressing given policy problems within an evidence-based intervention approach, models are alternatively potentiated as sites for the redistribution of expertise among actor networks as they seek to engage politically in a matter of concern. This leads us to consider possible new directions for participatory modelling in the field of health.

Now ubiquitous in research on adaptation to the impacts of anthropogenic climate change is the aim of cultivating adaptive capacity. With its promise to expand the scope of transformative human response within the adaptive dynamics of the social–ecological system, this approach is built upon the integration of the social and ecological, reflecting the ‘pragmatic holism’ at the heart of the concept of the ecological system. This vision is undercut, however, by an ambivalence about the agency of humans to effect adaptive change. I argue that this threatens to recoup the environmental determinism that characterised mid-20th-century theories of adaptation in geography and cognate disciplines – albeit in a new form defined by an understanding of agency as distributed and emergent that is associated with developments in cybernetics and complexity science. This article charts how the currently dominant discourse centred on adaptive capacity has come about and explores what it might mean for the politics of climate change adaptation, as the scope of human action is circumscribed by the adaptive dynamics of the social–ecological system.

Australia has world leading uptake of distributed PV (D-PV) and increasing installations of battery energy storage systems (BESS). D-PV and BESS can provide various economic and environmental benefits to energy users, network companies and other industry stakeholders. However, integrating increasing levels of D-PV into electricity networks present a range of social, technical, and regulatory challenges such as voltage management in low voltage networks. To help distribution network service providers in managing network voltage effectively, it is increasingly required that inverter-based D-PV and BESS implement one or more of the following power quality response modes (PQRM): tripping (anti-islanding and limits for sustained operation), Volt-VAr (V-V Ar) and Volt-Watt (V-Watt). The PQRMs can curtail power output which may limit opportunities and revenue that D-PV and BESS owners obtain from their investments. On the other hand, these modes can help with the management of voltage. Curtailment and Network Voltage Analysis Scoping Study (CANVAS) is a RACE for 2030 scoping study by the Collaboration on Energy and Environmental Markets at UNSW, including industry partners AGL, SA Power Networks and Solar Analytics. The study analysed two datasets including 1000 BESS sites from AGL's Virtual Power Plant trial and 500 D-PV sites from Solar Analytics' customer database both within the metropolitan Adelaide, focusing on the first two PQRM modes: tripping (anti-islanding and limits for sustained operations) and V-VAr curtailment. The study found a range of V-VAr response behavior from BESS and D-PV likely to be due to different installation dates and legacy standard settings. The tripping and V-VAr curtailment were not significant for most energy users (less than 1 % of total generation); however, some energy users lost up to 20% of their total generation. This clearly raises the issue of fairness in relation to curtailment which will become a more prevalent issue as D-PV penetration increases.

In the middle of 2020, with its borders tightly closed to the rest of the world, Australia almost achieved the local elimination of COVID-19 and subsequently maintained ‘COVID-zero’ in most parts of the country for the following year. Australia has since faced the relatively unique challenge of deliberately ‘undoing’ these achievements by progressively easing restrictions and reopening. Exploring the role of mathematical modelling in navigating a course through the pandemic through qualitative interviews with modellers and others working closely with modelling, we argue that each of these two significant phases of Australia’s COVID-19 experience can be understood as distinct forms of ‘model society’. This refers at once to the society enacted through the governance of risk, and to the visions of societal outcomes – whether to be sought or to be avoided – that are offered up by models. Each of the two model societies came about through a reflexive engagement with risk facilitated by models, and the iterative relationship between the representations of society enacted within models and the possibilities that these representations generate in the material world beyond them.