The Jordan Valley (JV) is a critical region where the interplay of water, energy, food, and ecosystem (WEFE) dynamics presents both challenges and opportunities for sustainable development and climate change mitigation and adaptation. In such a transboundary river basin with acute nexus problems and a long history of conflicts, it is essential that conscious efforts are made to pluralize the debate and actively encourage stakeholders' empowerment, participation and fair collaboration in strategic planning. An integrated framework for participatory strategic planning in the WEFE nexus is proposed, which has been developed in the context of the JV case study. The nexus approach emphasizes decentralized, but coordinated decision making as the source of solutions, based on a clear understanding of the challenges faced. The engagement process consisted of living lab sessions where Causal Loop diagrams facilitated discussions with stakeholders by visualizing the complexity and interdependence of WEFE sectors and prioritizing the challenges faced. Community capacity assessment appraised the capacities of each community, identifying barriers to addressing their priorities. Finally, the gap analysis bridged the baseline understanding with actionable targets. The results not only highlight the pressing challenges, priorities, and leverage points for each territory but also outline pathways for fostering resilience and adaptation to the region's intertwined crises. The priorities and capacities across the three territories of the JV reveal significant disparities, reflecting the diverse socio-political, environmental, and economic contexts of the region. The methodologies and overall framework may be replicated in other regions with similar climate and challenges around the world.

In this article, we explore the sustainability potential of an alternative commons-based mode of production called cosmolocalism. Cosmolocal production combines global knowledge production with local physical production. Such a production mode has been applied across the globe for locally manufacturing small wind turbines (SWTs) for rural electrification. We assess the sustainability of such cosmolocal SWTs in a case study of electrifying a rural community in Ethiopia. In this context, the life cycles of five SWT alternatives have been compared, ranging from conventional industrially produced turbines to open-source locally manufactured and maintained ones. Our case study indicates that the local manufacturing and maintenance of SWTs offer significant advantages and may redeem small wind turbines as a sustainable component for rural electrification. Specifically, the fully cosmolocal alternative (A1) performs better than any other alternative in technical, environmental, and social criteria, while it is close to the best-performing alternative with regard to economic objectives. For this solution to be implemented, the institutional burden cannot be neglected, but can rather be considered a sine qua non condition for locally manufactured and maintained SWTs. A set of generic institutional interventions to create favourable conditions for cosmolocal production is proposed, which needs to be elaborated in a context-specific manner.

The defossilisation of the agricultural sector is driven by intense worldwide academic research on non-fossil, renewable and energy-efficient agriculture, and the acknowledgment of the need for sustainable farming practices. For this purpose, not only technical transformations but also socio-technical system changes towards sustainability need to take place in a co-evolutionary manner. This paper investigates structural and qualitative characteristics of the knowledge produced by research on fossil-energy-free agriculture. We provide evidence on the worldwide research directions, as well as investigate whether academic research and publicly funded research projects foster knowledge creation for the desired transformation. Bibliographic maps are constructed using a query-based methodology as social networks to investigate the efficiency of the EU-funded research to achieve the goals set for the 2050 EU Green Deal. The H2020-funded papers are further analysed with dictionary-based text analysis to quantify the relative emphasis of different types of knowledge in the text. This approach is eventually used to relate transformational capacity to project profiles in the European Union, to evaluate past funding schemes and to improve the shape of future research programs on renewable and sustainable agriculture.

The Jordan Valley faces acute challenges of desertification, water scarcity, ecosystem degradation and socio-economic vulnerability, all exacerbated by climate change and geopolitical fragmentation. Addressing these interlinked pressures requires moving beyond sectoral interventions towards integrated and context-sensitive strategies. This paper presents a phased methodology for operationalizing the Water–Energy–Food–Ecosystem (WEFE) nexus for strategic planning in the Jordan Valley, developed through the PRIMA-funded EcoFuture project. Building on an initial diagnostic phase, the approach integrates participatory Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) with a strategic design process to move from system mapping to alternatives prioritization and strategic design for implementation. During a transnational living lab, Jordanian and Palestinian stakeholders assessed a portfolio of WEFE-aligned measures using a multi-criteria framework reflecting WEFE objectives, as well as socio-cultural, economic and feasibility objectives. The use of two decision algorithms—the Weighted Sum Method and the non-compensatory Minimax method—revealed convergent priorities and highlighted how alternative decision rationales may complement each other for better-informed planning. The resulting prioritized set of interventions constitutes the Agricultural Transformation Strategy (ATS), a WEFE-aligned portfolio that favours nature-based, regenerative, circular, and resource-conscious agricultural practices. Preliminary strategic design outputs—governance actions, implementation pathways, and systemic enablers—demonstrate how the assessment findings can be translated into actionable planning steps tailored to the distinct conditions of Jordan and Palestine. An illustrative bundling exercise further shows how synergistic packages of interventions can enhance feasibility and WEFE synergies. The phased approach provides a replicable blueprint for nexus-informed strategic planning in fragile, resource-scarce regions facing complex sustainability challenges.