Dear Colleagues,

Actions to seek "compromise" through stakeholder participation and negotiation is advocated to facilitate the integration of shared interests, knowledge, and values. Participation, one of the five principles of "good governance", through multi-stakeholder knowledge, significantly contributes to improve understanding and increase transparency in the decision-making process. Participation is a core action in a collaborative management process, and uses innovative practices in problem identification, decision-making and action planning. Further, participatory practices allow an ethical operational method of adaptive management and contributes to joint endorsement of common decisions. By working on sustainability topics, by sharing their importance, and by negotiating the ranking of each aspect with the related problem in a participatory way, it is possible to establish a voluntary aggregation of local and external actors (e.g., policy makers, stakeholders, citizens). Starting from these considerations, participation and advocacy play strategic roles at the local scale but are even more important at regional and global scales.

Today populism, nationalism, and various forms of ethnic exceptionalism have emerged as reactions to globalism and failed experiments in molding regional civic architecture via technocratic diktat. Identity and exceptionalism are the keystones of the anarchic confusion underlying much of the political debate. Few now can make confident statements based on linear projections of ‘how we are today'. The pundits have been proven wrong time and time again and we live in ‘interesting times'. Yet, the need for sustainability on a global scale has never been clearer, the challenge of fracture and the threat of conflict are balanced against the opportunity for localism and the potential for community engagement.
We are concerned to understand the methods, tools, the experiences, useful to build an empowered community of stakeholders, that can play a strategic role in enhancing understanding, generating new options, decreasing hostility and aggressive attitudes among participants, exploring new problem framing, enlightening policy makers, and producing competent, fair and optimized solution packages that also facilitate consensus.

On the other hand, what kind of new concepts and pitfalls are of importance in the light of sustainability, when we promote participation and advocacy?

Into all of this emerges our Special Issue on participation and advocacy. Moreover, this Special Issue is linked to ISDRS Conference 2018, and best papers from the conference will be selected and invited to submit an extended paper within this Special Issue.

This Special Issue is concerned with such issues as:

• The value of identity in political movement
• The potential for engaging local populations in meaningful change
• The passion for stakeholder values

We are also interested in:

• The key concepts, methods and applications in participatory action for cutting-edge sustainability
• The use of ICT for smart community and participation from local to global perspective
• Examples of citizen engagement
• The emergence of a new civics

Additionally, we want to hear about:

• Action research with stakeholders
• Blending political strategy with local needs
• Advocacy for community sustainability

Prof. Simon Bell
Prof. Giuseppe Ioppolo
Guest Editors

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• Governance
• Public participation
• role of stakeholders
• sustainability
• sustainable development