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CIFOR–ICRAF publishes over 750 publications every year on agroforestry, forests and climate change, landscape restoration, rights, forest policy and much more – in multiple languages.

CIFOR–ICRAF addresses local challenges and opportunities while providing solutions to global problems for forests, landscapes, people and the planet.

We deliver actionable evidence and solutions to transform how land is used and how food is produced: conserving and restoring ecosystems, responding to the global climate, malnutrition, biodiversity and desertification crises. In short, improving people’s lives.

Editorial

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The global and the local interact in unexpected ways; science has coined the term “telecoupling” to describe how “social-ecological interactions in one system generate mechanisms of influence over another” in a way characterized by “geographic separation between systems as well as a separation of social networks, institutions, and governance” (Eakin et al 2014: 142). In an anecdotal way, MRD just experienced this in the context of the present issue: massive floods in Chennai, India, in December 2015 led to a breakdown of the typesetting services upon which our US-based publishing services rely. The cost-effective business model allowing everyone to work locally while doing business across several disconnected borders functioned perfectly until the catastrophic floods in Chennai caught up with us all around the world, causing human tragedy in India, some degree of business problems in the US, and unexpected delays for authors and readers in many countries. In a small way, this shows how interconnected things are today, but more importantly, how strongly context matters. When exploring pathways for sustainable development, knowledge about context matters just as much as our understanding of global processes. Often, this knowledge becomes relevant and effective only when it is constituted by both scientists and other actors. Co-production of knowledge and a focus on the contextual are important in this Open Issue of MRD, in which papers carefully examine local aspects of development, the social-ecological context in which it is taking place, and the global factors that influence this context.

DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1659/mrd.3601
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