Many of the most critical and pressing sustainability problems involve cross-scale dynamics in social, ecological, economic or a combination of systems. Differences in interests across levels pose increasingly difficult challenges for decision-making, with actions at one level imposing constraints (and opportunities) at other levels, and influencing the vulnerability and resilience of actors at different levels. Local scale decisions are influenced by factors ranging from global (for example, global markets or global climate change) to national (e.g., national policies that play out differently in different in-country locations) to regional (e.g., watershed council decisions), as well as to local (e.g., land owner decisions based on soil and water quality and availability). Mechanisms that might enable better understanding and management of trade-offs, exclusion, and the points of negotiation are often weak or non-existent.

Likewise, the coordination and integration of scientific and technological information across scales has proven difficult to achieve, especially given the need to provide information that is salient, credible, and legitimate in scale-specific degrees. Most efforts have of necessity privileged one scale, often at the expense understanding trade-offs and synergies across scales and among different sectors and groups of people. A key need in solving sustainability problems will be to critically assess how knowledge is used and how sustainability problems are socially constructed at various scales.

Conceptually, there are a number of emerging models of cross-scale dynamics including: institutional interplay; distributed research, observations, assessment and decision support systems, panarchic systems, and others. These frameworks often derive from longer standing theories of federalism, hierarchy theory, human geography, multi-level game theory, international relations, etc. There is a need to synethesize these related and complementary frameworks. There is also a great potential to make use of recent advances in the modelling of complex adaptive systems using, for example, agent-based modelling techniques and relatively simple models of socio-ecological systems to explore institutional designs and their interactions in cross-scale systems.

Clearly, there is a need to critically analyze on-going experiments in cross-scale management for sustainability, as well as to explore the potential for alternative and novel institutional arrangements through scenarios and interactive modelling exercises. Our research approach explores all of these.