This paper introduces the papers in this special issue and uses them as evidence through which to examine four questions. First: are we witnessing a widespread (re)turn to big infrastructure projects for water management? The evidence suggests that large-scale infrastructure development has remained largely unswayed by the 'ecological turn', or the promotion of demand management or 'soft path' thinking, despite a drop in investments observed at the turn of the 20th century. Second: do these new projects have different justifications from those of the past? The papers in this issue provide evidence that the need to justify capital-intensive infrastructure in the face of commitments to sustainability, while borrowing from the conventional grammar of project justifications, has generated a few innovative tropes and rhetorical devices. Third: what does a (re)turn (or enduring commitment) to big infrastructure tells us about the governance and wider politics of large-scale infrastructure problems?

Some of the traditional interest groups are well represented in the stories told here - the corporations that demand water or compete to build pipes and dams; the large-scale irrigators that rely on water to expand their production; the engineers and consultants who seek money, prestige, career advancement or even satisfaction from 'controlling' nature; the politicians who can extract 'rents' from all this activity. Even so, the history of each particular project involves many contingencies - of the society's history, of previous rounds of infrastructure and of capital availability. Fourth: have there been changes in the scale at which water is managed within countries? In general, it seems there has been an increase in the scale of projects, generally involving a shift in power away from regional and up to multi-regional agencies of governance, such as the central state. Sometimes these shifts in scale and power have no effect on the salience of local voices - because in the past they were never heard or generally suppressed anyway. Sometimes the shifts in power and scale have been accompanied by increasing suppression of local voices of opposition. In one case - South Africa - the change in scale has seen a stand-offbetween representatives of new voices and the infrastructure-focussed engineering elite.

A growing body of literature on the commons has provided fascinating and intricate insights on how some local institutions have successfully managed to avoid a seemingly inevitable “tragedy of the commons” once popularized by Garrett Hardin. Primarily benefitting from the recent studies on the commonpool resources conducted by Elinor Ostrom and colleagues, polycentric selforganization and autonomy, rather than the direct state or market control over the commons, are often recognized as key features of the long enduring commons. However, these commons are quite diverse and the outcomes are often multiple and complex, accentuating the needs to differentiate among multiple commons outcomes. Furthermore, relatively under-reported are the cases where the degradation of common-pool resources are actually halted, and even restored. This study examines both the turbulent history of fishery mismanagement in Rupa Lake, Nepal and its reversal built around the participation, engagement and inclusiveness in the governance of its watershed. We find that Rupa Lake’s experience tells two stories. Reflecting Hardin’s dire forecast, the Rupa Lake watershed verged on collapse as population grew and seemingly selfish behavior intensified under an open-access regime. But the users also found a way to rebound and reverse their course as they adopted a bottom-up approach to fishery management and established an innovative community institution, the ‘Rupa Lake Rehabilitation and Fishery Cooperative’, dedicated to the sustainable governance of the commons. This case highlights how one community at the threshold of ‘tragedy’ transformed itself by turning conflict into collaboration, which we hope contributes to the effort of better understanding multiple commons.

Working memory (WM) theoretically affords the ability to privilege social threats and opportunities over other more mundane information, but few experiments have sought support for this contention. Using a functional logic, we predicted that threatening faces are likely to elicit encoding benefits in WM. Critically, however, threat depends on both the capacities and inclinations of the potential aggressor and the possible responses available to the perceiver. Two experiments demonstrate that participants more efficiently scan memory for angry facial expressions, but only when the faces also bear other cues that are heuristically associated with threat: masculinity in Study 1 and outgroup status in Study 2. Moreover, male participants showed robust speed and accuracy benefits, whereas female participants showed somewhat weaker effects, and only when threat was clearly expressed. Overall results indicate that working memory for faces depends on the accessibility of self-protective goals and on the functional relevance of other social attributes of the face.

Understanding and transforming how cities think is a crucial part of developing effective knowledge infrastructures for the Anthropocene. In this article, we review knowledge co-production as a popular approach in environmental and sustainability science communities to the generation of useable knowledge for sustainability and resilience. We present knowledge systems analysis as a conceptual and empirical framework for understanding existing co-production processes as preconditions to the design of new knowledge infrastructures in cities. Knowledge systems are the organizational practices and routines that make, validate, communicate, and apply knowledge. The knowledge systems analysis framework examines both the workings of these practices and routines and their interplay with the visions, values, social relations, and power dynamics embedded in the governance of building sustainable cities. The framework can be useful in uncovering hidden relations and highlighting the societal foundations that shape what is (and what is not) known by cities and how cities can co-produce new knowledge with meaningful sustainability and resilience actions and transformations. We highlight key innovations and design philosophies that we think can advance research and practice on knowledge co-production for urban sustainability and resilience.

We welcome the opportunity to respond to the commentaries on our paper—The Mouse That Trolled—by Hardy, Sarnoff , Cordova, and Feldman. Their comments are academic criticism in the very best sense. We also take the opportunity to update on recent legal actions, which we had not predicted. This opportunity enriches our narrative history of the patenting of the APPswe mutation for early onset Alzheimer's disease, and we hope the continued saga is of interest.