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The purpose of this paper is to identify practical lessons for urban managers involved in the post-disaster field, drawing on research about ethnic division, conflict and reconstruction in five divided cities.

The paper analyses the original case study fieldwork in the five divided cities to identify how the concept of “urban contract” can be used to explain the impacts of different levels of resilience to conflict or disaster. It also examines the importance of rebuilding the urban contract for community resilience as the key to “building back better” in urban reconstruction.

This analysis indicates three important lessons about the importance of the “urban contract” in building disaster resilience. The first is that disasters, like conflict, can be anticipated and strategies put in place to strengthen the social networks on which community resilience depends – and that such anticipatory behaviour provides the time to do this. The second finding is that dispersing people away from a damaged neighbourhood for any period but the absolute minimum necessary to ensure public health and community well-being should be avoided at all costs. The third finding relates to the importance of using skilled public consultation and engagement in physical reconstruction as a way of enhancing social reconstruction.

This is the first paper to draw parallels between the impacts of conflict and disasters on the urban contract between city managers and citizens. As well as identifying key lessons for disaster resilience, the paper makes a strong theoretical contribution by pointing to the significance of the urban contract in wider studies of cities and disasters.

This paper explores issues related to the choice of goals and approaches for advancing sustainability in higher education through research. The paper argues that the diverse nature of the questions, issues and problems facing advocates of sustainability in higher education requires a willingness to adopt an eclectic approach to the choice of research methodologies or paradigms. The views of reality and knowledge embedded in alternative research paradigms – empirical analytical, interpretive, critical, and poststructural paradigms – are summarised briefly. The relevance of the four paradigms is illustrated by taking two issues of sustainability in higher education and exploring how they would be addressed by each one. The two issues are: campus catering services and integrating the principles of the Earth Charter into an engineering degree program. The paper concludes by reviewing the debate over whether this eclectic position is consistent with the goals of advancing sustainability in higher education.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a menu of instruction methods for educators to increase engagement in sustainable practices. The paper also aims to assist those increasing the understanding of education for sustainable development, to the power of two‐EfSD², through research and teaching.

This paper provides a descriptive and analytical approach to the field of education for sustainable development. It includes a review of the relevant literature on stewardship and sustainable practices.

The paper provides a succinct summary of gaps to and remedies for sustainable development. It offers a comprehensive explanation of eight distinct approaches to education for sustainable development.

The application of EfSD² methods described in this paper have been found to increase productive results through enabling learners to grapple with and create solutions for real life sustainability problems. The paper proposes a more thorough testing of the various educational methods to assess their effectiveness in increasing sustainable practices.

As far as the author is aware, this paper is the first to compile this “tool kit” for EfSD². It offers the reader new ways to interpret older techniques along with a plethora of instructional methods not previously consolidated to advance stewardship and sustainable practices.

In addition to mapping the consistency in rhetoric behind education for sustainability, despite changes in jargon over the past 30 years, this paper endeavours to estimate the degree to which these ideas have been integrated into the Australian tertiary sector.

The results of a recent internet‐based audit of tertiary environmental and sustainability offerings are used to reflect upon key ideas associated with a liberal sustainability education: interdisciplinarity, cosmopolitanism and civics.

Sustainability is not yet well integrated in specialist or generalist coursework programs in Australia, largely due to a “customer”‐focused higher education sector. Additionally, the emphasis of such programs is usually technological solutions and scientific ken, to the detriment of human cultures and behavioural change.

Concrete recommendations are given to inform the development of appropriate generalist sustainability curricula, including liberal characteristics such as broad foundational years, and increased historical, spatial and cultural context.

This paper provides a valuable overview of progress towards sustainability in Australian university programs, based on a comprehensive survey, and with a minimum of new jargon to ensure accessibility for practitioners.

The present preoccupations of businesses and business educators include the increasing global debt, rising unemployment and expanding carbon footprints, and the societal and governmental pressures to minimise the impact of these challenges. Meanwhile, the urge towards technical fixes and problem solving is shaping the way that business is done today and constraining business practices for tomorrow. The repercussions for business education are serious and systemic, as these responses neglect the need to critically question, innovate and rethink business futures, through our educational processes. The purpose of this paper is to provide context and orientation to this special issue collection which showcases current thinking and practice in higher education aimed at addressing this predicament and finding new responses.

This paper offers a critical review of developments geared towards more sustainable and responsible forms of business education and practice. It takes an inclusive view of “sustainability” that embraces issues such as poverty and inequality, environmental degradation, human rights and access to resources. The concept reaches beyond the practice of “corporate social responsibility” to take into account the complex challenge of reorienting business practice to improve development processes and life chances worldwide, in the context of the inevitable limits to planetary resources.

The paper considers the influences of international movements in ushering in a vision of learning for sustainability in business education. It discusses challenges that have come to light through recent initiatives and in literature on curriculum innovation in this area. The paper calls for a re‐envisioning of business practice, education and learning which goes beyond remedies for current symptoms of unsustainable development and unmasks the need to reconnect business with people and planet.

This paper foregrounds lessons learned from several areas of thought and practice that have bearing on the communities of practice for business education. It frames and situates the contributions presented in this collection, exploring upcoming agendas in this critically important field.

This paper contributes to discourse about complex disasters by applying cultural lenses to the study of coastal infrastructure (such as seawalls and dikes), thus departing from studies that focus on characterising, assessing, and predicting the physical resilience of hard structural forms that dominate knowledge about coastal infrastructure.

This ethnographic study nuances Philippine coastal infrastructure through examining the material registers of a seawall bordering an island inhabited by artisanal fisherfolk. By “material registers”, this research refers to the socially informed ways of regarding and constructing material configurations and how the latter are enacted and resisted. Data collection was accomplished through focus groups with community leaders, on-site and remote interviews with homeowners, and archival research to further understand the spatial and policy context of the structure.

The discussion focuses on the seawall’s three material registers (protection, fragility, and misrecognition) and reveals how infrastructure built for an island community of fisherfolk simultaneously fulfils, fails, and complicates the promise of disaster resilience.

This research demonstrates the potential of “material registers”, a term previously used to analyse architecture and housing, to understand the technopolitics of infrastructure and how materially informed tensions between homeowners' and state notions of infrastructure contribute to protracted experiences of disaster and coastal maladaptation.

This research signposts the need for disaster risk reduction, climate adaptation, and sustainable development policies that legitimize the construction of infrastructure to recognize the latter's relationship and impact on multiple sphere of coastal life, including housing and citizenship implications.

This research highlights how infrastructure for coastal disaster risk management implicates geographically informed power relations within a community fisherfolk and between their “small” island community and more politically and economically dominant groups.

Whereas studies of coastal infrastructure are focused on quantitative and predictive research regarding hard structural forms in megacities, this study apprehends disaster complexity through examining the cultural and contested nature of infrastructure for coastal flood management in an island community of fisherfolk.