Abstract
Be it resource depletion, environmental pollution, land-use conflicts, man-made or natural disasters, health risks and epidemics, loss of biodiversity, global warming …or other issues: coping with isolated crises, no matter how committed, is doomed to failure. Their essential difficulty would be missed without paying attention to their networked characteristics and system dynamics. The same applies to studying their perception and response within society: it is indispensable to take into account the variety of mechanisms structuring how they are differentially framed and processed in discourses, institutions and communication systems. When figuring out countermeasures or transformation strategies something similar must be observed: both need to address quite different clusters and depend on exploiting multiple sources of knowledge.
Consequently, we need to mobilize scientific practice as an interdisciplinary team, by making use of diverse competences to elaborate distinct contributions without losing sight of the common task. So, what are the selective strengths and comparative advantages of separate approaches? In which ways may it be possible to combine them? This volume comprises a series of texts addressing these questions. They can be read individually, but as a whole they represent a synergizing intellectual development; thus, they offer benefits to all those interested in integrative studies.