There is increasing effort in science to support disaster risk management (DRM) and climate change adaptation in urban environments. It is now common for research calls and projects to reference coproduction methods and science uptake goals. This paper identifies lessons for researchers, research funders, and research users wishing to enable useful, useable, and used science based on the perspectives of research users in urban planning from low- and middle-income countries. DRM-supporting science is viewed by policy actors as: complicated and poorly communicated; presenting inadequate, partial, and outdated information; misaligned with policy cycles; and costly to access and inadequately positioned to overcome the policy barriers that hinder integration of DRM into urban planning. Addressing these specific concerns points to more systematic collection and organisation of data and enhancement of supporting administrative structures to facilitate better sight of human vulnerability and its link to development decision-making and wider processes of urban risk creation.

Models of the health policy process have largely developed in isolation from political studies more widely. Of the models which Powell and Mannion\'s editorial considers, a stages model of the policy process offers a framework for combining these specifically health-focused models with empirical findings and more general explanatory models of the policy process drawn from other political studies. This commentary uses a stages model to assemble a bricolage which combines some of these components. That identifies a further research task and suggests ways of revealing in more life-like ways the politics involved in the health policy process: that is, how that process channels wider, often conflicting, non-health interests, actors, policies, conflicts, ideologies and sources of power from outside the health system into health policy formation, and introduces non-rationality.

BACKGROUND: Presidents with no possibility of re-election overvalue far-future rewards and succumb to terminal logic behavior (TLB), responding to end-of-tenure legacy concerns despite political context. Government authorities perceiving the outgoing government is losing power at the end of term behave under the logic of strategic defection (SD), dissociating from the outgoing government once it is perceived powerless. In countries where re-election is impossible and government turnover and inconstant political parties are concerns, governmental officials at all levels may show TLB and SD during transitions that affect policy sustainability.
OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to understand the context during presidential transitions that makes TLB and SD relevant, whether TLB and SD affect sustainability of food and nutrition security policy (FNSP), and the tactics for navigating transitions that favor sustainability.
METHODS: A case-study design was used with semi-structured qualitative interviews and document review of news articles in Guatemala. Purposeful criteria and snowball sampling were used to recruit 52 policy actors implementing an FNSP across 2 transitions; 252 news articles from the referenced period covering topics on policy programmatic areas were purposefully sampled. Interviews were analyzed using coding and thematic analyses. News articles were analyzed using a priori thematic coding for verifying themes in interviews and data triangulation.
RESULTS: Governmental officials were replaced by others during transitions; political parties were perceived as inconstant. TLB and SD occurred at all levels and had consequences for sustainability of FNSP: implementation slow-down, dysfunctional collaboration, inefficient use of resources, benefits not reaching targeted groups, and loss of momentum. These occurred through individual, institutional, and political mechanisms. Civil society, international organizations, and government adopted tactics for maximizing sustainability.
CONCLUSIONS: Understanding governmental officials\' experiences and the extent to which TLB and SD occur and affect sustainability could be advantageous to develop compensatory actions for reaching long-term FNSP goals.

The concept of ecosystem services, especially in combination with economic valuation, can illuminate trade-offs involved in soil management, policy and governance, and thus support decision making. In this paper, we investigate and highlight the potential and limitations of the economic valuation of soil-based ecosystem services to inform sustainable soil management and policy. We formulate a definition of soil-based ecosystem services as basis for conducting a review of existing soil valuation studies with a focus on the inclusion of ecosystem services and the choice of valuation methods. We find that, so far, the economic valuation of soil-based ecosystem services has covered only a small number of such services and most studies have employed cost-based methods rather than state-of-the-art preference-based valuation methods, even though the latter would better acknowledge the public good character of soil related services. Therefore, the relevance of existing valuation studies for political processes is low. Broadening the spectrum of analyzed ecosystem services as well as using preference-based methods would likely increase the informational quality and policy relevance of valuation results. We point out options for improvement based on recent advances in economic valuation theory and practice. We conclude by investigating the specific roles economic valuation results can play in different phases of the policy-making process, and the specific requirements for its usefulness in this context.