Innovating Practice and Policy for Sustainable Pest Management

Dear Colleagues,

Many species have evolved resistance to pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and antibiotics. Weed, insect, plant pathogen, and antibiotic resistance is escalating around the world despite valiant public and private efforts to stem the advance. Left unchecked, these trends threaten widespread ecological, social and economic damage, especially in agriculture. Current approaches to manage pest resistance rely heavily on finding new technologies to replace those that have become ineffective. Yet, science and experience tell us that all new technologies are susceptible to resistance if not managed properly. The root causes of resistance arise from a combination of ecological, socio-economic, technological and human behavior factors. Befitting such a complex set of interactions, pest resistance is a “wicked problem” that requires transdisciplinary approaches under the convergence paradigm with deep integration across natural and social science disciplines and with non-academic experts.  

Innovating more sustainable approaches to manage pest resistance poses a critical scientific challenge of forging new research collaborations that fully engage stakeholders from industry, government and civil society from the outset. This special issue reports scientific and policy advances that hold significant potential to develop such innovations. The articles may address one or more of the following questions:

1. Under what socio-ecological conditions can uncoordinated individual decisions achieve sustainable management of pest resistance?
2. Under what socio-ecological conditions are collective, community-based approaches necessary to sustain effective pest resistance management under common pool resource conditions?
3. What are the key impediments/barriers and enabling conditions to instituting collective-community-based approaches to pest resistance management?
   • How do social and ecological systems interact to generate constructive enabling conditions or subdue the impediments/barriers?
4. What are the primary social behaviors that foster unsustainable pest resistance management?
5. What local, state and federal policies constrain or enable effective pest resistance management regimes that are tailored to local/regional socio-ecological conditions?
6. What lessons from sustainable pest management regimes can help incubate new successful efforts in other areas and regions beset by resistance epidemics?
7. How do different decisions in social systems of resistance management generate, and in turn become formed by, biological conditions of pests in the local environment?
8. How do management strategies for multiple vectors of resistance, such as weeds, insects, and viruses, interact to the detriment or support of one another?
   
   • How can multiple vectors of resistance be managed holistically through integration of social and ecological knowledge systems?

This Special Issue seeks to collect papers aimed at developing and evaluating policy options to address resistance problems in agriculture. This includes empirical studies of past policy successes (or failures) as well as prescriptive articles, making the case for innovative policies. Papers that take a synthetic approach, for example considering insecticide, herbicide and antibiotic resistance as an overarching problem, are of interest. Also welcome are analyses of the role of non-chemical pest control options, and policies to promote them.

Prof. David Ervin
Dr. Sonia Graham
Dr. David R. Shaw
Dr. George Frisvold
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.