Addressing water challenges in resource-constrained ‘Southern’ cities requires ‘reparation’, a transformative governance approach rooted in restorative justice. In India, formal governance often struggles to tackle social stratification and colonial legacies effectively, sometimes even reinforcing them. This study compares how informality can foster reparative transformation towards the water-sensitive city approach, further referred to as ‘water sensitivity’ in secondary cities like Bhuj and Bhopal. Our findings reveal that informal strategies foster consolidative and jugaadu (innovation within constraints) capacities, which help reveal the multifaceted nature of water problems, dismantle hierarchical power structures, promote care, and enable the improvisations crucial for reparation. However, informality also risks perpetuating existing inequalities and may overlook long-term environmental sustainability without a clear normative focus on reparation. To address this, combining informal approaches within formal regulatory frameworks mitigates the instability and lack of sustainability inherent in informality. While informal strategies provide flexibility and innovation, formal frameworks offer the necessary stability, legitimacy, and continuity, ensuring the embedding of reparative efforts in the socio-cultural fabric. In conclusion, informality is critical to reparative efforts as it facilitates the incorporation of transdisciplinary perspectives from non-experts and sustains necessary improvisations through fostering a sense of care, ultimately advancing water-sensitive governance.

1. Globally, environmental crises are at a critical point. Findings from scientific research are crucial to understand these issues and to inform new policies to address them. Yet the rapidity with which society, industry and lifestyles are changing is not matched in dynamism by institutionalised science, where institutional structures slow the rate of adaptation. 2. In this paper, we propose that citizen science can act as a bridge between the ideal and the reality of scientific research, structuring the interface of scientific research with its cultural context. In so doing, citizen science can increase science's ability to address complex ecological problems where data is needed alongside public and policy engagement. As part of a wider movement of informal scientific practices, citizen science can broaden institutionalised science's horizon, foster innovation and create more impact. 3. Drawing on examples of citizen science practice addressing pollution, we specify ways in which citizen science can provide embedded knowledge and foster alternative practices within the sciences. 4. We identify a clash of logics between citizen science and institutional science practice and suggest avenues that could be pursued to improve dialogue between the two.

With this perspective paper, we aim to raise awareness of and offer starting points for studying the role of emotions and associated behavioural responses to losses in relation to phase-outs. We start from a psychological perspective and explain how losses due to phasing out dominant practices, structures, and cultures may threaten core psychological needs and lead to-what we introduce as-'transition pain'. We borrow insights from the psychological coping literature to explain that different forms of transition pain may elicit characteristic coping responses (e.g. opposition, escape, negotiation), shaping individual meaning-making and behaviour in ongoing sustainability transitions. We then expand this psychological lens and present three additional perspectives, namely, that transition pain is (1) dynamic and process-dependent, (2) collectively shared and socially conditioned, and (3) political. We discuss how a 'coping with transition pain' lens can contribute to a better understanding of individual and collective meaning-making, behaviour and agency in transitions as well as a more emotion-sensitive governance of phase-outs.

This paper introduces the use of a pain analogy in exploring employee reactions in organizational change processes. Perceiving the signaling function of an individual pain experience as a call to action, we present a conceptualization of transition pains: emotional pain experienced by organizational members related to processes of change in the context of disruptive external change (i.e., transition). The transition context leads to realignment of strategy, policies and work organization. When these are not aligned or even contradictory, this creates confusion and an individual can experience incongruences. Pain symptoms such as tension or stress may act as signals that there is an imbalance between job demands and resources. This perspective supports practitioners in the interpretation of responses during a change process and offers interventions focused on developing resources and reducing incongruences.