This book offers readers the chance to learn from the experiences of researchers involved in integrated mission-directed research, particularly in the areas of natural resource management and regional development. Integrated Mission-directed Research covers important issues in integration science, supported by case studies that detail how to engage individuals and communities, and support policy decisions and development. The authors explore case studies undertaken in Australia, Europe, Thailand and Indonesia, as well as perspectives from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Closing chapters demonstrate key challenges for researchers and essential questions that should be answered when trying to set up integrated research. Potential benefits that could be obtained from effective integrated mission-directed research are included, as well as assessment questions to assist researchers to see if such benefits have been truly obtained. Written by experienced researchers, many of whom were involved in CSIRO’s Social and Economic Integration Emerging Science Initiative, the book explores how integrated research is now seen as crucial in achieving sustainability outcomes in natural resource management.

Christian school leaders need to reflect carefully on the leadership and governance processes that can best guide their schools. This book introduces a mission-directed governance system designed to define educational ideals, focus leadership energies, advance the school, create accountability, and measure results. While holding fast to essential positions of Christian faith and educational philosophy, these ideas can help leaders of Christian schools more effectively address purpose, priority, and organization through fresh approaches to governance.

This book explores the theme of the missional conversion of the church, namely how the church is transformed toward its missionary vocation, from a biblical-theological perspective. The purpose of this book is to find biblically grounded, theologically sound, and practically applicable principles helpful for the church which seeks to be continuously shaped into a missional community which authentically and fully participates in God’s mission today. The biblical-theological findings on how the triune God in the biblical narrative shapes the people of God toward their missionary vocation demonstrates, first, that, in Scripture, the missional conversion of the church is primarily the consequence of its continuous encounter with the triune God, and, second, that this divine-human encounter for the missional conversion of the church is ineluctable in view of the ongoing tension between the missional faithfulness of God in fulfilling the missionary vocation of the church, on the one hand, and the missional failure of the church in its missionary vocation, on the other hand.

The only book to present the synergy between modeling and simulation, systems engineering, and agent technologies expands the notion of agent-based simulation to also deal with agent simulation and agent-supported simulation. Accessible to both practitioners and managers, it systematically addresses designing and building agent systems from a systems engineering perspective.