Welcome to this Special Edition of the Journal of Economic and Social Policy (JESP). We have compiled the final papers of leading researchers who participated in an unprecedented and ambitious program between 2006 and 2009 to investigate various aspects that contribute to the sustainability of rural and remote Australian desert settlements. We acknowledge the generous time and effort afforded to the research by remote, mostly Aboriginal communities as well as the insights from partners and agencies to help us develop and interpret the research. Our work was largely funded through the Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre (DKCRC), as part of its Core Program Sustainable Desert Settlements. This program involved a team of nine universities, working in the back yard of most Australian States, and with several desert community organisations and Government agencies. The research team set out to capture the ideas and challenges of people living in Australia’s vast outback. Their aim was to inform policy regarding how to better invest in what constitutes a special system of human settlements: the class of settlements dispersed across 70 percent of Australia’s iconic arid and semi arid interior.