This issue of the CODESRIA Bulletin is produced at the end of the 2013–2016 programme cycle, and therefore at the beginning of a new programatic cycle and strategic plan. The 2017–2021 programme cycle has been entrusted with: “Reaching New Frontiers in Social Science Research and Knowledge Production for African Transformation and Development.” The new strategic plan builds on the recommendations of major comprehensive internal reviews aimed at sharpening the council’s mandate to develop the social sciences and humanities in Africa for better transformation and development within the context of continual global changes. These include: review of the intellectual agenda, membership, governance and management. The new strategic plan builds on the achievements of the past strategic cycle, ensuring consolidation and renewal, and ushering innovations in programme delivery and management; deeply emphasising the importance of basic research, and its relevance for policy, as well as community and civil society engagements. The new strategic plan prioritises three key thematic areas: democratic processes, governance, citizenship and security; ecologies, economies and societies; and higher education dynamics in a changing Africa. In addition to these three thematic priorities, a set of six crosscutting themes meant to suffuse all CODESRIA research; training and publications have been set. These include: gender; generations; alternatives and futures; inequality, rurality and urbanity; and memory and history. Most notable is a re-imagination and narrowing of research vehicles such as the traditional National Working Groups, Comparative Research Networks, and Multinational Working Groups which have now been collapsed under one vehicle – the Meaning-Making Research Initiative (MRI) to offer researchers the space to carryout and produce deeper empirical but also much more theoretically grounded and policy relevant basic research. Read the Full Editorial