Mehta Lyla, Parthasarathy D., Pickard Justin, Srivastava Shilpi. 2022. The Political Ecology of COVID-19 and Compounded Uncertainties in Marginal Environments, Frontiers in Human Dynamics, Vol. 4. DOI:10.3389/fhumd.2022.840942

This paper uses a political ecology lens to look at how COVID-19 adds to a set of existing uncertainties and challenges faced by vulnerable people in the marginal environments of coastal India.  Over the last few decades, local people have been systematically dispossessed from resource commons in the name of industrial, urban and infrastructure development or conservation efforts, leading to livelihood loss. The paper builds on current research in the TAPESTRY project in coastal Kutch and Mumbai to demonstrate how the pandemic has laid bare structural inequalities and unequal access to public goods and natural resources.

Read the full paper open access here: https://doi.org/10.3389/fhumd.2022.840942

Eleanor Fisher, Eduardo Brondizio, Emily Boyd, Critical social science perspectives on transformations to sustainability, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, Vol. 55 2022, 101160, ISSN 1877-3435,

Abstract: This article introduces a special issue on the contribution of social science to addressing transformations to sustainability. Articles underline the importance of embracing theoretically rooted, empirically informed, and collaboratively generated knowledge to address sustainability challenges and transformative change. Emphasis is placed on the role of the social sciences in elaborating on the politicisation and pluralisation of transformation processes and outcomes, helping situate, frame, reflect and generate societal action, while acknowledging the complexity of societal transformation in different contexts.

Read the full paper Open Access here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2022.101160.

Johan Bastiaensen, Frédéric Huybrechs, Pierre Merlet, Milagros Romero, Gert Van Hecken, Fostering bottom-up actor coalitions for transforming complex rural territorial pathways, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, Volume 49, 2021, Pages 42-49.

Abstract: This contribution presents the perspective on rural transformations to sustainability of the TRUEPATH action-research project in the agrarian frontier in Nicaragua. We start from a ‘territorial pathways’ framework, assembled from diverse theoretical building blocks and empirically grounded in experiences with local development interventions. This framework holds that incumbent and transformative pathways emerge out of the power-laden interactions of the biophysical territory with dominant, respectively innovative configurations of ideas, social structures and ‘rules-in-use’. We emphasize the centrality and political nature of the on-going territorial processes and acknowledge that uncertainty and epistemological plurality are inevitable characteristics of any change process, implying the impossibility to define any particular objective end-point of ‘sustainability’. This has methodological consequences for our potential contributions to transformative change. We reflect upon the ambiguous role of actors (including ourselves) involved in action-research processes and position our expected contributions to transformative change vis-à-vis potentially transformative actor coalitions.

Read the full open access paper here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2021.02.001.

Mathijs van Leeuwen, An Ansoms, Emery Mushagalusa Mudinga, Aymar Nyenyezi Bisoka, Rene-Claude Niyonkuru, Jonathan Shaw, Gemma van der Haar, Promoting land tenure security for sustainable peace — lessons on the politics of transformation, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, Volume 49, 2021, Pages 57-65.

Abstract: Literature on transformations to sustainability increasingly recognizes transformation as inherently political, but the field still struggles to study these politics. Our research project ‘Securing Tenure, Sustainable Peace?’ on efforts to localize land registration in conflict-affected settings, both illustrates and contributes to understanding the politics of transformation. Building on insights from political ecology/economy, legal and political anthropology, and the anthropology of conflict, we analyse the politics involved in (1) the overarching policy discourses that legitimize these interventions; (2) the competition around these programmes; and (3) the outcomes, or the risks and contradictory effects of these programmes. We present insights that we consider relevant to develop better conceptualizations of the politics of transformations in sustainability studies more broadly. In particular, we draw attention to the tendency of de-politicization, which involves the hiding in technical formats of what are in essence political choices; as well as the need to give attention to institutional competition and to risks involved and unexpected outcomes of transformation.

Read the full open access paper here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2021.02.012.

Eduardo S Brondizio, Krister Andersson, Fábio de Castro, Célia Futemma, Carl Salk, Maria Tengö, Marina Londres, Daiana CM Tourne, Taís S Gonzalez, Adriana Molina-Garzón, Gabriela Russo Lopes, Sacha MO Siani, Making place-based sustainability initiatives visible in the Brazilian Amazon, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, Volume 49, 2021, Pages 66-78.

Abstract: From state-based developmentalism to community-based initiatives to market-based conservation, the Brazilian Amazon has been a laboratory of development interventions for over 50 years. The region is now confronting a devastating COVID-19 pandemic amid renewed environmental pressures and increasing social inequities. While these forces are shaping the present and future of the region, the Amazon has also become an incubator of local innovations and efforts confronting these pressures. Often overlooked, place-based initiatives involving individual and collective-action have growing roles in promoting regional sustainability. We review the history of development interventions influencing the emergence of place-based initiatives and their potential to promoting changes in productive systems, value-aggregation and market-access, and governance arrangements improving living-standards and environmental sustainability. We provide examples of initiatives documented by the AGENTS project, contextualizing them within the literature. We reflect on challenges and opportunities affecting their trajectories at this critical juncture for the future of the region.

Read the full paper open access here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2021.03.007.

Kate Massarella, Anja Nygren, Robert Fletcher, Bram Büscher, Wilhelm A Kiwango, Sanna Komi, Judith E Krauss, Mathew B Mabele, Alex McInturff, Laila T Sandroni, Peter S Alagona, Dan Brockington, Robert Coates, Rosaleen Duffy, Katia M.P.M.B. Ferraz, Stasja Koot, Silvio Marchini, Alexandre R Percequillo, Transformation beyond conservation: how critical social science can contribute to a radical new agenda in biodiversity conservation, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, Volume 49, 2021, Pages 79-87.

Abstract: Multiple proposals for transforming biodiversity conservation have been put forward, yet critical exploration of how transformative change is conceptualised in this context is lacking. Drawing on transformations to sustainability scholarship, we review recent proposals for transformative change in biodiversity conservation, considering the suggested goals and means of transformation. We outline the crucial role for critical social scientific inquiry in transformative change by highlighting two core contributions. First, critical social science is an analytical device that politicises and pluralises debates and second, it can help facililitate the identification of transformative alternatives. We then show how such a critical social science approach is operationalised within the CONVIVA (Towards Convivial Conservation: Governing Human-Wildlife Interactions in the Anthropocene) project to pursue transformative change in biodiversity conservation.

Read the full open access paper here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2021.03.005.

Margreet Zwarteveen, Marcel Kuper, Cristian Olmos-Herrera, Muna Dajani, Jeltsje Kemerink-Seyoum, Frances Cleaver, Linnea Beckett, Flora Lu, Seema Kulkarni, Himanshu Kulkarni, Uma Aslekar, Lowe Börjeson, Andres Verzijl, Carolina Dominguez Guzmán, Maria Teresa Oré, Irene Leonardelli, Lisa Bossenbroek, Hind Ftouhi, Tavengwa Chitata, Tarik Hartani, Amine Saidani, Michelaina Johnson, Aysha Peterson, Sneha Bhat, Sachin Bhopal, Zakaria Kadiri, Rucha Deshmukh, Dhaval Joshi, Hans Komakech, Kerstin Joseph, Ebrania Mlimbila, Chris De Bont, Transformations to groundwater sustainability: from individuals and pumps to communities and aquifers, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability,
Volume 49, 2021, Pages 88-97,

Abstract: If the success of agricultural intensification continues to rely on the depletion of aquifers and exploitation of (female) labour, transformations to groundwater sustainability will be impossible to achieve. Hence, the development of new groundwater imaginaries, based on alternative ways of organizing society-water relations is highly important. This paper argues that a comparative documentation of grass-roots initiatives to care for, share or recharge aquifers in places with acute resource pressures provides an important source of inspiration. Using a grounded anti-colonial and feminist approach, we combine an ethnographic documentation of groundwater practices with hydrogeological and engineering insights to enunciate, normatively assess and jointly learn from the knowledges, technologies and institutions that characterize such initiatives. Doing this usefully shifts the focus of planned efforts to regulate and govern groundwater away from government efforts to control individual pumping behaviours, to the identification of possibilities to anchor transformations to sustainability in collective action.

Read the full open access paper here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2021.03.004.

Lyla Mehta, Shilpi Srivastava, Synne Movik, Hans Nicolai Adam, Rohan D’Souza, Devanathan Parthasarathy, Lars Otto Naess, Nobuhito Ohte, Transformation as praxis: responding to climate change uncertainties in marginal environments in South Asia, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, Volume 49, 2021, Pages 110-117.

Abstract: This paper provides some of the conceptual and methodological underpinnings being developed in the ongoing TAPESTRY project which is part of the Transformations to Sustainability (T2S) Programme. We debate how the notion of transformation may be conceptualized from ‘below’ in marginal environments that are especially marked by high levels of climate-related uncertainties. We propose the notion of transformation as praxis — where the focus is on bottom-up change, identities, wellbeing and the recovery of agency by marginalized people and explore how ‘patches’ and the ‘marginal’ offer critical conceptual templates to examine whether and how systemic transformative changes are being assembled and effected on the ground by hybrid and transformative alliances. The article concludes by discussing potential challenges of such engagements, alongside pursuing a normative and political approach to T2S.

Read the full paper open access here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2021.04.002.