Agri-food value chains (AFVCs) are exposed to compound, complex climatic, geopolitical, and market shocks, yet prevailing resilience frameworks treat the impact of these disruptions as linear, sector-specific, and primarily from a technical perspective. This paper challenges such assumptions through a comparative analysis of twelve disruptive shocks and the associated impact trajectories affecting diverse AFVCs. Drawing on available mixed qualitative and quantitative evidence, the study applies and refines an accessible Resilience-Impact Assessment Framework (RIAF) to explore how distinct disruptive shocks propagate across interconnected nodes (production, inputs, logistics, trade, and governance), generating cascading and often non-linear impact(s).The findings indicate that shock impacts and their trajectories are shaped less by the characteristics of the shock itself than by AFVC structure, institutional coordination, and the capacity to access buffering resources and implement adaptive responses. Highly concentrated, input-intensive, or weakly governed systems faced amplified disruptions cascading across nodes, whereas resilience emerged where redundancy, social capital, and polycentric governance absorbed shocks and enabled adaptive reorganisation. However, resilience was uneven across actors, places, and time. Indeed, AFVC operational continuity coincided with node-specific vulnerability for smallholders, marginalised producers, and other actors.By foregrounding these interdependencies and impact trajectories, this research advances a more nuanced conceptualisation of resilience within AFVCs. Methodologically, it demonstrates the value of combining node-based analysis with qualitative insights to capture both material disruptions and relational dynamics. Building resilient AFVCs requires shifting from reactive crisis management to anticipatory, inclusive, and institutionally grounded governance that reduces system fragility and existing inequalities while enabling transformative, agile adaptation.
Mangroves are socio-ecological systems increasingly central to international carbon sink-based mitigation agendas through initiatives such as REDD+ and blue carbon. Critical scholarship has examined the political economy, governance, and social impacts of carbon initiatives, yet the role of labour in shaping mitigation geographies remains underexplored. Drawing on interviews, document analysis, and observation in Cispatá Bay, a major blue carbon project in the Colombian Caribbean, I examine how historically situated labour practices and collective forms of social organization shape the uneven geographies of climate change mitigation. I show that carbon sink-based mitigation projects are grounded in long-standing labour regimes ranging from mangrove harvesting and canal maintenance to ecosystem restoration, through which mangleros (mangrove workers) have historically structured relations between communities, landscapes, and environmental governance. I argue that labour constitutes the foundational basis of territorial defence in Cispatá, and therefore, carbon sink-based mitigation depends on this ongoing labour and cannot be sustained without it. This paper contributes to critical debates on climate mitigation, showing how mitigation geographies are co-produced through labour regimes, territorial defence, and uneven power relations.
Resilience remains a central motif across environmental governance, yet has become deeply problematic. While critical scholarship highlights how resilience policy responsibilises citizens and depoliticises risk, emerging research demonstrates that resilience is frequently challenged, negotiated and reworked. However, less attention is paid to the specific modalities through which such contestation unfolds across everyday governance settings. Drawing on five years of longitudinal qualitative research (semi-structured interviews, participant observation) with three UK-based flood action groups, the paper extends these insights, reframing resilience not as a coherent neoliberal project but as an unsettled socio-political terrain shaped through struggle, resistance and negotiation. Extending repoliticised articulations of the concept, it develops a typology of contestation and resistance, revealing how communities actively repurpose and contest resilience. By challenging accounts portraying resilience as inevitable or internalised, the findings expose the fragility of "top-down" governance frameworks that assume compliance. These dynamics are traced over time, demonstrating how contestation is relational, evolving and situational, revealing insights largely absent from short-term studies. Through identifying the modalities by which such contestation unfolds, the paper foregrounds community agency, illuminating the everyday politics of adaptation. Ultimately, the analysis reveals resilience not as a neutral concept, but as a contested terrain of dissensus in which the meanings, responsibilities and practices of adaptation are continually negotiated.
Power asymmetries affect collaborative governance because they influence how actors access, interact, and benefit from collaboration. While the collaborative governance literature recognizes the role of power in shaping processes and outcomes, power is often narrowly defined through an actor-oriented perspective that centers human agency and interactions in participatory processes. This article examines how different dimensions of power —structural power, power-in-action, or designed power— interact to shape collaborative governance. Integrating power and collaborative governance theory and bridging diverse conceptualizations of power, this paper develops a framework and applyies it to California's groundwater governance reform. Drawing on 250 hours of participant observation, governance arrangement analysis, and 30 in-depth semi-structured interviews, the results reveal how structural power interacted with power-in-action through discourses and governance mechanisms to shape policy-design and implementation, replicating power asymmetries in newly created policy outputs (i.e., designed power). By integrating multiple dimensions of power into an analytical and practical framework, this paper extends analysis from a focus on process to consider how human agency is conditioned by antecedent socio-ecological conditions, and how new institutions deriving from collaborative governance processes can, in turn, shape broader socio-ecological systems.
The international climate policy regime is insufficient to achieve the Paris Agreement temperature target. Although Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes (ITMOs) aim to make mitigation more efficient, their unfettered use could weaken the domestic ambition of countries buying them and insufficiently compensate seller countries. To bolster ambition and align Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) with the Paris target, this paper proposes that a coalition of willing countries commit to additional rules governing ITMO use and NDC definition. Basic rules include the harmonization of NDC targets using a comparable metric and requiring that no ITMO be purchased from a country missing its NDC. Then, additional rules with increasing degrees of ambition are described. First, restrictions based on national assessments are discussed, in which coalition members commit not to buy ITMOs from countries with unambitious NDCs. Next, it is argued that NDCs should be assessed for the coalition as a whole rather than country-by-country. Participating countries would cooperate in determining their NDCs to ensure joint alignment with the Paris target and commit not to exchange ITMOs with countries outside the coalition. The article concludes that combining a tightly regulated ITMO coalition with ambitiously expanded Just Energy Transition Partnerships offers a viable pathway for effective international decarbonization.
The systemic marginalization of Indigenous and Local Knowledge (ILK) creates significant blind spots in conservation science, often obscuring the affective and cognitive signals of social-ecological decay. We introduce Expert Grief, a framework describing an epistemic paradox: the cognitive fisheries ecological knowledge that underpins livelihood resilience also amplifies affective distress in response to systemic environmental decline. Using a Philippines-based model system, we analyzed multi-decadal data from 448 artisanal fishers through a retrospective cross-sectional design and Linear Mixed-Effects Models (LMMs) to link shifts in cognitive fisheries baselines with affective livelihood satisfaction. Our results reveal a significant dual erosion, where a multi-decadal simplification of the fishery's trophic structure is mirrored by a concurrent decline in livelihood satisfaction (β = −0.44, p = 0.0012). Crucially, a significant interaction between fishing experience and time explains the Expert Grief paradox. Although the ILK of veteran fishers sustains their individual catch success (β = 0.006, p = 0.01), this deeper knowledge correlates with a steeper decline in livelihood satisfaction compared to novice fishers (β = −0.001, p = 0.02). The Expert Grief framework offers two theoretical advances: mechanistically defining the cognitive drivers of Shifting Baseline Syndrome (SBS) and characterizing an affective, knowledge-mediated form of solastalgia. Exposing this grief reveals that marginalizing local expertise obscures cumulative social-ecological decay and decouples technocratic conservation from the lived realities of those at the forefront of change. Ultimately, we demonstrate that epistemic justice is not just an ethical ideal but a fundamental prerequisite for effective and equitable conservation.
Territorial sustainability requires assessing whether LULC change remains within a context-specific safe and just space shaped by ecological potential, planning rules, and governance conditions. Doughnut-inspired frameworks offer an intuitive visualization of this space, but they are rarely operationalized for subnational rural planning or explicitly linked to land-use vocation. This article proposes the Territorial Sustainability Doughnut Model (TSDM), a multiscale interpretive framework that integrates land-use vocation, ecosystem-service trajectories, and field-based social evidence across vereda, municipal, and regional scales. The model is applied in Montes de María, Colombia, using multitemporal LULC analysis, agrological and zoning-based conflict diagnostics, and thirty-five semi-structured interviews with community and institutional actors. Results show localized ecosystem-service gains and stronger social conditions in some veredas, but these signals do not scale linearly upward. At the municipal and subregional levels, sustainability remains constrained by land tenure insecurity, institutional fragmentation, and persistent mismatches between observed land use and territorial vocation. Rather than statistically extrapolating social conditions, the TSDM synthesizes convergent spatial and qualitative evidence to interpret how land-use transitions reshape ecosystem-service bundles and social foundations under governance asymmetry. Spatial inputs were evaluated using class-wise classification, with F1-scores ranging from 0.73 to 0.87. Trustworthiness was strengthened through triangulation among LULC maps, zoning overlays, field observations, interviews, official documents, and participatory feedback. The case shows the value of a multiscale territorial approach and identifies political-institutional processes and temporal feedback as priorities for future applications.
Critical minerals are used in numerous technologies, including for energy transition, and there is increasing global attention to their production and supply chains. The concept of critical minerals potentially appeals across multiple registers, to those interested in security, economy, and environment. This paper analyzes the purported convergence of interests and existence of a critical minerals consensus, drawing from a case study of proposed new mines for nickel, copper, and cobalt in Minnesota. I focus on environmental groups and Tribal Governments, frequent opponents of mining projects, who would theoretically adopt supportive positions under a critical minerals consensus. The research reveals that these groups are broadly not changing their positions toward mining projects in response to critical minerals discourses. Instead, research participants questioned the links between critical minerals and green technology or environmental concerns. They contested the concept of mineral criticality across multiple facets, asking (1) whether the minerals in question are needed for energy transitions, (2) whether the mineral output would have significant impact, (3) whether the projects and their claims are realistic, and ultimately, (4) whether environmental impacts are justified. These results call into question the existence of a critical minerals consensus, particularly as environmental organizations and Tribal Governments felt that their interests were subjugated to those of security and economy. This suggests that policymakers should not expect critical minerals framing to diffuse opposition to mining developments.
A cross-disciplinary literature on just transitions shows that shifting to a lower-carbon economy can take jobs, tax revenues, and people from fossil-fuel-dependent communities. But few studies examine how pollution left by extractive industries may amplify and perpetuate losses. We conducted interviews with 39 stakeholders involved in remediating waterways polluted by abandoned coal mines in Pennsylvania, which once led coal production in the U.S. We find that, in our cases, water pollution acts as a “signal of neglect” that suppresses recreational use and economic activity and fosters pessimism among local residents. In our sample, communities with more social capital, defined by strong leadership and well-organized fishing and environmental networks, have successfully remediated numerous waterways. Although there was not deliberate coordination between remediation and economic development initiatives, participants report that cleaned waterways support emerging tourism and outdoor recreation industries. Our findings suggest that in some contexts, reversing signals of neglect can foster community optimism and local economic resilience. However, current policies to support waterway remediation depend on existing social capital and may therefore bypass socially-frayed communities. Our findings motivate policies to build grassroots capacity and to streamline remediation processes to reduce burdens on that capacity.
This article presents a novel critique of ecosystem service valuation (ESV) by problematizing the labor theory of value (LTV) that is inherent to the liberal economic framework from which it is derived. This discussion reveals that ESV and other approaches to valuing nature are based on two faulty and related elements: 1) a Cartesian dualism that posits humans and nature as distinct, which in turn leads to 2) the incomplete application of its own LTV. The result of both is that ESV casts the services that nature provides as “capital assets” rather than “reproductive labor”. Such an error is no minor piece of theoretical oversight. Rather, as this paper posits, this miscategorization of nature within ESV functions to invisibilize nature's vital reproductive labor, a process that parallels the invisibilization of other forms of labor such care, domestic, informal and unpaid labor under capitalism, which ultimately limits ESV's ability to address environmental challenges. The article concludes by exploring the theoretical and practical implications of conceptualizing the labor of nature in the context of climate change and a post-work/post-labor economy. Ultimately, we argue that a politics of redistribution is necessary, one which acknowledges the vital reproductive labor of both humans and nature and which aligns with many indigenous and non-Western conceptualizations of unified nature.
Reversing the loss and degradation of nature requires changes in how economies operate. However, economic models guiding policy fail to fully reflect nature's contributions to the economy as well as the economic and welfare consequences of ecosystem degradation. Here we review efforts to link ecosystem services (ES) models or estimates with Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models. We found that provisioning ES with clear market values (like timber and fish) are relatively often linked to CGE models, while regulating and cultural ES are less so. Moreover, studies typically consider only a few direct drivers of ES change, such as land use, which risks underestimating ecological and economic impacts of nature degradation. Most examples lack a temporal dimension and often examine single ES in single regions. We identify four ways forward towards more integrated Earth-economy modeling: 1) more comprehensive integration of ES in CGE models, 2) improving ES models to capture relevant ecological processes, 3) improving CGE models to better capture the consequences of changes in ES, and 4) improving the representation of direct drivers of biodiversity and ES change. Given the urgent and visible effects of environmental degradation, moving towards integrated Earth-economy models is essential to the design of sustainability policies.
Critical mineral supply chains face multiple vulnerabilities arising from high production concentration in a few countries, under multiple risks of geopolitical, technological, and socio-environmental pressures, making the quality of sustainability governance in these countries a decisive factor in global supply chain resilience. Current frameworks that use symmetric analysis across indicators (e.g., SDG dashboards, ESG indices) cannot detect directional interrelationships among sustainability governance domains. We analyse 43 sustainability indicators across 12 copper- and lithium-producing countries (2005–2021), covering 80% of global copper production and over 90% of lithium production, using Structural Paradox Diagnosis (SPD). SPD combines the Inner Composition Alignment (IOTA), a range-based method that detects monotonic directional relationships without linearity assumptions, with a complex network analysis. Our analysis identifies four structural patterns (paradoxes) that characterize governance challenges threatening supply chain resilience: (a) social indicators exhibit strong internal synergies yet systematically drive environmental trade-offs particularly on biodiversity indicators; (b) economic indicators operate in structural isolation from socio-environmental indicators, preventing feedback mechanisms that would signal emerging supply disruptions; (c) indicators lack cross-dimensional relationships, creating fragmentation where sectoral efficiency undermines systemic resilience; and (d) indicators exhibit context-dependent systemic roles across countries, requiring adaptive rather than standardized interventions. SPD is not merely addressing the symptoms, enabling differentiated governance strategies: global coordination frameworks for universal structural patterns, regional cooperation for systematic variations, and adaptive national implementation for context-dependent indicators.
The Greater Horn of Africa suffered the worst drought in >40 years between late 2020 and early 2023. Using a prospective, interdisciplinary unbalanced panel study between 2019-2024 among Daasanach pastoralists in northern Kenya, we measured the effects of and recovery from this drought in relation to experiential and objective measures. We examined water and food insecurity, coping and dietary strategies, and nutritional status among 515 adults and 384 children. Livestock herds dropped precipitously with little recovery by 2024. Individuals' consideration of moving due to water problems alongside experiential water and food insecurity scores increased substantially during the drought indicating severe distress but returned to pre-drought levels by 2024. The drought led to lower mobility, which continued post-drought for Daasanach and their remaining animals, indicating increased sedentarization. Milk intake declined drastically but rebounded by 2024. In contrast, meat intake declined and stayed lower a year post-drought, while consumption of previously stigmatized fish increased. As the drought progressed, nutritional status worsened. Children who consumed milk had significantly better nutritional status over time. Compared to men, women experienced greater levels of water and food insecurity and greater declines in adiposity at the drought's peak. Lower socio-economic standing was associated with worse outcomes except nutritional status over time. Overall, experiential measures of water and food insecurity recovered faster than livestock and nutrition, while shifts in livelihood and dietary strategies persisted post-drought. Policymakers should use these findings to inform drought mitigation plans as diversification of diet and livelihoods may help ameliorate negative impacts.
Resilience has become a dominant organizing principle in global environmental change research, climate governance, conservation, and sustainability planning, where it is commonly treated as a universally desirable and politically neutral objective. However, this assumption obscures a critical paradox: communities frequently resist interventions designed to enhance resilience, adaptation, and sustainability. This article argues that such resistance should not be interpreted as maladaptation, implementation failure, or opposition to environmental goals. Instead, it represents a rational and politically meaningful response to governance arrangements perceived as materially dispossessing, procedurally exclusionary, or epistemically unjust. Synthesizing insights from political ecology, environmental justice, critical development studies, and socio-environmental resistance studies, we develop a novel conceptual framework that reconceptualizes resistance as a generative form of environmental governance. Through a synthesis of evidence from carbon offset, conservation initiatives, climate adaptation policies, and urban sustainability interventions across diverse geographical contexts, we demonstrate how resistance emerges from structural power asymmetries, contested knowledge systems, and unequal distributions of environmental costs and benefits embedded within resilience-oriented governance. The study further shows that resistance functions as governance intelligence by revealing legitimacy deficits, epistemic exclusions, and risks of maladaptation that often remain invisible within technocratic approaches. Overall, this article advances a resistance-aware perspective on global environmental change. It contends that understanding why and when communities resist sustainability interventions is essential for developing more just, democratic, pluralistic, and socially grounded pathways toward environmental futures.
In both scholarly and policy spheres, the importance of international climate finance in enabling developing countries to mitigate and adapt to climate change is seen as vital. In recent years, studies tracking climate finance flows to developing countries have relied on self-reported data by developed countries on climate finance provided. However, there is limited understanding of what happens once climate finance is received by developing countries, how it is distributed, and what challenges exist in disbursing and using it nationally. We address these knowledge gaps by analyzing adaptation finance flows in Ethiopia. Using a mixed-methods approach, including analysis of a domestic aid dataset, document analysis, and interviews with national-level government officials and donors, we ask: (i) how is international adaptation finance flowing through existing institutional structures and processes; (ii) what is the extent and scope of international adaptation finance received by Ethiopia over the period of 2011–2023? and (iii) what challenges exist in governing these financial flows and with what consequences for oversight of adaptation finance received at the national level? Our findings identify the complex factors and dynamics shaping national-level adaptation finance governance in Ethiopia, including lack of sufficient coordination and institutional tensions. In concluding, we draw out implications for promoting transparency and accountability within developing countries for international adaptation finance utilization, particularly since current debates on climate finance focus on developed country provision of finance rather than domestic dynamics of finance received.
In 2024, global heating exceeded 1.5 °C for the first time. Paradoxically, as the climate crisis becomes ever more evident, climate change scepticism (CCS) has recently grown (rather than declined) in Germany, a high-emissions country with enormous responsibility. Past research has not systematically studied which social groups and characteristics are behind this shift. We address this gap by examining the social structure of rising CCS in Germany, taking its multidimensionality into account. Drawing on GESIS Panel data that is representative of the German adult population, we detect a strong and consistent increase across a comprehensive set of 14 CCS indicators between 2022 and 2023. We find that this rise in scepticism is not driven by a small and ‘loud’ minority but rather constitutes a mass phenomenon: on average across all items, CCS increased among 59% of respondents, and for 93% of respondents at least one indicator rose. Regression models reveal a complex picture with socio-structural effects depending on the dimension of CCS, but right-wing political orientation, government distrust, and hierarchical worldviews are most consistently associated with increases in CCS. Overall, political attitudes – which are flexible and have shifted substantially in recent years – relate far more strongly to rising CCS than stable socio-structural factors like income or gender. These findings demonstrate an urgent need to restore trust in political institutions and to foster inclusive, participatory climate dialogue to secure broad public support for the transition towards a carbon-neutral society.
As conventional chemical methods of weed control come under increasing scrutiny, the agri-tech industry has turned to artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics to combat the evolving ‘weed problem’. However, the intervention of AI and robotics into agricultural weed management in this ‘post-herbicide’ era poses new questions for human-weed relations. Although attention has been paid to the social and ethical impacts of agricultural AI and robotics in general, there has been less focus on its nonhuman impacts, in particular, the consequences for weed and plant life. Therefore, this paper examines AI and robotic agricultural weed systems and asks how it reproduces new biopolitical norms for human-weed relations under changing technological conditions. I review the literature on AI and robotic weed technologies, in addition to broader social science scholarship of weeds, to argue that the turn to AI and robotics is a biopolitical move that reconfigures the capital-colonial categorisation of agricultural weeds and thus forecloses sustainable agri-futures. I demonstrate how AI and robotics reshape biopolitical norms of weeds based on a logic of immunity which works to program weeds as ‘bare life’ and, in turn, displace agricultural care towards digital infrastructures via precision traps. In doing so, I briefly propose relations with weeds through an affirmative biopolitics to unsettle the technocratic categorisations of weeds and make visible their status as vital beings for collaborative and multispecies futures.
The ability to project migration flows is important to government planners at multiple scales as they balance challenging tradeoffs in social infrastructure investments amid changing populations and escalating climate risks. Simulation methods such as agent-based modeling have generated important insights about the non-linear ways in which climate shocks may reshape migration decision-making processes. However, these approaches have previously demonstrated limited ability to account for how climate risks may shape migration decisions through changes to individuals’ long-term livelihood aspirations. Here, we develop an agent-based model of livelihood decisions in Senegal, one of Africa’s fastest-growing populations and economies, in which human capital investments – including migration and post-secondary education – emerge endogenously from agents’ dynamic livelihood aspirations. In doing so, we incorporate theoretical insights from the migration aspirations-capabilities framework to simulate how individuals weigh near-term investments against long-term opportunities. In collaboration with migration and development experts, we apply the model to assess how two of West Africa’s most significant climate risks, droughts and sea level rise, influence human capital investments at individual, regional, and national scales. We find that climate shocks alter both the timing and nature of human capital investments and shift population distributions. Notably, an interior crescent that has not typically served as a migration destination – including the departments of Podor, Nio du Rop, Sedhiou, and Kolda – emerges as a key safety corridor for migrants from climate-vulnerable coastal and rural zones. Further, we find that migration and access to higher education significantly improve resilience to short- and medium-term climate shocks, increasing individual incomes by 40 to 250 percent across different scenarios. Our findings demonstrate the value of integrating a livelihood aspirations framework with modeling tools to understand the long-term consequences of climate shocks on migration and economic outcomes. These insights can inform targeted investments in improved access to education and mobility to build resilience to these shocks.
