In Europe, widespread projectification has led to sustainability transitions increasingly being enacted through projects. While projects have been seen as spaces in which multiple actors from different levels of society can interact to accelerate transitions, this paper examines the deeper implications for transition work that arise from relying on the project form. Drawing on an assemblage-topological lens, it analyses regional transition projects in northern Europe to explore the spatial work of project-making, showing how heterogeneous elements are drawn into relational proximity and held there, as well as how relations are forged across dispersed initiatives. The paper examines transition projects centred around wild berries in Västerbotten, Sweden. Through an analysis of project documents and interviews with project and case leaders, as well as related actors, it reveals projectified transitions to be dynamic and contested processes whose effects emerge from the spatial labour that continually shapes the scope and composition of transition projects. Furthermore, it shows that transitions are not driven by projects per se, but also by the relational practices through which actors pool resources and mobilise connections across multiple project configurations to enact transitions despite fragmentation. By tracing how transitions emerge from the spatial work required to assemble relations that operate within, across, between, and despite projects, this paper shows that transition work does not unfold through the mere execution of project plans, but rather through ongoing efforts to navigate the affordances and constraints of a projectified funding landscape.
Scientific developments in genetic modification (GM) are rapidly forging ahead, bringing both calls to enable their possibilities, but also concerns of potential harm. At a time of technological and regulatory change, we analyse thirty years of public debate on GM in Aotearoa New Zealand to better understand the trajectory of public discourse. Drawing on analysis over 1,648 texts, primarily media articles, from the early 1990s to the present, we trace the evolution of arguments by proponents and opponents of the technology across four consistent domains of debate: economy and environment; science and morality; risk and regulation; and democracy and freedom. We identify three discursive processes: ‘convergence’, in which proponents and opponents have both mobilised dominant western, neoliberal, and technocratic values to different ends; ‘absence’, relating to periods where both sides have not engaged with certain topics (proponents have de-emphasised economic arguments, while opponents have steered clear of ethical arguments); and ‘capture’, in which proponents have gradually claimed a broad range of arguments, with opponents occupying a relatively narrow discursive space. We argue these discursive processes have contributed to narrowly framed debate about GM and call attention to silences in public discourse, notably shallow discussion of societal, ethical, and cultural concerns.
This article examines the coexistence of expanding fossil-fuel extraction and ambitious energy transition initiatives in Africa through a case study of Ghana. Against narratives that cast decarbonisation and extraction as mutually exclusive trajectories, it explores how climate commitments and hydrocarbon development are increasingly pursued simultaneously. The article addresses a central puzzle: why would a country that has only recently become an oil producer embrace energy transition agendas that appear to challenge a resource widely regarded as a pathway to development? Drawing on interviews, archival ethnography, policy analysis, and stakeholder workshops conducted between 2023 and 2025, I argue that energy transition is not simply a technical process of decarbonisation but a moral and political project through which the contemporary petro-state is being reconstituted. Developing the concepts of performative governance and the integrative state, the article shows how transition frameworks, stakeholder consultations, and climate commitments function as practices of legitimacy-making through which state actors reconcile competing claims concerning development, energy justice, national sovereignty, and climate responsibility. Rather than displacing extraction, energy transition frequently generates new forms of legitimacy for its continuation, embedding fossil fuels within broader narratives of national progress and future-making. By foregrounding the moral foundations of state authority, the article contributes to debates on energy transition, climate governance, political ecology, and the transformation of petro-statehood in the Global South.
Science and policy have increasingly spotlighted the socio-economic and environmental issues associated with food waste, emphasizing the need for its reduction. Although normative frameworks like the waste hierarchy have been established, e.g. at the EU level, fragmented regulatory landscapes regarding surplus food persist. This study examines how stakeholders in the UK and Germany navigate the legal challenges of food waste donation and redistribution. By applying a legal geographies lens, we analyse empirical data from 19 semi-structured interviews with civil society initiative representatives, volunteers, and retailers, conducted in 2017–18 and 2024, as well as UK, EU, and German legislation and policy. Our findings highlight the complicating legal pluralisms, interlegalities, and (in)formal aspects of food waste regulation across time and space. In light of crises such as Brexit and COVID-19, the analysis exposes how legislation inadequately addresses barriers like liability concerns, financial incentives, and operational challenges. It reveals gaps and legal grey zones in British, German, and EU governance, where food donation occurs under ambiguous conditions. By exploring how different actors perceive, interpret, and navigate these circumstances, the study addresses associated moral dilemmas, risks, and unofficial consensuses. Our research offers actionable insights for food-saving actors and policymakers, aiming to bridge the gap between legal intent and practice, foster sustainable food systems, and promote edible food saving on the path towards achieving zero waste.
This article is an attempt to understand the changing relationship between the borderland inhabitants and the Kushiyara River, a transboundary river that divides Assam (India) and Sylhet (Bangladesh). The relationship is increasingly marked by anxieties and obstructions arising from the construction of new border fencing along the India-Bangladesh border. Focusing on the riparian stretch of the Kushiyara in south Assam, the study highlights how this river acts as a dynamic force in reshaping mobility and livelihoods throughout the borderland. Furthermore, the article situates the borderland of south Assam within the broader context of Northeast India, showing how borderlands here are shaped by their distinctive geography, ethnic composition, and regional political dynamics. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the article reveals how border fencing has reconfigured pre-existing mobility patterns, giving rise to a precarious form of mobility and to continuous negotiation with state actors embedded in the everyday lives of borderland inhabitants.
In this paper we take inspiration from geographies of volume to consider the drivers effecting tree canopy expansion in two Australian cities: Melbourne and Darwin. Presenting empirical material collected via semi-structed interviews with city residents and urban forest workers labouring with the urban forest, we contribute qualitative understanding about efforts to expand urban forests, understanding that has predominantly been captured through a quantitative lens. In so doing, we consider the vegetal politics of urban forestry practices that contrast with imaginations of bounded city space presented in policy, and which challenge efforts to increase tree canopy volume. To do this, we draw on cultural geographic and feminist accounts of volume as ‘immersive’ and ‘inhabited’ to highlight the intersecting geographies of tree and human lives in the city. Thinking with volume is valuable in this context because it attunes us to the relations from which emotion laden contestations arise. These contestations are important to consider because they pose challenges to urban forest expansion, a recognised climate change adaptation response. Our analysis also brings non-human considerations into the volumetric city. We foreground how trees transgress and influence other urban spaces. Such transgressions can incite violence towards the urban forest, which in turn, spurs urban forestry practices that foster gentleness to increase affirmative human feelings for city trees. Taking note of such practices, we contend that urban forest policies need to account for material and metaphorical volumes of arboreal life.
As global renewable energy (RE) capacity continues its unprecedented expansion, green extractivism and energy justice (EJ) have become increasingly pressing concerns, both in critical political ecology-inspired studies and where lower-carbon energy (LCE) infrastructures touch down in particular places and everyday lives. Here we focus on the justice implications of LCE transitions and the processes by which they are produced specifically in pastoralists’ lands and communities. We argue that these remain relatively marginalised in current scholarship, despite pastoral drylands globally becoming targets for roll-out of large-scale LCE, facilitated by intersection of their environmental characteristics and the livelihood strategies, land rights and relations of their occupants, and underpinned by re-emergent discourses of empty, degraded wastelands. The aim of this paper is to enhance critical understanding of EJ in pastoralist communities and through this to advance current debates on EJ principles and meanings and the role of non-Western norms, place and land relations therein. Our two-stage study draws on systematic desk-based analysis of pastoralist case studies globally and on secondary and empirical material from Kenyan and Mongolian case studies. It utilises Sovacool’s (2021) ‘4Es’ framework to examine the subtleties of how enclosure, exclusion, encroachment and entrenchment operate in these contexts, and links these to the production of particular energy-related injustices. We highlight the importance of non-Western, place-based meanings of EJ, grounded in local land relations and of contested concepts of consent, including Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) as critical in refining EJ principles and in shaping prospects for locally owned, just energy transitions.
This article draws on the case of Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital, to explore how infrastructure-based urban resilience projects shape the political subjectivities of the urban poor in development contexts. It develops the heuristic tool of infrastructural subjectivity to illuminate how flood-resilient infrastructure mediates residents’ agency, sense of self, and relationship with the state. The article argues that infrastructural subjectivities in Antananarivo are highly ambivalent and characterized by a tension between the poor’s desire for inclusion in the state and their refusal of the intermittent forms of citizenship they are offered. These subjectivities, which build on the experience of requesting and waiting for infrastructure and the emotions of disillusionment, hope, and fear that accompany it, play an important role in determining forms of political mobilization and, consequently, in shaping the outcomes of climate resilience projects. By bridging debates on infrastructure, resilience, citizenship and affects in geography, the article ultimately suggests that infrastructural subjectivity offers a fruitful lens for exploring the complex subjectivities and state-society relations that emerge from the interactions between resilience projects, structural relations of power and individual trajectories in cities of the Global South and beyond.
This paper examines how power relations of actors shape (socio-technical) transition processes. While transition studies increasingly emphasize the relevance of agency for change, the role of power remains insufficiently understood, particularly at the micro level and in regional contexts. We develop a conceptual framework that integrates the transition work perspective with a relational understanding of power, distinguishing between power over, power with and power to, and attending to how actors’ resources, strategies and capabilities enable or constrain transition work. The paper contributes to the geography of sustainability transitions literature by offering a lens to analyze the multi-scalar geographies of power in transition work and to explain how regional transition trajectories are conditioned by these dynamics. Empirically, we investigate the emerging transition towards bio-based construction in South Westfalia (Germany). Conceptualizing this as a regional transition field, we focus on the materials used, the key actors involved and the regional conditions that shape change. The study builds on a qualitative content analysis of interviews with stakeholders in the (bio-based) construction sector. Our analysis reveals how different power constellations underpin specific forms of transition work, and how the spatiality of power relations influences dynamics in the regional transition field. We observe that power is a constitutive element of transition work rather than a mere context factor and is manifested in all forms of transition work. Moreover, our geographically sensitive perspective highlights that regional transition work is conditioned by, and interacts with, multi-scalar power constellations involving both regional and supra-regional (sometimes place-less) actors.
This paper develops an analysis of assisted migration, a controversial proposal to move endangered species beyond their native range to follow current or projected climatic shifts, as a technology for ecosystem engineering and a discourse mobilising terraforming imaginaries. Terraforming serves as a metaphorical lens through which the manipulation of space and landscape via managed biomobilities can be foregrounded, and the rhetoric and experimental attempts of conservation biologists and ecologists engaged as sketches for multiple alternative natures and version of Earth yet to come. It shows how assisted migration develops in the context of simultaneously threatened and proliferating nonhuman migration and how, in response to the challenging weirding of anthropogenic ecologies, it has shifted from providing refugia to single threatened species to an ecosystem engineering technology. As a mobility- and landscape-modifying proposal, assisted migration projects are marked by baselining strategies that engage a variety of planetary pasts to legitimate future interventions, providing different visions of what a recreated, anthropogenic “Earth-likeness” might mean on a compromised planet. The paper identifies three contemporary and emerging modes of conjuring different Earths in assisted migration experiments: an eco-modernist reliance on the tools of industrial landscape management, an eco-spectral conjuring of past geological and climatic versions of the planet, and an eco-continuist mobilisation of past and discredited processes of Indigenous landscape modifications.
Geographical scholarship has begun to read resilience conjuncturally — as a contested terrain on which states, communities, and other actors compose, justify, and contest different futures. Building on this orientation, we develop an Indigenous Sámi-centred account of naturecultural resilience that keeps dispute and affective attachment in view. Drawing on Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s justification theory and Thévenot’s sociology of regimes of engagement (SRE), we propose that resilience can be analyzed as interactions between valuations and functional layers of life. We illustrate the approach through Sámi engagements with wolverine politics in Finland, showing how predator protection and compensation schemes may strengthen resilience in one such layer while undermining it elsewhere. We close by reflecting on the implications of the Sámi case and our proposed approach for geographical resilience studies and for SRE theory.
This article assesses the process of committeefication and its potential for planning and redeveloping slums and informal settlements. Grounded in critical literatures on co-production and governance spaces, it analyzes four community development committees (CDCs) established in two internationally funded programs by the World Bank and UN-Habitat in the rapidly urbanizing city of Accra, Ghana. Drawing on surveys, interviews, and focus group discussions, the article shows that the raison d’être of the CDCs was to help mobilize diverse stakeholders, provide robust socio-technical inputs to engineers and consultants, and facilitate the collective production of knowledge. However, they faced numerous challenges, including limited incentives and remuneration, unclear selection criteria for representatives, partisan politicization, and elite capture. The findings reveal that the CDCs maneuvered both soft, fluid spaces and hard, technocratic spaces. This mix shows that in reality, CDCs navigated a hybrid governance and planning landscape. I find that a hybrid space is indeed the right orientation to unlock the CDC’s potential, but its particularities require re-imagination. I term this ‘governance within and beyond the state.’ This space should possess soft elements, i.e., allow CDCs to remain outside nested, rigid, and political institutional structures, serving as an arena for collaboration across different territories and scales. Yet, to be resilient and maintain legitimacy, some degree of hardness is required: that is, anchored to state or civil society funding streams, technical oversight, and accountability safeguards.
In the current period, young people face multiple challenges in the labour market related to the rise of precarious work, but also hardships tied to housing affordability, homelessness and mental health. Age-related oppression intersects with inequality tied to gender identity and expression, as well as race, sexuality, citizenship status and disability, deepening experiences of marginalization. Work integration social enterprises (WISEs) assist young people in navigating some of these challenges. WISEs are social enterprises that provide a paid work and training experience, developing a range of hard and soft skills. These programs build networks that help integrate young people into the work force, while offering a variety of wrap-around supports. In this paper, we examine the ways WISEs help young people in Toronto, Canada. We explore the role they play as learning, support and social spaces, arguing that within these sites, young people develop pathways to disrupt temporal and spatial insecurities associated with a stalled future.
This paper examines the role of the housing sector as a form of ‘migration infrastructure’ which shapes the experiences of internationally mobile students. Drawing on survey and interview data collected in Scotland’s two largest cities, Glasgow and Edinburgh, the study repositions housing access as a core but thus far neglected component of arrival and wider migration infrastructures. The paper conceptualises housing policies, markets and brokers as infrastructures that do not only mediate but also actively produce mobility experiences and the inequalities that arise from them. In doing so, it builds on existing scholarship that calls for a shift in the focus of migration infrastructure debates towards the systems that structure and differentiate migrants’ experiences after arrival. Empirically, we present data that shows how housing markets, brokers, and related services and networks encountered by migrants continue to shape their everyday lives long after they arrive in the receiving country. The study documents how actors such as landlords; regulatory infrastructures such as national or university housing policies; non-profit services such as university support services; and social infrastructures such as migrant networks all mediate access to housing, often generating conditions of precarity. These infrastructures expose less affluent students to discrimination, exploitative housing practices, and exclusion, contributing to the emergence of a ‘two-tier’ housing system that significantly influences the socio-ontological dimensions of student mobility.
Urban leisure spaces may be formally open while remaining unevenly accessible, usable and appropriable in practice. This article examines how formal openness acquires practical meaning through a comparison of Dounia Park in Algiers and the Mediterranean Urban Garden in Oran. The study draws on eight observation sessions, 36 semi-structured interviews conducted in Algerian Arabic and documentary contextualisation. It distinguishes four related but non-interchangeable dimensions—formal accessibility, practical access, use and appropriation—and reconstructs two relational mechanisms grounded in the cases. At Dounia, conditional inclusion links demanding non-car journeys and advance planning to prolonged stays, spatial adaptation, selective positioning and contrasting interpretations of remoteness. At Oran, framed sociability connects neighbourhood proximity and uneven metropolitan travel with waterfront routines, climatic timing, reported management encounters and negotiated copresence. Neither mechanism denotes categorical exclusion, uniform inclusion or a fixed sequence of experience. Instead, both show how mobility, time, spatial resources and everyday interactions shape what visitors can sustain after formal entry. The comparison contributes an explanatory rather than typological account of publicness. It shows that practical difficulty does not necessarily prevent intensive appropriation, just as proximity does not guarantee that every activity can be maintained under equal conditions. The mechanisms are therefore offered as bounded comparative explanations and as questions for research in other urban contexts, rather than as universal models of public space.
The Wadden Sea and its islands are characterized by their mobility, which people have been living with and struggling against since the islands were formed. This paper identifies the ways in which ontological land/sea and human/nature borders shape how human and more-than-human mobilities are governed on the Wadden Islands. Governance frameworks in coastal sandscapes (re)affirm these ontological borders materially and conceptually through physical infrastructure, regulatory measures, and mapping. We apply mobility regimes and (b)ordering to understand how the interactions and entanglements of human and more-than-human mobilities are governed. Using empirical data from 19 weeks of ethnographic fieldwork on and near the Dutch Wadden Islands of Ameland and Schiermonnikoog, we examine the ways in which the ontological borders embedded in mobility regimes create (mis)alignments between coastal and environmental governance frameworks and local material and social ontologies. We argue that a shift to more relational, more-than-human sedimentary ontologies can more closely align governance with the social and material realities of coastal sandscapes.
