This paper engages with the persistent discourse of the 'feminisation of vulnerability' by focusing on chars (unstable river islands) of Assam, Northeast India. Building on growing feminist political ecology literature and through ethnographic analysis, it highlights how mainstream policy and development frameworks often homogenise women and their vulnerability. Instead of viewing women as passively burdened, the paper sees vulnerability as co-produced by class struggles and global agricultural practices - shaped by household and reproductive roles, and intertwined with religious and moral discipline. Bringing the concept of social reproduction to the centre, the study shows that the ecological crisis not only increases hardship but also redesigns gender norms and power relations for both women and men, reshaping the daily work of sustaining life, meaning, and relationships under conditions of systemic breakdown. Overall, the paper advocates for situating women within intersectional realities, shifting the focus from passive vulnerability to relational power, agency, and situated knowledge amidst socio-ecological change.
Neoliberal conservation is enjoying its latest zenith in the form of 'biodiversity finance'. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) seeks to close a biodiversity finance 'gap' of $700 billion per year, and emphasises the role of private finance in meeting this goal. The endurance of neoliberal conservation is rooted in often unseen negotiations of knowledge and power; hence it is crucial to understand how material futures are being shaped by discourse. Here we draw on twenty-nine (29) interviews with Australian biodiversity finance professionals to interrogate the main discourses driving post-GBF neoliberal conservation in Australia, consider how they shape power and material realities, and suggest potential avenues for disruption of harmful biodiversity futures. Using a diverse theoretical apparatus consisting of poststructuralism, feminist theory, and regulatory theory, we identify two primary discursive themes in the data: innovation and regulation. Discourses centred on innovation obfuscate the material losses and death enabled by biodiversity markets and empower the expert knowledge and elite networks of the often-male 'innovators'. The salience of regulation discourses highlights an opportunity for re-centring regulatory purpose towards biodiversity protection rather than market creation, and the Taskforce on Nature-Related Financial Disclosures as a source of fear and locus for potential disruption.
Green finance, once heralded as a pragmatic tool for aligning capitalism with climate action, is now accused of being 'woke'. While the social sciences have been strong on the critique of market-based environmental policy, we argue that the current political context calls for greater scholarly attention to how social and ecological change unfolds through the implementation of green financial instruments. Following a review of key literature on green finance, we highlight the social determinism embedded in the ways we study green financial markets and propose four research agendas that environmental sociologists are well-positioned to explore: 1) the ways of knowing and the epistemic settings that govern and organise financial actions; 2) the ways of value-ing and colonial legacies that have endured in the selection of which values matter to markets; 3) Global-local market-making effects and what new market configurations have emerged in local places and 4) Genderedness in greening finance and potential (dis)empowering effects feminising 'greenness'. We argue that the culture war waged on green finance should not deter us from critical analyses but rather energise a more defined intellectual agenda for environmental sociology.
Extractivism produces material and social fractures that deepen when industries enter into crisis. This article examines the collapse of the coal industry in Lebu (coastal Chile) and the productive transitions that followed, showing how they reconfigured, without overcoming, the region's longstanding socioeconomic marginalization. Drawing on a critical analysis of the local press (1994-2008), treated as a cultural text that reveals community narratives of risk, abandonment, and resistance, the study reconstructs the situated experience of the crisis and its subsequent mutation toward new forms of extractivism. Combining Mbembe's framework of brutalism with political ecology offers a novel reading of how dynamics of fracture and fissure are reterritorialized in post-coal economies, while communities develop practices of suturing and repair in the face of structural precarity. The findings show that the shift from coal to fishing, tourism, and - above all - the forestry industry did not constitute a just diversification, but rather the continuation of extractive metabolism under new forms of dispossession. The Lebu case illustrates how local discourses illuminate the materialities of slow violence and persistent inequalities in Global South territories, contributing a situated perspective for critically analyzing energy transitions and their socio-ecological impacts.
This study examines how parents in England interpret and respond to environmental and climate news, and how these engagements shape emotional experiences and everyday parenting practices. Using a longitudinal qualitative design utilising semi-structured interviews and WhatsApp diaries, the paper explores how parents negotiate environmental news within broader emotional climates marked by anxiety, uncertainty, and constrained agency. While participants widely recognised climate change as urgent and morally significant, reporting that was abstract, episodic, or sensationalised often felt distant, overwhelming, and difficult to translate into meaningful action. Parents were more responsive to local and solution-oriented forms of reporting that enabled tangible forms of care, agency, and role-modelling within family life. Engagement with environmental news was shaped by parents' dual role as both individuals and caregivers responsible for children's futures, producing ongoing forms of emotion work and emotional reflexivity through which participants negotiated tensions between responsibility, concern, and limited feelings of control. The findings contribute to the sociology of emotions by showing how climate-related anxieties are socially mediated through parental identities, moral expectations, and everyday practices. The paper concludes by arguing for more sustained, locally relevant, and actionable forms of environmental reporting capable of fostering meaningful public engagement with climate and environmental issues.
Illegal factories on farmland represent one of Taiwan's most persistent environmental governance challenges. This article examines how civic actors Thaubing Footprints confronted this issue through data activism. In 2020, the group used Taiwan's Presidential Hackathon as an entry point to demand data transparency and to challenge regulatory loopholes on farmland factories. During and after the hackathon, activists integrated datasets from multiple ministries and extended their advocacy into the public sphere to sustain policy pressure. The article conceptualizes this process as data repoliticization. Data repoliticization consists of three mutually reinforcing processes: data reassembly, interpretive contestation, and data arena shifting. Through these processes, civic actors expose inconsistencies across data infrastructures and mobilize them to challenge established practices of environmental governance. This article adopts a document-based qualitative analysis informed by practical experience. Building on this approach, the article analyzes the processes and mechanisms through which civic data activism influences environmental policy. In doing so, it contributes to scholarship on data activism and environmental justice.
This article explores the role of reflexivity in shaping how individuals engage with consumption reduction. We shed light on how 'reducers' -those who deliberately strive to limit their consumption-reflect on their practices, emotions, and identities in everyday life. Building on Archer's modes of reflexivity and Davidson's climate emotion framework, we investigate how internal conversations influence both motivations and strategies for reducing consumption. The study draws on a qualitative design involving 25 Swedish participants committed to consumption reduction. The findings reveal that individuals engage in reflexive work to different degrees and in diverse ways. Some rely on communicative reflexivity, seeking external validation and adjusting their practices to align with social expectations. Others demonstrate meta-reflexivity, critically questioning prevailing norms and their own contradictions, while several practice autonomous reflexivity, independently developing and sustaining reduction strategies. These varied reflexive orientations shape how participants balance ethical aspirations, social pressures, and emotional sustainability in their everyday negotiations of consumption.
In Commerce City, Colorado, the Suncor Oil Refinery routinely releases pollutants that disproportionately impact the community surrounding the facility. In the absence of state intervention, women-led organizing has mobilized, calling for justice and accountability. Cultivando, an Indigenous women-led grassroots organization serving Latine and Indigenous migrant communities in Adams County, facilitates activism and advocacy efforts. Drawing on 53 in-depth interviews with community members, this article examines: (1) the roles women play in organizing intersectional EJ activism in communities impacted by the Suncor refinery; (2) how their multi-scalar activism embodies Pellow's critical EJ pillars; and (3) how this activism advances community care and procedural and restorative justice, while challenging petro-hegemony. We argue that the organizations and systems of community care that women build and sustain facilitate multiscalar, critical EJ action. Cultivando's strong community presence, commitment to procedural and restorative justice, and role in inspiring sustained women-led activism for EJ exemplifies CEJ and offers a model for other community-based organizations.
In this article, we explore the ways in which urban dwellers understand and relate to 'the environment'. Conceptualisations of 'the environment' deserve attention due to its elusive character, and due to the unbalanced relationship between humans and non-humans where understandings of 'the environment' shape human actions in relation to the non-human. The study takes a Constructivist Grounded Theory approach and is based on 35 semi-structured interviews conducted with people living in and around Gothenburg, Sweden. We conceptualise ways of understanding and relating to 'the environment' as environmental relationalities spanning from divisions and disconnections to connections and interdependencies, stances that exist alongside ambivalences and contradictions. Rather than approaching these as fixed categories, we suggest that environmental relationalities are best understood as a dynamic continuum where understandings and relations are constantly in the process of coming into being. Despite dualistic understandings of human/environment being prevalent in our findings, these exist alongside more interdependent understandings of humans as part of 'the environment'. We reflect on how referring to something as 'the environment' is problematic as it tends to reproduce human/environment divisions and contend that environmental relationalities have the potential to move towards less divisive perspectives due to their dynamic character.
