The concept of development has deeply divided the social sciences concerned with peoples and earth’s future. For many researchers and practitioners, variants of development are crucial normative cornerstones to frame and guide research and policy. Many critical scholars and activists associate the term with colonial, capitalist, extractivist, and patriarchal threats, and see it as the root cause of environmental degradation. In short, some study development as a solution, others as the problem. I call this rift the Development Studies Divide. After tracing diverse disciplinary roots, I discuss where the fault lines run and whether fruitful frictions could enrich the future of (critical) development studies. Despite stark differences in ideological, epistemological, and conceptual orientations, there is room for mutual learning, specifically across methodologies. A reflexive integration of critical perspectives with quantitative methods can substantiate critical claims beyond isolated case studies, address them at larger scales, and generate robust knowledge on alternatives to development beyond largely theory-driven proposals. It could also correct global empirical analyses that become problematic when their assumptions and interpretations are not grounded in the diverse histories, worldviews, and values of non-Western realities.

Tackling the ecological crisis requires land-based conservation and renewable energy projects, yet many face local opposition. In this context, ‘green grabbing’ —the appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends— has become a significant global concern. As the ecological transition gains momentum, this phenomenon is expected to intensify across sectors and regions. To understand why such projects may fail to obtain a social license to operate, we analysed 132 conflictive projects developed under green credentials to examine their impacts on human rights, equity, and environmental problem shifting, as well as the social responses they provoked. Paradoxically, 85

. Tropical and subtropical forests and savannas support millions of forest-dependent people. These ecosystems are under rising pressure from deforestation, primarily due to agricultural expansion. Yet, a large proportion of agriculture-driven deforestation does not lead to productive land use afterwards, potentially because of speculative, halted, or abandoned land investment projects. Our understanding of such apparently failed projects, their links to deforestation, and their impact on local people, however, remains limited. Here, focusing on failed land investment projects in tropical and subtropical woodlands (i.e., forests and savannas), we aim to understand how these projects failed, how they led to deforestation, and how access to land for local communities changed after failure. We identified and reviewed cases of failed projects that led to deforestation sourced from a systematic literature review and global databases on land investments and environmental conflicts. Our results show that resistance to land investment projects was the most common determinant of failure, suggesting prevailing misalignment of investments with local needs. We identified various configurations on how failed projects are linked to woodland loss, ranging from land clearing for an eventually abandoned project to illegal timber harvesting. Most of the projects targeted areas used by local, forest-dependent communities. Despite failure, some of these communities lost access to lands in the process, indicating that even failed projects can result in land grabs. Our multi-case analysis revealed the pivotal roles played by governments, socioeconomic agendas, and investors in these complex predicaments. This emphasizes the need to learn from failed projects to reevaluate priorities in land governance, enhance government enforcement capabilities, and adopt a more inclusive and comprehensive approach that amplifies local voices and safeguards tropical and subtropical woodlands.

Wind energy is one of the European Union's key assets for addressing the climate crisis. However, insufficient attention has been paid to the consequences of the End-Of-Life (EOL) of wind turbines. While various options exist for managing waste, none effectively address the non-recyclability of wind blades. Although the literature has explored this problem from different angles, it has not yet been analysed through an environmental justice lens. This paper identifies the potential environmental justice implications of wind waste management in EU member states. Through a systematic literature review and qualitative analysis of 47 cases, we examine the issue from distributive, recognitional, procedural, and legislative perspectives. Our findings indicate that the industry frequently refers to technical challenges as a pretext to delay effective waste management. Local voices and knowledge are frequently disregarded, raising concerns about recognition and participation. Finally, the lack of specific and harmonised legislation on EOL may contribute to an unequal distribution of burdens. These dynamics exemplify forms of environmental injustice and reinforce existing power imbalances. The insights offered in this paper aim to support a more just energy transition in Europe.Key policy highlightsBlade waste from EOL processes is expected to increase substantially with wind energy expansion.The lack of recyclability of the blade materials creates important waste management issues for the wind industry.Poor waste management can be a catalyst for environmental justice concerns.There is a lack of specific and harmonised legislation on EOL processes in the European Union.A socially just energy transition in Europe must address the growing concern of wind blade waste.

Informal waste pickers play a critical role in urban waste management in the Global South, often serving as primary actors of recycling. Despite this, they face increasing socio-economic exclusion and environmental injustice. This article examines the drivers of environmental conflicts involving waste pickers in Global South cities, drawing on 70 cases from the Global Environmental Justice Atlas. We show how changes in the material-biophysical dimension (e.g. increasing volumes) and in the political-economic dimension of waste management (e.g. privatisation and incineration) jointly drive the marginalisation of waste pickers. Our mixed-method approach, combining descriptive statistics, qualitative coding, network analysis, and system dynamics modelling, reveals how reconfigurations of waste metabolism generate ecological distribution conflicts. We conceptualise these dynamics as waste capitalism, whereby waste becomes a contested site of capital accumulation through dispossession, and contamination. These transformations intensify disputes over waste, restrict access to recyclable materials, and shift environmental and health burdens onto marginalised groups. In response, waste pickers mobilise to defend their livelihoods, often forming alliances with urban residents and civil society organisations. This article advances ecological economics by conceptualising waste metabolism as the co-evolution of material-biophysical and political-economic processes, and by showing how their reconfiguration generates ecological distribution conflicts and gives rise to an urban environmentalism of the poor. More broadly, the concept of waste capitalism connects localised waste conflicts to global environmental change, including climate change as a large-scale manifestation of capital accumulation by contamination.

The urgent need for transformative change to address the intertwined crises of climate change and biodiversity loss is widely recognized. Here, drawing on work originally conducted within the IPBES Transformative Change Assessment and using a bibliometric analysis of more than 4 million scholarly documents, we examine the actions and actors driving transformative change for global sustainability. The literature disproportionately focuses on a limited set of available actions and actors, neglecting others and overlooking their potential interactions. Notably, the actions 'changing social norms' and 'technological change' and the communication and knowledge and private sectors are frequently discussed, while actions referring to transforming the economic and governance systems and the civil society and the public sector are understudied. Moreover, actions and actors do not tend to appear together in consistent or systematic ways; instead, most action-actor combinations appear at rates similar to random chance, with only a few notable exceptions. The uneven distribution of scholarly attention may hinder the coordination and cross-sectoral coalitions required for effective transformative change. Our findings call for a more inclusive approach to research on actors and actions needed for transformative change towards a just and sustainable world, and for a greater focus on synergies between actions and actors potentially driving transformative change.

Civil society has long been a catalyst for social change by reshaping structures, influencing values, and challenging power dynamics; however, its role in driving transformative change for biodiversity remains underexplored. To address this gap, we analyze 2,801 socio-environmental mobilizations documented in the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas). These mobilizations produce diverse outcomes that reveal distinct spatial, temporal, and sectoral patterns and proactively and reactively respond to environmental impacts across the globe. Notably, about 40% of these mobilizations occur within the top 30% of global priority lands for species conservation and their actions contribute to the achievement of key Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework targets focused on ecosystem protection, restoration, sustainable use, and inclusive spatial planning. Yet, one-third of mobilizations face repression, criminalization, or violence-pressures that are even more common in high-priority conservation areas. Moreover, mobilizations facing repressive outcomes contest environmental threats relevant for the KMGBF targets more extensively than those with progressive outcomes, underscoring the risks faced by movements driving biodiversity protection in critical regions. To amplify the transformative potential of socio-environmental mobilizations, we emphasize the importance of recognizing, strengthening, and protecting them through coordinated action among diverse social actors. By fostering collaboration and targeted resource allocation, these efforts can empower socio-environmental mobilizations to catalyze meaningful and lasting change for biodiversity conservation.

The word “development” is synonymous to economic growth in the UN Sustainable Development Goal 8. We know however that after Amartya Sen’s 1999 book “Development as Freedom”, development did not mean increased income per capita but a decrease in poverty and a wide exercising of capabilities and of freedom of choice. How was the measurement of the decrease in poverty to be operationalized? The answer was the MDP index (multidimensional poverty index), and previously also the HDI (human development index), where income per capita is one of three factors. In this article, we highlight the multi-criteria approach of the MDP Index that captures the multiple deprivations poor people experience with respect not so much to income as to health, education, and living standards. We notice however the lack of indicators of local and global environmental impoverishment in the MDP Index. In contrast, such dimensions are extremely visible in the Ecological Distribution Conflicts (EDC) collected in the EJAtlas. People get impoverished by land and water grabbing, climate change, biocultural loss, the displacements caused by economic growth and the concomitant changes in the social metabolism. The poor complain and display different valuation languages. Sometimes they coalesce in movements for environmental justice against the socio-ecological deprivations they suffer. This paper therefore brings together ecological economics, political ecology and development economics emphasizing the clash between economic growth and the preservation and enhancement of the social and natural environment.

This paper demonstrates how the global land rush simultaneously produces operational land deals and non-operational/'failed' land deals. We argue that it is important to study both types, and the logic that produces them, because both can fundamentally alter social relations and the wider landscapes in which they are embedded. Furthermore, non-operational land deals, sometimes lumped together with similar cases under the label of 'failed land deals' could in fact be successful land grabs. Differentiating the land rush and land grabbing, including their different scopes, allow us to see better the extent of the global land rush and land grabbing, and the long-term impacts they have on broad social life.

As the ecological transition accelerates, green grabbing is expected to intensify. Our systematic review of 80 empirical cases offers an overview of how soft and hard legal frameworks can both enable and prevent green land acquisitions. While current international development policies legitimise, and national laws operationalise, green grabs, accelerating the shift from communal to private property regimes, some cases highlight the transformative potential of 'law from below'. These bottom-up legal reforms, driven by grassroots initiatives, may offer meaningful resistance to mitigate the impacts of green grabbing.

Tropical and subtropical woodlands (forests and savannas) support millions of forest-dependent people. Deforestation frontiers in the tropics and subtropics primarily result from agricultural expansion, with major impacts on the environment and the local people. Yet, a large proportion of agriculture-driven deforestation does not lead to productive land use afterwards, potentially due to speculative clearings or halted or abandoned land investment projects. Our understanding of such apparently failed projects, their links to deforestation, and their impact on local people, however, remains limited. Here, we aim to understand how land investment projects in tropical and subtropical woodlands fail, how such failed projects lead to deforestation, and how access to land changed after failure for local communities. We compiled and reviewed cases of failed projects that led to deforestation sourced from a systematic literature review and global databases on land investments and environmental conflict. Our results show that resistance to land investment projects was the most common determinant of failure, suggesting prevailing misalignment of investments with local needs. We identified various configurations in which failed land projects are linked to woodland loss, ranging from land clearing for an eventually abandoned project to illegal timber harvesting. Most of the projects targeted areas used by local, forest-dependent communities. Despite failure, some of these communities lost access to lands and in the process, indicating that even failed projects can result in land grabs. Analysing across projects underscored the pivotal roles played by governments, socio-economic agendas, and investors in these complex predicaments. This emphasizes the need to learn from these projects and reevaluate priorities in land governance, enhance government enforcement capabilities, and adopt a more inclusive and comprehensive approach that amplifies local voices and safeguards tropical forests and savannas.

Which role plays the more-than-human world in shaping the possibilities for contentious actions and politics? We discuss this question by revisiting reflections from social movement theory, agrarian studies, and commons management, and by reviewing empirical cases of protest significantly shaped by ecological endowments. Distinct political ecological opportunities may arise from vulnerabilities in ecological cycles, ecological potentials, interspecies relationships, ecological invisibility, ecological visibility, ecological resources, and ecological connectivity, among other features. However, whether people, activists, and social movements are able to turn them into a dynamic source of power ultimately depends upon how they perceive and relate themselves to the more-than-human world.

To what extent do extractive and industrial development pressures affect Indigenous Peoples’ lifeways, lands, and rights globally? We analyze 3081 environmental conflicts over development projects to quantify Indigenous Peoples’ exposure to 11 reported social-environmental impacts jeopardizing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Indigenous Peoples are affected in at least 34% of all documented environmental conflicts worldwide. More than three-fourths of these conflicts are caused by mining, fossil fuels, dam projects, and the agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and livestock (AFFL) sector. Landscape loss (56% of cases), livelihood loss (52%), and land dispossession (50%) are reported to occur globally most often and are significantly more frequent in the AFFL sector. The resulting burdens jeopardize Indigenous rights and impede the realization of global environmental justice.

Environmental defenders commonly face violence in response to their activism against socially and ecologically destructive development projects. While various protection mechanisms have been developed in the last decades, the level of repression they face is on the rise—especially in Latin America. This chapter discusses different ways through which the public and international community have responded to the violence experienced by environmental defenders, as well as the limitations of such responses in preventing future violence against them. We examine, as indicative case studies, the responses to the murders of two high-profile defenders—Chico Mendes (murdered in Brazil in 1988) and Berta Cáceres (murdered in Honduras in 2016)—and propose a schema which maps responses according to: 1) their institutional character, and 2) their transformative capacity. We argue that while conventional institutional and non-institutional responses are crucial to address violence against defenders, more transformational responses that aim to recast the logic of extractivism are needed for the protection of environmental defenders. Furthermore, we argue these responses need to incorporate a wider understanding of violence and go beyond demands for retributive justice and incorporate demands for the protection of the territories and ways of life of environmental defenders.

When are protected areas drivers of environmental injustices and conflict, and under which circumstances may they support customary users in protecting their lands and livelihoods against extractivist development? We address these questions by analyzing the diverse roles that protected areas play in the context of environmental conflicts. We build a global database of 474 environmental conflicts in protected areas by overlapping data from the World Database of Protected Areas and the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice. Through descriptive statistics and content analysis, we characterize the intersections between the two databases and discuss those cases where protected areas play an important role in the origin, dynamics, or outcomes of the conflicts. Our findings show that growth-oriented extractivism and development are major drivers of conflicts in protected areas, where these latter can both jeopardize and support environmental justice. While several cases describe protected areas as drivers of injustices and conflicts, they can also become tools that support peoples' struggles against controversial extractivism and development projects. The diversity of possible interactions between conflict configurations, movement claims, and forms of conservation thus require a nuanced understanding of the complex implications of protected areas for environmental justice.

Which role may Political Ecology play for studies of Acoustic Ecology? As global environmental change is rapidly transforming soundscapes along the frontiers of resource use, important questions arise about who precisely occupies the common sonic environment, how resulting sonic burdens and benefits are distributed among diverse social groups, across the audible and inaudible spectrum, as well as how affected communities, activists and movements may respond to adverse sonic environmental change. This paper delves into some of the intersections of Political Ecology and Acoustic Ecology and explores five points of inquiry for a ”Political Acoustic Ecology” that may offer fresh insights in the socio-political dimensions of sonic environmental change.

AbstractIncreases in social metabolism drive environmental conflicts. This proposition, frequently found in the literature on ecological distribution conflicts, has stimulated much research at the interface of ecological economics and political ecology. However, under which conditions is this proposition valid and useful? This chapter briefly reviews the theoretical foundations underlying this proposition and discusses further socio-metabolic properties that may shape the dynamics of environmental conflicts. Furthermore, the chapter relates the socio-metabolic perspective to other ‘grand explanations’ of environmental conflicts, particularly, to the expansion of capitalism under a neo-Marxist perspective. The chapter argues that a socio-metabolic perspective has much to offer to understand some of the structural drivers of environmental conflicts. A socio-metabolic perspective links local environmental conflicts to the resource use profiles of economies as well as to global production and consumption systems, no matter whether these are capitalist societies, resource-intensive planning economies, autocratic monarchies, or illicit resource extractions occurring in the shadow economy. The chapter closes by recalling the need to integrate biophysical and social dynamics in a balanced manner for the nuanced study of environmental conflicts.