This study explores how disaster-impacted communities in New South Wales, Australia, mobilised during and after the bushfire crisis of 2019-20 and multiple catastrophic floods between 2020 and 2022. Interviews were conducted across three regions: Northern Rivers; Blue Mountains; and Hawkesbury. Our findings illuminate how community-led actions are driven by a broad range of 'local knowledges', based in and organised through long-standing networks and organisations. Supporting existing research, we illustrate why the 'spontaneous' label, which fuels negative perceptions of chaos and risk, remains inadequate for such organising. Furthermore, and crucially, we clarify the role and scope of 'local knowledges' and how they, and the networks in which they are embedded, refine an understanding of 'social infrastructure'. We argue that community knowledges and networks should be seen as essential for cross-sectoral disaster management and adaptation planning. Alongside the communities engaged, we advocate for their formal recognition and structural integration to reduce future disaster risk.

Response and recovery from climate-related disasters typically involve a mixture of formal and informal organising. There is an old and ongoing general debate about the efficiency and impact of formal versus informal organising, but evidence about the specific structures of these forms of response and recovery is lacking. In this study, we interviewed 68 informants from three different Australian communities impacted by floods and fires and conducted social network modelling to explore how formal and informal organising evolve, interact, complement and potentially come into tension with each other in response and recovery from compounding disasters. We explicitly measured and analysed the topology of community networks that are formed, mobilised and reshaped before and after disasters. Our focus is on how local community networks evolve in terms of centralisation—the extent to which a few key actors dominate coordination efforts—and reciprocity—the degree to which support and resources flow mutually between network members. The results across the three contexts provide empirical evidence on how centralisation combined with reciprocity can be mobilised during response and recovery to serve the communities and their resilience. The findings regarding the vital processes of shifting centralisation in disaster response and recovery can inform debates on frictions between formal and informal patterns of organising and illuminate how communities can most effectively respond to natural hazards within their local context.

As environmental crises intensify, political responses remain inadequate, feeding cultures of 'structural apathy'. On the margins of public opinion, however, growing numbers of environmental activists, community organisers, scientists, educators and young people testify to their experience of ecological emotions, that is, grief, despair and horror tracking accumulating more-than-human loss, past, present and future. This article offers a new conceptualisation of eco-emotions that helps us advance two arguments. First, we turn to social theory and critically modify Hartmut Rosa's concept of resonance to theorise eco-emotions as non-transient, painful experiences that evidence a non-alienated relationship with the more-than-human. Second, we propose that, to capture these emotions' political potential, they need validation and support in community. Consequently, in dialogue with theories of ritual, we identify the practices that can vindicate, collectivise and channel eco-emotions politically. As illustrations, we analyse the podcast 'Climate Change and Happiness' and the project 'Work that Reconnects'.

Formal disaster prevention, preparation, risk management, and response remain highly anthropocentric, with non-human animals afforded minimal attention, resourcing, and support. This article reports on informal community efforts to care for non-human animals during and after the 2019/2020 “Black Summer” bushfires in Australia, when over three billion animals were killed, injured, or displaced. We conducted 56 in-depth interviews with community members, government officials, and experts, and ran four full day workshops with community members to investigate: how communities sought to protect and care for domesticated, farmed, and wild animals; the factors that facilitated and impeded their efforts; and the changes they believed would lead to better outcomes for animals in disasters in the future. Key findings are that: human communities understood and treated non-human animals as part of their communities; humans went to extraordinary lengths to care for and rescue animals; these efforts were largely invisible to, and unsupported—even condemned—by formal emergency management agencies. We conclude that human-centric emergency and disaster management policies are at odds with community values and behaviors. We argue that disaster management must evolve to accommodate and support the realities of community-based rather than individual-based approaches, and must simultaneously expand to consider communities as multispecies.

Invasive species are widely posited as a major threat to native biodiversity worldwide. However, in urban and post-industrial environments, invasive species often contribute to the formation of novel ecosystems that support critical ecosystem services for Earths others. Despite this, current management approaches typically prioritise control and eradication, with little regard for local ecological contexts or the functional roles invasive species play. As a result, the removal of certain invasive species from urban environments can lead to a reduction in both functional and species diversity. We argue that a multi-species justice (MSJ) framework offers a productive way to engage with the complexity, uncertainty, and contested values surrounding invasive species by extending justice. Using an urban green space case study, we propose MSJ as a way of managing the tensions between nativeness and invasion. We invite a rethinking of how nativeness and flourishing are understood and enacted in shared urban environments.

While substantial efforts have been made to identify and address issues of environmental justice in urban areas, the question of how to consider and plan for the concerns of humans and other species remains a major challenge. This paper provides a conceptualisation of what 'justice' might mean from a multispecies justice (MSJ) perspective within the contexts of nature-based solutions (NBS) and urban sustainability planning. We offer a wider conceptualisation of representation, distribution and agency compared with dominant framings in NBS scholarship and provide exemplar cases on how to integrate these concepts in planning discourse. We critically discuss some of the challenges and opportunities of considering MSJ when confronted by established procedures and practices in NBS science and decision-making, focusing on (i) moving beyond existing standards for biodiversity conservation; (ii) embracing MSJ as a process and practice; and (iii) building the capacity of NBS planners to work with MSJ.

Formal disaster management plans and institutions are systematically neglectful of the impacts of climate-change-exacerbated disasters on animals, with few exceptions. While animals' exclusion in this context is consistent with their status as property, or parts of ecosystems with no independent ethical value, differently located humans and animals contest this status and the types of institutions that follow from it. In this article, we draw on research conducted with Australian communities whose witness of animals' suffering during the 2019-20 Black Summer fires, and the failure of state-led disaster responses to attend to this, led them to autonomously organise to care for wild and domesticated animals. Their efforts have been largely classified, and dismissed, as volunteerism and (feminised) care. They might instead be understood as prefigurative institutionalisations of Multispecies Justice, specifically as forms of care labour, and integrated within theorisations of, and movement-building toward, just futures oriented around socio-ecological care.

Multispecies Justice (MSJ) is a theory and practice seeking to correct the defects making dominant theories of justice incapable of responding to current and emerging planetary disruptions and extinctions. Multispecies Justice starts with the assumption that justice is not limited to humans but includes all Earth others, and the relationships that enable their functioning and flourishing. This Element describes and imagines a set of institutions, across all scales and in different spheres, that respect, revere, and care for the relationships that make life on Earth possible and allow all natural entities, humans included, to flourish. It draws attention to the prefigurative work happening within societies otherwise dominated by institutions characterised by Multispecies Injustice, demonstrating historical and ongoing practices of MSJ in different contexts. It then sketches speculative possibilities that expand on existing institutional reforms and are more fundamentally transformational. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

As communities around the world grapple with the impacts of climate change on the basic support systems of life, their future climate imaginaries both shape and are shaped by actions and material realities. This paper argues that the three globally dominant imaginaries of a climate changed future, which we call ‘business as usual’, ‘techno-fix’ and ‘apocalypse’ – fail to encourage actions that fundamentally challenge or transform the arrangements that underpin systemic injustices and extractive forms of life. And yet, to meet the challenges associated with food production, energy needs, and the destruction of ecosystems, people are coming together, not only to take transformative action, but in doing so, to create and nurture alternative imaginaries. This paper presents empirical findings about how communities in north and south India and south-east Australia are pre-figuring alternative futures, locally and in most cases in the absence of broader state support. An analysis of communities’ actions and reflections indicates that their praxes are altering their future imaginaries, and we consider how these local shifts might contribute to broader changes in climate imaginaries. At the heart of the emerging imaginaries are a set of transformations in the relational fabric within which communities are embedded and how they attend to those relations: relations within community, with the more-than-human, and with time.

It is difficult to exaggerate the scale of contemporary ecological crises. These challenges, particularly climate change, necessitate new modes of politics and policy, even potentially new institutions, that seem anathema to the emphases of traditional accounts of environmental political science. In this paper, we explore contemporary ecopolitics research in Australia that is attempting to come to terms with the reality of ecological crises and the geological epoch of the Anthropocene. Showcasing a range of scholarship in this area, we argue that contemporary Australian ecopolitics research identifies and engages with a wide range of sites of politics and a significant number of (consequential) political actors. It recognises the need to engage directly with key institutions while also extending our gaze to the environment movement, community groups, financial institutions, local governments, and consumers. It acknowledges that sites of politics extend from the way ecological crises are framed in public debate to policy management, practices of private corporations and even to individual patterns of consumption. And it argues for an expansive conception of ethics beyond currently living human communities, a vision which arguably better meets the reality of ecological crises and the Anthropocene epoch.

This chapter argues that the systematic destruction of the more-than-human is not a betrayal of liberalism but follows from its fundamental assumptions. The character of the individual human subject who lies at the heart of liberalism's ethical and political concerns structurally entails the foreclosure of the interests or conditions of flourishing of the more-than-human showing up as matters of justice. The chapter focuses on: the hierarchical dualisms embedded in liberalism that require that the more-than-human functions as means to (certain) human ends and be evacuated of all moral standing; the erasure of the ecological conditions within which all being and flourishing arise and are sustained; the erasure of the relationality that is the condition of the very autonomy liberalism holds sacrosanct; and the relegation of modes of being, philosophies and politics of peoples who do not accept these ontological and ethical commitments to 'barbarism'. In the last part of the chapter, we consider the potential of transforming liberal institutions such as personhood and rights in ways that might achieve justice for the more-than-human.

COVID-19 catalyzed a renewed focus on the interconnected nature of human health. Together with the climate crisis, it highlighted not only intra-human connections but the entanglement of human health with the health of non-human animals, plants, and ecological systems more broadly. In this article, we challenge the persistent notion that humans are ontologically distinct from the rest of nature and the ethics that flow from this understanding. Imposing this privileged view of humans has devastating consequences for beings other than humans and for humans and impedes effective responses to crises. We situate the COVID-19 pandemic within the "polycrisis," and argue that one component of addressing multidimensional crises must involve fully embracing a relational ontology and ethics. We discuss two approaches to relationality, one articulated by ecofeminists and the second inhering in an Indigenous Māori worldview. Two dominant approaches, One Health and Planetary Health, purport to take account of relational ontologies in their approaches to health, but, we argue, persist in casting the more-than-human world in an instrumental role to secure human health. We suggest that Multispecies Justice, which draws on ecofeminist and Indigenous approaches, affords a fully relational approach to health and well-being. We explore the implications of relationality, and suggest fresh ways of understanding humans' connections with the more-than-human world.

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years' time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries.