Search Results (980)

Regime theory has been used superficially to understand variation in socio-ecological transitions in industrialized countries. The broad array of concepts developed in recent decades to explain greater than expected regime dynamism is largely unused. These concepts highlight the varying generation by regime type of institutional fluidity, a consequence of exogenous or endogenous change underpinned by strategic political interaction in multi-dimensional policy spaces. How these dynamics affect the prospects for eco-social policy transition in different regimes remains unexplored. This paper addresses this gap focusing on a postgrowth transition, investigating the politics of the normative eco-social policy working time reduction. This policy is chosen as a potential ‘counter-hegemonic’ reform, one which postgrowth scholars theorize could initiate a broader challenge to growth models. A theory testing process trace is undertaken comparing the political prospects for working time reform in conservative Germany and the liberal UK, regime types which have received less attention in the eco-social regime literature. Empirically, the paper shows a shifting politics of working time reduction, with momentum for change stalled in Germany due to the declining status of coordinating institutions but of increased vitality in the UK mainly due to long hours and worker health problems. Theoretically, the dynamic regime model developed in the paper is shown to have utility in assessing the varying prospects for postgrowth eco-social policy change and how regime-related institutional legacies affect such processes. Further investigation of complementarities with political economy theorizing is recommended. Practically, the paper highlights the importance of cross-class, multi-actor coalition-building to confront the challenging circumstances proponents of postgrowth transition face. Full article

Environmental degradation in biosphere-reserve territories requires educational strategies that connect sustainability learning with practical ecological actions. This study evaluated an experiential environmental education intervention integrated with biofertilizer-based native plant cultivation in two Peruvian Amazonian localities, Chanchamayo and Satipo. Secondary-school students (n = 46) participated in workshops on soil degradation, sustainable land management, native species restoration, and the preparation of bocashi and vermicompost. Environmental cognition was assessed using a 15-item instrument covering ethical, critical, and political dimensions. In parallel, plant elongation and foliar growth were evaluated in five native species: Jacaranda copaia, Cedrela odorata, Tabebuia serratifolia, Banisteriopsis caapi, and Piper aduncum. The intervention was associated with statistically significant improvements in environmental cognition across all dimensions (p < 0.001; Cohen’s d > 1.0), with the strongest gain in the critical dimension. Biofertilization responses were species- and locality-dependent. Given the single-group pre–post design, these changes represent associations with the intervention rather than definitive causal effects. The highest elongation response occurred in Cedrela odorata in Satipo under vermicompost, whereas the highest foliar-growth response was observed in Jacaranda copaia under vermicompost in Satipo. These findings support an integrated educational–ecological model linking environmental learning, organic residue valorization, and native plant propagation. Full article

The Biblical prophet Ezekiel has received spurious diagnoses of schizophrenia. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus invert the category, recasting schizophrenia not as a clinical diagnosis but as a process of ‘deterritorialization’ (always paired with ‘reterritorialization’) which may produce liberative ways of life. Reading Ezekiel such, the first chapter depicts a delirious deterritorialization of Israel’s religious life as a result of the trauma of the Babylonian Exile, while the last chapters contain a reterritorialization of these features in the novel eschatological key of the New Jerusalem. Thus, Ezekiel is an example of what I call the ‘schizophrenic physician,’ in that he participates in deterritorialization and creatively senses and discerns new reterritorialized constellations of elements, actively enabling new forms of life. Ezekiel is therefore read into Deleuze’s ‘clinical-critical project’, which both deliriously affirms life and engages in ‘symptomatology,’ a discernment of signs and events common both to medicine and literature. Contemporary clinical–political examples of sensitive world-diagnosis creating the possibility for healing are discussed via two examples: the discovery of the relationship of childhood trauma to poor medical outcomes, and in the literature around the concept of global ‘syndemics’ tying together forces as diverse as climate change and ecology, capitalism, and metabolic dysfunction. Full article

This study aimed to identify the ecological literacy education needs of pre-service teachers in Türkiye. A qualitative approach was adopted. Data were collected from 23 pre-service teachers, selected through convenience sampling, using an open-ended questionnaire developed by the researchers. The data were analyzed through inductive content analysis. Findings revealed that participants primarily conceptualized ecological literacy in terms of environmental knowledge and environmental protection while placing limited emphasis on systems thinking, human–nature relationships, and action-oriented competencies. Although the participants demonstrated general awareness of the causes of ecological problems, they also exhibited misconceptions regarding fundamental ecological concepts. They predominantly prioritized global environmental issues, with little or no reference to political–economic dimensions of ecological crises or local environmental problems. The participants identified teacher education programs as an important source of ecological literacy development and emphasized the value of nature-based, practice-oriented learning experiences. By empirically documenting these needs within the Turkish context, this study extends the theoretical distinction between environmental and ecological literacy and offers novel insight into an underexplored context. Practically, findings inform teacher education curricula, suggesting that ecological literacy education should move beyond a knowledge-focused approach toward one integrating systems thinking, critical thinking, local contexts, political–economic dimensions, and collective action competencies. Full article

In semi-arid Ghana, girls bear primary responsibility for household water collection in communities without on-premises access, a burden intensified by climate change associated with rising temperatures and frequent droughts. Yet little is known about how this responsibility shapes their embodied health and well-being. Guided by a political ecology of health framework, this qualitative study examined how water insecurity shapes girls’ physical, psychosocial, and neurological health in two communities, Wechiau and Kandue, in Ghana’s Upper West Region. We conducted in-depth interviews with nineteen purposively selected girls aged 10 to 19 and analyzed the transcripts thematically. Four interconnected themes emerged: structural and political determinants of water access, environmental and ecological conditions, gendered social relations, and embodied health consequences. Financial barriers, governance failures, and infrastructure deficits force girls into long queues and repeated trips, a burden that falls disproportionately on girls under cultural norms exempting boys from water duties. This gendered allocation of labour produces gendered health harm, whereby girls sustain musculoskeletal pain and injury carrying heavy loads over hazardous terrain, while chronic time loss disrupts sleep, schooling, and psychological well-being. Girls with pre-existing conditions such as epilepsy face the most acute risk, as water fetching directly exacerbates their vulnerability to seizures. These findings show that addressing this crisis requires more than infrastructure investment. Coordinated public–private investment in water access must be paired with social protection for vulnerable households, gender-responsive water policy, and rainwater-harvesting strategies that confront the structural and gendered inequities placing this burden on girls. Full article

Post-industrial Pennsylvania faces a wave of AI data center development, arriving in communities whose capacity for local news has sharply diminished. This article examines how a reconfigured news ecology renders data center development, and its attachment to AI, sensible as a political concern. Through critical analysis of news coverage produced by local legacy outlets and statewide nonprofit and public media newsrooms, it shows how reporting constitutes data center development differently depending on venue, scale, and genre. Municipal meeting coverage renders data centers a matter of zoning procedure, while state-level reporting constitutes them as a matter of legislative and electoral contest, tracking resistance as a political variable. Long-form features situate economic promise and environmental cost within the life of a community, giving voice to residents’ lived experience and resistance to development. Across coverage, reporting makes legible the procedural, legislative, cultural, and economic constraints within which resistance to AI data centers operates. The article concludes that, within this corpus, journalism’s representational authority—the capacity to set the scale of a controversy, legitimate actors and grievances, name the political options available, and delimit plausible outcomes—has narrowed in range, but still retains capacity to render data center development legible as a matter of politics and procedure. Full article

Artificial intelligence is a rapidly evolving technology whose capabilities are expanding quickly, leaving instructors across higher education to determine how to integrate it into teaching with little shared guidance. This paper reports on a Faculty Learning Community comprising seven faculty members from computer science, management information systems, systems engineering, economics, development studies, political science, and geography at a technological university in the northeastern United States. Through collaborative autoethnography, the group developed a convergence–divergence framework for AI-integrated pedagogy, visualized as a daisy: a shared core of AI literacy, ethical and risk awareness, and governance frameworks, surrounded by discipline-specific petals reflecting each field’s distinct conceptualization and application of AI. Seven disciplinary vignettes illustrate the framework in practice, revealing a common pattern across disciplines: AI tools offer possibilities and efficiencies while simultaneously obscuring risks and reproducing biases that require deliberate human attention. Drawing on ecological systems theory, the framework offers faculty a multi-level structure for designing AI-integrated courses that honor both shared foundations and disciplinary authenticity. Full article

This study examines how students aged 10–20 conceptualize Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), focusing on their ability to think multiperspectively and justify decisions multidimensionally. In a classroom-based teaching experiment, 131 high school students from Lower Saxony completed a drawing task visualizing sustainable village transformations, followed by interviews with twelve participants. Their negotiation processes, verbal responses, and drawings were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. The visualization of village transformations functions as a biology-didactic ESD activity, where students apply decision-making and problem-solving strategies to address biological system levels (e.g., individuals, populations, ecosystems) and their interconnections (trophic levels, food webs, biodiversity). Results indicate age-related differences: students in grades 5–7 primarily emphasized social and ecological aspects, designing idealized living spaces for themselves. Upper-secondary students (grades 11–13) incorporated societal, political, and economic considerations, prioritizing economic development. However, no consistent relationship between multiperspectivity and multidimensional reasoning was identified. Based on these findings and related research, the study advocates integrating systems thinking with a comprehension-oriented approach, combining the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and the Model of Educational Reconstruction (MER). This aims to address the complexity of ESD more effectively, avoiding oversimplified, monocausal narratives that undermine the multidimensional nature of sustainable development. Full article

Global biodiversity policy increasingly depends on community-led conservation, yet the comparative evidence base contains little from South Asia’s frontier regions. This article asks how a long-running grassroots organisation in a politically and ecologically marginal region combined community mobilisation, vernacular knowledge, scientific evidence, and engagement with public institutions in pursuing conservation outcomes, and which features of that process may be relevant beyond Northeast India. Four campaigns of Nature’s Beckon, founded in Dhubri, Assam, in 1982, are compared as distinct types of intervention: species-led protected-area mobilisation at Chakrashila; landscape-scale conservation against extractive pressure at Dihing Patkai; species research with public ecological education; and community-managed institution-building. The available evidence indicates a documented and substantial, though not exclusive, role in campaigns associated with the notification of two protected areas whose current notified areas total approximately 279.83 km². Advocacy alone does not adequately explain these outcomes: where a formal government decision was required, sustained organisational capacity became consequential only when it coincided with a favourable political and administrative opening. Measured against four design features associated with successful community-based conservation, the model corresponds strongly to capacity-building investment and external linkage, in qualified form to equitable benefit-sharing, and only partly to tenure security. The article develops an ecology of the margins framework and specifies which elements appear transferable and which do not. Full article

This study analyzes land use dynamics in Fălticeni Municipality over four decades (1985–2025), examining the influence of major political, socio-economic, and demographic changes on urban development. The transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy, Romania’s democratic transformation and European integration, together with migration and population dynamics, have driven largely unregulated urban expansion at the expense of agricultural land and natural landscapes. Recent urban growth has also extended into areas with varying geomorphological vulnerability, increasing exposure to landslide hazards, while the city continues to face challenges related to abandoned industrial areas and insufficient forested land and green spaces. By integrating land use change analysis with physical vulnerability indicators, this study highlights the need for risk-informed and sustainable urban planning in medium-sized cities. It proposes a planning framework based on ecological zoning, controlled urban expansion on suitable terrain, brownfield redevelopment, the establishment of peri-urban forests, and the implementation of essential infrastructure supported by comprehensive geomorphological susceptibility assessments. The proposed approach provides practical guidance for enhancing urban resilience and can be replicated in other cities facing similar environmental and development challenges. Full article

The European Union’s REPowerEU Plan (2022) targets 10 million tonnes of renewable hydrogen imports by 2030, catalyzing an unprecedented cascade of bilateral green hydrogen partnerships with countries across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Despite the strategic and developmental significance of these partnerships, the literature has treated hydrogen largely as a techno-economic or single-country problem, leaving the diplomatic architecture and equity dimensions of EU–MENA–SSA hydrogen diplomacy under-theorized and unmeasured. This study addresses these gaps by integrating energy-security realism, regime-complex theory, and critical political ecology into a synthetic framework, and by introducing two novel empirical instruments: a hand-coded dataset of 26 in-scope bilateral hydrogen agreements (2020–2024) and a fully specified protocol for a Green Hydrogen Diplomacy Equity Index (GHD-EI). A longitudinal dyad-year panel skeleton (27 EU importers × 36 MENA/SSA exporters, 2015–2026, 11,664 dyad-year cells) has been constructed to host a planned multi-method quantitative sequence, structural gravity PPML, staggered difference-in-differences, synthetic control, exponential random graph models, and causal forests whose execution against fully populated covariates is reserved for a subsequent paper. This paper is accordingly framed as a data descriptor and specified analytical protocol, reporting descriptive and structural findings from the 26 in-scope agreements: a 2022 inflection synchronized with REPowerEU and COP27; importer-side concentration on Germany (34.6% of agreements) and EU-level framework partnerships (34.6%)—two distinct actors jointly accounting for 69.2%—and a small, statistically non-significant difference in mean partnership depth between MENA (n = 18, M = 3.22) and SSA (n = 8, M = 3.25) exporters (Welch t = −0.08, p = 0.94; Cohen’s d = −0.04). The comparison is likely under-powered (power ≈ 0.20–0.44) given the small SSA cell and reported here as a tentative pattern. At this stage, the study contributes a cross-regional agreement dataset, a fully specified equity-indicator protocol, and a theoretical framework for subsequently evaluating whether the green hydrogen transition advances just internationalism or reproduces green-extractivist patterns. Full article

This article examines Slavoj Žižek’s critique of ecocentrism through the lens of Lacanian ideology theory, asking how the ecological crisis is symbolically organized in contemporary discourse. Rather than treating ecocentrism as a coherent ecological doctrine, it approaches it as an ideological formation that shapes how environmental breakdown is interpreted, moralized, and acted upon. The article argues that appeals to “nature” often construct it as a normative horizon of balance, limit, or lost order through which crisis becomes intelligible in specific ways. It then traces the conceptual, subjective, and social operations through which ecocentrism acquires force: ecological disruption is narrated through images of harmony and violation, responsibility is individualized through guilt and obligation, and ecological concern is absorbed into green capitalist practices such as ethical consumption and managed environmental responsibility. In this way, ecocentrism can function not only as a language of ecological critique but also as a framework that obscures the historically specific political–economic processes driving environmental destruction. The article does not deny the urgency of the ecological crisis. Rather, it argues for a more materially mediated account of ecological politics, one that is more attentive to capitalist accumulation, infrastructural systems, and unequal social relations in producing socioecological harm. Full article

This article reconsiders the relationship between religions and the environment from a historical and methodological perspective. It argues that the ecological orientation of a religious tradition cannot be deduced directly from its sacred texts, since texts become socially effective only through a range of mediating processes such as interpretation, preaching, ritual, education, institutional authority, devotional practice, and political use. This is especially evident in ancient and medieval societies, where most believers encountered Scripture through mediators rather than as individual readers. The article discusses the influential paradigm inaugurated by Lynn White, the critical contribution of ecofeminism, and recent theological genealogies linking Christian doctrines to ecological and colonial violence. While recognising the importance of these approaches, it stresses the need to avoid anachronism and overly linear explanations. Concepts such as “nature” and “environment” have changed over time, and the environmental question, as currently understood, belongs to the modern and contemporary world. The article also criticises the public tendency to rank religions according to their supposed ecological value. Religious environmentalism is interpreted as a contemporary process of reinterpretation, in which inherited symbols, doctrines, and practices are resemanticised in response to the ecological crisis. In doing so, it proposes mediation as a central category for studying religions and environmental thought historically. Full article

Educators are working within increasingly complex environments characterized by rapid change and uncertainty, where future conditions, expectations, and appropriate responses are often ambiguous or difficult to anticipate. Technological innovation, political and social polarization, climate-related concerns, shifting policy landscapes, workforce pressures, and the lasting effects of public health disruptions each introduce distinct yet interconnected forms of uncertainty. While these domains of uncertainty have generated substantial bodies of scholarship, less attention has been paid to how multiple forms of uncertainty converge within educators’ professional lives. This essay introduces the concept of stacked uncertainties as a lens for understanding how overlapping uncertainties accumulate, interact, and amplify across interconnected technological, socio-political, ecological, organizational, and policy systems. From this perspective, multiple uncertainties compete for the same personal, relational, organizational, and material resources that support educator well-being and resilience. Resilience is understood as a dynamic process shaped by access to adaptive resources across ecological systems. Applying the concept of stacked uncertainties has practical implications for educational leadership, policy, professional learning, and initiatives aimed at strengthening conditions that support educator well-being and resilience amid ongoing complexity and change. Full article

Sustainable food system transformation is inseparable from planetary health, the interdependent wellbeing of human populations and the ecological systems that sustain them. Agroecology and regenerative agriculture are frequently portrayed as competing paradigms for sustainable food system transformation. This commentary challenges this framing as both analytically unwarranted and practically counterproductive. Grounded in Ethiopia’s smallholder agricultural context and informed by recent empirical evidence, we argue that these two approaches are complementary and mutually reinforcing. Agroecology emerged from an equity-centered, participatory, and politically engaged framework for transforming food systems, while regenerative agriculture contributes farm-level ecological restoration tools and measurable biophysical outcomes related to planetary health. Neither is sufficient alone: regenerative practices without agroecology’s social architecture risk reinforcing existing inequities; agroecology without a systematic effort to ensure a widespread increase in production for food security and a net positive regeneration of environmental health cannot fully deliver its transformative potential, particularly in contexts where productivity, livelihoods, and ecosystem restoration must be achieved Ethiopia’s concurrent validation of a National Agroecology Strategy (2026–2040) and advancement of a National Regenerative Agriculture Strategy (2026–2036) reflects a growing national recognition that these paradigms are essential partners, not rivals. An integrated framework embedding regenerative practices within agroecological principles offers the most scientifically grounded and contextually appropriate pathway for Ethiopia’s resilient, equitable, and productive agricultural transformation. Reframed in these terms, agroecology–regenerative integration is not simply a technical or sectoral fix but a direct contribution to planetary health, safeguarding the ecological systems, food security, and social equity on which human wellbeing ultimately depends. Full article