Challenges for Social-Ecological Transformations: Contributions from Social and Political Ecology
By Christoph Görg, Ulrich Brand, H. Haberl, D. Hummel, T. Jahn, S. Liehr. 2017
128 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Transformation has become a major topic of sustainability research. This opens up new perspectives, but at the same time, runs the danger to convert into a new critical orthodoxy which narrows down analytical perspectives. Most research is committed towards a political-strategic approach towards transformation. This focus, however, clashes with ongoing transformation processes towards un-sustainability. The paper presents cornerstones of an integrative approach to social-ecological transformations (SET), which builds upon empirical work and conceptual considerations from Social Ecology and Political Ecology. We argue that a critical understanding of the challenges for societal transformations can be advanced by focusing on the interdependencies between societies and the natural environment. This starting point provides a more realistic understanding of the societal and biophysical constraints of sustainability transformations by emphasising the crisis-driven and contested character of the appropriation of nature and the power relations involved. Moreover, it pursues a transdisciplinary mode of research, decisive for adequately understanding any strategy for transformations towards sustainability. Such a conceptual approach of SET is supposed to better integrate the analytical, normative and political-strategic dimension of transformation research. We use the examples of global land use patterns, neo-extractivism in Latin America and the global water crisis to clarify our approach.
Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b92de2c3623be3f38756ca8f443065d8c98b1d05
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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
In Global and Planetary Change
- H. Haberl
- K. Erb
- Christoph Görg
- Dominik Wiedenhofer
- G. P. Peters
- Thomas Kastner
- S. Nonhebel
- Marina Fischer‐Kowalski
In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
Citations in the corpus
- The Material Stock–Flow–Service Nexus: A New Approach for Tackling the Decoupling Conundrum (2017, background): “What is required is a more comprehensive analysis of the crisis-driven and contested character of the appropriation of nature and the power relations involved as discussed under the concept of social-ecological transformations (see [170], in this issue).”