ABSTRACT Contemporary environmentalism and environmental thought have a tendency to emphasise hope over despair: despair, the argument goes, leads to inaction while hope inspires agency in the face of environmental challenges. This article draws on ethnographic evidence from Gaelic Scotland to suggest a reappraisal of the generative power of doom in addressing socio-environmental problems. It traces the history of doomsday prophecies as a political force in Gaelic Scotland and draws parallels between these prophecies and contemporary predictive forms that foretell the loss of Gaelic and of nature. It argues that while nature conservation and Gaelic revitalisation have struggled to find common discursive ground, predictions of catastrophic loss have proven fertile for intersectional discussions of linguistic and environmental justice. Ironically, then, doom-laden discourses provide a glimmer of hope for a more inclusive environmentalism in Scotland, and despair proves a potent resource in marginalised spaces where continual state neglect leaves hope in short supply.

ABSTRACT In the pursuit of sustainable consumption, reducing acquisition and prolonging the life of household items – like clothing, appliances and furniture – has never been more essential. Practices such as purchasing second-hand goods, borrowing, sharing and passing items between people offer environmental advantages and social support and connection too. These informal exchanges of goods remain underexplored in sustainability and consumption research. This study draws on a unique national survey of 2,700 Australian households, shedding light on how everyday sharing of goods flows through informal networks of family and friends. We argue that these personal relationships are pivotal to both understanding and encouraging the circulation of used goods in a developed economy. Our findings reveal gendered, class-based and life-stage differences in sharing practices. We discuss the influence of social capital, which allows more privileged households to circulate goods more actively than their less privileged counterparts – a novel contribution to the literature. Households with children experience faster consumption cycles, driving greater circulation of goods. Generational shifts also play a key role. We contend that informal sharing – with family and friends – holds just as much significance as formal sharing economies in diverting goods from landfills and supporting sustainable consumption. This everyday circulation is vital to the sustainability conversation.

ABSTRACT Feelings of being responsible for reducing climate change can stimulate climate action. These feelings may depend on the broader cultural (e.g. religious) and social context (e.g. social and environmental welfare expenditure) in which one lives, as well as on individual beliefs and attitudes, such as religiosity, religion and welfare attitudes. This study analyses data from the European Social Survey Round 8 to gain a better understanding of how contextual and individual factors relate to feelings of responsibility toward climate change reduction across European countries. Our findings highlight the association of religions with feelings of responsibility, with Muslims and non-religious people feeling more responsible compared to Christians. Only non-religious people feel more responsible to reduce climate change when expenditures for environmental protection increase. Furthermore, the religious context and individual level of religiosity were found to not affect feelings of responsibility. More positive welfare attitudes were shown to result in greater feelings of responsibility to reduce climate change. The nature of state expenditure (social vs. environmental protection) were found to have an effect.

ABSTRACT This paper explores how contestation unfolds within the interconnected processes of governing, managing, and measuring nature, using Swedish forest policy and Woodland Key Habitats (WKHs) as a case study. It illustrates how contestation rooted in different interests and worldviews manifests as epistemic struggles within the state apparatus. Based on document analysis and expert interviews with policymakers, researchers, and stakeholders, the paper traces the development of WKHs since the 1990s as a method, grounded in an ecosystem approach, for measuring the ecological value of a forest, as well as the subsequent politicization and contestation of the method that has played out over the past decade. Rather than targeting political goals, the contestation is directed at the objectivity, legality, and reasonableness of WKHs. The contestation led to a revision of the classification criteria and eventually the termination of the assessments. This case underscores how the deep entanglement of values and facts is essential both for driving change and for understanding the limited implementation of more progressive ecosystem-oriented policies. Assessing this triadic interrelationship between governing, managing, and measuring nature provides a deeper understanding of how contestation plays out and impacts environmental governance.

ABSTRACT This article investigates the persistence of gardening by the bloc, an informal urban gardening practice in the green spaces of collective housing districts of post-socialist Bucharest. Although often reduced in public discourse to a leftover of socialist survival strategies, this research reconsiders it as an everyday social interaction that supports communities amid urban transformations. Following Tsing and De Angelis, the article views gardening by the bloc as a local form of ‘latent commons’, reflecting broader socio-political shifts in a post-socialist city. Based on qualitative research, it documents how residents use, adapt and manage green spaces, along with their relations with institutional actors, revealing how they engage these areas under increasingly neoliberal governance. The study argues that the overlap between a market-oriented regulatory project, inherited socialist structures, and collective spatial practices shaped a distinct way of living together. As an emerging form of urban commons, gardening by the bloc can maintain a shared practice of communal life against an increasingly individualized society, laying the groundwork for bottom-up regeneration of housing estates across diverse social and political contexts. However, through the lens of gardening, the article also reveals the contradictions inherent to latent commons, drawing attention to their internal tensions and ambiguities.

ABSTRACT This paper details an application of Q methodology for a global environmental justice project, a novel use in terms of the scale and complexity of our research agenda. We provide a rationale for our use of Q, an overview of the methodological adaptations required for our research agenda and the deliberative infrastructures we developed to support them, and reflection on the challenges and benefits of this approach. This work considers the feasibility of modification and experimentation in Q method applications for different scales of socio-environmental research, and for research with an ethic of engagement and respect for participants. We hope to stimulate collaborative and constructive dialogue among experienced and novice Q researchers alike regarding the possibilities and limitations of the method in diverse research contexts in the environmental social sciences.

ABSTRACT Landfilling is one of the most common waste management strategies and is a significant source of environmental degradation. While research has shown that landfills are more commonly placed in low-income communities and communities of color throughout the United States, less has been done to evaluate landfill siting from an intersectional perspective. To address this gap, this study examined the distribution and disparities related to the placement of landfills throughout South Carolina using an environmental justice and intersectional lens. We used buffer analysis and inferential spatial statistics to assess the relationship between landfill siting and population characteristics. The study found that higher percentages of Black and Hispanic residents were in proximity to a landfill, while households with lower socioeconomic status (SES) were also disproportionately located near landfills. The study also demonstrates evidence of intersectional impacts from landfill siting, particularly with respect to combinations of race, class, and gender. These results provide insight into concerns related to environmental justice and intersectionality related to landfilling in South Carolina, which can assist policymakers in decision-making and community outreach efforts. To conclude, this study provides policy implications and additional considerations related to environmental justice and intersectional concerns related to landfills in South Carolina.

ABSTRACT How has public discourse about climate change evolved? This paper answers this question through the paradigmatic case of British heatwaves. These are traditionally considered a fortunate break from dull weather, making them a least likely case for the emergency of a discourse of doom. With a topic-modeling analysis of British national newspaper articles on heatwaves from 1985 until 2023 (N = 35,127), we show that a longstanding Romantic heatwave discourse eventually buckled, and that Apocalypticism finally became the dominant genre in the last decade. A supplementary hermeneutic analysis then indicates and explains complexity within this broad trend. 1980s stories already noted routine heatwave problems, while many recent ones continue depicting positive lifestyle implications. Within the Apocalyptic genre itself climate change is today deemed a factual causal force, whereas in the 1980s and 1990s it was a possible carrier of future dangers. In connecting the genre perspective from literary theory to big data method topic modelling, our approach is parsimonious, novel and replicable in other national contexts.

ABSTRACT Alongside being viewed as institutional tools of sustainability policies, community gardens are also seen as an inclusive democratic public sphere and places of socially valued manual labour. In this article, we apply Hannah Arendt’s distinction between different types of work to investigate how community gardening ideals are materialised and abandoned. By focusing on the processes of work that create, maintain and modify gardens, we borrow Arendt’s concepts and make a conceptual contribution to the debates on the community gardens’ sustainability potential. We also propose a processual concept of slippage to understand the mechanisms by which departures from ideals occur. Our empirical analysis, based on narratives and observations of work practices in 12 gardens across Poland, demonstrates how the processual approach we advance provides a way to better understand the obstacles to democratic sustainability transitions and think innovatively about overcoming them.

ABSTRACT The ban of DDT in the 1970s is widely remembered as a turning point in environmental regulation. Through a comparative analysis of the United States and France, this study explores how discontinuing a single chemical paradoxically contributed to stabilizing the broader socio-technical regime underpinning productivity-oriented agriculture, which still heavily relies on chemical inputs.Drawing on historical archives, policy documents, and scientific literature, the study introduces the concept of continuous discontinuation, arguing that rather than disrupting the pesticide regime, the DDT ban legitimized its persistence by institutionalizing selective removals. This process structured regulatory frameworks, reinforced risk assessment methods, and enabled agrochemical industries to adapt without fundamentally altering pesticide dependence. By highlighting the interplay between destabilization and stabilization mechanisms, this article challenges linear narratives of socio-technical change, showing that regulatory discontinuities can paradoxically serve as instruments of continuity. Ultimately, it sheds light on how governance of technological withdrawals shapes socio-technical resilience and the long-term trajectory of contested technologies.