Smallholder farmer-based rural social movements have been heralded as a promising source of political power with the potential to effectively promote sustainable trajectories of agricultural development in Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. However, the very early stages of rural social movement building remain understudied, including under what conditions such nascent efforts are likely to lead to effective political influence and foundations for broader collective action. Drawing on insights from organizational studies and resource mobilization theories, we provide an analytical narrative of the emergence and development of a smallholder farmerbased policy advocacy organization, the Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana (PFAG). Through analysis of organizational documents and an extensive open-ended focus group interview with PFAG's founders, long-term members, and current staff, we discuss how PFAG managed to overcome the "liability of newness" faced by new organizations, and how its resulting organizational structure influences its modes of resource mobilization and thus type and coverage of its advocacy and service delivery activities. Considering this developmental narrative, we elaborate several challenges that PFAG faces in pursuit of its ambitions to expand its influence in Ghanaian agricultural policy and practice. Our findings indicate the need for PFAG to address emerging contradictions in project activities and uneven geographical coverage, manage tensions between advocacy and service delivery objectives and to work towards establishing an umbrella agenda capable of providing for the diverse and evolving needs of their membership base.

Smallholder farmers are widely touted as essential to sustainable agricultural development in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. But what exactly is meant by sustainable development, and how are smallholder farmers expected to contribute to it? In this perspective, we describe and assess two competing visions of sustainable development, namely Capital Theory and the Capabilities approach, paying special attention to the major yet divergent repercussions each approach implies for the future of smallholder farmers and the activities of their representative organizations. We present the core concepts, tools and practices stemming from each sustainable development perspective, and from a critique of these motivate the superiority of a capabilities approach as more conducive to smallholder farmers wellbeing now and in the future. In doing so, we bring to the fore the pivotal role smallholder farmer organizations and rural social movements, as collective vehicles for smallholder political agency, play in strategically advocating for the conditions that support sustainable and just smallholder agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond.

Sustainable development (SD) is a concept that can be used to address complex challenges, including energy transitions. SD offers diverse strategies that provide useful direction in navigating tensions, trade-offs and synergies in energy transitions. The purpose of this research was to identify the challenges that energy practitioners are faced with in energy transitions and explore potential solutions. To achieve this purpose, we identified and explored the challenges faced by energy practitioners in Canada. Specifically, we conducted a survey of 34 energy practitioners from across Canada, as well as in-depth interviews with the Energy Futures Lab design team (which is a civil society initiative actively working on the energy transition in Canada).

We identified the following challenges faced by energy practitioners in Canada: there is no simple, single solution for energy transitions; energy transitions have potentially conflicting considerations; energy systems have potentially conflicting goals; energy practitioners have different levels of trust and competencies in key actors; energy practitioners need to work across the political spectrum; and the costs and benefits of energy transitions are unevenly distributed. We discuss how the three strategies of SD (i.e., economic choice, political choice, social choice) could be applied to manage the intended and unintended tensions and trade-offs inherent in energy transitions. We conclude that the three SD strategies are not always equally valued by energy practitioners, but they have the potential to be useful in different energy transitions scenarios.

Agriculture is key to sustainable development globally – particularly in countries where agriculture both accounts for most of the land use and provides a livelihood for most of the population. We map out a collaborative research agenda aimed at tackling the urgent but poorly understood issue of the role of farmer organisations in overcoming political barriers to sustainable and inclusive agricultural development, with particular attention to sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. Building on a critical and collaborative dialogue between a diversity of small-scale farmer-led organisations, local activist groups, transnational civil society networks, and heterogeneous academic institutions, our agenda is organized around two key objectives: 1) understanding the conditions for, development of and outcomes from farmer-based political mobilisation in rural areas; and 2) strengthening participatory, action-oriented research capacity for critically engaged research on agrarian questions in SSA. The approach we advocate emphasises the scientific and societal benefits of combining theoretically informed crosscountry comparison of farmer-based rural social movements, with deepening of academic-civil society collaboration

It has become quite common in environmental sustainability research to promote the influencing of so-called inner dimensions of individuals as means to address pressing environmental problems such as climate change, what we refer to as the Inward Turn. We argue that the conceptual foundations of the Inward Turn, an extreme form of methodological individualism, limit it significantly as a strategy for addressing climate change and other socially relevant environmental problems. After briefly reviewing major shortcomings with the way the Inward Turn conceptualizes the relationship between individuals and social change, including its neglect of causal structures and propensity to abstract its analysis away from problems that are specific to place and time, we sketch the basic tenets of an alternative methodological approach capable of overcoming these limitations. Our approach, however, does not go to the other extreme and neglect the role of individuals; rather, our recognition of the structural drivers of particular environmental problems points to the necessity of specific collective actions by individuals, for example, in the practice of social movements. This recognition demands a rethinking of the role of individual factors, like emotion and empathy, in addressing environmental sustainability problems, namely as they relate to collective action/social movement emergence, development, and outcomes.

A central challenge for sustainable development is how societies are to avoid, minimize or address impacts from anthropogenic climate change. However, competing perspectives on “what should be sustained” lead to widely different understandings of what mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage entail and how best to approach them. We provide a novel conceptual and empirical comparison of two contrasting sustainable development-based approaches to the study of impacts from climate-related extreme events: Capital Theory and capability-based Human Development. We use our analysis of immediate residential property value and housing capacity impacts caused by Hurricane Michael in Gulf County, Florida, to demonstrate how the sustainable development theory used to assess and interpret impacts greatly affects the identification of whom and where is objectively “most impacted.” Through a comparison of the two approaches, we identify relative advantages and disadvantages, emphasizing that while both provide coherent, comprehensive, and integrative approaches to climate-related impact assessment, the capability approach is much less likely to lead researchers and practitioners to overlook the most disadvantaged communities when compared to Capital Theory.

An energy transition is unfolding in Canada and across the world. During this transition, countries are facing increasing demands for their energy systems to address economic, social, and environmental considerations, including providing affordable and reliable energy, reducing inequality, and producing fewer environmental impacts. First, we identify key themes from the academic literature related to energy transitions: the systems perspective; economic, social, and environmental considerations; collaboration and dialogue; and social innovation. Second, we focus on a case study of a critical actor in Canada’s energy transition, the Energy Futures Lab (EFL), a social innovation lab that is actively working on the energy transition in Canada. We interviewed members of the EFL design team to investigate and deepen our understanding of the key themes identified in the academic literature. Third, we discuss how our research results relate to innovation and governance in the energy transition in Canada, and we offer an Integrated Model of Sustainable Development (SD) to help manage the common affairs of the energy transition. Fourth, we offer a theoretical contribution, arguing that both the ends and the means should be considered in an energy transition. It is important to keep in mind the overarching objective, or end, of the energy transition (e.g., alignment with the sustainability principles) to create the energy system that the future requires of us. Finally, we offer a practical contribution to show that SD can help inform a collaborative approach, that promotes innovation and increases knowledge, in an effort to address complex sustainability challenges.

Sustainability science (SS) is diverse field of problem-driven and solution-oriented research that is still developing. The further maturation of the field relies on its practitioners formulating alternative paradigms to use-inspired knowledge production to facilitate comparison and reasoned judgment on what constitutes scientific best practices. In this short article, we flag several blind spots that can arise in attempts to articulate potential paradigms in SS. We identify and discuss three crucial components that should be included when constructing and presenting potential paradigms in the field, namely the necessity of 1) comparing suggested alternatives with available competitors, 2) preserving scientific integrity in scientific knowledge production, and 3) clarifying the particular contribution of scientific knowledge to social change. Keeping sight of these three important issues will allow the still developing field of SS to mature in a way that builds on scientific comparison and reasoned judgment among the field’s practitioners, with implications for advancing its research agenda. The issues we outline here should not only concern authors, but reviewers and editors of SS journals as well. 

Loss and damage from climate change, recognized as a unique research and policy domain through the Warsaw International Mechanism (WIM) in 2013, has drawn increasing attention among climate scientists and policy makers. Labelled by some as the “third pillar” of the international climate regime—along with mitigation and adaptation—it has been suggested that loss and damage has the potential to catalyze important synergies with other international agendas, particularly sustainable development. However, the specific approaches to sustainable development that inform loss and damage research and how these approaches influence research outcomes and policy recommendations remain largely unexplored. We offer a systematic analysis of the assumptions of sustainable development that underpins loss and damage scholarship through a comprehensive review of peer-reviewed research on loss and damage. We demonstrate that the use of specific metrics, decision criteria, and policy prescriptions by loss and damage researchers and practitioners implies an unwitting adherence to different underlying theories of sustainable development, which in turn impact how loss and damage is conceptualized and applied. In addition to research and policy implications, our review suggests that assumptions about the aims of sustainable development determine how loss and damage is conceptualized, measured, and governed, and the human development approach currently represents the most advanced perspective on sustainable development and thus loss and damage. This review supports sustainable development as a coherent, comprehensive, and integrative framework for guiding further conceptual and empirical development of loss and damage scholarship.