The growing Environment and Sustainability list is at the heart of our remit to publish quality scholarship that addresses global social challenges.
This list covers a broad spectrum of issues and focuses on the social justice dimensions of environmental sustainability, including in: climate change, environmental politics, developing sustainable economies, transport and sustainability and environmentalist thought and ideology.
The new open access Global Social Challenges Journal incorporates these themes to facilitate critical thinking across disciplines and fields.
Environment and Sustainability
Diverse approaches to climate information services are emerging as impacts escalate in an urbanising globe. However, the climate information services involving cities are mainly collaborations with actors from science, multilateral, national and municipal authorities. There are limited efforts to build on knowledge from residents in local communities about risk and response options, to steer collaborations on climate information services. This article examines visual ethnography as an enabler of climate information services that connect societal and scientific objectives at local scales in cities. Based on case study findings from Kampala city in Uganda, local-level framings of climate risks and responses were grouped into exploratory and intersectional framings. The exploratory framings are risks and response options directly linked to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 11 and 13 on cities and climate change respectively, while depicting some degree of contradiction. Intersectional framings are risks and response options demonstrating the interrelatedness of climate issues across different SDGs. Local communities do take on scientific information on impacts and adaptation barriers but also connect risks and responses to experiences of tested options, which sometimes only emerge during the process of visual ethnography and are not initially identified. Visual ethnography can be an important source of information not only on stressors experienced and priority actions by local communities, but can also be a climate solutions imagery, that contains positive adaptation stories with opportunities for enriching and complementing scientific inquiry on responses.
Violence against women and girls (VAWG) has been at the forefront of feminist struggles for equality; however, movements to prevent VAWG have been depoliticised, particularly by Western voices, with processes rooted in colonialism and patriarchy. Despite a growing movement to decolonise violence prevention and centre voices and experiences of the Global South, many continue to navigate power-imbalanced partnerships. To dismantle power imbalances within North–South and South–South collaborations, it is necessary to reflect on positionalities and ‘power within’, explore deep structures of partnership models, technical assistance and funding mechanisms, and collectively harness the ‘power to’ create systems promoting trust, mutual learning and accountability.
We conducted a qualitative retrospective and prospective, multi-site case study to generate evidence on effective technical assistance and partnership models for adapting and scaling VAWG prevention programmes and contribute to discussions on feminist funding approaches and devolution of funder power. We examined partnership models and power dynamics among funders, programme designers and implementers involved in adapting Program H (Lebanon), Take Back the Tech Campaign (Mexico), Safetipin (South Africa), Legal Promoters Training and Community Care Model (Cape Verde) and Transforming Masculinities (Nigeria). This provocation builds upon findings from this research by offering first-person reflections from some members of the study team, Study Advisory Board and study participants. Authors respond to provocative statements by drawing upon experiences from this study and other projects for how funders, programme implementers and researchers can better work together to accelerate efforts to achieve social and gender justice within and beyond the violence prevention field.
This chapter examines the role of civil society in advancing sustainable welfare in the Swedish metropolitan cities of Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. It views civil society as a space for collective action and potential transformation, where organisations, movements and activist networks strive for change. The chapter explores the collaboration and integration between civil society groups focused on environmental and welfare issues. Based on interviews with leaders and a survey of participants in environmental protests, the findings reveal an absence of a unifying master frame that bridges the environmental and welfare divides. This is primarily attributed to the particularistic nature of civil society organisations and their alignment with the siloed structure of local government, which separates policy areas. While inertia appears to dominate, the chapter highlights the emergence of a justice frame able to mobilise supporters from both environmental and welfare sectors, offering a potential path towards sustainable welfare.
This concluding chapter evaluates whether Swedish cities have successfully bridged the gap between environmental and welfare concerns in urban governance. Despite the disruptive pressures of climate change, the findings indicate that substantive transformative change has not yet occurred in the investigated cities. Environmental and welfare policy domains remain largely separate, with civil society organisations and public attitudes continuing to operate within a framework of differentiation rather than integration. While many results adhere to established pathways, the chapter highlights that patterns of inertia and emergence coexist. Actors actively push for new discourses and practices to integrate environmental and welfare concerns. However, the emergence of a sustainable welfare path remains contested, with expressions of denial, rejection and opposition to transformative efforts. Drawing on Polanyi’s concepts of movements and counter-movements, these tensions do not represent a failure of transformation but rather the clarification of two competing pathways for addressing the challenges and risks posed by climate change.
The introductory chapter outlines the core challenge of providing welfare within planetary boundaries, a pressing issue for cities and societies globally. It emphasises the growing recognition of climate change’s impact on welfare and social risks, forming the foundation for the book’s objectives. It explores patterns of inertia, emergence and transformation in Swedish urban governance and analyses if and to what extent Swedish cities have overcome the separation between welfare and environmental concerns and practices. Sweden, with its strong social democratic welfare legacy and widespread support for environmental policies, serves as a compelling case to examine factors that either promote or impede the integration of these domains. The chapter introduces the three cities central to the study – Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö – and outlines the three sites of urban governance explored in the book: local government, civil society and public attitudes. This sets the stage for the empirical investigation of sustainable welfare integration in Swedish urban governance.
This chapter examines how city governments and administrations integrate environmental and social concerns into urban governance. Utilising theories of policy integration, it explores the potential for eco-social integration in three major Swedish cities – Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. The findings, based on interviews and document analysis, reveal limited integration between environmental and welfare domains. The siloed structure of public administration poses a significant barrier to cross-sectoral integration, compounded by resource constraints and the high degree of specialisation among experts. Despite this inertia, signs of emergence are observed in the form of urban experiments – short-term projects that challenge existing silo structures but generally do not establish lasting pathways for integration. The chapter recognises the potential impact of the sustainable development goals in reshaping urban governance, offering a path towards enhanced integration of eco-social policies.
Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Pathways to Sustainable Welfare critically examines how cities can address the dual challenges of climate change and sustainability while ensuring the welfare of their populations.
Focused on three Swedish cities, it explores the integration of environmental and welfare concerns in local policies, urban movements and public opinions. Based on theories of inertia, emergence and transformation, it identifies factors driving or obstructing sustainable welfare advancements.
This book is a crucial resource for scholars interested in sustainable transformation, urban governance and social policy. It offers frameworks and empirical evidence relevant to academics, policymakers and practitioners seeking to understand and engage in urban sustainable welfare development.
This chapter explores public attitudes towards sustainable welfare and the social dispositions that influence them based on a survey of urban and rural residents. The findings show that urban residents are generally more supportive of an eco-social agenda than their rural counterparts. Among the specific policies, working time reduction garners the most public support, followed by a wealth tax and a meat tax, while maximum income and basic income receive the least support. The analysis highlights that urban residents are more supportive of eco-social policies. Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, the chapter examines the social dispositions that explain these varying attitudes. While many of these dispositions reflect inertia or emergence, one – ‘active sustainable welfare’ – is linked to a transformative outlook among parts of the public.
This chapter investigates varying conceptions of stability and change within sociology, political science and sustainability sciences. It synthesises key theoretical constructs such as dependency, niches, path entrepreneurs and tipping points to study pathways towards sustainable welfare. Building on these theories and concepts, the chapter proposes an analytical framework based on the conceptual distinctions between inertia, emergence and transformation. Inertia is framed as stability, while emergence reflects the creation of something new without a predefined trajectory. Transformation, on the other hand, involves the establishment of new pathways and the restructuring of institutions and practices to support them. The framework highlights the roles of discourses, actors and practices in shaping these dynamics, enabling a deeper empirical and analytical exploration of the integration between environmental and welfare domains and the mechanisms that facilitate or obstruct such integration.
This chapter explores issues of crime, deviancy, conflict and victimisation as these pertain to the planet’s southern continent. The discussion centres on harm and how these are manifested at local levels through to global levels. Transgressions that cause harm have ramifications for the health and well-being of humans, ecosystems, and plants and animals, not only within the environs of Antarctica but worldwide. The chapter maps out different types of harm, for example, those affecting the Antarctic continent itself, such as pollution and waste, and global warming, and the impacts these are having on endemic non-human animals as well as the biotic communities of the Southern Ocean, not to mention rising seas and shifts in climatic conditions generally. It also examines the nature of transgressions involving humans who live and work in the Antarctic, and the harms that emerge within communities and between colleagues in such remote and physically harsh environments. Antarctica is increasingly important to world powers, as reflected in contemporary debates over the Antarctic Treaty. There are also heightened conservation concerns about the state of the Antarctic as a nature reserve, intricate ecosystem and unique biophysical space. For rural criminology, Antarctica presents profound challenges for research, horizon scanning and strategic intervention.
