Global biodiversity scenarios have long struggled to capture the diversity of ways people value and relate to nature, favoring instrumental, growth-oriented framings over relational and intrinsic perspectives. The Nature Futures Framework (NFF) was developed to address this gap, offering a pluralistic, target-seeking approach to imagining nature-positive futures. This Special Feature brings together contributions that advance...

The circular economy (abbreviation: CE) has become a dominant policy and research paradigm in recent years, emphasizing sustainability through waste minimization, repair, reuse, and the extension of product lifecycles. While the technical and systemic dimensions of CE have been extensively studied, its social and cultural implications, particularly regarding labour, heritage, and intergenerational knowledge, remain underexplor...

High-Andean peatlands (bofedales) are part of a social-ecological system managed and used by pastoralists as forage for their livestock and a water source during the dry season. Maintaining healthy bofedales is important for pastoralist communities as well as critical zone function (watershed management, including water flow regulation and soil carbon sequestration). In our study region, bofedales are found near the headwaters...

Water governance has grown more sophisticated over the past half-century, yet many water systems remain under severe stress. Aquifers continue to decline, rivers and wetlands continue to degrade, and irrigation and urban water systems face growing pressure from competing demands, pollution and climate variability. This article argues that the paradox reflects a structural imbalance. Contemporary governance is highly developed...

Nature contributes to our quality of life through a wide range of non-material Nature’s Contributions to People (NCP), including aesthetic enjoyment, restorative experiences and recreational opportunities. However, quantifying and managing the supply of non-material NCP requires a mechanistic understanding of how they are associated with the entities of nature that support them across different ecological contexts. We characte...

Sustainability is not a fact to be read off from ecosystems, but an evaluative framework shaped by human judgements about what should be sustained, for whom, and at what cost. Posthuman and more-than-human approaches, which seek to decentre the human by foregrounding ecological interdependence and the agency of nonhuman actors, offer an important corrective to crude anthropocentrism, but they risk obscuring human normative age...

Contemporary societal planning is increasingly confronted with urgent and interdependent challenges such as sustainable development, climate change, segregation, and organized crime. These issues are frequently described as wicked problems —a concept used to capture the multifaceted, multilayered, and often resistant nature of complex societal challenges. This paper aims to deepen understanding of the dilemmas that arise withi...

Incorporating diverse values of nature into decision-making is essential for achieving sustainability, particularly in contested policy arenas. Decision-making about forests is highly contested in Australia due to historical legacies, ongoing discourses and emerging challenges. We investigate values that participants from diverse stakeholder groups nationally have of forests in Australia through semi-structured interviews, gui...

Positive future visions for cities are fundamental to transformative change in times of social polarisation against the backdrop of deep-rooted social-ecological crises. Our study examines the views and underlying values regarding desirable futures held by local planners working for the public administration in Dresden (Germany). We employed the Urban Nature Futures Framework as a heuristic to engage in pluralistic valuation o...

The unsustainability of the EU food system calls for a shift toward more sustainable and healthy consumption patterns. However, the system’s complexity—marked by multiple loosely coupled subsystems and interacting drivers—poses a major challenge to identifying effective interventions. To locate leverage points for policy action, we develop a high-level systems map that captures the core dynamics of the EU food system using a s...

This special feature brings into dialogue debates that have evolved mainly separately: scholarship on infrastructural heterogeneity in Southern cities and research on distributed and decentralized energy transitions in the North. Drawing on empirical cases from Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Europe, Australia, and North America, the contributions show that heterogeneity is no longer an exception but a defining feature of conte...

Collaboration across the ‘siloes’ of government is key to unlocking a transformative paradigm shift in climate change adaptation (CCA), yet such ‘mainstreaming’ efforts have been unsuccessful to date. This paper argues that these shortcomings are rooted primarily in the mainstreaming literature’s neglect of people’s worldviews as an integral component of successful collaboration. For an individual’s internal dimensions to be r...

Rural areas, encompassing 80% of the EU’s territory and nearly 30% of its population, face complex socio-ecological challenges. EU rural policies put significant emphasis on the role of (digital) innovation to address issues such as employment opportunities, service accessibility, and infrastructure management. Yet the transition from analog to digital is accompanied by tensions and conflicts among the diverse actors engaged i...

Sufficiency calls for an absolute reduction of production and consumption volumes in affluent societies and is seen by many sustainability scholars as a fundamental strategy for businesses to tackle environmental and social crises. Existing literature emphasizes challenges that businesses experience when implementing sufficiency. However, the complex and paradoxical nature of implementing sufficiency has so far hindered schola...

Agroecology in Europe is increasingly framed as a transformative response to environmental, social, and economic pressures in contemporary agriculture. Although agroecological initiatives remain unevenly distributed and far from mainstream, current efforts to scale up and scale out are intensifying debates around legitimacy, governance, and sustainability. This paper provides a critical and conceptual interpretive framework th...

Achieving sustainability requires collective action by diverse stakeholders, facilitated by knowledge systems that integrate scientific, policy, and locally tested, place-based practical insights. As collective action and knowledge systems are usually analyzed separately, this paper explicitly examines this relationship, assessing the role of knowledge in shaping collective action within a network of 32 sustainability initiati...

Transdisciplinarity and the production of actionable knowledge with and for societal actors is a central feature of sustainability science. Yet questions remain about whether such efforts genuinely challenge the structural roots of unsustainability or inadvertently reinforce them in pursuit of proximate impacts. This paper responds to calls for more critical monitoring and evaluation by evaluating a transdisciplinary Horizon E...

Growth in blue industries require heightened attention to justice in coastal governance. However, our understanding of different societal groups’ perceptions of justice in the context of the blue economy and coastal governance is limited. To address this gap, we developed a survey instrument to assess justice perceptions for local fisheries and subsequently used this instrument to elicit justice perceptions among coastal plann...

Social sustainability is a crucial yet underexplored dimension of sustainability. Although often referenced alongside environmental and economic sustainability, its meaning remains ambiguous. Given that education is frequently seen as a key driver of sustainability transitions, this review examines how social sustainability is conceptualised in educational research. We analyse journal articles that address social sustainabilit...

Conservation agriculture is a promising approach to address the sustainability challenge of soil degradation facing Mediterranean farming systems. We documented the collective mental model of pioneering conservation agriculture farmers in Morocco, Spain, and Tunisia, including their motivations, perceived benefits, and how they overcome barriers in implementation. We find that pioneer farmers identify interlinked benefits incl...