Notions of care for humans and more-than-humans appear at the margins of the sustainability transformations debate. This paper explores the merits of an ethics of care approach to sustainability transformations. It argues that more radical, transformative change can be fostered via three mutually reinforcing dimensions: a) ethically-informed practices; b) relational response-ability; and c) emotional awareness. This novel theoretical and methodological lens emphasizes the transformative potential of caring practices and as such extends the reach of the sustainability transformations debate.

Socially desirable outcomes such as community cohesion, diversity and social mixing are key features of the sustainable communities discourse. However, this aspect of the sustainable communities policy agenda remains under-researched. This paper uses the case of a community food initiative (Stroudco, located in Stroud, UK) to review some of the challenges faced in incorporating these social goals into wider (community led) sustainability initiatives. In particular, we explore the tensions that arise between the three core facets of sustainability – the social, the environmental and the economic – when they are brought together at a community level. Although Stroudco was established with the aim of bridging diverse communities and broadening the cross-section of people consuming local food, to date this remains a significant challenge. The case of Stroudco provides an insight into some of the difficulties encountered by local initiatives that attempt to operate across a range of social groupings while also overcoming cultural differences about the value of local food. It also raises important questions about the social geographies of resilience which community sustainability initiatives are able to support.

Concern over the spread of infectious animal diseases has led to attempts to improve the biosecurity behaviour of farmers. Implicit within these behavioural change strategies are different geographies of knowledge that enact different versions of disease. Some versions are fixed whilst others attempt to live with disease by accommodating difference. This paper explores how these different strategies fare in attempts to promote biosecurity to farmers. The paper compares farmers' responses to ‘high‐risk’ and ‘population’ strategies of biosecurity behaviour change in relation to bovine tuberculosis in cattle. Drawing on quantitative assessments of biosecurity and farmer interviews, the paper suggests that biosecurity behaviour change initiatives that draw on locally situated practices and knowledges of disease are more likely to have an impact on biosecurity behaviour than those which attempt to standardise biosecurity and disease. Through a process of constant tinkering and rewiring biosecurity to fit local social and ecological conditions, approaches like the high‐risk strategy represent one way of living with the uncertainties of disease. It is argued that thinking more broadly about the nature of disease should lead policymakers to re‐evaluate the purpose of disease control and their approaches to it.

This article explores the links between biosecurity policy and rural differentiation. It attempts to show how biosecurity policy has been fundamentally affected by uncertainty over the rules of the game of policy‐making – what Hajer has called the ‘institutional void’. In particular, the article attempts to show how this void has created a new political space in which the traditional practices of dealing with animal disease have been challenged and reshaped. Crucial to this is a discourse of partnership that permits new actors and forms of expertise to construct different approaches to biosecurity at new spatial scales. These actions legitimate a new spatiality of disease control, thereby contributing to the differentiation of the countryside. The article uses a case‐study of policy attempts to control the spread of bovine tuberculosis in England and Wales.