Impacts of climate change are likely to be marked in areas with steep climatic transitions. Species turnover, spread of invasive species, altered productivity, and modified processes such as fire regimes can all spread rapidly along ecotones, which challenge the current paradigms of ecosystem management. We conducted a literature review at a continental-wide scale of South-Western European forests, where the drier and warmer conditions of the Mediterranean have been widely used as examples of what is expected in more temperate areas. Results from the literature point to: (a) an expansion of slow-growing evergreen hardwood trees; (b) increased dieback and mortality episodes in forests (both natural and planted) mostly related to competition and droughts, and mainly affecting conifers; and (c) an increase in emergent diseases and pests of keystone-trees used in agroforestry zones. There is no consensus in the literature that fire regimes are directly increasing due to climate change, but available satellite data of fire intensity in the last 17 years has been lower in zones where agroforestry practices are dominant compared to unmanaged forests. In contrast, there is agreement in the literature that the current spread of fire events is probably related to land abandonment patterns. The practice of agroforestry, common in all Mediterranean countries, emerges as a frequent recommendation in the literature to cope with drought, reduce fire risk, and maintain biodiverse landscapes and rural jobs. However, it is unknown the extent to which the open vegetation resulting from agroforestry is of interest to forest managers in temperate areas used to exploiting closed forest vegetation. Hence, many transitional areas surrounding the Mediterranean Basin may be left unmanaged with potentially higher climate-change risks, which require active monitoring in order to understand and help ongoing natural adaptation processes.

This article engages with non-human agency through the interrogation of the emerging role of metrics in the governance of sustainability in the New Zealand primary sector. In it, we argue that the agency of the metrics builds on previous work that has elaborated the impact of audited best practice on the subjectivities of producers and processors, including the recent examination of the active influence of metrics that engenders unexpected and uncontrolled change in social networks of production. In this case, the analysis of the influence of metrics shifts to those used within a recently introduced ‘learning’ tool (Wine Industry Sustainability Engine) that can be classified as an effort in transition management. The capacity of metrics as agents is already apparent in the perceived interactions and engagements with the Wine Industry Sustainability Engine tool as expressed by likely users during assessments of the usability of initial pilot software. Using their response, we demonstrate that, despite intentions to use the tool to foster particular sets of practices and ethics through benchmarking, the metrics have multiple roles in production worlds—compelling compliance to regulations, creating new ways to communicate complex relations and practices, and generating information for reflexive self-evaluation. Through these roles, we argue, metrics clearly operate as both a material and ontological non-human actor, expressed in different ways in different assemblages. This conclusion has implications for the application of transition management more broadly, and helps us to better understand what we want metrics to accomplish, what they can accomplish, and the possible gap between the two.

Questions have been raised on what role the knowledge provided by sustainability science actually plays in the transition to sustainability and what role it may play in the future. In this paper we investigate different approaches to sustainability transformation of food systems by analyzing the rationale behind transformative acts-the ground that the direct agents of change act upon- and how the type of rationale is connected to the role of research and how the agents of change are involved. To do this we employ Max Weber’s distinction between instrumental rationality and value-rationality in social action. In particular, we compare two different approaches to the role of research in sustainability transformation: (1) Performance-based approaches that measure performance and set up sustainability indicator targets and benchmarks to motivate the agents in the food system to change; (2) Values-based approaches that aim at communicating and mediating sustainability values to enable coordinated and cooperative action to transform the food system. We identify their respective strengths and weaknesses based on a cross-case analysis of four cases, and propose that the two approaches, like Weber’s two types of rationality, are complementary-because they are based on complementary observer stances—and that an optimal in-between approach therefore cannot be found. However, there are options for reflexive learning by observing one perspective-and its possible blind spots-from the vantage point of the other, so we suggest that new strategies for sustainability transformation can be found based on reflexive rationality as a third and distinct type of rationality.