The concept of resilience in ecology has been expanded into a framework to analyse human-environment dynamics. The extension of resilience notions to society has important limits, particularly its conceptualization of social change. The paper argues that this stems from the lack of attention to normative and epistemological issues underlying the notion of ‘social resilience’. We suggest that critically examining the role of knowledge at the intersections between social and environmental dynamics helps to address normative questions and to capture how power and competing value systems are not external to, but rather integral to the development and functioning of SES.

Climate change research is at an impasse. The transformation of economies and everyday practices is more urgent, and yet appears ever more daunting as attempts at behaviour change, regulations, and global agreements confront material and social-political infrastructures that support the status quo. Effective action requires new ways of conceptualizing society, climate and environment and yet current research struggles to break free of established categories. In response, this contribution revisits important insights from the social sciences and humanities on the co-production of political economies, cultures, societies and biophysical relations and shows the possibilities for ontological pluralism to open up for new imaginations. Its intention is to help generate a different framing of socionatural change that goes beyond the current science-policy-behavioural change pathway. It puts forward several moments of inadvertent concealment in contemporary debates that stem directly from the way issues are framed and imagined in contemporary discourses. By placing values, normative commitments, and experiential and plural ways of knowing from around the world at the centre of climate knowledge, we confront climate change with contested politics and the everyday foundations of action rather than just data.

Gender has long been recognised as important within environmental issues, but there has been considerable debate over how to conceptualise the gender–environment nexus. As feminist theorising around women and gender has changed, so have conceptualisations about gender and environment, leading to a key debate within ecofeminism and related literatures about whether there is an essential or a contingent relationship between women and natural environments. Within geography, most political ecologists work with the assumption that the gender–environment nexus is a contingent relationship, and thus investigate how gender relations are salient in the symbolic and material construction of environmental issues. In this paper I seek to build from this work and again raise the issue of how gender is conceptualised in relation to environment. I begin by briefly reviewing some of the work that has been done on gender and environment and then draw from poststructural feminism to suggest that gender itself has been undertheorised in work on environment. Once gender is reconceptualised as a process, the dynamic relationship between gender, environment, and other aspects of social and cultural life can be brought into view. What emerges is the need for political ecologists to examine gender beyond the household and community and the need to reconceptualise the gender–environment nexus. A case study of community forestry in Nepal is used to illustrate the importance of interrogating the processes by which gender relations become salient and are reproduced symbolically and materially.