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Today, several social movements in western democracies argue that traditional representative democracy has failed to adequately represent the will of the "people", and instead support direct democracy as the only political system to restore the will of the majority. We analyze under what conditions the policy – a vector of decisions on every issue – implemented by the winner of a bipartisan electoral competition coincides with the policy that citizens would choose by means of direct democracy. We find necessary and sufficient conditions for this equivalence to hold, implying that, as long as at least one of them is not fulfilled, a divergence of outcomes between direct and representative democracy arises. The first condition requires that the outcome of majority voting issue-by-issue is the Condorcet winner relative to the voters' preference profile over the set of policies. The second requires that either that outcome is the preferred policy for at least one of the candidates, or that candidates' preferred policies differ on every single issue. We reinterpret some findings in the literature in the light of our model and present them as potential reasons why the equivalence between direct and representative democracy may fail. • We find necessary and sufficient conditions for the coincidence of policies implemented under direct and representative democracy. • Loosely divided electorates and highly polarized politicians favor such a coincidence. • The bundling of issues by politicians does not jeopardize the coincidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disruptions to transport systems often significantly change travel behaviour. This is especially true when the disruption lasts over an extended period and is accompanied by the massive-scale dysfunction of transit operations. In addition, although attitude is critical for predicting travel behaviour, there is little documentation of changes in attitudes towards transit modes and the factors influencing such changes during a transit system disruption. Furthermore, few studies have investigated how social movements can exert a pronounced disrupting effect on a transit system. To fill these research gaps and provide policy recommendations for a more responsive contingency plan in response to future transit system disruptions, our study aims to investigate this issue based on the case of Hong Kong during the 2019 social movement. We collected a questionnaire survey representing the period from late June to early July 2020, a few months after the end of the protests. Using structural equation models, we have examined how people's attitudes towards different transit modes changed during the social movement. Our findings highlight that people's perception of the city's urban rail system – the Mass Transit Railway, which the government has a significant stake in and control over – worsened significantly during the transit disruption, but the effects were less pronounced for bus and mini-bus. In addition, attitudes towards the social movement were found to vary significantly across social groups, a finding linked to people's attitudes towards different transit modes. Importantly, our study reveals that people's views of social movements can significantly determine how they evaluate impacted and alternative transport modes during transit disruptions. These newly revealed attitudinal dimensions should be fully considered in predicting behavioural change and adjusting transit services under similar conditions. • Examined the attitudinal dimensions during transit disruption caused by social movement. • During the disruption, people' attitudes towards transit modes changed markedly. • Attitudes towards the social movement influenced people's attitudes of transit modes. • Political views should be considered when arranging transit service during social movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Around the globe the amount and frequency of social protests have been increasing. However, we do not fully understand when such protests are effective. This is in part due to conflicting findings in the literature, and the lack of a framework that can integrate these divergent findings about why types of social protests are effective. We introduce a framework for evaluating effectiveness of social protest made up of three components: (i) what types of action are being considered; (ii) what target audience is being affected; and (iii) what outcomes are being evaluated? We apply our framework to organize the literature, and in doing so find a pattern that suggests that normative nonviolent forms of action may be most effective in mobilizing sympathetic target audiences, and more extreme disruptive action may be effective at motivating policy concessions from resistant target audiences. Around the world, people engage in social protests aimed at addressing major societal problems. Certain protests have led to significant progress, yet other protests have resulted in little demonstrable change. We introduce a framework for evaluating the effectiveness of social protest made up of three components: (i) what types of action are being considered; (ii) what target audience is being affected; and (iii) what outcomes are being evaluated? We then review relevant research to suggest how the framework can help synthesize conflicting findings in the literature. This synthesis points to two key conclusions: that nonviolent protests are effective at mobilizing sympathizers to support the cause, whereas more disruptive protests can motivate support for policy change among resistant individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the determinants of people's attention to climate change in Italy. We propose a Twitter-based indicator consistent with traditional survey data but potentially available at a higher frequency and spatial granularity. We show that attention to climate change is heterogeneous across the country and correlated with socioeconomic characteristics and social capital. Mass media and social movements have a relevant impact on people's attention about climate change while the effect of private experience – proxied by the occurrence of extreme weather events – is more limited. • In recent years, attention to climate change has urged, accompanied by a worsening of the overall sentiment about the issue • Attention to climate change correlates with socioeconomic characteristics, media coverage, and social movement initiatives • Heat waves draw attention to climate change, while cold waves merely shape weather discussions • Experiencing an extreme weather event has a limited, but still significant, impact on the attention to climate change [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In September 2020 Deutsche Bank published a report entitled "The Age of Disorder." Fronted dramatically by the image of a volcano and volley of lightning across a brooding sky, the report warned that the global economy was on the precipice of a phase shift from neo-liberal quasi-stability to an era characterized by dramatic social, economic, and ecological upheavals. Deutsche Bank's researchers call this new period "the age of disorder". This paper proposes Deutsche Bank's appraisal is part of a broader condition that it calls capitalist catastrophism and an emerging regime of eco-apartheid. Taking as its point of departure Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright's call for geographers to construct concepts that might help navigate a hotter planet, the paper introduces capitalist catastrophism as a concept that names and theorizes the effects of a dramatic and asymmetrically catastrophic reconfiguration of the capitalist world-system. Capitalist catastrophism has three characteristics. First, a newfound ability for social movements and theorists to imagine post-capitalist futures combined with an inability to realize them. Second, cascading and mutually amplifying social and ecological crises that outrun the capacities of states and capital to contain them. Third, an unevenly distributed cancellation of human and non-human futures. Drawing on Marxist political economy and Nyasha Mboti's theorization of apartheid, the paper concludes that capitalist catastrophism is resolving itself into a global system of eco-apartheid in which a green transition for some is secured by putting the exploited and oppressed majority in harm's way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The high overdose mortality rates in the United States poses several questions: Why have they been increasing exponentially since 1979? Why are they so high? And how can they be greatly reduced? Building on past research, the causes of the increase seem to be deeply rooted in US social and economic structures and processes, rather than due only to opioid prescription patterns or the advent of synthetic opioids. Given this, we consider what changes might be needed to reverse the exponentially-increasing overdose mortality. We use a path dependency argument to argue that the United States political, economic, and public health systems have helped create this crisis and, unfortunately, continue to heighten it. These same systems suggest that proposals to expand harm reduction and drug treatment capacity, to decriminalize or legalize drugs, or to re-industrialize the country sufficiently to reduce "communities of despair" will not be enacted at a scale sufficient to end the overdose crisis. We thus suggest that in the United States serious improvements in overdose rates and related policies and structures require massive social movements with a broad social change agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• An actor- and practice-oriented approach can fill theoretical gaps in actors-driven sustainable and just transitions. • Grassroots movements need to accumulate diverse types of social capitals essential to foster transitions. • Social capitals are accumulated and depleted through social interfaces between different arenas affecting niche and regime constellations. • Conflicts and critical moments can have a constructive dimension by opening windows of opportunity to reconfigure power asymmetries in societal systems. Water conflicts open windows of opportunity for grassroots movements to transform water systems. However, academic fields studying social movements in socio-environmental conflicts are not well equipped to deal with complexity, non-linear dynamics, and emergent properties. Therefore, these fields rarely engage with long-term complex social processes and dynamics leading to systemic socio-technical changes. Researching water conflicts driven by grassroots movements, we ask whether and how the latter can influence a socio-technical transition of a water management regime. Through an emblematic water conflict in Mexico, we analyse the grassroots movement's trajectory since the conflict´s inception by following the dynamic process of developing agency. Our findings show that throughout the conflict, the grassroots movement accumulated and mobilized diverse capitals to initiate water management strategies and practices that catalysed change in the water management regime by stalling the implementation of large infrastructures. Eventually, this led to the inception of a sustainable and just transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement scholarship has long attempted to apprehend the dynamic qualities of social movements. Considering the temporal embeddedness of social movement activities is essential because it leads to an understanding of continuity and change in the content and form of social movements in the long run. Because the past, the present, and the future are co-defined, more attention should be paid to the way different time frames shape one another. In this article, we focus our attention on the influence of visions of the future on present practices. Drawing on qualitative research mainly in Belgium, France, and Germany, we explore how projected climate-just futures influence the practices of grassroots climate justice organizations in the present. For this purpose, we center our analysis on a macro-level vision that depicts a climate-just world as a world where domination systems (aka. capitalism, colonialism, or patriarchy) have been replaced in order to let a more egalitarian society strive. We use the concept of prefiguration to illustrate how this vision transforms organizing and mobilizing activities. Such transformative effects are exemplified in attempts at developing an alternative organizational culture and building alliances with marginalized groups, with more or less success. • We identify one widespread vision of climate justice that permeates a lot of activist organizations in Europe. • This vision is based on a systemic analysis of the roots and drivers of climate change and vulnerability to the latter. • This vision shapes the organizing and mobilizing practices of grassroots organizations in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing studies of extractivisms, in the plural, examine the diverse politics that permeate extractive activities. However useful, this appeal to plurality is problematic. Plurality without relationality risks justifying some extractive activities over others, without addressing how they relate. Drawing on anti-essentialist, decolonial, and political ecological scholarship, this article proposes an ontological reframing of extractivisms that troubles the division and comparison that pervade notions of taxonomic plurality, and emphasizes the mutual constitution articulated within the concept of relationality. Analyses of relational resources are better equipped to illuminate the power-laden associations through which supposedly distinct commodity values, extractive geographies, sectors, and governance regimes shape one another. Beyond complicating rigid definitions of extractive categories, this ontological shift requires distinct methodologies for understanding and contesting entangled extractive interests and logics. It implicates what forms of anti-extractive resistance, solidarities, and alternative futures become viable, thinkable, and necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the growing body of scholarly work on the Global East, there has been a surprising lack of research that systematically explores the "civil society building" during postsocialist transformation, particularly in terms of identifying and explicating its distinct developmental stages. Seeking to address this gap, this article utilizes contemporary Montenegro as a case study for investigating the form and content, sites and scales, and dynamics and interactions of civic engagement, associational life, and protest politics against the backdrop of the intricate processes characteristic of the "postsocialist condition": political transition, economic restructuring, and social transformation. By examining the development of an actually existing civil society in the Global East over the course of three decades, this article identifies its three stages and demonstrates the ways in which functionalist (civil society as a democratizing force), normativist (civil society as a civilized society), and structuralist (civil society as the civic sector) conceptualizations tend to be reductive, often obscuring rather than illuminating the empirical realities of civil societies. Conversely, by emphasizing practices , relations , and processes , this article broadens the symbolic (and thus political) boundaries of civil society, while simultaneously avoiding conceptual stretching that could compromise precision in producing analytical tools tailor-made to the evolving realities in the Global East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Approximately one in ten individuals globally currently reside without authorization in another person's dwelling, building, or parcel of land, underscoring the magnitude of squatting as a widespread phenomenon. Despite its prevalence, squatting has largely remained overlooked in policy discussions and academic discourse, often associated with anarchistic behavior. Through a critical examination of existing literature and evolving perspectives in the policy debate on squatting, this article emphasizes the imperative of recognizing the inherent complexities of this phenomenon. The primary goal is to provide policymakers with an integrated framework that recognizes the intricacies of squatting, rectifies the limitations of prevailing neoclassical models, and facilitates evidence-based interventions for sustainable urban development. Central to this proposed framework is the Squatting Index, a numeric representation of overall squatting intensity derived from the weighted contribution of various socioeconomic factors. This index serves as a dynamic tool for formulating policy, evaluating policy effectiveness, monitoring evolving squatting dynamics over time, and adapting strategies and adjusting resource allocation to address emerging needs. Its application holds the promise of instigating a more informed, adaptable, and effective approach to address the multifaceted challenges associated with squatting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Small-scale farmer associations like the Peasant Farmer Association of Ghana (PFAG) have long been viewed as potential vehicles for agricultural development, but their intentions and effectiveness as political advocacy organizations remains understudied. • The context and actors involved in their founding (e.g. development NGOs) can heavily influence the structure and subsequent development trajectory of small-scale farmer advocacy organization like PFAG. • The form of recourse mobilization (e.g. patronage or self-production) adopted by small-scale farmer organizations like PFAG can provide both opportunities and present constraints on the organization's development and activities. • PFAG's reliance on patronage for funding creates challenges in terms of membership coverage and financial sustainability, as well as potential tensions between donors and PFAG's own advocacy mission. • PFAG's increasing interest in complementing its advocacy activities with service delivery may address some of the organization's financial challenges while also creating tensions with their avowed purpose as an advocacy organization. Smallholder farmer-based rural social movements have been heralded as a promising source of political power with the potential to effectively promote sustainable trajectories of agricultural development in Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. However, the very early stages of rural social movement building remain understudied, including under what conditions such nascent efforts are likely to lead to effective political influence and foundations for broader collective action. Drawing on insights from organizational studies and resource mobilization theories, we provide an analytical narrative of the emergence and development of a smallholder farmer-based policy advocacy organization, the Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana (PFAG). Through analysis of organizational documents and an extensive open-ended focus group interview with PFAG's founders, long-term members, and current staff, we discuss how PFAG managed to overcome the "liability of newness" faced by new organizations, and how its resulting organizational structure influences its modes of resource mobilization and thus type and coverage of its advocacy and service delivery activities. Considering this developmental narrative, we elaborate several challenges that PFAG faces in pursuit of its ambitions to expand its influence in Ghanaian agricultural policy and practice. Our findings indicate the need for PFAG to address emerging contradictions in project activities and uneven geographical coverage, manage tensions between advocacy and service delivery objectives and to work towards establishing an umbrella agenda capable of providing for the diverse and evolving needs of their membership base. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper conceptualises the ways grassroots innovations (GIs) influence sustainability transitions. While research on GI diffusion tends to use the three-pathway model (replication, scaling up and translation), this paper rethinks GI diffusion through the lenses of an embedding framework. We illustrate this framework by applying it to the empirical case of ecovillages in the Global North and South. The results show that GIs become embedded in wider society through different dynamics: expansion, reframing, circulation of knowledge, shifting material arrangements and replication. The embedding framework brings clarity to diverse dynamics of diffusion and is particularly able to grasp the cultural, cognitive, economic and environmental impacts of GI initiatives. [Display omitted] • GIs influence sustainability transitions through different dynamics of embedding. • GIs' embedding includes symbolic and cognitive dynamics. • We offer an embedding framework to the study of GI diffusion. • We apply this framework to a study with ecovillages in 20 different countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • The paper shows how spirituality strategically supports an Adivasi self-empowerment movement in India. • Spirituality provides motivation, makes groups' indigeneity visible, and protects their activities against reprisals. • Tribal groups in India using this strategy can escape debt bondage and gain their own land. • Action organisations working with subaltern groups can orchestrate spirituality to achieve progressive goals. Spirituality strategically enables self-empowerment in a clandestine movement of Adivasis which this paper calls 'the Programme'. To explain how social movements and action organisations can orchestrate spirituality, this paper examines how the Programme helps landless rural people overcome debt bondage and gain land by employing spiritual repertoires. The paper addresses the question how, in the context of an increasingly tribalised politics in India, spiritual orchestration allows some Scheduled Tribes to make substantive economic gains, especially on debt freedom and land rights. The paper draws on an analysis of qualitative data collected through workshops, interviews and visits to villages across several Indian states, which has been anonymised to protect identities and avoid divulging sensitive information. The study finds that spirituality supports self-empowerment in three ways: first, it provides motivation and ideological reinforcement for people engaging in struggles against debt bondage and for land rights; second, it makes tribal identity more visible and helps groups make claims as indigenous owners; third, it offers groups protection from reprisals and creates platforms for engaging powerful actors. These findings are significant because, for activists and scholars who work with subaltern groups in India or other contexts, they demonstrate that the orchestration of spirituality can strengthen action repertoires for self-empowerment and help groups secure or protect economic and social gains. The paper adds insights to research on social movements and organisations on how to strengthen the 'weapons of the weak'; it contributes empirical knowledge about how strategies to overcome debt and exploitation can succeed; and it underscores the importance of protecting freedom of religion and belief in development practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the multi-actor making of the ruralscape in Hong Kong. I critically adopt the theoretical framework of Ingold's concepts of walking to understand how different "wayfarers", including but not limited to farmers, residents, land activists, agriculture learners, researchers, journalists, leisure practitioners and government officials, walk to make a multi-sensorial landscape. This paper encapsulates the observation outcomes of multiple times of walking by different individuals and groups recorded during my ethnographic fieldwork between 2008 and 2021. I shed light on the local practices and perspectives of hang cyun (walking in villages) and hang tin (walking in fields) to illustrate my observations. By analyzing the wayfarers' walking experiences and embodied movements, I consider the ruralscape as a vibrant space where people configure its meanings and materialize their lifestyle. The wayfarers' embodied experiences reflect the continuity and changes of a rural Hong Kong. Their making of ruralscape helps alleviate people's anxiety and enhance people's hope concerning the current Hong Kong society that faces food safety issues, environmental degradation, social class disparity and spoon-feeding education. I consider that being an agent who exercises his/her subjectivity during the walking in the ruralscape, a wayfarer makes the ruralscape meaningful in various aspects. My explanation contributes to the theoretical discussion of embodied movement and space making particular to the construction of a politicized nature telling us stories of (in)equality, (in)justice, and hope (lessness). • Walking is a political and socio-economic process that produces a multi-sensorial ruralscape. • Embodied movement and space making alleviates anxiety and enhances hope in rural Hong Kong. • Actor-actant interactions in Hong Kong's ruralscape entails stories of (in)equality, (in)justice, and hope (lessness). • People configure meanings and materialize lifestyle in walking in villages and fields. • Wayfarers's experiences reflect the continuity and changes of social movement, education, and agro-economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on community-supported agriculture (CSA) has highlighted the coexistence of different models and types of CSA initiatives. However, no study has explored how diverse models and definitions of CSA are collectively established, maintained, and enforced vis-à-vis changing political, economic, social, and cultural contexts. This article addresses this gap by drawing on the concept of boundary work, developed in social movement theory, which describes the process through which a social movement defines and situates itself in time and space in relation to its context. We investigate the boundary work of CSA at the level of the national network organisations in Germany and Italy, which provide a space where boundary work occurs, that is, where protagonists and antagonists are framed and a common understanding of CSA and who should join the network is constantly negotiated. By reconstructing the narratives and key topics of boundary work in both CSA networks, we showcase how the CSA model is delineated and a collective 'we' is constructed differently across countries in relation or opposition to pre-existing movements as well as the international CSA movement. Through the lens of boundary work, we highlight the internal contestations within the networks, which are often hidden by the seeming unity depicted in social mobilisations and the networks' official communication. Moreover, this study identifies different mechanisms of boundary work, which can be grouped into three types: creating, institutionalising, and enforcing the boundary. We find that the networks are engaged, to different extents and in different forms, in these types of boundary works. Based on the two case studies, we discuss potential misalignments, the implications of choosing a narrow or broad definition for the membership, and the challenge of addressing the internal heterogeneity within CSA networks. • National CSA networks provide spaces for collectively defining the CSA model. • Pre-existing movements fundamentally shape the boundaries of CSA in a given context. • A processual perspective on boundary work reveals internal contestations within networks. • Boundary work mechanisms include creation, institutionalisation and enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Asks whether and how state capacities contribute to movement-initiated policy change in the sphere of housing and land use. • Analyzes contrasting cases of local state capacities and their relationship to the urban social movements in São Paulo and Johannesburg. • Draws on original field-based research in both cities, using extensive interview and archival data. • Findings highlight the scale of urban social movement organizing — at the city-wide or neighborhood level — and the openness of local government bureaucracy to movements. • These interact to shape state capacities to deliver on movement-initiated policy change. Studies of social movements generally focus on the mechanisms through which movements affect the political will of states. Much of this research, in turn, implicitly assumes that the state has the capacity to realize the decisions adopted as a result of movement action. Focusing on local governments in young democracies, this article examines whether and how state capacities contribute to movement-initiated policy change and associated delivery in the sphere of housing and land use. It analyzes contrasting cases of local state capacities using a paired "most-similar" comparison of two megacities of the Global South, each of which underwent transitions to democracy in the past three decades: São Paulo, Brazil, and Johannesburg, South Africa. In São Paulo, state capacities facilitated policy success. These capacities were developed through interactions between movements and key bureaucratic allies. In Johannesburg, by contrast, the local bureaucracy became both impervious to movement pressure and unable to counter strategies by business elites to weaken efforts at policy reform. State capacity in this case hindered reforms. As a result, in São Paulo, sequential, reinforcing feedback loops of city-wide movement mobilization and formal policy reforms took shape. In Johannesburg, lack of openness of the state to civil society led grassroots movement organizations to refrain from city-wide policy reform efforts and to increasingly organize their activity at the neighborhood and street levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sonyosang (girl statue in Korean) is a bronze statue symbolizing "comfort women," the estimated 80,000 to 200,000 women physically, mentally, and sexually exploited by the Japanese Empire during WWII. As a backlash against the 2015 ″comfort women" agreement between the South Korean and Japanese governments, Koreans have installed 384 girl statues across South Korea. Based on ethnographic research that I conducted in South Korea between 2019 and 2021, including in-depth interviews with Korean activists who raised funds for or participated in creating, installing, and managing girl statues in South Korea, this research examines how the girl statue movement in South Korea has developed into a left-wing nationalist-populist movement and how affective identification with the statue generates a populist identity. To this end, this research firstly discusses how former President Park Geun-hye's undemocratic political measures recall the memory of minjungism (Korean populism) that led the pro-democracy movement in the 1980s, enabling Korean nationalist leftists' demands to form a chain of equivalence in the girl statue movement. Secondly, relying on Melanie Klein's theory of identification, this article examines how the 'people' is constituted through affective forms of identification with the girl statue. By doing so, this article demonstrates that the growth of the girl statue movement into a left-wing nationalist-populist movement blurs boundaries between the psychological, the personal, the national, and the (geo)political. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Calls for decolonizing theory, knowledge, methods, and the university have taken hold of academia. However, critics have pointed out that these projects are primarily located in the global North and distanced from actual political struggles. This paper proposes a way to disaggregate different elements of the North and evaluate the "decolonization" potential in relation to broader anticolonial political geographies. We define the North as an orientation toward the capitalist-colonial world and Northness as a relational property along three axes of geographical location, social position, and institutional vocation. Applying this, we review historic trends in decolonization thought by using a stylistic scheme of three southern ruptures: resistance to colonial conquest, postcolonial arrivals into the Northern academy, and transnational convergence. This analytical lens cautions against giving primacy to issues of marginalized social position over geographic location and institutional vocation, while also offering a political economic focus on postcolonial engagements with anticolonial politics. We call for attending to the current conjuncture characterized by increasing decolonial discourse alongside southern ruination by aligning epistemic endeavors with social movement struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • Synthesized data from 244 studies on Indonesian environmental movements 1990–2022. • Found 571 examples of lived religion used to create new environmental practices. • Movements blended official religions, Indigenous religions, and local knowledges. • Movements adopted many religious and other strategies to respond to local contexts. • Movements faced huge opposition, increasing their creativity and vulnerability. Religions play an important yet poorly understood part in how social movements motivate societies to respond to environmental crises and the rapidly changing climate. Indonesia sits on the global frontline of environmental crises, with a rich history of religious diversity and environmental activism. Using framework synthesis, we analyzed 244 empirical studies (English and Indonesian) on 208 environmental social movements operating in local communities in Indonesia from 1990 through 2022. We developed a conceptual model showing how grassroots movements used lived religion to create new environmental practices and motivate environmental behavioral changes in diverse local communities. Our study inventoried 571 examples of lived religious concepts, practices, rituals and systems that movements used to create environmental concepts and practices. We found three patterns in the creative process: 1) conceptual hybridization, meaning that movements often blended official religions, Indigenous religions, and local knowledges and traditions (often called cultural practices), and they fused these aspects of lived religion with economic, legal and scientific concepts; 2) contextual imagination, meaning that movements adopted multiple religious and other strategies to respond to local economic, environmental, political, and religio-cultural contexts; and, 3) contestation-driven improvisation, meaning that movements faced intense opposition, and this dynamic both motivated improvisation and increased the vulnerability of movements and of local communities adapting to rapid environmental change. We propose that future studies on adaptation and sustainable transitions could include lived eco-religion as a meeting point for critical partnerships between environmental scholars in the sciences and the humanities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]