Academic Journal Article

The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration

The authors update the ‘Great Acceleration’ graphs of socio-economic and Earth System trends from 1750 to 2010, differentiating between wealthy, emerging, and other countries. Earth system indicators continue their long-term rise, with notable acceleration in the mid-20th century driven by human activities. The year 1950 therefore represents the most convincing start date for the Great […]

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Synchronous Failure: The Emerging Causal Architecture of Global Crisis

The authors argue we are increasingly witnessing a new form global crises they characterize as “synchronous failure.” This form of crisis “is more biophysical in origin, more inter-systemic in manifestation, more global in scope, and more rapid in development” (5). The deep cause of synchronous failure are increases in energy throughput, heightened global connectivity, and

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A Decade of Adaptive Governance Scholarship: Synthesis and Future Directions

The authors survey the development of the adaptive governance concept, which they define as “A range of interactions between actors, networks, organizations, and institutions emerging in pursuit of a desired state for social-ecological systems” (p. 6). Flexible, polycentric networks of diverse stakeholders can better address the uncertainty and complexity of change in social-ecological systems than

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Economic Crisis, Long Waves and the Sustainability Transition: An African Perspective

Mark Swilling analyzes economic crises from both a global and a more regional (global south/South African) perspective, examining sociological and technological changes from the post-WWII era into the future green economy. He notes that “a growing body of popular and academic literature has turned to long-wave theory to contextualise the crisis and predict the system

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Anticipating Critical Transitions

The authors define a “tipping point” in terms of “a catastrophic bifurcation, where a minor trigger can invoke a self-propagating shift to a contrasting state.” Such “critical transitions” appear in nature and society but remain difficult to predict. The authors propose that complex systems with feature high connectivity and high homogeneity are particularly vulnerable to

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Going South: Capitalist Crisis, Systemic Crisis, Civilisational Crisis

Writing in the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis, Barry K. Gills argues that the world is actually in “a multidimensional set of simultaneous and interacting crises on a global scale” that he terms a “triple conjuncture.” It involves: A capitalist crisis of over-accumulation that includes the externalities of neoliberalism. A world system crisis

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Overcoming Systemic Roadblocks to Sustainability: The Evolutionary Redesign of Worldviews, Institutions, and Technologies

The authors propose that socio-ecological systems feature the co-evolution of ecological systems and self-reinforcing complexes of (human) worldviews, institutions, and technologies (WITs). Contemporary WITs arose in a world of abundant resources and immense potential for growth but are now reaching the biophysical limits of the ecosphere. The authors thus advocate a deliberate shift from and

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