Current conceptual debates on the impacts of ecosystem services (ESS) on human well-being often boil down to discussing the application and limitations of monetisation approaches. Meanwhile we argue that ESS can be understood in a richer and more nuanced way if we revisit the human well-being...

Conceptual discussions on the impacts of ecosystem services (ESS) on human well-being have largely been boiled down to limits and applications of their monetisation. Therefore, in practice, the use of the ESS concept has been to a large extent boiled down to payment-for-ecosystem-services...

Scientific activities which are targeted to engage and enact on societal problems – and governance of sustainability transition itself is one such activity – are necessarily prescriptive endeavours, have to recognize the fundamental normativity of sustainable development, need to be based on...

Using the capability approach, we analyse a recent environmental conflict in the city of Leipzig, Germany. Following its concept of flood protection, a state authority felled thousands of trees in a highly popular nature protection area, which culminated in public protests and lawsuits. In...

This paper sketches a re-conceptualisation of sustainable development (SD) on the basis of the capability approach (CA). The notion sustainable development was developed as a compromise in a political process and has been re-interpreted (some say: diluted) again and again in the last 20 years....

The politically influential idea of sustainable development is closely tied to the concept of inter- and intragenerational justice without clarifying these concepts and their relationship. In developing an account of human development, the capability approach conceptualizes parts of...

Policies for sustainability transitions necessarily have three main characteristics: they are prescriptive with regard to dynamic societal processes, linked to the normativity of sustainable development, and are able to interlink both the societal and the individual levels. Taking transition...