There is a growing imperative for responses to climate change to go beyond incremental adjustments, aiming instead for society-wide transformation. In this context, sociotechnical (ST) transitions and social-ecological (SE) resilience are two prominent normative agendas. Reviewing these literatures reveals how both share a complex-systems epistemology with inherent limitations, often producing managerial governance recommendations and foregrounding material over social drivers of change. Further interdisciplinary dialogue with social theory is essential if these frameworks are to become more theoretically robust and capable of informing effective, let alone transformational, climate change governance. To illustrate this potential, ideas from Deleuze and Guattari's political writing as well as other approaches that utilize the notion social fields (as opposed to sociosystems) are combined to more fully theorize the origins and enactment of social change. First, the logic of systems is replaced with the contingency of assemblages to reveal how pluralism, not elitism, can produce more ambitious and politicized visions of the future. In particular, this view encourages us to see social and ecological tensions as opportunities for thinking and acting differently rather than as mere technical problems to be solved. Secondly, the setting of social fields is introduced to situate and explain the power of ideas and the role of agency in times of uncertainty. The potential of such insights is already visible in some strands of climate change mitigation and adaptation research, but more needs to be done to advance this field and to bring it into dialogue with the mainstream systems based literature.

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This paper is the first large scale, quantitative study of the impact of corporate carbon management practices on corporate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Using data for 2009 and 2010 from the Carbon Disclosure Project survey, we find little compelling evidence that commonly adopted management practices are reducing emissions. This finding is unexpected and we propose three possible explanations for it. First, it may be because corporate carbon data and management practice information have not been reported in a standardized way. Second, there may be a delay between the application of corporate carbon management practices and their impact on emissions performance. Third, carbon management practices are not sufficiently impact-oriented, meaning there is no relationship to observe. Our findings are important for policymakers designing corporate GHG reporting standards, for the multiple stakeholders trying to understand the drivers of corporate carbon performance, and for the corporate managers responsible for measuring, reporting and mitigating emissions.

This article examines the key contributions of the political science and systems theory based literatures on environmental governance, and uses them to analyse the governance of biodiversity in Europe. The article suggests that the key insights of the two bodies of literature are a distinction between governance frameworks and regimes on one hand, and the importance of multifaceted and multiple scales on the other. These key insights draw attention to horizontal and vertical forms of interplay. The article suggests that interplay, both between actors and levels and between frameworks and regimes, is ubiquitous and ambivalent: it can either foster or hinder environmental governance. The article illustrates this discussion in the context of governance of biodiversity in Europe, highlighting how vertical and horizontal interplay between the governance framework for biodiversity and the broader institutional setting or regime have characterized the implementation of the Habitats Directive, both complicating and fostering the governance of biodiversity in Europe.