In contrast to sustainable development, it seems that the green economy is attractive for relevant socioeconomic actors. Technologies to develop renewable sources of energy or electric vehicles are available, and microelectronics play a much more important role today than 20 years ago. And there is another dynamic, i. e., the current financial crisis, the major cause of which is an enormous amount of over-accumulated capital that seeks new investment opportunities. Financial capital has discovered agriculture, soil, infrastructure, and environmental protection as a new field of investment, thereby creating opportunities for a few, threatening the living conditions of many, particularly in the global South (Zeller 2010, Dörre et al. 2009). In sum, the concept of a green economy seems to promise an attractive orientation out of the crisis of neoliberalism that became manifest in 2008 and has hit vulnerable countries and social groups.

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“Transformation” is an umbrella term which places the ecological crisis in a broader context. To foster societal change, opinion leaders of the transformation debate are focusing on cooperation and learning, existing political, cultural and economic institutions, and trust in incremental change. However, these leaders are not questioning existing power relations. This bias may partly explain why social-ecological transformation has not yet occurred. A more analytical under standing of transformation can complement and correct some of these shortcomings in order to better understand the obstacles to policy change.

Transformation has become a major topic of sustainability research. This opens up new perspectives, but at the same time, runs the danger to convert into a new critical orthodoxy which narrows down analytical perspectives. Most research is committed towards a political-strategic approach towards transformation. This focus, however, clashes with ongoing transformation processes towards un-sustainability. The paper presents cornerstones of an integrative approach to social-ecological transformations (SET), which builds upon empirical work and conceptual considerations from Social Ecology and Political Ecology. We argue that a critical understanding of the challenges for societal transformations can be advanced by focusing on the interdependencies between societies and the natural environment. This starting point provides a more realistic understanding of the societal and biophysical constraints of sustainability transformations by emphasising the crisis-driven and contested character of the appropriation of nature and the power relations involved. Moreover, it pursues a transdisciplinary mode of research, decisive for adequately understanding any strategy for transformations towards sustainability. Such a conceptual approach of SET is supposed to better integrate the analytical, normative and political-strategic dimension of transformation research. We use the examples of global land use patterns, neo-extractivism in Latin America and the global water crisis to clarify our approach.

The concept of transformation has become a buzzword within the last few years. This has to do, first, with the ever broader recognition of the profound character of the environmental crisis, secondly, with increasingly obvious limits to existing forms of (global) environmental governance, thirdly, with the emergence of other dimensions of the crisis since 2008 and, fourthly, with intensified debates about required profound social change, especially of societal nature relations. However, the term transformation itself is contested. It largely depends on theoretical assumptions as well as the plausibility and applicability of the arguments which are made. In this paper, a historical-materialist approach to social-ecological transformation is outlined by referring to a theoretically sophisticated understanding of 'subject(s)' of transformation as well as the 'object(s)' of what is to be transformed. Theoretical concepts like the capitalist mode of production, regulation and hegemony, a critical understanding of the state and governance as well as the term societal nature relations are key. Such a perspective contributes to a more sophisticated understanding of the obstacles and requirements of real-world transformation. Finally, the argument has implications for visions and strategies, i.e., an emancipatory and democratic shaping of social relations and societal nature relations.

The ecological crisis has intensified in many respects. Prominent proposals to deal with the crisis are discussed under the header 'sustainability transformations' or even 'Great Transformation'. We argue that most contributions suffer from a narrow analytical approach to transformation ignoring the largely unsustainable dynamics of global capitalism and the power relations involved in it. Thus, a 'new critical orthodoxy' of knowledge about transformation is emerging which runs the danger to contribute to a spatially and socially highly uneven green capitalism. This article claims that the current debate on social-ecological transformation can be enriched by a Polanyian understanding but also based on regulation theory. We distinguish between three types of transformation: incremental adaptation of the current institutional systems, institutional change in favour of a new 'green' phase of capitalism, and a post-capitalist great transformation that implies a profound structural change of the mode of production and living.

The aim of this text is to make sense of the emerging political-institutional, territorial, and socio-ecological dynamics and contradictions of neo-extractivism in Latin America in the context of global capitalist development. In contrast to some existing literature, we argue that the term ‘neo-extractivism’ should not be restricted to countries with progressive governments but be applied to all Latin American societies that, since the 1970s and especially since the year 2000, depend predominantly on the exploitation and exportation of nature. We argue that the often vague usage of the term neo-extractivism can be strengthened when it is seen in line with dominant development models. Therefore we refer to regulation theory and its historical heuristic of different phases of capitalist development. This enables us to look at the temporal-spatial interdependencies between shifting socio-economic and technological developments, world market structures, and political-institutional configurations that characterize neo-extractivism across scales and beyond national borders.

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