Continued unsustainability and surpassed planetary boundaries require not only scientific and technological advances, but deep and enduring social and cultural changes. The purpose of this article is to contribute a theoretical approach to understand conditions and constraints for societal change towards sustainable development. In order to break with unsustainable norms, habits, practices, and structures, there is a need for learning for transformation, not only adaption. Based on a critical literature review within the field of learning for sustainable development, our approach is a development of the concept of transformative learning, by integrating three additional dimensions—Institutional Structures, Social Practices, and Conflict Perspectives. This approach acknowledges conflicts on macro, meso, and micro levels, as well as structural and cultural constraints. It contends that transformative learning is processual, interactional, long-term, and cumbersome. It takes place within existing institutions and social practices, while also transcending them. The article adopts an interdisciplinary social science perspective that acknowledges the importance of transformative learning in order for communities, organizations, and individuals to be able to deal with global sustainability problems, acknowledging the societal and personal conflicts involved in such transformation.

An extensive literature examines political or green consumption, attending to how people make sense of their consumption relative to norms of individual responsibility and pro-environmental behaviour. Similarly, a small but growing literature addresses green governmentality, focusing on new governance forms and responsibilization processes. These two strands seldom meet, resulting in poor understanding of the links between consumption governance and people's sense-making and actions relative to the moral imperative of being 'responsible consumers'. We address this weakness by juxtaposing these two strands of literature, improving our understanding of the processes of responsibilization and some of their consequences. We argue that, to understand the effects of this form of governance, we must realize that subjects are not inevitably positioned and predetermined by a hegemonic discourse. At the same time, we must acknowledge that responsibilization processes give rise to compliance and to a range of ambivalences and forms of resistance.

Reflexivity is a central concept in environmental sociology, as in environmental social science in general. The concept is often connected to topics such as modernity, governance, expertise, and consumption. Reflexivity is presented as a means for taking constructive steps towards sustainability as it recognizes complexity, uncertainty, dilemmas, and ambivalence. Critical discussion of the conceptual meaning and usage of reflexivity is therefore needed. Is it a useful theoretical concept for understanding various sustainability issues? Is 'more reflexivity' relevant and useful advice that environmental sociologists can give in communicating with other disciplines, policymakers, and practitioners? This article explores the conceptual meaning of reflexivity and assesses its relevance for environmental sociology. In particular, it reviews its usages in three research fields; expertise, governance, and citizen-consumers. The paper furthermore discusses the spatial and temporal boundaries of reflexivity. It concludes by discussing how the concept can be a useful analytical concept in environmental sociology, at the same time as it warns against an exaggerated and unreflexive use of the concept.

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This paper treats two highly topical and interconnected environmental issues-climate change and biodiversity-in which the nature-culture divide appears in policy and regulation. The aim is to analyze how "the natural" and concerns for biodiversity and climate change are constructed in applicable regulatory frameworks, and to explore social and environmental consequences of these constructions. The analysis indicates that biodiversity and climate change regulation help construct nature and culture as separate categories and give rise to the notion that the natural state is worth protecting from human intrusion. The notion of human agency, however, is ambiguous because humans are depicted as having the power and skill to protect and even recreate "natural nature". The paper concludes that, although nature and the natural are often used as politically and socially-neutral concepts, the definition of "natural nature" as a place devoid of humans has social as well as environmental consequences.Keywords: biodiversity, climate change, human-nature relations, environmental protection, environmental regulation