This chapter approaches the concrete, everyday lives of older persons in the Vineyard region. We examine how people living in towns, in villages, alone or in shared housing, organise their lives. Daily trajectories, typical interactions, everyday encounters are described. The chapter first examines informal encounters and networks, daily interactions, occasional meetings, and the importance of social interactions. Both the role of ‘lighthouse watcher’ and tenuous ties are put to the fore. Second, the chapter follows interactions taking place in an institutional setting, a day-care centre. Here also, people can develop meaningful activities and reveal their engagements, while the frame can offer a containing function. Altogether, this chapter shows how evolving material, social and symbolic environments are deeply related to people’s development in older age.

Global environmental change is on the rise and has detrimental effects for most humans. Violent conflict is also increasing. The environment is almost always a victim of conflict, and conflict activities are always shaped by the environment. Understanding the interactions between the environment and conflict is difficult because of their complexity. This chapter reviews the broad literature on the environment and conflict and introduces the analytical framework that forms the core of this book.

This chapter highlights key findings from the five pillars of the framework and environmental peacebuilding, focusing on future pathways and implications for the environment in conflict, and simultaneously promoting human and environmental flourishing.

In conflict and conflict-affected areas, the environment can take a backseat to other pressing issues. Whether due to limited capability, capacity, or will, the environment is often neglected during conflict activities, resulting in substantial risks to human health and environmental quality. Understanding how this happens and what can be done is critical to prevention and, where needed, remediation in conflict settings to promote human and environmental flourishing. This chapter explores how and why the environment can become neglected in conflict and what the key implications of this are.

Chapter 8 provides a comprehensive roadmap for enabling a societal shift toward a sustainable and equitable future. Central to the argument is the need to repurpose the “invisible hand”—a metaphor for systemic incentives that currently reinforce unsustainable behaviors—into a helping force that promotes global well-being. The chapter proposes change at both the individual and institutional levels, encouraging citizens to act within their roles—whether as voters, educators, business leaders, artists, or scientists—to nudge society toward a tipping point. The chapter explores innovative governance models such as an autonomous global climate board, and even suggests taxing extreme wealth or implementing a universal basic income to mitigate inequality and systemic stress. Education and science must shift focus toward actionable, hopeful narratives, while business and media must align incentives with public good. Ultimately, the chapter frames global transformation as possible—if society can collectively shift its worldview and reshape the systems guiding human behavior.

The introduction critically examines current understandings of climate mitigation politics and makes a case for thinking politically and proactively about mitigation. This is contrasted with approaches that explicitly seek to draw narrow boundaries around mitigation politics and/or to avoid it. It sets out the overall approach to the book, how it relates to existing research on mitigation politics, and introduces the four ‘phases’ of climate politics that form the historical analysis in the book.

In this concluding chapter, we give community strategy its due place in sustainability governance and recapitulate key insights from the previous chapters. Narrative appears in a variety of roles yet is unlikely to do its work as a catalyst of community action if it does not take its place within strategy. Such institutionalization does come with risk, including ossification and the introduction of blind spots. We coin a new leadership function, tightly coupled with the role of strategist: The management of goal dependencies and reality effects associated with community strategy. Strategy appears appropriate as a topic to conclude our interpretive account of sustainability leadership as it is, in part, a narrative itself and as the building of strategic capacity in a community is the culminating point of leadership work, requiring other features of good sustainability to be in place.

Chapter 4 analyses processes of making climate mitigation into a policy area during the 1970s to mid 1990s. It explores the ideas, frames, and interests that informed United Nations climate change debates, how mitigation came to be defined as a policy area, and, ultimately, the specific compromises that were necessary to agree emissions reduction targets for Annex 1 countries. The role of political compromise in processes of reaching agreements and on governing bodies is foregrounded. Particular attention is also paid to questions of how pro-mitigation groups articulated the need for change, the role of climate science within this, how anti-mitigation coalitions narrated their contestations, and how these debates informed compromises reached. Although negotiated outcomes were unsatisfactory in many ways, there is a sense that all parties did, to greater or lesser extents, compromise to engender these first stages in the politicisation of climate mitigation.

The EU is more than a traditional international organisation such as the UN, because it has its own budget, currency, and directly applicable law. Yet it is not a state, for it lacks a police force, army, and criminal justice system. Its member states conserve a right of veto for all major decisions. It is therefore illuminating to explore the EU’s unique political and institutional features in order to understand how it has played such a large role in organising European capitalism, and to determine its compatibility with the three forms of capitalist governance (liberty, solidarity and community). The European Union’s dominant role in regulating capitalism emerged quite late, after the failure of numerous alternatives in both European and international organisations. As Brexit has shown, it is perfectly possible for the Union to shrivel, potentially due to nationalistic pressures. The European institutional system, while being easier to combine with the liberty aspect of capitalism, is also conducive to solidarity and community. The role of European institutions was to facilitate the combination of various national forms of solidarity and community capitalism in Europe.

Innovation systems take a holistic view of the dynamics shaping innovation, emphasizing actors, institutions, and networks as key structural elements. These interact to create positive or negative feedback loops. Initially, innovation systems focused on national competitiveness and were technology-neutral. The introduction of technological innovation systems (TIS), the focus of this chapter, shifted attention to the emergence of specific technologies, particularly sustainable ones that face market barriers. This made TIS a foundational framework in sustainability transitions research. The introduction of TIS ‘functions’ marked a key milestone in the field. Over time, TIS has evolved, addressing context, geography, and system interactions. Scholars continue to expand innovation system frameworks, exploring missions, life cycles, and destabilisation. This work increasingly integrates both technological and social innovation, supporting pathways towards sustainability.

Throughout the 1970s, audience research conducted at both the BBC and ITV affiliates consistently overlooked audiences of colour, even as these institutions began to hesitantly acknowledge and consider institutional mis-steps in their approach to Britain’s own ‘race problem’. Several extended audience research reports were conducted on shows about ‘race’ in the period, including Till Death Us Do Part in 1973, which began to produce a coherent picture of persistent racial prejudice among white viewers. Alongside this, audiences of colour were finally brought into audience research but in quite exceptional ways, including a 1975 study for ITV, when 21 West Indian television viewers offered their thoughts on Love Thy Neighbour and the broader television landscape, and in 1979 at the BBC for a potential programme on “multiracial Britain.” The chapter examines the shape of this belated inclusion within these institutions and considers the highly circumscribed ways in which Black and south Asian audiences were allowed to speak about screen content and racism.

This chapter argues that to understand cooperation and conflict in large-scale societies we need to blend these ideas with a systematic study of within-society conflict and the institutions and norms that structure these relations.