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How much do misleading representations matter? This article examines carefully constructed narratives of engagement in 'sustainable' cocoa production initiatives, which fail to mention one of the actual key drivers: the need to shore up production in the long term in an embattled sector. Consequently, representations also downplay the need for systemic change, reproducing the power asymmetries they claim to change. The research seeks to establish to what degree public-facing communication differs from underlying priorities in terms of forefronting altruism over necessity, and whether this is problematic for the initiatives' overall outcome. Through semi-structured interviews, focus-group discussions, documentary analysis and participant observation in Latin America and Europe, it reviews relations in two cocoa sustainability initiatives with environmental foci. Crucially, the research establishes a link between representations, underlying priorities and the degree to which they (re)produce pre-existing power asymmetries between global North and global South, private sector and other stakeholders in the industry, speaking to a variety of political ecology questions. It argues that public-facing, altruism-focused communication distracts from the sector's underlying systemic issues: the emphasis on altruism works to reduce pressure to transform power asymmetries and omnipresent inequalities.

This article shares the author's reflections on what decolonial cracks for recreating UK universities as sustainable pluriversities emerge from encounters and engagement in three arts–research co-productions relating to sustainability and justice: a training process led by a professional storyteller on converting political-ecology research into short, spoken ten-minute stories, the co-production of visual summaries and a role-playing game on sustainable value chains, and the collaboration producing an immersive audiovisual exhibition on 'Can we fly-less?'.
This article makes an empirically based case that engaging in co-production on arts–research knowledge translation can help identify decolonial cracks to sow the seeds of pluriversity, that is, epistemically diverse institutions for public good that recognise present patterns of colonially rooted injustices and unsustainability, in UK academia. Drawing on relational, deep-listening conversations with six collaborators on the projects, three artists and three researchers, the article highlights benefits arising from the creative collaborations, such as social, transformative learning and critical introspection, and research acquiring a life beyond the page and becoming accessible to a broader audience. However, they also emphasised institutional barriers such as perverse incentives in current academic conventions, such as little or no recognition for knowledge translation, unequal starting points among permanent/precarious or salaried/non-salaried staff, and uncooperative monitoring and application systems, which render identifying these decolonial cracks and seeds necessary. With a methodology rooted in its conceptual, relational approach, the article highlights decolonial cracks in current academia, and transformative seeds to reimagine it in a more decolonial and sustainable image befitting of a pluriversity.

In their article 'Towards convivial conservation' (2019), Büscher and Fletcher propose a vision for conservation which partly builds on Ivan Illich's 1973 book Tools for conviviality. Given a growing chorus of voices calling for decolonizing conservation to address the ramifications of racialized mindsets and biases,this article asks: what role could conviviality play in envisioning alternative, decolonizing conservation ideas, particularly for Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 15? The article first reflects on the case for decolonizing conservation. It then conducts an in-depth analysis of Illich's radical ideas as well as subsequent understandings of conviviality, before juxtaposing Illich's ideas with Büscher and Fletcher's suggestions through a decolonizing lens. Finally,the article reviews SDG 15, 'Life on Land', against the backdrop of the prior decolonizing and convivial perspectives. The article argues that Illich's conviviality and related ideas have much to offer in envisioning alternative, decolonizing conservation ideas by promoting grassroots, democratic decision-making, living within bounds by the rich, emphasizing interdependencies between and within people and the environment, yet need to avoid imposition and incorporate intergenerational and marginalized viewpoints adequately.

How much do misleading representations matter? This article examines carefully constructed narratives of engagement in 'sustainable' cocoa production initiatives, which fail to mention one of the actual key drivers: the need to shore up production in the long term in an embattled sector. Consequently, representations also downplay the need for systemic change, reproducing the power asymmetries they claim to change. The research seeks to establish to what degree public-facing communication differs from underlying priorities in terms of forefronting altruism over necessity, and whether this is problematic for the initiatives' overall outcome. Through semi-structured interviews, focus-group discussions, documentary analysis and participant observation in Latin America and Europe, it reviews relations in two cocoa sustainability initiatives with environmental foci. Crucially, the research establishes a link between representations, underlying priorities and the degree to which they (re)produce pre-existing power asymmetries between global North and global South, private sector and other stakeholders in the industry, speaking to a variety of political ecology questions. It argues that public-facing, altruism-focused communication distracts from the sector's underlying systemic issues: the emphasis on altruism works to reduce pressure to transform power asymmetries and omnipresent inequalities.

AbstractVoluntary sustainability standards (VSSs) in global production networks (GPNs) have grown significantly in prominence. Existing research largely assumed that VSSs create linear upgrading outcomes for all GPN actors and has studied VSSs from the point of adoption in the GPNs, rather than a broader range of stages in their lifecycle. To address these limitations, and building on literature around power and agency in GPNs, we develop the constellation of priorities (CoP) model to unpack the diverse and often diverging boardroom (Northern lead firm) and local (Southern supplier) priorities involved in such standards. Through in‐depth fieldwork on horticulture in Kenya and cocoa in Nicaragua across the VSS lifecycle, we find significant divergences in priorities between farmer groups in both countries and lead firms in the UK and Germany. We demonstrate analytically and empirically that diverging priorities coupled with power asymmetries produced contestations, leading to simultaneous economic and environmental downgrading, and social upgrading.

Given growing human influence on the earth system's functioning, caring for nature has never been this critical. However, whether for economic interests or 'wilderness' preservation, attempts to save nature have been grounded on a Western scientific philosophy of separating it from people's ways of living, especially through 'protected areas'. Under the banner 'convivial conservation', which advocates socio-ecological justice and structural transformations in the global economic system, an alternative idea called 'promoted areas' has been proposed, advocating for conservation which promotes nature for, to, and by humans. Here, we argue that 'promoted areas' are best fitted with decolonial thinking in conservation science and practice. In southern Africa, one available 'decolonial option' is Ubuntu philosophy, which is anchored on the ethical principle of promoting life through mutual caring and sharing between and among humans and nonhumans. Ubuntu disengages from western ways of knowing about human–environment interactions, as it is predicated on promoting the many links between humans and nonhumans. From this, we argue that instituted through Ubuntu, 'promoted areas' re-initiate a harmony between human beings and physical nature, as practices of individualistic, excessive extractions of nonhuman nature are discouraged, and human–nonhuman relationships based on respect, solidarity, and collaboration are celebrated.

Convivial conservation has been put forward as a radical alternative to transform prevailing mainstream approaches that aim to address global concerns of biodiversity loss and extinction. This special issue includes contributions from diverse disciplinary and geographical perspectives which critically examine convivial conservation's potential in theory and practice and explore both possibilities and challenges for the approach's transformative ambitions. This introduction focuses on three issues which the contributions highlight as critical for facilitating transformation of mainstream conservation. First, the different ways in which key dimensions of justice — epistemic, distributive, and participatory and multi-species justice — intersect with the convivial conservation proposal, and how potential injustices might be mitigated. Second, how convivial conservation approaches the potential to facilitate human and non-human coexistence. Third, how transformative methodologies and innovative conceptual lenses can be used to further develop convivial conservation. The diverse contributions show that convivial conservation has clear potential to be transformative. However, to realise this potential, convivial conservation must avoid previous proposals' pitfalls, such as trying to 'reinvent the wheel' and being too narrowly focused. Instead, convivial conservation must continue to evolve in response to engagement with a plurality of perspectives, experiences, ideas and methodologies from around the world.

Contemporary and market-based conservation policies, constructed as rational, neutral and apolitical, are being pursued around the world in the aim of staving off multiple, unfolding and overlapping environmental crises. However, the substantial body of research that examines the dominance of neoliberal environmental policies has paid relatively little attention to how colonial legacies interact with these contemporary and market-based conservation policies enacted in the Global South. It is only recently that critical scholars have begun to demonstrate how colonial legacies interact with market-based conservation policies in ways that increase their risk of failure, deepen on-the-ground inequalities and cement global injustices. In this article, we take further this emerging body of work by showing how contemporary,market-based conservation initiatives extend the temporalities and geographies of colonialism, undergird long-standing hegemonies and perpetuate exploitative power relations in the governing of nature-society relations, particularly in the Global South. Reflecting on ethnographic insights from six different field sites across countries of the Global South, we argue that decolonization is an important and necessary step in confronting some of the major weaknesses of contemporary conservation and the wider socio-ecological crisis itself. We conclude by briefly outlining what decolonizing conservation might entail.