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Describes new ways of looking at environmental science and politics, and discusses the problems of formulating and implementing environmental policy, particularly in the global arena and in developing countries.

In a recent article in this journal, Ståle Knudsen argues that the recent trend to flat ontology in political ecology is mistaken and urges more engagement with critical realism as introduced by Roy Bhaskar. His article also criticizes how various political ecologists have used critical realism. In this response, I argue that Knudsen misses the point firstly about my work but more generally also on two further matters: the challenges of discussing ontology for environmental problems that are embedded in human experience and discourse, and on his insistence that ideas about critical realism should be limited to a literal reading of Bhaskar's writings decades ago. This response gently questions Knudsen's tone and argument by making two points. Firstly, debates about critical realism should not be limited only to Bhaskar's original framework concerning different domains of the actual, empirical, and real, but also to ideas that have built on this framework. Second, political ecology does not only ask what is ecologically real but also how, and with what politics, are ideas of reality made and used. Bhaskar's writings in the 1970s were foundational to debates about critical realism, but are insufficient for understanding how ideas of ecological reality are made, persist, and include or exclude different perspectives. This article examines Knudsen's discussion of the Tragedy of the Commons as an example.

Brown, Katrina. 2016: Resilience, Development and Global Change. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. xiv + 228 pp. £80 (hardback), £26.09 (paperback). ISBN: 978–0-415–66346–5 (hardback). ISBN: 978–0-415–66347–2 (paperback). ISBN: 978–0-203–49809–5 (e-book).

Reid, Hannah. 2014: Climate Change and Human Development. London: Zed Books. x + 287 pp. ISBN 918-2-78032-441-8 (hardback), 978-1-78032-440-1 (paperback). £80 (hardback), £21.99 (paperback).

Tanner, Thomas and Horn-Phathanothai, Leo. 2014: Climate Change and Development. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. xxiii + 367 pp. £85 hardback, £23.99 paperback. ISBN: 978-0-415-664264 (hardback), 978-0-415-66427 (paperback).

ABSTRACTEcosystem services are part of a growing trend within environment and development to analyse environmental change within the context of socially valued outcomes. Yet, ecosystem services‐based policies and analyses are increasingly criticized for failing to connect with, or even for restricting, development outcomes. This article seeks to connect environmental analysis with development outcomes better by applying the capability approach of Amartya Sen and others. It demonstrates how scientific analysis of ecosystem services sometimes conflates pathways of ecosystem management with development outcomes, but that it can be reconfigured to include more diverse values and objectives. The article argues that ecosystem services should be identified more as 'functionings' (in the Senian sense of valued development outcomes) rather than 'functions' (in the sense of biophysical, apolitical ecosystem properties) in order to indicate that 'services' always reflect social values, and that values and scientific explanations of underlying biophysical properties evolve together. Environmental science for socially valued outcomes such as ecosystem services is therefore an important site of political inclusion and exclusion. The article illustrates this analysis with examples of ecosystem‐based adaptation to climate change from the World Bank and government of Bangladesh, and in contrast to differing approaches from the field of sustainability science.