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AbstractGiven that wolves have been extinct in Germany for approximately 150 years, their return and growing population over the last decade has caused intense discussion and conflict. To develop a widely accepted and just coexistence between humans and wolves, a comprehensive understanding of the conflict is needed. There are indications that the conflict goes beyond dealing with the wolf population and marks a spatial–cultural divide between urban and rural areas. Nevertheless, the social dimensions of the human–wolf conflict in Germany have been little studied. The aim of this paper is to narrow this gap by means of a media discourse analysis including reader comments in order to provide insights into the constituent elements of this conflict. We conducted a qualitative content analysis. The sample comprises articles (n = 63) and reader comments (n = 515) over a period of one year (5/2018-5/2019) from six online periodicals in Germany. The results support the assumption of an urban–rural divide in terms of perspectives and values. The discourse indicates that rural actors who are most affected by the wolves' vicinity have more negative attitudes towards them. At the same time, they feel abandoned and dominated by urban perspectives and politics. In addition, linkages to right-wing populist positions and conspiracy narratives that can be interpreted as a consequence of political alienation are found.

Bioeconomic ideas and visions have received increasing attention from scientists and policy makers to address socioecological challenges. However, the role of imagined futures in the design of bioeconomic innovations and transitions has hitherto been widely neglected. In this study, we therefore explore the role of imaginaries of the future to understand how they shape bioeconomic innovations and transitions. We thereby build on insights from economic sociology and compare two distinct case studies from Germany and India. Based on our results, we inductively develop an analytic model that describes the co-constitution of imaginaries, fictional expectations, narratives, and innovation dynamics. Our results show that narrative dynamics are caused by irritations in the political and discursive landscape; these irritations prompt economic actors to stabilize, adapt, or reject their own bioeconomic conceptions, while the underlying imaginary of a technological fix remains fixed. We discuss this reductionist imaginary and instead plead for an imaginary of a socioecological fix that reintertwines technologies with their underlying societal, cultural, and ecological factors. We conclude that this will support sustainability scholars and policy makers in remaining vigilant against premature mental and institutional lock-ins that could lead to a colonization of the future with severe negative implications for society's ability to mitigate and adapt to global environmental change in the future.

AbstractClimate change poses significant threats to the sustainability of tourism economies globally. This is particularly true for beach tourism, which is highly dependent on the mean climate, daily weather, and natural setting of a destination to attract and satisfy tourists. This case study of the South African coastline provides new insights to the applicability of the vulnerability assessment methodology of hazard–activity pairs to the global south and specifically to sub-Saharan Africa. Through this method, tourists' climate perceptions were analyzed and related to potential future impacts of climate change, creating hazard–activity pairs. Tourists' perceptions of climate were captured by means of a questionnaire. Downscaled CMIP5 climate projections (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5) for six weather stations close to major beach tourism destinations were used to estimate changes in precipitation and temperature. This study reveals that future projections of a mean reduction in precipitation and increasing temperature may have positive rather than negative direct effects on South African beach tourism destinations because what tourists perceive as "comfortable" weather conditions are increasing in prevalence. Nevertheless, indirect and induced effects of an already changing climate, defining further hazard–activity pairs, must be considered in vulnerability assessments. This work endorses the applicability of the hazard–activity pair methodology to South Africa and the global south at large.