Publications

Violeta Cabello, Alejandro Merlo, María Mancilla, Jesús M. Siqueiros, Xabier E. Barandiaran. 2025. Autonomy and Its Limits in Social-Ecological Systems. Outonomy: Fleshing out the Concept of Autonomy Beyond the Individual. Pages 121–130. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-05501-9_12

Traditionally, autonomy has been perceived through the lens of individualism and internalism, a view increasingly challenged by contemporary philosophical approaches, as well as by the context of global sustainability. Environmental challenges underline the need to shift from Earth-imposed limits to social-ecological limitations to achieve autonomy, democracy, and sustainability. In the realm of sustainability sciences, the co...

Tilman Hertz, Anja Klein, Maria Mancilla García, Maja Schlüter. 2025. Transforming a world that never stands still. Ecosystems and People. https://doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2025.2469859

Process-relational perspectives (PRP) have been put forward as a crucial contribution for conceptualizing radical transformations towards sustainability. This is because PRP conceptualize transformations as open processes. This openness is attributed, first, to processes and relations having performative power, which means that processes and relations are constitutive of elements. Second, PRP take processes and relations as co...

María Mancilla García, Lena Bertemes Lalia, Marlino Mubai, Tilman Hertz, Elizabeth Maria Drury O’Neill, Caroline Abunge, Salomão Olinda Bandeira, François Bousquet, Christopher Cheupe, Dadivo José Combane, Tim Daw, Nyawira Muthiga, Halimu Shauri, Taís Sonetti González. 2025. A meaningful performative experience: using Forum Theatre as an ethical method in sustainability science. Sustainability Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-025-01699-3

Sustainability scientists have engaged in extensive discussions on ethical ways of doing research and argued on the importance of co-production approaches to counter knowledge extractivism. The specific issue of research fatigue, often associated with knowledge extractivism, and the possible methods to counter it, have however received less attention. This paper seeks to contribute to discussions on ethical ways of doing resea...

María Mancilla García, Örjan Bodin. 2025. The Imperative of New and Shiny Clothes: A Discussion on Novelty and Its Effects in Water Governance Research. Environmental Policy and Governance. https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.2167

Novelty is a requirement demanded from scholars by reviewers holding the keys to publication as well as by funding bodies allocating project funds and thus sometimes enabling the possibility of an academic career. In fields such as water governance research, at the intersection of research and practice, an additional pressure comes from practitioners' need to find solutions and resources to try and implement different solution...

Michele-Lee Moore, Lan Wang-Erlandsson, Örjan Bodin, Johan Enqvist, Fernando Jaramillo, Krisztina Jónás, Carl Folke, Patrick Keys, Steven J. Lade, Maria Mancilla Garcia, Romina Martin, Nathanial Matthews, Agnes Pranindita, Juan C. Rocha, Shuchi Vora. 2024. Moving from fit to fitness for governing water in the Anthropocene. Nature Water. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-024-00257-y

We bring together two decades of research on cross-scale spatial and temporal connectivity of water in the Anthropocene to understand the implications for institutional fit and water governance, with a focus on river basin organizations and watershed-based bodies. There is strong evidence showing how hydrological cycles are tightly coupled across larger spatial scales than they were in the past, which implies a possible expans...

Simon West, L. Jamila Haider, Tilman Hertz, Maria Mancilla Garcia, Michele-Lee Moore. 2024. Relational approaches to sustainability transformations: walking together in a world of many worlds. Ecosystems and People. https://doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2024.2370539

Transformations to sustainability require alternatives to the paradigms, practices, and policies that have generated social-ecological destruction and the Anthropocene. In sustainability science, several conceptual frameworks have been developed for transformations, including social-ecological, multi-level, transformative adaptation, and pathways approaches. There is a growing shift towards recognising transformations as ‘shar...

María Mancilla García, Caroline Abunge, Salomão Olinda Bandeira, Christopher Cheupe, Dadivo José Combane, Tim Daw, Elizabeth Maria Drury O’Neill, Tilman Hertz, Marlino Mubai, Nyawira Muthiga, Taís Sonetti González, Halimu Shauri. 2024. Exploring a process‐relational approach to qualitative research methods for sustainability science. People and Nature. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10667

As sustainability scientists increasingly put forward the relevance of process-relational approaches to make sense of social-ecological phenomena, an inquiry on which methods would fit a process-relational approach is necessary. This paper discusses how a process-relational approach can be applied to traditional qualitative research methods, namely interviews and coding and the tensions associated with it. Process-relational p...

Hertz, T., Mancilla Garcia, M.. 2021. The Cod and the Cut: Intra-Active Intuitions. Frontiers in Sociology. http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2021.724751

Interest in causality is growing in sustainability science and it has been argued that a multiplicity of approaches is needed to account for the complexities of social-ecological dynamics. However, many of these approaches operate within perspectives that establish a separation between what has causal agency and all the rest, which is relegated to the role of background conditions. We argue that the distinction between causal...

Jericó-Daminello, C., Schröter, B., Mancilla Garcia, M., Albert, C.. 2021. Exploring perceptions of stakeholder roles in ecosystem services coproduction. Ecosystem Services. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2021.101353

Stakeholder groups engage in ecosystem services coproduction as both coproducers and beneficiaries. Stakeholder group perceptions of their own and each other’s roles in ecosystem services coproduction therefore influence how ecosystem services are provided in a given landscape. However, only a few studies have investigated self-perceived and attributed stakeholder group roles in this context. The aim of this paper is to assess...

Ahlström, H., Hileman, J., Wang-Erlandsson, L., García, M., Moore, M., Jonas, K., Pranindita, A., Kuiper, J., Fetzer, I., Jaramillo, F., Svedin, U.. 2021. An Earth system law perspective on governing social-hydrological systems in the Anthropocene. Earth System Governance. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.esg.2021.100120

The global hydrological cycle is characterized by complex interdependencies and self-regulating feedbacks that keep water in an ever-evolving state of flux at local, regional, and global levels. Increasingly, the scale of human impacts in the Anthropocene is altering the dynamics of this cycle, which presents additional challenges for water governance. “Earth system law” provides an important approach for addressing gaps in go...