georgecu

• Cusworth, George (2026). Planetary citizenship in a dynamic world: posthuman cosmopolitanism. Territory, Politics, Governance. ISSN 2162-2671. s. 1–14. doi: 10.1080/21622671.2026.2686254. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Socio-environmental crisis is changing how we think about the spatiality of sovereignty claims. It is also undermining the plausibility of territorial accounts premised on titles, ownership, and jurisdiction. The paper’s first aim is to conceptually codify these dynamic challenges to territorial theorisation. The second is to present an account of planetary citizenship that can withstand the territorial dynamism of socio-ecological crisis. This model takes cosmopolitan solidarity with the world’s human population and extends it to the natural world and it endorses a latent set of attachments that citizens have towards the diffuse biophysical systems that make life on earth liveable.

• Turnbull, Jonathon; Cusworth, George; Searle, Adam; Vogel, Else; Thoreau, François & Oliver, Catherine (2026). Metabolo-politics: Bovine Metabolism and Environmental Biopower. Theory, Culture and Society. Explorations in Critical Social Science. ISSN 0263-2764. 43(5), s. 21–42. doi: 10.1177/02632764261438395. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Cusworth, George & Stanley, Theo (2025). Environmental performativity: How natures are made. Progress in Environmental Geography. 4(1), s. 69–91. doi: 10.1177/27539687251321503. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  A range of things get made as natures are subject to programmes of management, measurement, regulation, subsidy, and commodification. Knowledge production practices stabilise dynamic environments into governable objects. Environmental management schemes materialise specific ecologies in particular places and create value for certain actors. Neoliberal governance mechanisms reproduce their own ideological foundations. This paper offers a conceptual vocabulary to articulate the different performances and performative processes that drive these makings. Drawn together under the framework of environmental performativity, we show how objects , environments , and regimes all get made as natures are governed. Together, these terms disambiguate the diverging ways the concept of performativity gets used in the literature. They reveal how material, semiotic, ideological, and calculative forces exert their influence at different points in the design and delivery of environmental governance interventions. In describing these terms, we want to highlight the unique influence that human activities have in shaping the world without denying the agency of nonhuman actors and materialities. By drawing attention to the fact that alternative performances have the power to yield more just and sustainable environmental futures, we conclude the paper on a more optimistic note. We use the concept of reflexive performativity to discuss these political opportunities.

• Cusworth, George (2025). Framing the Planetary and Calculating the Complex: The Controversies, Overflows, and Floods of the EAT-Lancet Planetary Diet. Science, Technology and Human Values. ISSN 0162-2439. s. 1–32. doi: 10.1177/01622439251367132. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Data-intensive methods have become vital for getting epistemic purchase on global socioecological issues. Yet these methods are never fully insulated against contestation precisely because they seek to represent things that are so large and complex. This article is about these contestations and what they reveal about knowledge politics, today. It focuses on the EAT-Lancet report and its Planetary Diet. By promising to have comprehensively mapped the interactions between food and human and environmental health, the EAT-Lancet Commission attracted a flood of contestations. The concept of the flood is introduced to explore what happens when political, cultural, and scientific interest in the complex, interconnected, and planetary ontology of ecological crisis encounters the epistemologies of data-intensive knowledge production. Building on the language of framing and overflowing, the article shows why complexity and planetarity have become so alluring in science communication strategies, and it interrogates the political economy that determines which representation–reality gaps get to become controversial. The contestations the EAT-Lancet report attracted arose, in part, because of conflicting understandings of complexity. Where the report depicted the food system as a romantic whole, those who challenged its findings did so by attesting to the food system's baroque irreducibility and the pervasiveness of context.

• Stanley, Theo & Cusworth, George (2025). Legitimacy in the making: Conservatism, additionality and natural capital accreditation in the UK's Woodland Carbon Code. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. ISSN 2514-8486. 8(6), s. 2018–2037. doi: 10.1177/25148486251379613. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  This article critically examines the Woodland Carbon Code (WCC), the quality assurance test for UK woodland carbon credits. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with stakeholders in the Scottish land sector, we show how the WCC's finance allocation, additionality criteria, and carbon measurement systems create legitimacy for the code, the credits the code generates, and the market on which the credits are traded. The paper begins by tracing the early history of the WCC to describe how the code's developers integrated a commitment to calculative conservatism into its design. We then consider how WCC developers responded to a trial of legitimacy. Stakeholders argued that the existence of WCC-accredited commercial timber plantations, which should not have passed its economic additionality criteria, revealed flaws in the WCC's accreditation process. The ensuing threats to the code's legitimacy were exacerbated by broader concerns about the mixed socio-ecological record of natural capital markets worldwide. We then analyse the additionality demands introduced to the code to exclude forest ecologies deemed undesirable from receiving carbon finance. These tweaks were made to shore up the code's legitimacy and to maintain the long-term functioning of the voluntary carbon market. These dynamics are constitutive of the three main claims we make in this article. First, that ecological, political, and scientific forces interact in natural capital markets in ways that threaten the legitimacy of the commodification process by creating undesirable outcomes. Second, that operators of accreditation schemes reflexively respond to these reputational risks by changing the way they measure nature, allocate credits, and direct finance towards particular carbon offsetting projects. Third, that the (il)legibility of nature is, in part, an emergent effect of the way political and cultural pressures bear down on the practices of scientific representation and economic valuation rather than something that is inherent to the ecologies being represented.

• Cusworth, George; Finlay, B. Brett; Nguyen, Nhu H. & Lorimer, Jamie (2025). Microbial repair and ecological justice: A new paradigm for agriculture. npj Sustainable Agriculture. 3. doi: 10.1038/s44264-025-00062-4. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  In this paper, we put forward a case for repair by showing how food security, rural economic resilience, ecological restoration, and environmental justice can be achieved through a repaired agricultural microbiome. Microbial repair must reverse the damage done by legacies of agricultural intensification to restore the microbiome’s ability to deliver key agricultural and societal functions. This project demands collaboration from diverse food system actors building on different types of knowledge.

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