This insightful Modern Guide explores heterodox approaches to modern wellbeing research, with a specific focus on how wellbeing is understood and practised, exploring policies and actions which are taken to shape wellbeing. It evaluates contemporary trends in wellbeing research, including the sometimes competing definitions, methods and approaches offered by different disciplinary perspectives. Exploring the threats to wellbeing from the environments we inhabit and the situations societies create and endure, chapters particularly look at wellbeing inequalities and the experiences of marginalised groups, demonstrating the connection between wellbeing and political struggle. Provocative commentaries from leading scholars plus chapters on original theoretical developments and research studies across diverse world regions reveal wellbeing research based on situated practices, social differences and specific cultural contexts. This Modern Guide assesses the influence and impact of wellbeing research on policy and practice across a range of sectors and spaces, including: wellbeing budgeting, nature-based interventions, urban design, environmental resource management, prisons, housing, international migration, and post-conflict situations. This will be a useful read for scholars of human geography, social policy, urban studies, anthropology, political science and environmental economics. Policy makers will also appreciate the suggestions for improvement to wellbeing policies and practices.

This innovative Research Handbook answers crucial questions about how individuals and organisations can make a difference towards sustainability. Offering an integrative perspective on sustainability agency, it reviews individual, active, organisational and relational forms of sustainability agency, demonstrating the capacity of individuals and organisations to act toward sustainable futures. The Research Handbook investigates the relationships between agency and sustainability, demonstrating the importance of agency for different types of sustainability challenges, including mitigating environmental change and resource depletion. International contributors offer a multidisciplinary overview of the field, constructing detailed literature reviews on its many angles and variations. Concluding with a consolidative meta-review of sustainability agency, the Research Handbook offers directions for future research in the discipline. Crucial reading for scholars and researchers of sustainability, this cutting-edge Research Handbook is particularly useful for those exploring new avenues for research in relation to agency. It will also benefit graduate students looking for an interdisciplinary perspective in the field, as well as practitioners, advocates and NGOs hoping to understand ways in which sustainability can be enacted in various contexts.

Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences, business and law, expertly written by the world's leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas. Insightful and original in its approach, this Advanced Introduction to Urban Transport Planning provides a fresh look at cost-efficiency and casts the craft of transport planning in new light, allowing engineers and urban planners to understand the benefits of breaking mobility-centric systems that favour cars and prioritising multi-modal transport systems that promote access. It features in-depth analysis of traditional methods and how these are changing due to new technologies, financial constraints and evolving environmental trends. Key features include: Discussion of advantages of urban areas in terms of transport service provision Clear distillation of priorities for a new era of transport planning Concise coverage of predominant concepts and theories Application for both urban planners and engineers Future oriented, cost-effective strategy. This Advanced Introduction will be invaluable for students of urban planning, transport geography, environmental studies, urban studies and civil engineering. It will also provide a useful update for urban planners, elected officials and civil engineers alike.

In Rock | Water | Life, Lesley Green examines the interwoven realities of inequality, racism, colonialism, and environmental destruction in South Africa, calling for environmental research and governance to transition to an ecopolitical approach that could address South Africa's history of racial oppression and environmental exploitation.

Green analyses conflicting accounts of nature in environmental sciences that claim neutrality amid ongoing struggles for land restitution and environmental justice.

Offering in-depth studies of environmental conflict in contemporary South Africa, Green addresses the history of contested water access in Cape Town; struggles over natural gas fracking in the Karoo; debates about decolonising science; the potential for a politics of soil in the call for land restitution; urban baboon management, and the consequences of sending sewage to urban oceans.