Gender Equity, Social Learning, and Governance for Inclusive Sustainability Transitions in Natural Resource Systems

Gender equity, social learning, and governance are increasingly recognised as critical, interdependent dimensions of efforts to address contemporary sustainability challenges in natural resource systems. Across fields such as water and land governance, climate adaptation, biodiversity conservation, and agrarian and energy transitions, there is growing acknowledgement that sustainable and equitable outcomes depend not only on technological innovation or policy reform, but also on the biophysical dynamics of the resource systems themselves and on how people participate in decision-making, learn from one another, and shape collective responses to change within those systems. Social learning has emerged as an important approach for fostering collaboration, knowledge exchange, and adaptive action among diverse actors confronting shared resource constraints, while governance research continues to highlight the importance of inclusion, accountability, and representation in shaping development and sustainability outcomes. Yet persistent gendered inequalities continue to influence whose knowledge, including whose ecological and biophysical knowledge, is valued, who participates in decision-making over resource use, and who benefits from governance and innovation initiatives. These challenges underscore the need for a deeper, genuinely interdisciplinary understanding of how gender equity, social learning, and governance interact with the biophysical properties and dynamics of natural resource systems to support more inclusive, just, and sustainable pathways of development.
This research topic seeks to advance understanding of how gender equity, social learning, and governance interact, jointly with biophysical resource conditions and processes, to shape more inclusive and sustainable natural resource management outcomes. While each of these themes has attracted considerable scholarly attention, they are often examined in isolation from one another and, more particularly, in isolation from the biophysical systems, soil, water, vegetation, climate, and ecosystem function, within which resource governance and social learning actually take place. This separation limits understanding of how learning processes, governance arrangements, gender dynamics, and the material properties and constraints of natural resource systems intersect to influence decision-making, innovation, and societal transformation. The topic accordingly calls for contributions that explicitly bridge the social and biophysical sciences, treating natural resource systems as coupled social-ecological systems in which gender relations, learning processes, and governance arrangements are understood to interact dynamically with hydrological, ecological, agronomic, and climatic conditions rather than as a separate layer of analysis overlaid upon them.

Recent advances in participatory governance, knowledge co-production, inclusive innovation, and sustainability transitions have highlighted the importance of collaboration, reflexive learning, and stakeholder engagement in addressing complex societal and environmental challenges. Within this scholarship, important questions remain regarding whose knowledge, scientific and biophysical as well as experiential and local, is recognised, whose voices are heard, and how power relations shape participation and outcomes within governance and learning processes oriented toward natural resource sustainability. Greater attention is needed to understand how governance systems and social learning processes can either reinforce or challenge existing gendered inequalities in access to, control over, and knowledge of natural resources, and how these social dynamics in turn shape, and are shaped by, the biophysical condition and trajectory of the resource systems in question, including land degradation, water scarcity, biodiversity loss, and climate variability.

The topic will bring together conceptual, methodological, and empirical contributions that examine how gender-responsive governance and social learning can foster more equitable approaches to resource governance, climate adaptation, and socio-technical transformation, with explicit attention to the biophysical inputs, soil fertility and degradation status, water availability and quality, vegetation cover, agro-ecological zoning, climatic exposure, that condition the resource management decisions over which governance and learning processes operate. Exploring these intersections through an interdisciplinary, social-ecological lens, the collection seeks to generate new insights into the institutional, social, political, and biophysical conditions that jointly enable, or constrain, inclusive, equitable, and sustainable change in natural resource systems.

This Research Topic welcomes interdisciplinary contributions, spanning the social and natural sciences and the methodological space between them, that examine the intersections among gender equity, social learning, governance, and biophysical resource dynamics to advance inclusive and sustainable natural resource management outcomes. Particular attention will be given to:

• Gender-responsive governance, participation, and institutional transformation in natural resource management, including water, land, forest, fisheries, and rangeland governance systems
• Social learning, knowledge co-production, and collaborative decision-making that bridges local, indigenous, and scientific biophysical knowledge of soils, water, climate, and ecosystems
• Power, inclusion, and representation in resource governance and climate adaptation, including how gendered access to land, water, and other productive natural assets shapes participation and outcomes
• Inclusive innovation and socio-technical transitions for sustainability, including gender dimensions of agricultural, water, and energy technology adoption and adaptation under varying biophysical and climatic conditions
• Coupled social-ecological systems approaches that integrate biophysical modelling, environmental monitoring, or ecological assessment with social learning and governance analysis
• Equity, justice, and transformative pathways for sustainable development that explicitly account for the distribution of biophysical resource constraints and environmental risk across gender lines

We welcome Original Research, Review Articles, Perspectives, Methods Papers, and Conceptual Contributions that generate theoretical, empirical, or practical insights into the governance and learning processes, understood in dynamic interaction with the biophysical properties and trajectories of natural resource systems, that enable more equitable and sustainable futures. Contributions that integrate biophysical data, environmental indicators, or ecological methods with social, institutional, or gender analysis are particularly encouraged, as are interdisciplinary teams and methodologically pluralistic studies capable of speaking to both the natural resource sustainability and the social equity dimensions of the Research Topic's scope.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Community Case Study
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Community Case Study
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: gender equity, social learning, sustainability governance, inclusive development

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.