The backdrop is Germany’s coal phase-out. In 2019, the federal government decided that lignite, the dirty brown coal mined in three German districts and burned for electricity and heat, would be phased out by 2038. To soften the blow, it pledged 40 billion euros to the affected mining regions, framing them as living laboratories of the wider socio-ecological transformation that policymakers insist modern societies must undergo to become sustainable, innovative, and resilient. The Central German mining district, where Zeitz lies, is one of these three regions. The political narrative was confident: if these post-industrial areas can reinvent themselves as green economies, anyone can. A few years on, that confidence has soured. Publicly funded transition projects increasingly meet suspicion, hostility, and, most intriguingly, resistance from the very city councils meant to implement them.

The puzzle the researchers set out to solve is deceptively simple: why would a municipality refuse large sums of federal money? The intuitive answer, often heard in German public debate, is transformation fatigue, a weariness with endless ecological modernization, or an attitudinal deficit that better communication could fix. Pampus and her colleagues argue that this framing misses the point. Drawing on ethnographic engagement with municipalities across the Central German district since 2020, and on council meeting recordings, minutes, and local media from Zeitz, they found that resistance rarely announces itself as ideology. It arrives dressed as administrative prudence: concerns about maintenance obligations, staffing capacity, legal competencies, and budgetary constraints. These are legitimate worries, often rooted in real experiences of marginality and underfunded local government. But their political force depends on when and where they are voiced.

The concept of anti-transformation borrows from two theoretical traditions. From debates on post-politics, it takes the observation that environmental governance often wraps political choices in technocratic, consensus-oriented language. From James Ferguson’s classic notion of the anti-politics machine, it takes the mechanism: political disagreements get translated into technical-administrative questions, shifting the very terms on which a project can be contested. Yet the authors depart from both traditions in a crucial way. Where post-political readings see administrative reasoning as depoliticizing conflict, the Zeitz material shows administration becoming a medium through which political contestation is actively enacted. Bureaucratic arguments do not suspend politics; they are politics, wielded at decisive institutional moments by actors who understand exactly how procedural timing works.

Zeitz itself is a textbook post-industrial town. Located in southern Saxony-Anhalt at the heart of the lignite district, it has suffered decades of population loss, plant closures, fiscal strain, and decaying infrastructure since the early 1990s. Since 2020 it has attracted a series of federal and EU-funded projects tied to just-transition agendas, including the federal programme Kommunale Modellvorhaben zur Umsetzung der ökologischen Nachhaltigkeitsziele in Strukturwandelregionen, or KoMoNa, financed by the federal environment ministry and administered through the project agency ZUG. The programme supports local sustainability projects but requires municipal co-financing, typically ten percent of the total, and long-term maintenance after funding ends. Zeitz’s first funding round produced small but symbolically charged interventions: tiny forests, orchard meadows, a health-themed walking trail. Many residents embraced them. Others saw red.

The political atmosphere matters. Support for the far-right Alternative for Germany has surged across Saxony-Anhalt: nearly 39 percent at state level in the 2025 federal election, more than 44 percent in the southern county of Burgenlandkreis, and almost 46 percent in Zeitz itself. Established parties, weakened by long-term membership decline in East Germany, operate under organizational strain. Against this backdrop, the authors read the sustainability disputes not as isolated administrative quarrels but as expressions of deeper conflicts over participation, recognition, and the perceived legitimacy of transformation in post-industrial regions. Transformation, in this mood, is experienced not as opportunity but as burden, a dynamic that scholars such as Steffen Mau and Ingolfur Blühdorn have described as the erosion of sustainability’s persuasive power in late-modern societies.

The June 2024 meeting of Zeitz’s Hauptausschuss, the main executive committee of the city council, is the study’s central vignette. The sustainability strategy had already passed through consultation rounds and committee discussions, and the funding agency had approved it. Around the table sat elected councillors, administrators, and project staff, but their roles were asymmetric: councillors debated and decided, while project staff could answer questions only when invited. The tone was sceptical, at times hostile. One councillor demanded to know where greenery would go, asking whether buildings would be torn down. Another pointed to dilapidated paths and asked why new ones should be built. The refrain that recurred throughout the debate was maintenance: the trees would need care long after the project ended, and the city would be left holding the bill. It is not about whether it is a nice idea, one member concluded; the town simply does not have the money.

The debate also exposed a spatial politics. A representative of a peripheral district complained that the presented measures were almost entirely focused on the city centre, leaving out surrounding neighbourhoods and villages home to roughly a fifth of Zeitz’s population. The claim was factually inaccurate, as several measures did target outer districts, but it resonated because it mobilized an established narrative of spatial injustice, recasting transformation as a zero-sum choice between urban greening and rural neglect. Project staff attempted to explain that projects in villages like Theißen had been included where viable ideas and local caretakers existed, but scepticism persisted. Another councillor summed up the mood: plenty of talk, plenty of concepts, nothing happening in practice. Individually, each objection appeared reasonable. Collectively, they transformed the terms of the debate, translating normative disagreements about socio-ecological futures into apparently technical questions of upkeep, responsibility, and institutional capacity.

The procedural conditions were decisive. The objections were raised in a formal council setting governed by speaking rules, where administrative actors and project staff who had already addressed these very concerns in earlier planning stages were not granted the right to respond on equal terms. Arguments that had been settled re-entered the debate with renewed force precisely because rebuttal was impossible. The strategy ultimately passed narrowly, but the story did not end there: months later, the administration failed to provide the required co-financing and had to return one million euros, cancelling the entire project with the approval of the main committee. The political effect of anti-transformation, the authors conclude, lies less in what is said than in when and where it is said. Legitimate concerns acquire destructive force through institutional timing.

The study’s broader argument is that the fate of socio-ecological transformation may be decided not in national parliaments but in committee rooms, budget negotiations, and planning documents. Local administrations occupy an ambivalent position: tasked with delivering transformative policies designed and funded elsewhere, while blamed both for overreach and for inaction, all under austerity conditions and fragmented competencies. This ambivalence, the authors suggest, is not a bug but a feature of contemporary multi-level governance. They propose anti-transformation as both an empirical phenomenon and a research agenda for political geography, calling for close attention to the micro-politics of decision-making: its terminology, institutional framing, and procedural conditions. Transformation, on this view, is never simply implemented or resisted. It is negotiated, redirected, delayed, and sometimes undone through the ordinary practices of local governance, one carefully timed question about who will take care of the trees at a time.

Subject of Research: Local political resistance to socio-ecological transformation projects in East German municipal governance

Article Title: Anti-transformation: the political geography of local resistance to transformation projects in East Germany

Article References: Pampus, M., Naumann, M., & Everts, J. (2026). Anti-transformation: the political geography of local resistance to transformation projects in East Germany. Geographica Helvetica, 81(3), 427-433. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-427-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-427-2026

Keywords: anti-transformation, socio-ecological transformation, East Germany, Zeitz, coal phase-out, local governance, municipal politics, political geography, sustainability policy, just transition, post-industrial regions, AfD

The authors’ central claim is provocative: biodiversity is routinely treated as an environmental co-benefit of health policy rather than as a foundational determinant of health itself. This framing, they contend, undermines the implementation of One Health approaches, because biodiversity underpins disease regulation, immune system development, food and water security, ecosystem functioning, resilience, and climate adaptation. At the same time, biodiversity provides the critical conceptual bridge between One Health, which focuses on the interdependence of human, animal, and environmental health, and Planetary Health, which situates human well-being within the stability of Earth systems. Without recognizing that bridge, policymakers oscillate between frameworks without a coherent mechanism connecting them.

The conceptual confusion the authors describe is well documented. In biomedical contexts, health is typically approached through disease, therapy, and individual well-being. Public and global health shift attention toward populations, prevention, and governance. One Health, formally defined by the One Health High-Level Expert Panel as an integrated, unifying approach that balances and optimizes the health of people, animals, and ecosystems, emphasizes interdependence across sectors. Planetary Health goes further, embedding human flourishing within the biophysical limits of the planet, including the transgression of planetary boundaries. EcoHealth and GeoHealth add further ecological and environmental dimensions. Each concept carries distinct theoretical foundations and practical implications, yet international agreements tend to blur these distinctions into a generic aspiration.

Policy documents illustrate the pattern. The Paris Agreement identifies health as a key concern affected by climate change but endorses no particular health framework. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development addresses health through Sustainable Development Goal 3 and weaves it across multiple goals, again without conceptual differentiation. A notable exception is the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which explicitly references the One Health approach and recognizes links between biodiversity, wildlife, and disease risks. The authors argue that this ambiguity matters because concepts shape implementation: a narrow, disease-focused framing treats environmental degradation as an external risk to health, whereas broader approaches recognize ecosystem functioning and environmental stability as the very substrate from which health emerges.

So what does the evidence actually say about biodiversity as a determinant of health? The most direct pathway runs through food systems. Soil biodiversity—including microbial communities, plant diversity, pollinators, and natural enemies of agricultural pests—underpins soil fertility, nutrient cycling, crop productivity, plant health, and dietary diversity. Research cited by the authors shows that biodiversity across multiple trophic levels is required for ecosystem multifunctionality, and that simplification of soil biota communities impairs nutrient recycling while increasing nitrogen losses above and below ground. These ecological processes influence micronutrient availability, reduce dependence on pesticides and antimicrobials, and enhance the resilience of food production under climate stress, ultimately linking ecosystem functioning to nutrition, food security, and disease prevention.

Biodiversity also shapes the dynamics of infectious disease, though the relationship is more nuanced than popular narratives suggest. The authors caution against the simplistic assumption that higher biodiversity always reduces disease risk. Instead, current evidence indicates that disease dynamics emerge from complex ecological systems in which biodiversity plays important regulatory roles, particularly through host-microbe interactions and trophic networks. Studies show that bat species assemblage predicts coronavirus prevalence, that biodiversity changes drive trypanosome infections in Panamanian wildlife, and that zoonotic host diversity tends to increase in human-dominated ecosystems. Biodiversity loss, deforestation, land-use change, and agricultural intensification can disrupt ecological relationships and create new opportunities for pathogen spillover, although these effects are highly context dependent. The practical lesson is that maintaining ecological integrity is a component of disease prevention and health system resilience, not an optional luxury.

Perhaps the most striking mechanism involves the human immune system itself. Contact with biodiverse soils, plants, animals, and outdoor environments enriches the diversity of host-associated microbial communities and supports the development of immune tolerance, particularly during early life. A landmark intervention study found that replacing playground gravel with forest floor material enhanced immune regulation and health-associated commensal microbiota among daycare children, while dust from traditional farm environments has been shown to contain asthma-protective agents. Conversely, biodiversity loss, urbanization, reduced contact with nature, and the homogenization of microbial exposures can contribute to immune dysregulation, increasing susceptibility to allergies, asthma, and other chronic inflammatory diseases. In other words, the erosion of biodiversity is written into the immunological arithmetic of childhood.

Microbial diversity emerges in the commentary as the connective tissue across all dimensions of One Health. Microbiomes are integral components of humans, animals, plants, soils, freshwater and marine systems, and the built environment, mediating interactions between environmental conditions and biological functioning. Changes in microbiome composition can serve as sensitive early indicators of environmental and health-related stress. Studies of wildlife illustrate the point vividly: bats feeding in banana monocultures are heavier but carry less diverse gut microbiota, astrovirus infections induce age-dependent dysbiosis in bat guts, climate change drives the loss of bacterial gut mutualists at the expense of host survival in wild meerkats, and human encroachment alters wildlife gut microbiomes. Recognizing microbial diversity as a shared component of environmental, animal, and human health, the authors argue, strengthens both the conceptual and operational integration of One Health.

The policy implications are concrete. Rather than choosing between One Health and Planetary Health, the authors recommend treating them as complementary: One Health provides an operational framework for collaboration across medicine, veterinary science, agriculture, and environmental management, while Planetary Health defines the ecological boundaries within which societies and health systems must operate. Translating this understanding into practice means integrating biodiversity into health planning, pandemic preparedness, veterinary strategies, and antimicrobial resistance action plans. Surveillance should extend beyond human and livestock health to include wildlife, environmental, and ecosystem indicators. Institutions across health, agriculture, environment, finance, and urban planning should develop shared data systems and joint risk assessments, and ecosystem conservation and restoration should be recognized as investments in prevention rather than as discretionary environmental spending.

Agriculture, food systems, and cities are central to this transition. Agriculture is a major driver of biodiversity loss, yet it simultaneously shapes nutrition, livelihoods, antimicrobial use, and climate resilience. Cities concentrate environmental health risks while offering opportunities to expand access to biodiverse green spaces and healthier food systems. Biodiversity-friendly agriculture, regenerative food systems, urban green infrastructure, healthy soils, wetlands, community gardens, and other nature-based solutions can simultaneously strengthen biodiversity, food security, climate adaptation, and physical and mental health. The authors conclude that the question ‘What health are we talking about?’ is far more than semantic: it determines how problems are framed, which sectors engage, and which interventions are prioritized. Their prescription is a shift from disease treatment toward prevention and health promotion, with future sustainability frameworks placing biodiversity at the center of healthy people, ecosystems, and the planet—an explicit recognition that protecting the variety of life is, in the most literal biological sense, protecting ourselves.

Subject of Research: The role of biodiversity as a foundational determinant of health linking One Health and Planetary Health frameworks

Article Title: What health are we talking about? Biodiversity as the missing link between One Health and Planetary Health

Article References: Geschke, J., Sommer, S., & Schloter, M. (2026). What health are we talking about? Biodiversity as the missing link between One Health and Planetary Health. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02487-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-026-02487-8

Keywords: biodiversity, One Health, Planetary Health, public health, microbiome, infectious disease, zoonoses, food security, immune system, sustainability policy, ecosystem services, planetary boundaries