Global environmental change III: Closing the gap between knowledge and action

There are increasing calls from the global environmental change research community for new strategies for translating knowledge into action. Such calls are not new, yet they are often based on the assumption that more solutions-oriented knowledge about environmental problems will lead to desired outcomes. In this progress report, I argue that it is time to shift attention to the issue of change itself, and to question some of the assumptions that reproduce certain types of knowledge and certain types of action over alternatives. I discuss an approach for challenging big assumptions, which draws greater attention to a broad body of social science research that renders many of the paradigmatic assumptions ambiguous or problematic. Finally, I consider the implications for human geography, including whether some of our own disciplinary assumptions are complicit in perpetuating paradigms that contribute to continued global environmental change.