The role of sustainability initiatives and niche groups in transitions towards sustainability has received a good deal of attention. However, little is known about the people who make up these groups. This paper discusses their psychological wellbeing – a concept that comprises six elements: self-acceptance, personal growth and development, purpose in life, environmental mastery, autonomy, and positive relations with others. In the study we performed 46 semi-structured interviews with people from 11 sustainability initiatives in five countries across Europe. We find that the groups offer a platform to build and maintain social relations with other, often like-minded, people. While these relations often serve an important motivational function to stay engaged, they are not free of challenges. The interviews show that sustainability initiatives can also provide fertile ground for personal growth and other dimensions of psychological wellbeing. Environmental mastery – and specifically the capacity to cope with global environmental problems beyond individual control – is a major challenge for people engaged in sustainability initiatives. Overall, the data suggests strong links between social engagement and psychological wellbeing. From a theoretical perspective, this paper enriches the transition literature by exploring the role of psychological wellbeing among people engaged in niches.

There is a substantial body of literature on public understandings of large-scale ‘environmental’ phenomena such as climate change and resource degradation. At the same time, political science and economics analyse the governance arrangements to deal with such issues. These realms of research rarely meet: there has been little research into people’s understandings of the governance of environmental change. This study adds a psychological perspective to governance research by investigating social representations of governance that promotes societal change towards sustainability, and related practices. It examines data from qualitative interviews with sustainability-interested people in seven European countries (n = 105). The analysis identified building blocks of representations suitable as an analytical framework for future research on governance representations. The diversity of their content reflected a range of pathways to societal change. Representations often seemed to have a creative function as a guiding vision for individuals’ own practices, but their wider transformative potential was constrained.