The purpose of this chapter is to summarise Chapters One to Four, and to offer a bridge to Chapters Six to Ten.

Chapter One welcomed the capabilities approach's recognition of complexity, pluralism and diversity, but proposed that it is flawed in several respects. First, it has failed to ground itself in a universalist frame of reference that is both sufficiently robust and flexible. And second, it unjustifiably downgrades the importance of income and wealth, material resources, economic power and the distributive paradigm, both to the capabilities approach itself and to any understanding of contemporary capitalism. The chapter then adapts the work of Holland in identifying a category of meta-capabilities (that which makes other capabilities possible), based on the premise that the interdependency of social and natural environments is both strong and fundamental. The chapter ended by suggesting that in so far as ‘poverty’ implies a multidimensional ‘poverty of capabilities’, we ought to focus on the socionatural conditions underpinning those multiple dimensions. Thus, an ecosocial understanding of poverty defines it as the deprivations resulting from an inadequate distribution of, and participative access to, those resources that are key to both natural and social environments.

The aim in Chapter Two was to formulate an appropriate conceptualisation of resources. It began by arguing that natural assets have not been given sufficient attention in a range of literatures. It then critiqued a principled justification for ecological modernisation by proposing that intrinsic value should be at the heart of social thinking and social reforms. We should look beyond ecological modernisation to more radical approaches, albeit ones still rooted in the pragmatic need to apply economic categories and ideas to the natural world. This then inspired the first elements of an ecosocial account via a discussion of decommodification, alienation and exclusion, domainship and ownership. This account argues that we lack sufficient control over socioeconomic resources and adequate synergies between socioeconomic and natural resources; it proposes both the socialisation of natural resources but also the ‘re-naturing’ of economic and social relations through an ethic of ‘qualified partial ownership’. This led to the idea that ‘socionatural resources’ should be subject to the principles of minimum entitlements, property rights, political voice and democratic representation, and obligations to value. The chapter closed by offering an initial definition of ecosocial poverty.

Since socionatural resources border, occupy, affect and are affected by space, Chapter Three reviewed several debates relating to social space.