Vol.:(0123456789) SN Soc Sci (2022) 2:206 https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-022-00507-4 ORIGINAL PAPER Bullying to sustainability: human behaviour barriers to local ecological sustainability Kim Polistina 1,2 Received: 23 November 2021 / Accepted: 5 September 2022 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Abstract Communities are the front line of local sustainability implementation. These communities are part of the current dominant human/environment dynamic which is encompassed in the neoliberal system. The nuances of human behaviour at the local community level that perpetuate unsustainable behaviours, particularly in the pursuit of neoliberal aims, is a complex and unpredictable problem. Adult bullying behaviours as a modus operandi for those perpetuating neoliberalism, through their management of corporations and businesses, provided a microscopic lens to examine the social–ecological context of barriers to ecological sustainability in two communities in south-east Queensland, Australia. There are no arbitrary delineations between society and the environment in social–ecological systems (Guerrero et al. Ecol Soc 23:38, 2018; Noorden, Nature 525:306–307, 2015). We need to understand the benefcial or detrimental impact of the dynamics between humans and the environment to understand barriers to sustainability implementation (Bennett et al. Reg Environ Change 16:907–926, 2016). This inductive research was conducted through a critical social constructionism approach. A transdisciplinary cross-case study research was conducted to examine the human and human/ environment interactions using interviews, documentary and media analysis, personal communications, and researcher observations and journal. The use of bullying tactics by the individuals perpetuating neoliberalism in each case were discovered. Detrimental impacts on all sustainability domains, as a result of these bullying tactics, were discovered. The remit of this paper is a discussion on the main impacts on ecological sustainability. This focus expands our social–ecological understanding of these human interactions and how they impacted detrimentally on the ecologically sustainable actions implemented by the communities. These impacts were identifed as environmental pollution and degradation; barriers to sustainable lifestyles choices; restrictions to pro-environmental education and regeneration activities; and exclusionary control of access to natural environments for human- nature interconnectedness. This illuminated an inconspicuous barrier in the social– ecological dynamic of ecological sustainability in the lack of knowledge, skills and capacity the communities had to identify and alleviate bullying that was preventing Extended author information available on the last page of the article