Contribution short abstract

We examine how human and nonhuman actors co-produce landscape change and livelihoods in Hungary’s Sand Ridge region. Drawing on interview analysis and natural archives, we analyse local interpretations of aridification, land-use pressures, and prospects for multispecies adaptive strategies.

Contribution long abstract

The Sand Ridge has undergone rapid aridification and landscape transformation over the past two centuries, with marked acceleration since the 1980s. While these changes have attracted growing research attention, multispecies and more-than-human political ecological perspectives remain underused despite their relevance. This paper combines new materialist approaches with critical political economy to examine how inanimate actants (water, sand, wind) and diverse flora and fauna (grazing livestock, introduced plants, invasive species) interact with historically situated forms of socio-economic organization to shape the region’s landscape and multi-species livelihoods.

Drawing on interviews with local stakeholders, the paper analyses how people living in and from the land perceive these socio-ecological processes. It highlights interviewees’ assessments of the roles and potentials of animate and inanimate nonhuman entities in co-creating landscapes and livelihoods, and considers how such understandings might support renewed strategies of multispecies collaborative adaptation.

Empirically, the study focuses on two sites. The first is a small border town once known for tomato production but now severely affected by the drastic decline of the groundwater table. The second is a historic wine-growing area with relatively favourable soils, where wine-related tourism is expanding while conservation efforts face pressure from recurring drought and the political embeddedness of some landowners and the fishing community.

Our approach offers new momentum for collective reflection among researchers and practitioners working in the region, and contributes to building counter-narratives grounded in residents’ own insights, as well as the natural archives of the region.

Contribution short abstract

This roundtable contribution reflects on integrating eDNA, camera surveys, and discourse analysis in research on Sears Island. It considers how to hold ecological patterns and community knowledge together in politically contested energy transitions.

Contribution long abstract

My contribution reflects on what it means to do more-than-human political ecology in a landscape where ecological processes, state planning, and local conflict collide. Drawing from ongoing research on the proposed offshore wind port on Wassumkeag (Sears Island) in Maine, I work through the practical and interpretive challenges of integrating eDNA metabarcoding, island-wide camera surveys, seasonal habitat observations, and discourse analysis into a single relational field practice. These methods reveal multispecies patterns that complicate official portrayals of the island as a low-value landscape ready for industrial transformation, yet translating ecological signals into political terms raises questions about representation, scale, and responsibility. Rather than offering a finished model, I hope to use this roundtable to think collaboratively about how political ecologists can treat ecological data as more than evidence for or against development, and instead consider it part of the relational life of contested landscapes. How do we acknowledge multispecies presence without turning them into static datapoints? How do we bring community knowledge into conversation with the ecological patterns our fieldwork reveals? What does it mean to situate fieldwork in a place where governance frameworks do not recognize these relations at all? I offer these tensions as openings for shared methodological exploration.

Contribution short abstract

Integrating nonhuman needs into land use modelling reveals their agency in shaping landscapes and nature’s contributions. This methodological approach supports fairer futures, informs governance, and highlights power and justice issues in human-nonhuman relationships, promoting societal shifts.

Contribution long abstract

Exploratory futures often consider human-nature relationships but still primarily focus on human needs. Approaches such as the IPBES Nature Futures Framework recognise the plural and relational values of nature, yet their use in tools like land use models continues to privilege human-centred outcomes. This work argues that nonhumans also shape landscapes, influence the flow of nature’s gifts, and should be considered as actors rather than resources in decisions about land use and sustainable futures.

The talk presents insights from a methodological approach for conceptualising nonhuman demands and linking them with how people benefit from and affect nature. This draws on the interplay between nature’s contributions to people, nature’s contributions to nature, and people’s contributions to nature as a core co-creation dynamic.

Including nonhuman needs in land-use modelling tools produces understandings that can help sustain benefits for humans while reducing harms for both humans and nonhumans. The model outputs can inform governance and planning strategies and make more visible the role of policies and societies in building healthy human-nonhuman relationships. It raises important questions about the power and justice implications of recognising nonhuman voices in decisions about socio-ecological priorities and the provision and distribution of nature’s contributions.

This conceptual approach brings more-than-human political ecology into land use modelling by creating space for nonhuman agency. It represents a transboundary method that links political ecology, sustainability narratives, land system dynamics, mathematical approaches, and empirical data. It also supports the development of nature-centred scenarios that are more consistent with ecocentric and pluricentric perspectives.

Contribution short abstract

We explored how cultural beliefs, environmental factors, conservation policies, local tolerance, and socio-economic aspects determine HEC in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve in southern India. Our ethnography emphasizes more on animistc beliefs of communities across borders.

Contribution long abstract

We explored how cultural beliefs, environmental factors, conservation policies, local tolerance, and socio-economic aspects determine HEC in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve in southern India. Based on these factors, we focus on how HEC magnitudes differ across the three bordering states, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Our ethnography emphasizes more on animistc beliefs of communities across borders: As per local beliefs elephants still follow aanataras (ancestral movement routes). The Soliga community pays respect to an elephant deity Aanabommaraya before cultivation for a better crop yield. We found that elephants’ movements across political borders are determined by ecological factors such as water availability, especially during the dry seasons. Rampant land use changes disrupt Aanataras creating fear landscapes within their habitat. The marginalised communities here experience socio-economic and psycho-social costs. Resultantly, the local tolerance towards elephants is decreasing and interspecies retaliatory killings are on the rise. These sentient nonhumans realise ‘fear landscapes’ and use their political awareness to navigate the shared space. Similarly, given the conservation status of elephants in India, humans are also aware of the political repercussions. We found that elephant agency guides the community’s choice of crop cultivation and daily practices. These interspecies interactions highlight the more-than-human perspectives in the shared space. We found that there are differences in approaches towards elephants based on ethnicity, cultural practices, religious ideologies, and access to government schemes. By delving into anthropomorphism we attempt to question anthropocentrism in a more-than-human world.

Contribution short abstract

We approach the study of multi-species and socio-environmental conflicts generated by climate change and the extractivism of natural resources. We focus on emblematic species and the animal agency in conflicts triggered by the mining projects in the Aconcagua Valley, central Chile.

Contribution long abstract

This proposal seeks to explore the political agency of animals in conflicts generated by extractive projects and in the climate change context. From a multispecies perspective, we focus on emblematic species in the Andes. Especially, the cougar and Andean cat inhabit the heights of the Andes mountain range. Although the second is in danger of extinction, both face large-scale mining and climate change, which cause alterations, fragmentation, and loss of their habitat. Based on conflicts over the installation of a mining project in the Aconcagua valley in central Chile, and with an ethnographic method, we analyze the effects and affectations of the project on the human and more-than-human population and the relationships between species. It also considers the methodological and technological challenges in studying more-than-humans and their perspectives, as well as the paradox inherent in the need to make visible and quantify the presence of a species characterised by its elusiveness. We explore how these animals have been degraded by extractive projects based on a vision of modern colonial and anthropocentric development. At the same time, we want to study the emergence of animal resistance associated with cosmopolitics of social or community movements that confront extractive projects.

Finally, this case addresses the question of the possibility of building a future with more than human justice. To consider other, more just forms of coexistence, this article is an invitation to think about conflicts linked to extractivism from a more-than-human perspective and to imagine other futures.

Contribution short abstract

Hybrid Amazonian pluriverses reveal more-than-human agencies shaping climate futures. This research outlines methodological pathways, pluriversal backcasting, hybrid risk mapping and multispecies cartographies to operationalise more-than-human political ecology in practice.

Contribution long abstract

This contribution explores how hybrid pluriversal worlds in the Brazilian Amazon invite new methodological possibilities for a more-than-human political ecology. Rather than presuming a unified “nature” or a single ontological ground for environmental change, hybrid Amazonian contexts highlight how rivers, forest beings, climatic anomalies, agro-extractive dynamics, policies and politics, and spiritual ecologies co-produce socio-environmental realities. These assemblages challenge established boundaries between knowledge systems and expose the limits of methods centred solely on human perspectives.

Drawing on emerging reflections, the research sketches three methodological pathways to operationalise more-than-human political ecology to think about futures: (1) a hybrid risk chain approach that includes human and nonhuman agencies; (2) pluriversal backcasting that traces multiple, situated climate futures grounded in diverse ways of world-making; and (3) multispecies and spiritual cartographies that shape relational human and more-than-human experiences of environmental change. The contribution presents how these tools can bridge epistemological divides and support transboundary collaborations.

By placing ontological multiplicity and more-than-human presence at the forefront, the methods invite reflection on the reconfiguration of climate research and action in ways that honour Amazonian worlds and open new pathways for thinking about futures.

Contribution short abstract

We integrated ethnographic and ecological methods (like camera traps and satellite telemetry) to examine the interplay of human actors, nonhuman actors (elephants), and inanimate materials like haria (rice beer) and electric fences in shaping human-elephant conflict in North Bengal, India.

Contribution long abstract

Human-Elephant Conflict (HEC) is co-produced through a dynamic interplay between human actors, nonhuman actors, and inanimate materials like haria (rice beer) and electric fences. We deploy a more-than-human political ecology framework that uses a mixed-methods approach, which combines ethnographic findings with ecological data through camera traps and satellite telemetry. The combination of methods allows a nuanced understanding of how both humans and elephants perceive each other and navigate the shared landscape for better resources and survival. Elephants, through their increased state protection, emerge as political animals under the contemporary conservation regime, wherein they adapt to ‘weak’ retaliation by humans and modify local agricultural practices—behaviors reflecting interspecies cultural learning, adaptive intelligence, and political awareness.

Haria emerges as ‘less illegal’ than timber felling and remains a key livelihood option among the indigenous communities. However, as an actant, it acts as a double-edged catalyst, both attracting elephants and rendering intoxicated humans more vulnerable to HEC. Electric fences remain the most preferred technical intervention to mitigate HEC. Regression analysis shows that electric fences reduce the elephant-induced costs locally by 32% but also create a spillover effect of increased cost in the neighboring unfenced (40%) and weak-fenced (37%) villages.

Overall, this research calls for not only mitigating HEC but also transforming the conditions under which it prevails. This can be achieved by bringing together and recognizing the political lives of elephants, the cultural politics of haria, and the contested consequences of electric fences, instead of separating them through disciplinary, methodological, and political boundaries.

Contribution short abstract

This paper examines how elephants and conservation laws jointly shape mobility, fear, and livelihood in Wayanad. Using eight months of ethnography, it shows how more-than-human governance structures everyday life and argues for multispecies justice and Indigenous-centered conservation.

Contribution long abstract

This paper explores more-than-human political ecologies in a forest-fringe landscape in Wayanad, Kerala. Based on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork with the Mullu Kurumans, a forest-dependent community in Wayanad (Kerala), the study examines how conservation laws regulate human behaviour as more-than-human actors, particularly elephants whose habitat vastly overlaps with that of humans. The presence of elephants shapes people’s mobility and livelihoods, instilling fear and anxiety and challenging the everyday decision-making of local human residents, thereby restructuring their daily routines and relationships with the forest. Borrowing the concept of ‘more-than-human governance,’ the paper argues that wildlife conservation in contemporary India operates through forms where animals and infrastructures, together, create regulatory systems that discipline movement, access, and subsistence by deterrence and surveillance of both elephants and humans.

By foregrounding Indigenous environmental relations and multispecies interactions, the paper shows that forest governance cannot be understood solely through human institutions. Instead, animals, ecologies, and technologies co-produce the conditions under which communities live, adapt, and resist and become ‘subjects’ of governance by both the state and the nonhuman neighbours. The study calls for rethinking conservation through frameworks of multispecies justice and Indigenous knowledge, arguing that sustaining forests requires recognising, not erasing, the long histories of human–nonhuman cohabitation that shape these landscapes.

Contribution short abstract

I present eco-biopolitics as a more-than-human framework that uses document analysis of environmental governance to trace how nonhuman life is rendered governable and to reflect on the possibilities and limits of such methods.

Contribution long abstract

This presentation develops eco-biopolitics as an analytical framework for studying how political power manages life beyond the human. Building on Foucault and Latour’s political ecology, I conceptualise eco-biopolitics as a mode of governing in which forests, species and ecosystems become populations to be known, protected and optimised alongside human societies.

Empirically, I use qualitative document analysis of environmental governance texts, including biodiversity strategies, restoration laws and “rights of nature” provisions. I employ a coding scheme that traces three dimensions: (1) rationalities that justify why life should be governed (for example through crisis, resilience or optimisation logics); (2) techniques and indicators through which nonhuman beings and ecosystems are made calculable; and (3) the populations of life that emerge as protectable, optimisable or disposable.

I argue that such text-based eco-biopolitical analysis can make visible how environmental governance distributes value and vulnerability across human and nonhuman lives, and how specific forms of life are stabilised as worthy of protection or exposed to sacrifice. At the same time, this approach risks remaining blind to lived relations, material ecologies and practices of resistance if it is not combined with other methods. This raises a set of methodological questions: how might document-centred analysis be linked to ethnographic, ecological or collaborative approaches? What kinds of more-than-human politics become thinkable through these combinations, and how can they expand the possibilities for environmental and multispecies justice?

Contribution short abstract

In this talk, I will provide a brief overview of ongoing debates surrounding more-than-human political ecology, clarifying its scope and approach through delineating three key analytical focuses. I will advance current discussions from 'whether' to 'how' to do more-than-human political ecology.

Contribution long abstract

For this lighting talk, I will introduce my recent conceptualisation of a ‘more-than-human political ecology’ (Donfrancesco, V. 2025. The radical edge of more-than-human political ecology: A clarification of scope and approach. Progress in Environmental Geography, 4(4): 465-481. https://doi.org/10.1177/27539687251378495). After a brief contextualisation and overview, I will flesh out three key focuses of more-than-human political ecology: (I) reciprocity and mutual constitution; (II) re-territorialization; and (III) subversiveness. I will thus make the case that it is possible to engage with non-human agencies without losing track of structural forces – responding to ongoing debates, and bringing attention to an existing and growing body of scholarship that is already working productively at this critical interface. This conceptualisation, which is not meant to be exclusive but generative, opens up a new framing: the question ceases to be 'whether' there is scope for a more-than-human political ecology, and becomes 'how' such scope might be amplified, applied, diversified, and used strategically in struggles for more-than-human flourishing. This will be the central question that I will raise for the group discussion. I will begin with a reflection, based on my research on human-wolf relations in Italy, on how researchers themselves might mobilise non-human agency in support of such goals.

Contribution short abstract

This paper addresses the theoretical and methodological contribution of the ontological turn to the study of HWI. We highlight how these frameworks unsettle long-standing conservation assumptions, provide new insights and contribute to methodological innovation and interdisciplinary collaborations.

Contribution long abstract

Responding to recent calls from within conservation science and the growing interdisciplinary field of coexistence studies, there is increasing recognition of the need to fundamentally rethink our relationships with nonhuman natures. This includes moving beyond conventional Eurocentric conservation and resource management paradigms, in ways that prioritise, rather than merely accommodate, local and Indigenous onto-epistemologies. This rethinking requires more sustained engagement with insights from the humanities and critical social sciences. To this end, this paper illustrates how recent theoretical propositions within the humanities can inform the emerging field of coexistence studies and mainstream critical approaches in conservation social sciences, such as political ecology, enhancing analyses and critiques of environmental inequalities and injustices. Specifically, we concentrate on more-than-human and political ontology frameworks. We focus on human-elephant coexistence, combining a review of interdisciplinary literature with ethnographic fieldwork to illustrate how these frameworks might inform research and our understanding of coexistence. We emphasise the value of foregrounding relationality, acknowledging nonhuman agency and autonomy, and recognising the multiplicity of worlds and ways of knowing in the way we approach human-wildlife coexistence. We provide insights into what relationality might look like in the field and how such orientations can reconfigure the questions we ask, the methods we employ, and the interpretations we make when studying human–wildlife coexistence. We propose that ethnographers conducting research in post-colonial contexts, particularly when collaborating with Indigenous peoples, reorient their approach through these lenses to engage meaningfully with local ways of knowing, practices, and relations with wildlife without imposing a Western onto-epistemology

Contribution short abstract

As part of my doctoral dissertation on the political ecology of wolf conservation, I created the album KO:MI - Belonging in Nature. This presentation examines how music's emotional resonance can enhance our understanding of our relationships with other-than-humans.

Contribution long abstract

This presentation explores the intersection of political ecology and the arts, particularly through music, to examine how we understand our relationships with other-than-humans. In a world grappling with climate change and biodiversity loss, it’s essential to recognize that while we can never fully escape our human perspective, we can strive to understand other-than-human viewpoints. This is where the arts, and music specifically, can play an important role.

As part of my doctoral dissertation on the political ecology of wolf conservation, I created an album of music titled Belonging in Nature, which functioned both as an analytical tool and an output of the research. Music, as a non-verbal and non-visual medium, has a unique ability to connect directly with our emotions and intuitive understanding of the world. Artistic work included in social scientific research can create resonating experiences, and disrupt and animate discussions, providing deeper engagement with complex ideas. These characteristics also give music intriguing potential for gaining insight into other-than-human perspectives.

In this presentation, I will discuss how music creation can become a tool for analysis, while musical experiences can broaden the impacts of research both within and beyond academia, enriching our understanding of socio-ecological dynamics. By integrating artistic methods into political ecology, we can cultivate a more holistic view of our relationships with the more-than-human world. Ultimately, embracing the arts helps us navigate our human limitations and encourages us to take responsibility for the diverse lives that share our planet, paving the way for social change and environmental justice.

Contribution short abstract

My intervention reflects on how transgressing disciplinary and scientific boundaries can imagine and implement a praxis of solidarity and care for humans and more-than-humans in more-than-human political ecology, drawing on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary squirrel-human research.

Contribution long abstract

Western scientific norms are predicated on categorisation and conformity, such as what is (not) seen as acceptable knowledge or methods, what disciplines can (not) ask what questions, what species to (not) care about, and what is (not) acceptable output in what outlets. Such questions, generally more style than substance, can become more important than situating research in relation to political and social change. As we face widening environmental and social inequalities and climate breakdown, a research praxis rooted in identifying and addressing drivers of harm, and taking actions of solidarity towards humans and more-than-humans through intellectual, collaborative and communicative praxis becomes all the more important, including in how to travel, where and with whom to publish and how to communicate findings. My intervention reflects on the key question of how transgressing disciplinary and scientific boundaries can imagine and implement a focus on social change and justice for both humans and more-than-humans in more-than-human political ecology? Based on an interdisciplinary investigation into coexistence between and among (grey) squirrels and humans, I reflect on drawing on social science, natural science and humanities materials and methods as well as storytelling and visual approaches for research and knowledge exchange to promote solidarity both in what and how I research, but also in what and how I communicate. Such practices of everyday care both resist dominant forces driving conforming, for-profit research and education and personal promotion or gain, and are a vital step of building hope and solidarity in more-than-human political ecology and beyond.

Contribution short abstract

Using multispecies fieldwork in the Pantanal, this contribution examines how more-than-human political ecology can better engage with marginalised human experiences, revealing overlooked relations and supporting more just and grounded forms of coexistence with nonhumans.

Contribution long abstract

Grounded in multispecies fieldwork in the Brazilian Pantanal, this contribution considers how more-than-human political ecology can be methodologically operationalised and connected to broader questions of justice and coexistence. My research followed jaguar–human encounters on the river, engaged with guides, conservationists, Indigenous actors, and Pantaneiro families, and attended to the ecological and affective relations that shape tourism landscapes. These observations highlight jaguars as agentive beings that co-create interspecies interactions and guide how humans move, watch, and interpret the landscape.

At the same time, the fieldwork revealed processes through which certain human actors become less-than-human—marginalised, excluded from decision-making, or rendered invisible within dominant conservation and tourism narratives. In some instances, the intensification of more-than-human attention seemed to reinforce these dynamics, as the visibility of jaguars and other nonhumans overshadowed the lived experiences of marginalised human groups. This tension between nonhuman agency and human devaluation is an empirical reality that more-than-human political ecology must address more explicitly.

Working with multispecies assemblage provided a methodological space to integrate ecological cues, local knowledge, embodied experience, and social dynamics. Assemblages composed of jaguars, boats, prey species, river currents, photographic infrastructures, and tourist expectations show how landscapes are co-created and how power operates across species and institutions.

I offer these reflections to contribute to a collective discussion on how multispecies approaches might illuminate overlooked relations, challenge hierarchical knowledge practices, and support more inclusive and justice-oriented pathways to human–nonhuman coexistence.

Contribution short abstract

A lighting talk on experimenting with storytelling and perspective-taking methods for more-than-human representation.

Contribution long abstract

Storytelling can be both a method and a practical tool for the researcher as an agent of transformative change. Bridging divides between objectivity and emotional subjectivity, how might this influence the field of political ecology? In this lighting talk, I will present my experience from experimenting with more-than-human storytelling and perspective-taking as methods, drawing on fieldwork experience in Kenya and South Africa, and at animal sanctuaries in Croatia and Portugal.

Contribution short abstract

Pluriversal Environmental Governance challenges Western anthropocentrism. Using Grounded Theory on Latin American data, governance is explained as co-governance with more-than-human political actors (Pachamama, plants), operationalising decolonial social change for environmental justice and degrowth

Contribution long abstract

The persistent global ecological crisis is symptomatic of a significant governance deficit, fundamentally rooted in dominant Western, anthropocentric, and colonial-extractivist paradigms. This research addresses this urgent need by centring Indigenous knowledge systems and relational cosmologies, which offer transformative pathways toward more just and sustainable human-environmental entanglements.

Employing a critical and decolonial research paradigm, and drawing upon Grounded Theory (GT), this study inductively generates a model of Pluriversal Environmental Co-Governance in Latin America. Data collection involved semi-structured interviews with Indigenous leaders, scholars, activists, and legal experts, forging transboundary collaborations that prioritize Indigenous epistemologies over a priori Western theory.

The generated model describes ecological stewardship rooted in relational ontologies and Indigenous jurisprudence interacting with colonial legacies. Key findings highlight profound ontological differences from Western frameworks, supporting a more-than-human political ecology. Indigenous systems perceive the environment as a community of political actors (e.g., Pachamama), dissolving the Western subject/object dichotomy and aligning with the Western juridical concept of Rights of Nature. Environmental degradation is interpreted as a relational disease stemming from the pathology of colonisation and objectification.

The study conceptualises governance as territorial co-governance, wherein critical decision-making incorporates the rights and agency of more-than-human entities, often mediated by spiritual dialogue. This Pluriversal configuration proposes a model of epistemic delinking from colonial modernity for environmental justice and degrowth, emphasising the ecological need to hold multiple worldviews in dialogue without reducing their difference to universal anthropocentric categories.