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Paper short abstract

This paper examines environmental anti-cosmopolitanism in Austrian Alpine communities, showing how nativist ideas of non-human belonging shape resistance to rewilding and conservation policies.

Paper long abstract

Rural responses to environmental governance are often framed through a moral opposition between progressive ecological concern and reactionary resistance. Drawing on ethnographic research in Austrian Alpine communities, this paper complicates such binaries by examining forms of environmental anti-cosmopolitanism that target not human Others but non-human ones. I explore how opposition to rewilding, habitat restoration, and species protection is articulated through nativist ideas of ecological belonging, in which particular landscapes, animals, and modes of land use are understood as autochthonous, while others are framed as foreign, invasive, or imposed from elsewhere.

Situated at the frontline of climate change, Alpine environments have become symbolic and material battlegrounds where broader anxieties about globalization, expertise, and political legitimacy are negotiated. The paper will show that local resistance to conservation policies is not only a reaction to specific measures, but also to the perceived cosmopolitanism of environmental science, transnational institutions, and abstract planetary futures. These dynamics have intensified in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which deepened mistrust toward expert knowledge and sharpened rural-urban divides.

By focusing on everyday practices of environmental knowledge-making, this paper traces how alternative ecological interpretations circulate, gain authority, and produce polarized understandings of nature, belonging, and responsibility. It will suggest that attending to non-human nativism highlights how rural politics of (un)belonging extend beyond human communities to landscapes and species, revealing the multipolar character of rural politics and the ambivalent entanglements of nativism and cosmopolitanism in contemporary environmental governance.