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Short abstract

Peatland restoration is increasingly driven by efforts to "economize" the agenda. Analyzing it as a temporal-material frontier, I examine ethnographically the frictions between slow peat temporalities and short-term financialized logics, and ask what kind of futurization is at stake in this process.

Long abstract

The restoration of European peatlands will radically change European agriculture. As one of the most important instruments for mitigating climate change and securing water supplies, the renaturation of formerly drained and agriculturally used peatlands is the focus of economic and political attention. It is increasingly driven by efforts to "economize" (Çalışkan & Callon 2009) the peatland restoration agenda, for example through voluntary CO₂ credits. These approaches promise win-win solutions for farmers, financial actors, and the climate alike, while fundamentally transforming the economic, cultural, and social management of peatlands.

This paper contributes to the critical analysis of the temporal-material dimension of epistemic frontiers in post-agrarian, financialized "peatscapes" (Palmer et al. 2025). I propose analyzing peatland restoration as a 'temporal-material frontier' to reveal the structural tensions of these financing strategies. Central is the incompatibility between the slow, fragile materialities of peatlands and the short-term horizons of financial actors: peatland regeneration takes decades and requires specific ecological conditions – a timeframe difficult to reconcile with the promise of quick carbon returns. Translating ecological "peat time" (Parry 2025) into financed time logics leads to contradictory resistances and epistemic uncertainties – for example, whether rapid rewetting increases methane emissions in the short term, thereby accelerating rather than delaying climate change. Based on multi-sided ethnographic fieldwork in Scottish and German peatlands, I examine how epistemic and financial controversies are negotiated in financialized rewetting, what "futurization" (Tellmann 2020) is at stake, and which actors, materialities, and temporalities are taken into account.