Send message to Authors

Presentation short abstract

Based on over a decade of experience in social consultation on wildlife restoration and rewilding projects in inland areas of Portugal, different positions of the social actors inhabiting these territories will be presented from an analytical and critical perspective.

Presentation long abstract

Like other European rural and economically marginal regions, inland depopulated areas in Portugal have undergone significant economic and social changes. These have led to the decline of agricultural activity, land abandonment and consequent processes of passive rewilding that are not always conducive to generating biodiversity. The conservationists’ desired resurgence often requires assistance, including reintroductions of species, which might face resistance from local communities.

In Portugal, the Iberian lynx has already been reintroduced, and recent rewilding initiatives in the Centre region have focused on improving coexistence with Iberian wolves in an enlarged area and on proposals to reintroduce the ibex. Our team’s involvement in these processes through social consultation studies for over a decade provides robust data on the socioeconomic dimensions of reintroduction and rewilding processes, particularly local communities' perspectives, enabling an in-depth discussion of their political contours.

These studies have entailed semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders—including livestock breeders, hunting managers, local authorities, conservation practitioners, and nature tourism promoters—to capture their positions regarding potential reintroductions and coexistence, alongside local knowledge, emotions, and beliefs. Additionally, observation was carried out of local practices and, in the case of lynx reintroduction, of the meetings with stakeholders organised by the state administration.

The complexity of the relationship between humans and these large predators and herbivores, shaped by their insertion into a market economy, emerge as a central and transversal conclusion in our research. These findings further prompt reflection on a core question: what, ultimately, defines the wild of the rewilding—and for whom?

Send message to Authors

Presentation short abstract

Climate-driven forest decline sparks debates in France over how to renew or restore forests. Our study reveals two opposing discourses, with institutions positioned on a gradient between them. These discourses reflect diverging expectations for forests, management practices, and desired governance.

Presentation long abstract

As climate change raises concerns about forests, various approaches are proposed to restore and conserve forests, their biodiversity or their productive capacity (e.g., clear-cutting and plantations, exotic species introduction, assisted migration, natural regeneration). In France, a political, technical and ideological debate has emerged on the need for forest renewal for adaptation to climate change and on its definition and implementation. Our study analyses the divergent discourses of institutions involved in forest renewal or restoration in France. We combined the argumentative framework (with storylines that may be shared across discourses) and the Values-Rules-Knowledge framework (to identify storylines about expectations from renewal, its governance, and recommended practices). We coded eighteen semi-structured interviews and then applied correspondence analyses and fuzzy clustering. The results confirmed that forest renewal is a contested notion and revealed an opposition between two major discourses. The first discourse corresponded to a “business-as-usual” forestry, emphasizing timber production from human-controlled forests and interventionist management supported by public incentives. The second discourse highlighted social and environmental benefits provided by conserving or restoring natural forest, with no or limited intervention practices, and rejected intensive practices and current governmental policies. The interviewed institutions fell along a gradient between these two discourses, with positions that depended on the types of institution. Our study shows the need for a genuine stakeholder dialogue and greater transparency in government policies for renewal. In particular, the modalities of the financial incentives need to be reconsidered, as they are currently aligned with the production-oriented discourse.

Send message to Author

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how concepts like restoring, enlivening and rewilding rivers shape diverse cultural values, political contestations and justice struggles. Through cases in the Netherlands and Colombia, it reveals contradictions and power dynamics in river interventions and riverine lifeways.

Presentation long abstract

Over the last years, various initiatives have emerged to restore and protect rivers. With so few free-flowing rivers remaining, their defense has become an urgent global priority. In response to this, governments, NGOs, civil society and international organizations have launched numerous river restoration initiatives. Whereas, critical scholars have called for new ontological approaches to understanding and living with rivers, through their engagement with new water justice movements to defend and enlivening rivers. The different efforts from both sides have not been enough examined. Specifically, the deliberate use of concepts such as enlivening, rewilding, restoring and protecting rivers creates dispute over cultural values and lead to socio-cultural injustices. In the Netherlands, for example, the living-with-water paradigm is creating a crisis in the Dutch cultural identity, social unrest and a turmoil in the pollical debate. While Colombia is coined as an amphibious country due to its riverine inhabitants who have coexisted with river rhythms, the techno control of the rivers is paradoxically advancing alongside with river restoration initiatives, disrupting bio-cultural memory and enclosing amphibious cultures. Therefore, this work carefully examines the meanings, political implications and cultural differences of mobilizing these concepts in settings with high interventions by hydraulic infrastructure, and in places where rivers still flow more freely. By illustrating these two cases, this paper aims to unravel the contradictions, challenges and power structures embedded in the discourses of enlivening, rewilding, restoring and protecting rivers that justify the actions, advocacy and river intervention from the different social sectors.

Send message to Authors

Presentation short abstract

By examining the embodied experiences of everyday Venetian muddiness we suggest eco-restory-ation as a radical qualifier and generative pathway to meaningful wetland futures and socio-natural outcomes. This subverts both nostalgia and solastalgia resonate in metanarratives of the Death of Venice.

Presentation long abstract

Passing halfway through the UN decade of ecological restoration it is arguable that processes and practices of ecological remediation, remain ossified in techno-managerial failures of expansive finance driven formalisation. Even within the remit of re-wilding branded projects, such approaches, cleave embodied experience from landscape vitalisation. Building on a (2023) pragmatist agenda for eco-restoration, we suggest that socio-ecological recovery requires attention to the stories that are generated with and through both individual and collective practices of dwelling with, and caring for, ecology. We proffer the concept of “ecore-story-ation” acts as a critical, invitation to consider story as both bell weather of, and pathway to meaningful wetland futures. The relative richness of socio-natural storying is a situated practice entangled with, and reflective of, the ‘well-being’ and resilience of socio-ecological relations. To illustrate this the deep, reciprocal connections between the Venetian lagoon, its city and citizens are explored in stories of refuge, origins, identity – which generated through embodied engagement give shape to socio-ecological relations in the Venetian Mud. Yet we also demonstrate how these stories have become warped by nostalgia and solastalgia, and flattened by persistent metanarratives surrounding the Death of Venice. As such Venetian wetlands are drawn into resonance with broader (eco)systemic crises at multiple scales through the pertinent theoretical concerns of embodiment. We conclude that re-story-ation offers not only a lens to understand collective stasis in the face of ecological degradation, but a means restore a socio-ecological system by (re)connecting community and commons.

Send message to Author

Presentation short abstract

In the Argentine Chaco, cattle-rearing pastoralists and jaguar-rewilding conservationists form two coexisting multispecies regimes. We show how each enacts frontier power through its animals, and ask what coexistence means when conservation becomes the new frontier maker.

Presentation long abstract

Frontier landscapes are made through the layered work of competing land-use regimes, multispecies arrangements of people, animals, capital, and narrative. In the Argentine Dry Chaco, two such regimes now overlap: a pastoralism built by Criollos, settlers of mixed Spanish and Indigenous descent, and an emergent conservation regime organised around jaguar reintroduction, protected areas, and ecotourism. Starting with the animals each regime tends, cattle in one and jaguars in the other, we ask how regimes enact power through the more-than-human relations that hold them. Cattle were the medium through which Criollo households claimed the landscape across four generations, their feral grazing turning open grasslands, long maintained by the Indigenous peoples they displaced, into dense forest. Jaguars are now the medium through which a transnational rewilding enterprise produces a different kind of frontier, intensively surveilled and capitalised. Both embrace ferality to different degrees, working through animals that exceed the conditions intended for them. In 2024, rural workers tracking a missing cow found a dispersing jaguar with her carcass and killed him. In that killing, the regimes’ incommensurable ways of holding feral lives met on a single body. Drawing on oral histories and conservation actors' public materials, we show how these animals, and the people who tend and fear them, recast debates about wilderness, dispossession, and coexistence. Attending to these more-than-human assemblages, we show how frontier landscapes are always made at the intersection of colonial histories and multispecies relations, and ask what coexistence means once conservation becomes the frontier maker.

Send message to Authors

Presentation short abstract

Cities are also becoming laboratories of rewilding. Comparing Berlin and Melbourne, we look at urban rewilding projects around ponds and wetlands, that become contested spaces where governance, ecology, and community values meet, and where new multispecies futures are being actively negotiated.

Presentation long abstract

Urban environments are often considered by scholars, policymakers, and the public as incompatible with conservation or rewilding efforts, which are typically associated with remote or sparsely populated landscapes. Yet, cities are sites where ecological restoration, species recovery, and multispecies coexistence are actively experimented with. We compared rewilding case studies around waterbodies in Berlin, Germany, and Melbourne, Australia. Through interviews with municipal officers, planners, scientists, and community groups, and on-site visits, we investigated how urban rewilding is practised in these two cities. In both Berlin and Melbourne, several rewilding efforts are changing social-ecological relations around small waterbodies, wetlands, and the blue–green infrastructures of everyday urban life. At the same time, competing visions of “nature in the city” emerge: some emphasize ecological function and autonomous processes, others prioritize recreational access, safety, education, or aesthetics. Urban rewilding exposes a deeper question: should cities continue to impose their order on nature, or should they imagine themselves as “cities in nature”? Comparing Berlin and Melbourne highlights some shared challenges like jurisdictional complexity as well as different opportunities shaped by natural history, city planning, culture, and local histories of community participation. Ultimately, we argue that urban rewilding is achievable and, in some cases, well under way as a situated and negotiated practice of world-making, where ecological futures are co-produced through political choices and social values. In both cities, current rewilding initiatives remain small, experimental, and often fragile, but these stepping-stone projects nevertheless offer practical lessons and imaginative openings for more biodiverse, ecologically autonomous urban futures.

Send message to Author

Presentation short abstract

Beavers were reintroduced to the river Tay in Scotland in 2007, and the population has been contested ever since. Through a mixed-methods approach, this research explores the perceptions held by landworkers in this area towards beavers, and the socioecological context in which these are shaped.

Presentation long abstract

In 2007, it emerged that an illicit beaver population had become resident on the River Tay. Despite fierce opposition from organisations such as the National Farmers’ Union of Scotland and initial attempts by the Scottish government to remove the beavers, they gradually came to obtain legal status. Studies since have shown the benefits of beaver wetlands on local biodiversity, but their right to existence along the river Tay remains contested by landworker groups such as farmers and gamekeepers. This has led to the licensed and non-licensed (i.e. covert) culling of beavers, potentially jeopardising the conservation gains from their presence.

Previous research conducted on the human-wildlife conflict in this geographical area has focused largely on farmer perceptions of beavers without focusing on a broader socioecological context. Scotland has the highest percentage of privately owned land of any European country. Whilst this land was historically traditionally-managed, in recent years, Scottish land has increasingly been purchased for rewilding or carbon capture initiatives.

In this study, I use a mixed methods approach - survey and interview - to assess the opinions held by a range of landworkers on beaver reintroductions and the underlying values which explain these opinions. By including a mixture of landowners, mixed-tenure landworkers, tenant landworkers and employees, I assess how landownership and land history factors into these values, as well as exploring the potential barriers of non-landownership to local environmental governance.

Send message to Author

Presentation short abstract

Based on ethnography in North Sulawesi, this paper explores coral restoration as a contested form of world-making where care, authority, and capital meet. It shows how restoration redefines human–reef relations and reflects the politics of Indonesia’s blue economy.

Presentation long abstract

In recent years, coral reef restoration (CRR) has emerged as a key strategy within Indonesia’s expanding blue economy agenda, with the government positioning the country as a global leader in reef rehabilitation. However, only a small proportion of CRR projects include evaluation mechanisms (Razak et al. 2022), raising concerns about their ecological efficacy and governance legitimacy. This paper presents preliminary findings from six months of ethnographic fieldwork in North Sulawesi, an area known for its high marine biodiversity, where CRR initiatives have grown in popularity in recent years.

These initiatives vary widely in scale, actors involved, and motivations - from government-led programs and private sector CSR projects to community-driven efforts and tourist-facing restoration ‘experiences’. Many of these projects blur the lines between environmental care, commercial interest, and public legitimacy, raising critical questions about who governs restoration practices, to what ends, and with whose knowledge.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with stakeholders from NGOs, government, the tourism sector, and the scientific community, this paper situates CRR within the broader political ecology of ocean governance and blue economies. The paper argues that coral restoration is not merely a technical intervention but a political and moral project that remakes relations between humans, reefs, and the state. It reveals how competing logics of care, capital, and ecological repair shape the material and imaginative geographies of Indonesia’s seascapes. In doing so, it contributes to critical debates on restoration as a form of environmental governance and a site where ecological, economic, and ethical futures are negotiated.

Send message to Authors

Presentation short abstract

Analizamos la aparición del concepto rewilding en Uruguay y su inclusión en la propuesta denominada producción de naturaleza, impulsada por una ONG local en articulación con fundaciones y filántropos conservacionistas. Exploramos las controversias con otras perspectivas de naturaleza y conservación.

Presentation long abstract

A partir de su aparición en la década del 90, el término rewilding ha tenido distintos usos, pero en general propone restaurar procesos ecológicos tomando una línea histórica de base y promoviendo la reintroducción de especies consideradas clave. Desde entonces han emergido controversias entre este denominado manejo activo de fauna y formas predominantes de conservación, así como críticas hacia la actualización de concepciones de naturaleza prístina. En Uruguay, el concepto aparece en 2021 con el programa Rewilding Uruguay de Ambá, una ONG conservacionista local, que planteó la “restauración de biodiversidad mediante la protección de áreas silvestres y reinserción de especies clave”. Pero, en la narrativa de la organización, rápidamente el término rewilding fue subsumido en una propuesta más amplia denominada “producción de la naturaleza”, como herramienta para los denominados “ecosistemas completos” caracterizados por especies emblemáticas, extintas o casi extintas en el país. Este trabajo analiza la narrativa y el desarrollo de este modelo en Uruguay, identificando las controversias con otras perspectivas de naturaleza y conservación. La producción de naturaleza plantea una conservación rentable mediante la “producción de abundante fauna silvestre” en áreas naturales y el ecoturismo, promoviendo la participación de capital internacional a través de organizaciones filantrópicas de la conservación. Si bien las especies clave son centrales para la legitimación social y política de los proyectos, actualmente la política pública ambiental no es proclive a autorizar reintroducciones de especies. Sin abandonar este aspecto ecológico como estrategia, la narrativa enfatiza el desarrollo local y la reconexión espiritual con la naturaleza.

Send message to Authors

Presentation short abstract

This paper describes the reintroduction of beavers to a site in London as a form of prefigurative urban ecological politics. We argue the it evidences a novel form of urban conservation, that forges forge new (re)wilded (human and nonhuman) citizens, and reworks the ambit of the local state.

Presentation long abstract

Beavers have emerged as the flagship species for rewilding in Britain. Legal and illegal releases across the British countryside have driven rapid increases in their population and range and, with this proliferation, it is widely anticipated that beavers will soon colonise British cities as they have elsewhere in Europe. Hundreds of wild beavers now live in the landscape surrounding the capital city. This growing population is expected to expand and establish in London’s waterways in the not–too-distant future. In anticipation of this re-beavered urban future, Citizen Zoo seeks to prepare Londoners to welcome the rodent’s imminent return. At Paradise Fields in Ealing, west London, they have designed and staged a high-profile experiment in how to live well with beavers in an urban environment. In this paper, we argue that the Ealing Beaver Project evidences a new type of prefigurative urban ecological politics that leverages encounters with urban wildlife to forge new (re)wilded (human and nonhuman) citizens, and experiment with new forms of urban wildlife management. This intervention is developed through repurposing the ambit of the local state, what we term as municipal wilds. Prefigurative urban ecological politics describes political programmes that summon the future to anticipate and nurture desired configurations of urban socio-ecological relations in the present. The paper develops a conceptual framework for studying this new mode of urban rewilding and then deploys it to critically analyse beaver reintroduction in London.