Presentation short abstract

A more-than-human Geography and Environmental History of African wild dogs-people relations in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, following from an early case of reintroduction conservation (1980s), with an attention to animals’ mobilities and agency embroiled with colonialism and its legacies.

Presentation long abstract

After local extirpation in the 1940s as ‘vermin’ by white settlers, the endangered African Wild Dogs (Lycaon pictus) were reintroduced in Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park (KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa), and currently navigate a complicated socio-political conservation landscape. Predation on livestock leads to what is often, and simplistically called Human-Wildlife Conflict, but this framing obscures deeper historical forces. Based on archival research and interviews, this presentation examines how colonial and apartheid-era policies shaped the conditions for today’s tensions. I show how present day relations are saturated with the past; past conservation interventions, namely the practices of reintroduction, generated conflicting notions of where wild dogs belong, and reshaped the embodied interactions with them. Moreover, the presentation highlights the role of collective memories of having lived with wild dogs, the shifting baselines of predation, and the ecological and societal legacies of local animal extinctions. Current strategies for 'renewed coexistence' emerge within this history. My presentation raises sharp questions at the heart of reintroduction work and in relation to environmental justice (for both people and animals): when one returns a species to a landscape shaped by colonial legacies, what kind of return is actually being made possible? And, as conservationists move to more preventive interventions, and certain wild dog mobilities are curtailed, ‘What is exactly being saved from extinction?’ (Van Dooren, 2018) with the reintroduction?

Timothy Hodgetts & Jamie Lorimer. "Animals’ mobilities." Progress in Human Geography 44.1 (2020), 4-26.

Thom van Dooren, ‘Extinction’, in Lori Gruen (ed.), Critical Terms for Animal Studies (Chicago, 2018), pp. 169-181.

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?

Presentation short abstract

The paper analyses animal reintroduction through the new lens of federal power dynamics and post-colonial sovereignty. It argues that India’s rhino reintroduction programme (1979-1985) asserted centralised control over the nation’s wildlife and India’s coming of age in their management.

Presentation long abstract

The Kaziranga National Park in Assam, India is home to nearly the two-thirds of the 4,000 greater one-horned rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis) surviving on the earth. The return of the rhino is considered a twentieth-century conservation marvel. From the late 1960s, American ecologists intensely lobbied the Government of India (GoI) to study the rhino in Kaziranga. However, the GoI barred them throughout the 1970s even as Indian ecological expertise was yet to emerge. Around 1980, the GoI initiated efforts to relocate a few rhinos from Kaziranga to the Dudhwa National Park in Uttar Pradesh, where rhinos existed until the mid-nineteenth century. The stated objective was to create alternate home for the rhino and ease Kaziranga from congestion. The transfer of five rhinos was completed in 1984 despite vehement opposition from the Assamese nationalists, who viewed the rhino as a key symbol of their identity. By reviewing archival documents, newspapers and reports, this paper shows that the project veered away from the stated goal and science. Instead, it argues that the project became a lynchpin to assert centralised control over the nation’s wildlife and environment and to demonstrate India’s coming of age in wildlife management. The coercive rhino reintroduction reinforced Assam’s peripheral identity in the national imagination—that of a state posing a strategic and security challenge and requiring central authority to protect its valuable natural heritage. The paper contributes to the scholarship on animal reintroduction by analysing the practice through the new lens of federal power dynamics and post-colonial sovereignty.

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.

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.

Presentation short abstract

In Istanbul’s post-industrial wetlands, water buffalo and herders generate ecological repair beyond formal conservation. Their daily practices create novel ecologies and challenge baselines, revealing post-industrial pastoralism as a mode of multispecies landscape stewardship.

Presentation long abstract

In the post-industrial wetlands of Istanbul, ecological regeneration unfolds not through formal conservation programmes but the daily herding routines of water buffalo and the migrant herding communities who care for them. These wetlands - formed through decades of coal extraction and reshaped by state-led speculative megaprojects amid accelerating climate volatility - are productive landscapes that preserve the city’s last remaining pastoralist practices and host ecological assemblages that do not fit established conservation categories. Rather than restoring an imagined historical baseline, buffalo actively generate novel ecologies that unsettle distinctions between conservation and production, pastoralism and rewilding, and human and nonhuman modes of landscape stewardship.

Drawing on multispecies ethnography, critical spatial practice, and participatory fieldwork undertaken as part of CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA Water Buffalo Commons, the research examines post-industrial pastoralism as a situated form of landscape repair. It interrogates how different knowledge practices - buffalo and herders’ inherited ecological memory, municipal land-use classifications and state imaginaries of infrastructural modernity - compete and converge in defining what is worth restoring, and who is allowed to imagine the future of peri-urban landscapes undergoing rapid transformation. Water Buffalo Commons proposes a framework of “post-industrial repair”: a future-oriented approach suited to landscapes where baselines are irretrievable and futures remain uncertain. It argues that post-industrial pastoralism offers a critical vantage point from which to rethink coexistence - not as a stable condition, but as a prefigurative practice emerging within uncertainty. Through buffalo-led landscape repair, new forms of multispecies governance and ecological futurity come into view.

Presentation short abstract

After intensive logging and reforesting with exotic species, new tree-planting initiatives challenge established Philippine forestry paradigms. Yet, bringing back native trees in a landscape transformed by colonial forestry raises new questions about the belonging of tree species in the archipelago.

Presentation long abstract

How to restore an altered archipelago? This is the question that more and more people engage with in the Philippines. After centuries of deforestation, most reforestation efforts in the 20th and 21st centuries have focused on a few introduced tree species on account of being fast-growing, available, and easy to grow. The knowledge around native tree species, as well as the species themselves, has been gradually lost during this process.

In the last decade, interest in native trees has increased in the Philippines, leading to the establishment of initiatives by scientists and civil society groups aiming to bring back many of the almost forgotten native tree species. These new bottom-up reforestation communities try to challenge governmental reforestation paradigms by circulating seeds and knowledge through trainings or social media groups.

Yet, despite their common goal of bringing back native tree species, new conflicts between scientists and civil society groups arise. What are the baselines of restoration, as well as what “native” means in an archipelago, are two contested questions influencing collaborations between different actors. Based on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork accompanying initiatives of scientists and civil society groups, I highlight the conflicts around tree planting by examining the role of expertise and the different perspectives on tree planting that shape the Philippines’ future forests.

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.

Presentation short abstract

Framing jaguar reintroduction in the Chaco via the “Patchy Anthropocene,” we reveal frictions between “Conservation” and “Criollo-Cattle” multispecies regimes. We show how rewilding narratives erase local history and argue for a practice that negotiates coexistence within these persistent patches.

Presentation long abstract

The reintroduction of jaguars (Panthera onca) into the Argentine Chaco has ignited deep-seated conflicts between global conservation models and local realities. We argue these conflicts are not simply human-wildlife issues, but are shaped by historical ruptures between two distinct, multi-species land-use regimes. Drawing on the “Patchy Anthropocene” framework, we move beyond linear transition models to analyze the violent ruptures and persistent “patches” left by competing histories. We demonstrate how livestock and jaguars are not passive objects but active agents entangled in the co-production of the Chaco. First, we analyze the “Criollo-Cattle regime,” where semi-feral cattle were fundamental to settlement and remain inextricably linked to livelihoods and historical relations with carnivores. We contrast this with the emerging “Conservation regime,” which reframes the jaguar as an objectified emblem for a new economy based on rewilding and ecotourism. Crucially, the ahistorical narrative of this rewilding project actively erases the embedded history of the Criollo-Cattle regime and its practices of coexistence. Through a qualitative study in the Impenetrable region—combining oral histories with pastoralists and content analysis of management discourse—our analysis reveals the contemporary Chaco as a “patchy” mosaic constituted by these overlapping worlds. We conclude that an alternative conservation practice is needed: one that engages with these competing multispecies histories to find ways of coexisting within the patch, rather than attempting to erase them.

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.

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.

Presentation short abstract

Drawing from "slow observation" and action-research, this presentation introduces "intimate sensing" to approach how Indigenous Amazonian communities see abandoned mining ponds not as degraded sites, but as spaces for ecological repair, aquatic livelihoods and territorial governance.

Presentation long abstract

For many conservation organizations, the moon-like, cratered landscape mining leaves behind in the Amazon is beyond recovery; reforestation, perhaps, is the only alternative for ecosystem restoration. This presentation explores how Indigenous communities prefigure the potential of abandoned mining ponds in the Peruvian Southern Amazon, to explore possibilities flying under the radar of remediation science and conservation organizations. I explain their perspectives with the concept of intimate sensing, developed at the intersection of feminist political ecology and critical approaches to ecological restoration. Intimate sensing appraises the formation of Indigenous territorial projects of ecological repair in extractive frontiers, which stem from the embodied experience of ecological renewal in areas profoundly transformed by mining. It is an alternative to remote sensing, one of the most common detection practices to account for Amazonian degradation, but one that has been better attuned to identify patterns of forest cover loss. This scientific orientation, derived from and informing carbon-centric environmental fixes, matches poorly with Indigenous quotidian observations of the same degraded areas. Abandoned mining ponds exhibit multifarious afterlives where amphibian and fish repopulation, and pond cleaning and renewal, animate indigenous projects for aquatic-based livelihood diversification and their aspirations to become environmental stewards in remediation processes. The findings interrogate the plausibility and long-term sustainability of remediation interventions developed in, but ultimately disconnected from, Indigenous territories. Instead, intimate sensing suggests that remediation science can more productively engage with Indigenous perspectives, acknowledging the embeddedness and embodied experience of socio-ecological change.

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.

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.