Format/Structure

We intend to have paper presentations with an introduction to set the agenda

Long Abstract

Restoration has gained prominence in the last decade as a major force in the management of nature, both with numerous grassroots movements seeking to restore local ecosystems that have been degraded as well as large-scale global efforts to reshape the biosphere as a “nature-based climate solution.” As a result, restoration and its modifiers (e.g. “ecological restoration”, “ecosystem restoration”, “forest and landscape restoration”, etc.) have taken a wide variety of forms in practice globally. While such interventions have substantial potential to advance human well-being, current scientific and policy discourse tends to emphasize environmental goals, often defined around abstract quantitative targets (for example, total trees planted or aggregate tree cover gains), rather than the qualitative assessment of societal impacts, community perspectives, and lived experiences of landscapes.

This paper session seeks to reframe the debate by focusing on how restoration can be refashioned as a pathway to build more thriving and sustainable human-environment relationships. Restoration, we propose, may be viewed not simply as the recovery of ecosystem functionality, but as a means to build new, generative futures of living with nature. We seek contributions that examine how people living in landscapes targeted for restoration or engaging in restoration interventions understand their needs, values, lived experiences, and future aspirations for socio-ecological transformation. We likewise invite papers that engage with the political and creative processes through which futures are variously defined, negotiated, undermined, and produced. What aspects of the past do different actors wish to recover, what might they seek to undo, what futures do they wish to bring about, and through what processes does it unfold in practice? We welcome papers that engage with these questions from a variety of perspectives, including work that pursues novel theoretical or methodological approaches to studying “restoration futures”.

This Panel has 20 pending paper proposals.
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