Presentation short abstract

This study explores, from a socio-environmental justice perspective, hunting practices in Italy's Subequana Valley and the local Natural Park, as they highlight conflicts between conservation policies and local livelihoods while reshaping human–non-human relations in contested mountain futures.

Presentation long abstract

This contribution examines how hunting practices in the Subequana Valley, within the Sirente Velino Regional Natural Park in Italy’s Central Apennines, reveal the socio-environmental conflicts that are currently shaping mountain futures. Drawing on political ecology and decolonial mountain studies, the study analyses how diverse and often competing conservation and development paradigms — ranging from species protection and tourist-oriented planning to eco-territorialist and convivial approaches — reconfigure relations between humans, non-humans, and mountain territories. In this framework, hunters emerge as a controversial yet pivotal group whose land-based knowledge is increasingly mobilised by institutions while remaining marginalised in public discourse and governance.

Methodologically, the research combines multispecies ethnography of hunting practices and participant observation during Park-organised training courses for hunters involved in wild boar control and selective deer culling. It also draws on semi-structured interviews with institutional actors, including personnel from the Park Authority, the Abruzzo Region, and the local ATC, as well as document analysis of hunting regulations and training materials.

The findings reveal how hunting activities expose tensions between external "ontologies of nature” — often shaped by picturesque, recreational, or neoliberal conservationist visions — and local understandings rooted in everyday multispecies interactions. As the Park redefines its identity around tourism and local products, hunters become simultaneously an indispensable yet "sacrificed" group, revealing conflicts between privileged and subaltern socionatures. The study argues that effective mountain governance in Italy should involve heterogeneous local knowledges and the co-constitutive agency of human and non-human actors in shaping ethical, ecological, and economic futures.