Presentation short abstract

Applying a relational lens to Wales' environmental governance organisation, we show how actors’ everyday, often unseen work—experimenting, translating, and repurposing practices and knowledges within and beyond formalized structures—creates pathways for transformative socio-ecological change.

Presentation long abstract

Against a backdrop of accelerating efforts to address the environment and biodiversity crises, place-based nature recovery has gained prominence across UK and international agendas. While relational understandings of place are well-established, emphasising interdependencies between people, ecologies, and institutions, they are rarely applied to the organisations responsible for environmental policy. Such institutions are often considered coherent and static, rather than internally diverse, relational, and contested spaces, where multiple values and practices of nature and place co-exist and co-evolve.

Turning a relational lens to organisational spaces, we examine how place is understood, negotiated, and enacted within policy institutions, and subsequently shapes interactions with local nature restoration. Drawing on research within Natural Resources Wales (NRW), an arm’s-length body responsible for national environmental governance, we examine Area Statements – regional, place-based plans mandated under the Environment Act (Wales).

Interviews and observations across NRW and the Welsh Government, show how staff exercise everyday agency that generates diverse practices of place-based governance. These often-unseen actions, occurring outside formal structures, create opportunities for transformative change. We identify three dynamics: (1) Everyday tactics that subtly subvert dominant systems; (2) Experimental spaces within risk-averse institutional cultures; (3) Translation work moving diverse knowledges and practices across institutional boundaries.

These small, provisional acts constitute an under-examined layer of transformative change – demonstrating how policy actors work within, through and despite, organisational power structures to enable alternative socio-ecological futures. We conclude by considering how Area Statements may be strengthened and learning may inform socio-ecologically just environmental governance in the UK and internationally.