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Contribution short abstract

The poster lays out a multi-disciplinary methodological toolkit to advance research on European conservation frontiers, while also featuring a range of interactive elements aimed at fostering further analytical cross-fertilization to explore unequal ecological exchange in marginal mountain areas.

Contribution long abstract

Mountain areas across Europe are caught between green extractivism and visions of green growth by conservation, often associated with EU’s push for the green transition. While the two policies appear as polar opposites, they are both green capitalism’s attempts to solve the joint climate-biodiversity crisis without addressing its root causes. Emerging from the GreenFrontier project, the current intervention proposes the conservation frontier as portable analytic to make sense of these transformations and lays out a multi-disciplinary toolkit by bringing together methodological approaches from anthropology, environmental history and environmental politics.

Conservation frontiers are ongoing and mutating processes through which the expansion of conservation initiatives foster the incorporation of new natures into capitalist dynamics. Through interdisciplinary cross-fertilisation, the GreenFrontier project researches these frontiers as political spaces shaped by governance and power struggles and changing land-use regimes, showing how these frictions lead to various environmental injustices which result from deepening existing vulnerabilities and historical underdevelopment and marginalization.

The poster is aimed at fostering academic collaboration and novel ways of thinking together about current processes of unequal ecological exchange in Europe’s peripheries.