Presentation short abstract

This contribution examines how the EU biodiversity strategy’s “strict protection” goal is translated into a national wilderness area target in Germany, and how this translation catalyzed a conflict in the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve Spreewald ('Spreeforest').

Presentation long abstract

The EU biodiversity strategy’s target to expand “strict protection” has travelled quickly into national policy arenas, yet its meaning changes as it moves through governance levels, reaching orest frontiers. This paper examines how the EU biodiversity strategy’s “strict protection” goal is translated into a national wilderness area target in Germany, and how this translation catalyzed a conflict in the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve Spreewald ('Spreeforest'). By combining insights from Critical Discourse Analyses of EU and German Bioviersity Strategies as well as Net-Map and participatory workshop data, I argue that this translation is not technical but political: it privileges particular imaginaries of nature, its protection as well as long-standing land use—while marginalizin others.

This case shows how discursive translation operates through discursive power, using mechanisms such as equivalence-making, responsibilization and depoliticization. While silence was first used as a governance communication strategy, it unintentionally gave space for public outcry, enabling open conflict. This conflict reveals inequalities embedded in institutional path dependencies: whose knowledge counts in defining “wilderness,” which land-use histories are acknowledged as legitimate, and who bears the costs of meeting distantly set targets. The paper contributes to political ecology debates on conservation frontiers by showing how discursive translation and value-mismatches can produce new sites of contestation.