Paper short abstract:

The research explores the evolution of Southern Transylvanian grasslands as a social-ecological system, focusing on the tensions between the competing visions regarding environmental protection as well as on the practices which extract economic value from the use of the ecological resource.

Paper long abstract:

A decades-long history of state disinvestment in rural Southern Transylvania, paired with other related factors such as depopulation (e.g. the mass emigration of the local German population) contributed to the shaping of a local mosaic cultural landscape defined by semi-subsistence, non-intensive farming, which conservationists enthusiastically index as “medieval” and value for its high environmental value (Akeroyd and Page 2006; 2011; Rozylowicz et al 2019, Page 2010; Sutcliffe et al 2015 etc.). This grassland landscape, protected as a Natura 2000 site, offers a remarkable example of reframing and legitimation of traditional ecological knowledge associated with small-scale farming in a post-productive logic focused on environmental outputs and ecosystem services.

The research seeks to explore the dynamic evolution of Southern Transylvanian grasslands as a social-ecological system, focusing on the tensions between the competing visions regarding environmental protection and biodiversity conservation, as well as on the practices which extract economic value from the use of the ecological resource. I explore how a network of social actors (policy-makers, NGOs, small-scale farmers, neo-rurals, local authorities) build strategies and discourses of resistance, audit, entrepreneurship in relation to the local grasslands and how they attribute socio-cultural and ecological meanings to this environmental presence. My analysis focuses on the examination of the boundaries and misalignments between the cultivated and the wild, between subsistence and market economies (Tsing 2005), regarded not only as a set of environmental phenomena, but also as a moral and political arena.