Politics of Conservation and Unequal Ecological Exchange in European Peripheries

Introduction

GreenFrontier will radically transform understandings of how strict protection of nature remakes human-environment relations in Europe’s marginal areas by developing a novel field of inquiry - political ecology of conservation frontiers. It breaks new grounds from research on frontier commodities by showing that uneven power relations within the EU’s conservation vision create a new resource – wilderness, essential for future green growth.

Research Design

The project’s pioneering and high-risk research design combines approaches from three disciplines:

1. Anthropology
2. History
3. Politics

Its main research question is: How does a green growth vision based on strict protection of biodiversity affect human-environment relations in Europe’s marginal areas?

Urgency of the Project

GreenFrontier is urgently required because the EU's visions of green growth, which includes earmarking 10% of the EU’s land area for strict protection by 2030, raise serious issues of social and environmental injustice. These issues include:

• Involuntary changes to livelihoods
• Forced displacement
• Marginalisation
• Decline of traditional ecological knowledge

Research Focus

The project will investigate how strict protection of nature reshapes socio-environmental relations in the following mountain regions often overlooked by academic debates:

• The Southern Carpathians in Romania
• The Central Apennines in Italy
• The Central Cantabrians in Spain
• The Bieszczady in Poland

Analytical Framework

The project moves beyond the state of the art and explores new analytical frameworks to understand European conservation frontiers within their specific genealogies of land use change and as part of the current political momentum of green growth imperatives within the EU.

Challenging Mainstream Understandings

GreenFrontier challenges the mainstream understanding of commodity frontiers as happening in the global South. Instead, it focuses on how the EU's green growth vision produces in Europe non-intervention zones where strictly protected carbon- and biodiversity-rich areas become essential fixes for multiple planetary crises.