This project investigated how ideas about past human–wildlife–land relations shaped contemporary conservation debates in Southern Africa and the European Alps. Conservation initiatives frequently rely on historical references—such as imagined wildernesses, pre-industrial rural practices, or colonial visions of untamed landscapes—to legitimise current interventions. However, these historical claims often lack empirical grounding. The project therefore applied historiographical methods, oral history, archival research and expert interviews to examine how such narratives were produced, used and contested in both regions.
Research was conducted in national and local archives in Namibia, Switzerland and Austria, and complemented by expert interviews with conservation practitioners in all three countries. A short academic stay at the University of Innsbruck enabled conceptual refinement and regional contextualisation of the Alpine component. The project showed that conservation narratives in Europe frequently invoked a harmonious rural landscape, while narratives in Southern Africa tended to reiterate colonial ideas of wildness (a pre-human past) and racialised belonging (a hunter-gatherer past). In both contexts, historical arguments played a key role in debates on rewilding, species reintroduction, land-use change and biodiversity management.
By contrasting influential public narratives and conceptual debates with historically grounded local case studies, the project demonstrated the importance of historically informed approaches to conservation planning and contributed to broader discussions in environmental humanities. The outcomes are expected to support more inclusive and context-sensitive conservation policies in both the Global South and Europe at a time of urgent environmental and climate challenges.
The project addressed an important gap in conservation debates: while historical arguments are frequently invoked to justify conservation measures, they are seldom based on systematic historical research. In Southern Africa, references to colonial ideas of pristine nature and racialised notions of belonging continue to influence conservation thinking, whereas in the European Alps debates often draw on imagined pre-industrial rural landscapes or narratives of an untouched wilderness. These assumptions inform contemporary decisions about land use, pastoralism, species management and rewilding, as well as reflecting (neo-)colonial inequalities.
The project therefore aimed to analyse how historical arguments were used in conservation debates in both regions; to investigate the accuracy and origins of selected historical claims through archival work, oral history and expert interviews; and to compare the two contexts to evaluate whether insights from Global South environmental history could enrich European debates.
