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CORDIS

Politics of Conservation and Unequal Ecological Exchange in European Peripheries

Project description

Rethinking nature and people in Europe’s green frontiers

Europe’s green growth plans are reshaping its most remote landscapes, but what happens to the people who live there? The ERC-funded GreenFrontier project explores how biodiversity protection affects human-environment relations in marginalised areas, from the Southern Carpathians to the Central Apennines, central Cantabrians and the Bieszczady mountains. By combining anthropology, history and political analysis, the project examines how conservation frontiers create new ‘resource wildernesses’ while altering livelihoods, traditions and local knowledge. GreenFrontier challenges conventional ideas that such environmental frontiers only exist in the Global South, showing that Europe’s green growth ambitions produce zones crucial for tackling climate and biodiversity crises, transforming both the land and the communities that depend on it.

Objective

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. The project’s pioneering and high-risk research design combines approaches from three disciplines –anthropology, history and 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?

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: involuntary changes to livelihoods, forced displacement, marginalisation and decline of traditional ecological knowledge. 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, and the Bieszczady in Poland. 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.
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.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

Keywords

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Funding Scheme

HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

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Call for proposal

(opens in new window) ERC-2024-STG

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Host institution

WAGENINGEN UNIVERSITY
Net EU contribution
€ 1 499 976,00
Address
DROEVENDAALSESTEEG 4
6708 PB Wageningen
Netherlands
Region
Oost-Nederland Gelderland Veluwe
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
€ 1 499 976,25

Beneficiaries (1)