The GreenFrontier team organised a double-session panel at the POLLEN26 Conference attended by researchers exploring the topics of conservation frontierization and justice in their work. The panel’s aim was to contribute to a better understanding of social and environmental justice dimensions of incorporating Europe’s peripheries into the green growth vision through conservation.
Keeping this geographical focus in mind, we invited contributions that critically engage with:
• Politics and unequal geographies of conservation;
• Frictions between forms of green grabbing, loss, and rural transformations;
• Marginal areas as conservation sacrifice zones;
• Land abandonment as an opportunity for rewilding;
• New actors, financial instruments, and conservation governance arrangements;
• Conservation prioritization and political resistance from the margins;
• Pathways and synergies in recognizing the conservation labor of local land stewards.
The panel included six talks across the two sessions:
Session 1:
- Marco Immovilli (Wageningen University) – Between care and growth: conservation frontiers as political battlefields in the Italian Alps.
- Agnese Marino (ICTA-UAB) – Towards and improved recognition and theorization of pastoralist’s labour of coexistence.
- Martina Marianetti (University of Palermo, University of Messina) – From inland island to green frontier of the sea: conservation justice in the failed MBA of Pantelleria.
Session 2
- Anna Antonova (Technical University of Munich) – Convivial conservation on the urban waterfront. Advancing more-than-capitalist futures from the ‘margins’ of Europe.
- Ana Vilenica (Södertörn University and University of Belgrade) – Self-Organised Nature Conservation Efforts in Serbia: the Rangers of Eastern Serbia and the Army of Mlava.
- Giulia Ferrante (Gran Sasso Science Institute) – Hunting Practices and the Contested Futures of Wildlife Governance in the Sirente Velino Regional Natural Park (Abruzzo, Italy).
The two sessions were followed-up by a roundtable and open discussion with the audience, to further explore if and how conservation frontiers could be approached as green sacrifice zones, what are the meanings of justice in frontierization processes and what are potential just conservation alternatives emerging from the case studies discussed.