Our Research
GreenFrontier: Politics of Conservation and Unequal Ecological Exchange in the European Peripheries is a five-year research project running from 2024 to 2029 funded by the European Research Council and hosted in the Forest and Nature Conservation Policy Group at Wageningen University.
Why does this research matter?
Biodiversity conservation and ecosystem restoration are essential components of Europe’s green transition and economic recovery.
Across the continent, biodiversity rich mountain forestlands and natural grasslands have historically been co-produced through local land-use practices such as transhumance, extensive agro-silvo-pastoral systems, and other traditional or customary forms of land management.
These are now declining as part of complex rural transformations, including land abandonment, outmigration, renewed extractivism, and economic underdevelopment. While these processes free up land for conservation, rewilding and restoration they also place immense pressure on the livelihoods of local communities that depend on these upland landscapes.
The project examines these frictions across four mountain areas to better understand three cross-cutting processes:
Conservation Opportunities
Framing marginal areas as conservation opportunities.
Wilderness as Asset for Green Growth
Rendering wilderness legible for green growth.
Environmental Securitization
Reordering environmental relations through strenghtened protection & enforcement.
Our Objectives
GreenFrontier has three main objectives:
1. Develop a new theoretical framework to examine the expansion of European frontiers of conservation as historical processes of unequal ecological exchange.
2. Advance decolonizing approaches to biodiversity governance on the continent by questioning the coloniality of power relations within European conservation.
3. Inform and spearhead public debate and policy interventions towards socially just conservation in Europe’s marginal areas.
Our overarching research question is: How does a green growth vision based on strict protection of biodiversity affect human-environment relations in Europe's marginal areas?
The research is organised in four work packages
Work Package 1
Conceptualizing a Political Ecology of Conservation Frontiers
Work Package 2
Conservation Opportunities in Marginal Areas
Work Package 3
Mechanisms of Securitization
Work Package 4
Towards Just Conservation Alternatives