Politics of Conservation and Unequal Ecological Exchange in European Peripheries

GreenFrontier will radically transform understandings of how strict protection of nature remakes human-environment relations in Europes 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 EUs conservation vision create a new resource wilderness, essential for future green growth.

The projects 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 Europes marginal areas?GreenFrontier is urgently required because the EU's visions of green growth, which includes earmarking 10% of the EUs 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.