Project

The Green Frontier project

GreenFrontier critically examines the uneven geographies of current conservation vision in the Europe based on the expansion of strict protection of nature into marginal areas across he continent.

GreenFrontier aims to 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. The project 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 – environmental anthropology, environmental history and environmental 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?

This research is timely because the EU's visions of green growth - which includes earmarking 10 per cent of the EU’s land area for strict protection by 2030 - raise serious issues of social and environmental justice: 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.

ERC case studies will be carried out in the Euroopean Union, with focus on Romania, Poland, Italy and Spain.
ERC case studies will be carried out in the Euroopean Union, with focus on Romania, Poland, Italy and Spain.

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.