Contesting Ecologies

The Contesting Ecologies priority area emerges from the growing need to address how ecologies are deeply entangled in political, economic, and cultural disputes. It examines the power dynamics and negotiations that shape how societies imagine, use, and govern their environments. It recognizes that ecological spaces (parks, forests, wetlands, highlands, agricultural landscapes, rivers, and the sky) and ecological practices (production and consumption, conservation, climate action, agriculture, and beyond) are arenas of competing claims, values, and visions for the future. We explore how socio-environmental conflicts generate diverse forms of governance through processes of commodification, extraction, and protection, as well as through struggles and imaginations of human–planetary relations, multispecies justice, and ecological care. 

Central to our concerns are questions of political economy and environmental governance, vernacular forms of knowledge, the shaping of landscapes and livelihoods and how different people mobilize science, law, culture and activism to assert alternative ecological futures. Through seminars, workshops and collaborative projects, we foster interdisciplinary engagement with critical questions in an era of climate urgency: 

  • Who holds the authority to define ecological health and degradation?
  • How can we contest the increasing tie between militarization, criminalization, and violence, economic systems and environmental agendas?
  • How do societies challenge dominant extractivist narratives and actions?
  • What role do borders, property regimes and infrastructure play in shaping ecological conflicts?
  • And how do present-day ecologies reproduce or resist colonial continuities?

We partner with researchers, activists and practitioners working at the intersection of environmental change and social inequality, seeking to illuminate both the structures that generate ecological conflict and to build more just, plural, and livable futures.

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