REGenPLACE · Pathways towards a 'restorative' Anthropocene: a comparative study of three marginalised land practices, their narratives and regenerative potential across local-global dimensions
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-10-04 → 2025-05-03
- EU contribution
- €224,934
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Pathways towards a 'restorative' Anthropocene: a comparative study of three marginalised land practices, their narratives and regenerative potential across local-global dimensions
Climate change and biodiversity loss are among the most pressing global challenges of our time, threatening ecosystems, species survival, and human well-being. While these issues are global in scale, the most promising solutions are deeply place-based -- specific to place, culture, and community. This project explored three such place-based practices and their biocultural narratives, meaning, implementation, and policy treatment. The goal was to understand how these practices are interpreted by different stakeholders and how such interpretations—framed as narratives of place—either enable or constrain their adoption within policy. In brief the project examined in: • Wales (UK), nature recovery (government driven) and rewilding (popular driven) approaches, both aiming to restore ecosystem functions and biodiversity. • Yuin Country (Australia), cultural-burning, an Aboriginal practice using ‘cool fire’ to care for Country, maintaining healthy landscapes while strengthening kinship ties, which differs vastly from the government prescribed burning and hazard reduction burning approaches. • Bhutan, Ladam/Ridam, a spiritual and social restriction practice, designating specific times of year when people refrain from entering forests or mountain areas, allowing for crop management and nature regeneration. The research was conducted through collaboration with local researchers, community members, and practitioners. A decolonising methodology ensures that knowledge is co-created in ways that honours the historical, cultural, and political contexts of each place. Rather than comparing case studies directly, the project sought to understand how diverse cultural worldviews about land or place shape the narratives used to justify or contest particular land practices. A key conclusion is that these narratives of place significantly influence environmental policy and practice. If land management policies are to be both effective and culturally appropriate, they must recognise and accommodate the multiple, sometimes competing, ways in which people relate to land and their place. This research offers insights for policymakers seeking to address climate and biodiversity challenges in a way that respects and integrates diverse cultural understandings of place.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
We are experiencing unprecedented environmental and societal changes at a global scale that affect all living beings on earth at a local scale. The epoch of humanity's impact on the biosphere with its irreversible degradation of ecosystems, devistating pandemics, economic and governance failures, unequal development, social and environmental injustice and discrimination, has a name - the Anthropocene. It is synonymous with destruction, inequality and increased vulnerability driven and accelerated by many factors but primarily by the enduring impacts of colonisation, the industrial revolution and the spread of capitalism. A ‘restorative’ Anthropocene instead sees human activity give back more than it takes. Such activity can be seen in place-based land practices that regenerate land and ecosystems. However, many of those practices are marginalised or silenced as they emerge from diverse worldviews and narratives that are perceived as incompatible with contemporary scientific natural resource management approaches.This study aims to compare marginalised land practices, their associated narratives, and regenerative potential for land and biodiversity across the local-global dimension, by investigating three cases from the Celtic parts of the UK, Bhutan and Australia using a place-based approach within the framing of a ‘restorative’ Anthropocene. The practices to be compared include fire management techniques of Australian indigenous communities known as ‘cultural-burning’ of the landscape, the Bhutanese cultural practice of Reedum [closing of mountains] and the transition from degraded landscapes to 'rewilding' woodlands in the Celtic parts of the UK. The findings from this research will suggest pathways for how we can apply knowledge from culturally, geographically, ontologically and epistemologically diverse regenerative land practices to inform current policy, practice and research agendas across the local-global dimension towards a 'restorative' Anthropocene.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- CARDIFF UNIVERSITY · CARDIFFCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union