Muddy terrains of environmental expertise: Ethnographies of changing and competing knowledge of wetland restoration in times of climate change
Funded by the Swedish Research Council / Vetenskapsrådet 2025-2027
Freshwater is an increasingly acute issue for cities in the context of the multifaceted climate crisis. In response to this, restoration of freshwater urban ecosystems is gaining momentum. However, restoration is far from straightforward, as diverse ways of knowing, valuing and living with ecosystems are at stake in claims about imperatives for their remaking on the ground. By investigating the multiplicity, diversity and ordering of expertise that inform urban restoration, this project seeks to identify dominant knowledge regimes, value conflicts and local ecosystem understandings that underpin contemporary ecosystem restoration.
It does so by addressing the overall research question: How is dominant restoration expertise constructed and maintained? This overall research question is operationalized through the following questions:
- What different understandings about specific wetland sites are produced, and through what means, in the planning and performing of restoration interventions?
- What relations of consensus and competition exist across the identified wetland understandings and value frameworks?
- How are various understandings and value frameworks sorted in and out from restoration interventions, and on what grounds?
The project is situated within the critical scholarly work that explores the mechanisms of ecosystem restoration actions and other forms of environmental management through which unsustainabilities are sustained and hegemonic relationships cemented. The empirical entry-point for the project is urban wetland restoration in the region of Stockholm.
Project members: Kristina Tamm Hallström, Stockholm School of Economics/Score and Linda Soneryd, Örebro University/Score.
