Muddy terrains of environmental expertise: Ethnographies of changing and competing knowledge of wetland restoration in times of climate change
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?
Rising sea levels, intensified rains, and recurrent flooding pressure cities to rethink and revise ways through which freshwater ecosystems are engineered to mitigate and adapt to changed flows of water. Freshwater is a life-sustaining matter for humans and non-humans endangered by eutrophication, toxication and drought. Therefore, in response to acknowledgments that urban development has been, and is, a driver for water ecosystem degradation, the United Nations ongoing Decade on Ecosystem Restoration rallies for restoration of urban freshwater ecosystems. However, restoring amphibious urban terrains is far from a straightforward process, as diverse human and non-human ways of knowing, valuing and living with ecosystems come to the fore in claims about imperatives for their restoration on the ground.
It is particularly challenging in the social, ecological and governance complexities of urban areas, where restoration of freshwater ecosystem takes form through struggles among expertise drawing on competing value frameworks variously privileging issues such as climate adaptation, biodiversity, water purification, recreation, and property values.
The project studies how the relationship between the production of expertise and ecosystems' cultural, economic and environmental values lead up restoration action, and inaction, on the ground. It studies these dynamics in relation to unruly ecosystems that unsettle the foundations of established knowledge regimes, hence the exploring of the muddy terrains of environmental expertise in times of climate change.
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.
Wetlands are a productive site to inquire changing restoration expertise, given the expansion of efforts and expectations mobilized around these freshwater ecosystems. By investigating the multiplicity, diversity and ordering of expertise that informs wetland restoration, this project seeks to identify dominant knowledge regimes and value conflicts in contemporary modes of operation that underpin ecosystem restoration, and the alternatives of urban water futures that are foreclosed and marginalized.
More generally, answering the overall research questions will allow us to consider how contemporary knowledge regimes in restoration expertise give prominence to certain futures of urban ecosystems at the expense of others, potentially more just and inclusive of both humans and non-humans.
Project period
2025-2027
Funding
The Swedish Research Council
Contact persons
Kristina Tamm Hallström and Linda Soneryd are also part of Stockholm Centre for Organizational Research (SCORE) .