This seminar will be in person at Niagara C0826 and hybrid on Zoom (link here).
Speaker: Chad Boda
Title: An emerging restoration movement in southern Scandinavia? – insights from a pilot study
Abstract: Ecological restoration efforts are expanding rapidly across much of Europe in response to accelerating biodiversity loss, climate change, declining ecosystem services, and evolving policy frameworks. While restoration has traditionally been understood as a technical and ecological endeavor, emerging evidence suggests that its future success depends equally on social and political processes. In this seminar, I want to make the case that restoration efforts in southern Scandinavia (specifically Skåne and Bornholm) may be best understood as the early emergence of a coalition-based social movement seeking landscape-scale transformation. Building on social movement and coalition theories, I show that a diverse set of environmental actors is beginning to recognize shared challenges, develop common narratives, and explore opportunities for collective action, which I argue constitutes a transition between the emergence and coalescence phases of social movement development. As the principal barriers to transformation appear increasingly political, institutional, and cultural rather than ecological, future progress may depend less on generating new ecological knowledge than on strengthening networks, building collective agency through social movement coalitions and constructing a shared vision and strategy capable of transcending individual projects and steering the future development of the region at the landscape scale.
This seminar is part of the IUR Brown Bag Seminar Series. Bring your lunch! If you have any questions, please contact Defne Kadioglu and Julie Goodrich.