Collaborative conservation and coexistence with wolves through a feminist political ecology lens

Description

The recovery of wolves across Europe’s rural landscapes is occurring alongside a deep crisis in the livestock breeding sector. Stalling sale prices of meat and dairy products, rising costs of agricultural inputs, reduced subsidies, and volatile climatic conditions are amplifying farmers’ vulnerability to predation and challenging their capacity to adapt to ecological change. While there is a long tradition of research that looks at pastoralists’ relations and coexistence with wildlife, the role played by women in adapting to the structural and ecological changes occurring in Europe’s marginal and rewilding landscapes has, for the most part, been left unexplored.  

This research focuses on a female led collective of sheep farmers in southern Tuscany who are leading local efforts to facilitate coexistence between wolves and farming activities, by promoting the use of livestock guarding dogs. It employs ethnographic methods to understand the motivations behind these women’s efforts and the characteristics that set them apart from other farmers in the area. The first part of the project draws on feminist political ecology to explore how the women of the collective negotiate their identities as pastoralists, entrepreneurs, and nature stewards, in the context of structural agrarian changes and broader rewilding polices. In doing so, the research aims to understand the role of gender in mediating the experience of ecological change, as well as the role that ecological changes play in producing gendered experiences and subjectivities. Beyond a pure focus on gender, the research also seeks to value the contributions of feminist political ecology to our understanding of coexistence more broadly, though its attention to situated and partial knowledges, everyday emotions, and embodied practices of care on which convivial relations with nature are built. 

The second part of the project focuses on the motivations and tensions behind a strategic allyship that was forged among the female-led collective of farmers in Tuscany and several conservation NGOs who support their work. The research explores the fragile grounds that enable collaboration between stakeholders, in instances where difference plays an even greater role than similarity, and where relations are generative but never smooth. This story revolves around three related species of canids: wolves, livestock guarding dogs and wolf-dog hybrids, all enmeshed in a local politics of identity formation. The intent here is to ‘pay attention to collaboration’, the contingencies that lead to its hindrance and success, and the concrete engagements that actors are drawn into and from which they emerge as changed. 

Funded by the Maria de Maeztu Program.