OOS 40-5 - Rewilding as a Plural Boundary Object: Implications for Research and Practice

Roughly one million irreplaceable species face extinction. Addressing this biodiversity crisis will require collaborative effort to not only prevent further losses, but also to recover extirpated species and ecological processes, and perhaps even build them anew. “Rewilding” is a regenerative conservation approach which aims to restore ecological autonomy and function, relying on reparative tactics such as species reintroduction and landscape restoration to achieve recovery. Since all major direct drivers of the biodiversity crisis are human-caused, most conservationists agree that solutions must involve and engage human communities. Recent scholarly efforts, e.g. led by the IUCN, have sought to establish a discrete, “unifying'' scientific definition of rewilding, positing that this consistency will help enhance its efficacy. Among other assertions, they suggest that cities and human-prevalent landscapes are largely out of scope for rewilding.

We argue in this conceptual paper that rewilding is a “boundary object”, already interpreted, understood and valued differently by diverse actors with varied goals. Boundary objects are evocative orienting points, ideas and artifacts that can be used to foster collaboration, knowledge exchange, and dialogue across multiple actors who see shared subjects from different perspectives. They come with a degree of irreducible ambiguity which can make them powerful tools for collaboration and dialogue, but this same quality can also make them subjects of debate and confusion.

We do not posit whether being a boundary object is “good” or “bad” for rewilding, but instead explore the implications of this reality for practice and scholarship. We use case study examples, literature review, and references to IUCN’s Guiding Principles for Rewilding to discuss benefits and drawbacks of the approach’s ascension to “boundary object” status, and argue that the influence of the rewilding concept might be expanded by acknowledging that there are varied and plural definitions of it. That is, practitioners and communities who might initially perceive their subject landscapes as unsuitable for rewilding might still benefit from exposure to the concept. Many principles of rewilding (such as restoring ecological function) can enhance conservation efforts in cities, industrial areas, farms, and other human-shared landscapes – where most biodiversity loss occurs. We conclude by making recommendations for how scholars and practitioners can manage the flexible nature of this concept to meet conservation goals across the full continuum of landscapes where rewilding might occur.