Rewilding has become increasingly popular around the world, with rewilding practiced in a variety of ways to suit local ecological and cultural contexts. This has led to some confusion over the term rewilding, leaving it open to misinterpretation and the risk of diluting its longer-term potential to deliver transformational change. This presentation will focus on rewilding’s long-term aims, integrating ecological and socio-cultural factors, as a means to unify the global, multidisciplinary field of rewilding and will propose a theory of change framework based on these. The presented framework can assist practitioners in the planning and application of rewilding, offering an iterative, adaptive process that recognises the need to address both social and ecological factors at a landscape scale. This framework is based on data collected through a grounded theory approach, drawing from surveys and secondary data from influential rewilding practitioners, researchers and authors. Rewilding requires and promotes transformational ecological and social change, the application of rewilding therefore requires innovative and interdisciplinary approaches. This rewilding theory of change will provide a focus for remaining debates and a framework for planning, monitoring and evaluating rewilding, enabling researchers and practitioners to affect vital change.
