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Mainstream environmental protection has increasingly moved towards an understanding of the linkages between humans and nature, but with a wide diversity in how different conservation approaches are developed. This chapter summarises the discourse on and critique of a rewilding approach and the related discussion of wilderness, and traces it back to a particularly United States-based understanding. It then compares these assumptions with the established broad systems for land use in European cases, particularly Sweden. It is argued that land use in the Swedish case illustrates a model of organisation that significantly differs from a rewilding assumption, resulting in great risks of conflict in the case of applying a rewilding approach. Understanding this type of variation in cultural and institutional assumptions regarding land use and its role in societal systems is considered relevant in discussions and research related to rewilding, as well as more broadly to conservation and restoration in land-use systems.

Taking its examples from Fennoscandia as a coherent region with historical ties between areas – although today described in multiple and varying ways – this book has shown how shared histories and development of land uses continue to impact multiple practices today. The chapters illustrate the conflicts that arise in many cases, as land comes to be abstracted into uses that are not situated within an established understanding. The book thus both illustrates the possibilities for legislation and practice that to a higher degree emphasise not only humans in nature but also the need to continue to delimit use in context, particularly under increasing resource-use pressures and the disassociation of use from the context. The book highlights the need to recognise that social and human sciences are pivotal for us to understand not only nature but society: our problems in coping with environmental change are perhaps less based in a lack of understanding of the environment than in a limited understanding of how society can be reorganised to manage systems, beyond the binaries we typically use in describing nature areas.

Nature has often been understood in literature through a disjunction to human systems. This can be seen in the nature-culture binary, or even more clearly in the opposition of ‘wilderness’ to ‘civilization’.

Drawing on historical and present-day examples and case studies from Northern Europe, this book critically examines the ways in which the use of such dichotomies can be transcended to respond to sustainability challenges. Using illustrative examples, the authors demonstrate how shared histories and development of land use continue to impact multiple practices today. The book explores the prerequisites for environmental management approaches that counterpose the nature-culture binaries that are present in existing governance mechanisms.

This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental management, environmental law and policy and environmental anthropology.

Combining historical, social and regulative analysis, this book builds a compelling critique of ‘frontier thinking’ as it continues to form our assumptions about social and environmental organisation – in ways that impact not least the present environmental crisis.

This book systematically identifies the ways in which images of nature and society are formed by the historically developed frontier-oriented narratives which have underpinned much Anglo-American and Anglocentric thought. The book confronts these conceptions at large, showing that they never held empirically, and contrasts them with the situation in northern Europe, where diverging assumptions are integral to this day. Through this juxtaposition, this book illustrates not only the pervasiveness of structures of understanding in steering policy but also the varying traditions regarding how understandings of the environment can be formed.

This study highlights how historical thought patterns, formed for very different reasons than exist today, continue to shape our assumptions about nature, the relation between urban and rural areas and our understanding of ourselves in relation to the environment. This book will be of wide interest to a range of academics and students in the fields of geography, anthropology, environmental studies, sociology, political science and development studies, amongst others.

This paper advances the study of metagovernance by examining its spatial horizons in the empirical case of tourism development. Drawing upon Jessop et al.’s (2008) TPSNE framework on territory, place, scale, network and environment for a longitudinal qualitative analysis, the article traces the evolution of tourism metagovernance in northernmost Finland and Sweden over the past 150 years. The shifts from pre-Fordism over welfare state Fordism to the competition state manifest themselves in tourism metagovernance through distinct socio-spatial relationships between the state, tourism stakeholders and society at large. Applying the TPSNE framework provides crucial explanatory insights into processes and drivers of change and continuity in tourism’s sectoral development as part of wider societal and political transformations.

Northern Europe is often seen as having a specific relation to nature. In this manuscript, the policy and regulatory frameworks in Norway and Sweden are compared when it comes to the scope for local use that is provided by the regulatory frameworks relating to natural resources. The paper analyzes the legal framework for the use of nature and its resources, including hunting, fishing, and reindeer husbandry, with a focus on the Swedish natural resource legislation in relation to the (corresponding) Norwegian Finnmark Act. The study thereby compares the Finnmark Act and the protection it affords local resource users with that in northern Sweden under general Swedish and municipal regulatory systems.

This report provides an assessment of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) under Horizon Europe and the Euratom research and training programme 2021-2025, prepared by a Panel of nine independent experts for the two programme parts separately, with common conclusions and observations on the JRC's performance and future direction as a whole. The Panel's assessment will support the evaluation of the JRC's contribution to the overall research programmes and as the European Commission's in-house science service. The assessment follows almost immediately after the ex post evaluation was completed in 2022. Thus the Panel was asked to evaluate activities under the current research programmes building on the results of the previous programmes. In line with its mandate, this Panel has also looked into what changes the JRC has implemented and what effects they have already had or are expected to have, and what could be further developed to enhance the agility, impact and efficiency of the JRC’s policy support and to ensure EU decision-makers get the best possible scientific advice also in the future.