Dr George Iordachescu has just published a new piece entitled The shifting geopolitical ecologies of wild nature conservation in Romania as part of the collective volume politics and the environment in eastern Europe edited by Dr Eszter Krasznai Kovács.
The chapter uses a political ecology approach to understand how wild nature emerges as a new resource in eastern Europe, tracing the regional connections of a private conservation project unfolding in the Southern Carpathian Mountains. Over the last decade private and non-governmental conservation actors worked closely with the state to produce not only the legal framework for wilderness conservation but also the conditions of its reproduction and insertion into accumulation processes. The paper proposes a reading of the shifting relations between the state and conservation actors through an ethnography of the most important Romanian private conservation project. The chapter is a result of extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Romania between 2016 and 2018, complemented by archival study and legal framework analysis. This contribution is part of a broader debate on resource securitisation and processes of de-democratisation of decision-making in eastern Europe.
The volume has been published open access by Open Book Publishers and can be read here.