Political ecology (PE) has played a pivotal role in examining human–wildlife interactions and their implications for conservation practice. The most commonly researched themes in this domain include impacts of animals on people and related responses from different human actors; nonhuman-mediated re-ordering of landscapes, resource access, lives and livelihoods of local communities; or state-, market- and community-driven actions, their repercussions and the impacts of human social categories on interspecies interactions. While such scholarship has broken new grounds in the understanding of how power and inequality mediate environmental outcomes, the other-than-human has typically been relegated to being a mere object in these endeavours, or as lifeless entities upon which human meanings are inscribed.
There are a number of approaches in cognate sub-fields that are beginning to take other-than-human lives seriously in their accounts of social and political life. For instance, ‘more-than-human’ geographers have argued that landscapes and lives are co-constructed by both humans and nonhumans, while others have called for the development of multispecies ethnographies, integration of individual- and collective animal subjectivities into geography, and the construction of dialogues between geography and ethology. Recent scholarship, careful to being attentive to animal lives within the mesh of material and symbolic politics through space and time, have also been successful in demonstrating the purposefulness of more-than-human political ecologies or a political ecology that considers other-than-human lives vital.
We are organising paper session, from Global North and South, engaging with wild and feral other-than-human species, as actors in the political ecologies of wildlife conservation.

TITLE: REWILDING AGRARIAN WORLDS: A MORE-THAN-HUMAN POLITICAL ECOLOGY OF LIVESTOCK PREDATION IN THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS

ABSTRACT: Rewilding in Europe often occurs in upland areas, and is commonly linked with large levels of agricultural abandonment amongst traditional farming systems. In the Scottish Highlands, rewilding is associated with species-reintroduction initiatives, and can be positioned within a broader move towards a post-productivist countryside. Taking up the reintroduction of the white-tailed eagle, this paper seeks to understand the material and sociocultural impacts of livestock predation by a high conservation-value carnivore. It employs a more-than-human political ecology approach to conceive agrarian worlds as landscapes of liveable collaboration between humans and nonhumans that are constitutive of the ways of life of upland farmers. Livelihoods, and sociocultural meaning, stem from the relational compositions that occur through structural changes in agrarian capitalism, the biophysical materiality of landscape and the agency of nonhumans. The paper specifically forefronts the lifeworlds and behaviours of Scottish blackface sheep in accounting for how and why predation occurs. Sheep behavioural ecology and biology are central to the material vulnerabilities to predation that are intrinsic to extensive grazing systems, and bear emotional and sociocultural significance for farmers. I argue that we can only understand how predation occurs, and what it means to those who lose livestock, by centring the agency of sheep in the composition of agrarian worlds. I also illustrate the relevance of more-than-human accounts of animal agency in understanding conservation conflicts occurring in rewilding initiatives.

KEYWORDS: Rewilding, predation, coexistence