'Fostering Resilience' in Front-line Environmental Management Practice: A Multi-Sited Ethnography of Novel Constellations of Environmental Value in Practice (FosResil)

Environmental management professionals (EMPs) play a crucial role in strengthening ecosystems and mitigating the effects of global warming. Given the fundamental unpredictability of events associated with climate change, EMPs are asked to "foster ecosystem resilience," thereby enhancing ecosystems' capacities to bounce back from, or adapt to, unpredictable environmental stressors. As a recently emerged environmental policy paradigm, however, "resilience" remains a contested concept. The EU-funded FosResil project will fill these empirical and analytical gaps. By means of a multi-sited ethnography of three pioneering resilience-based initiatives across Western Europe (United Kingdom, Belgium and the Netherlands), FosResil will examine and assess the ways in which "resilience" is currently reshaping environmental management practices and analyse how it gives rise to novel forms of knowing, valuing and managing environments.