Philosophical Boundary Work for Wildlife Conservation

This chapter is a case study of a rewilding project with large herbivores in the Netherlands (Oostvaardersplassen, or OVP) that time and again provoked heated debates over the moral problems associated with the management of the large ungulates introduced into the OVP. At the request of the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature Management and Fisheries, the Philosophy Group of Wageningen University developed an ethical framework and field approach to tackle these moral conflicts. This framework involved ‘boundary work,’ that is, the constructive effort to facilitate communication, conflict management, and consensus building across the fences that separate communities with often divergent ethical convictions and moral vocabularies. A general lesson that was learned from this case study is that the success of philosophical boundary work is highly dependent on the broader political, social, and cultural context in which nature management practices evolve.