Landscape scale rewilding project management: exploring rewilding as a multi-project environment

Rewilding has gained growing prominence in recent years as an alternative to established environmental conservation and ecological restoration projects. Strategic rewilding interventions typically involve greater ambition over larger geographical areas, and embrace visionary time horizons, such as 100-years for Durrell’s Dalnacardoch Estate and 250-years for Trees for Life’s Dundreggan Estate, both in the Scottish Highlands. For initiatives with such mega-timescales, should we be using the word ‘project’ at all? Perhaps rewilding on this scale and ambition might be better considered as transformational endeavors. Many rewilding projects do not have short-term fixed outcomes, and deliberately take an agile approach to realize success, enabling more adaptive, place-based collaboration with natural world stakeholders. What works in one location may not work in another due to ecological or climate differences, even at a very local level. Rewilding interventions, like other projects, require attention to context in design and delivery. This paper proposes that long duration rewilding interventions may be considered as portfolios of connected projects and operational activities working at landscape level in collaboration with nature.