Ecology, Place, and Regeneration

Ecological crisis is never only ecological. Behind every degraded landscape lies an institutional history: decisions about what to finance, what to permit, what to measure, and what to ignore. The nitrogen that saturates protected habitats in the Dutch Peel did not arrive by accident. It arrived through decades of financial incentives, regulatory frameworks, and knowledge infrastructures that made intensive farming the only viable option, and then held farmers locked in when the consequences became undeniable.

CCER's ecological research does not study ecosystems in isolation. It studies the institutional and financial conditions under which ecological renewal becomes possible or impossible. The question is not what nature needs. That is often well understood. The question is why the transition toward what nature needs remains structurally foreclosed, even when the knowledge, the will, and the alternatives are already present.

Place matters in this work. Ecological pressures are not evenly distributed. They concentrate in regions where agricultural intensification, contested governance, and thin institutional infrastructure overlap. In these peripheral landscapes, communities live at the intersection of ecological urgency and institutional paralysis. They experience the nitrogen crisis not as a policy debate but as a daily reality that reshapes family futures, social cohesion, and the relationship between generations.

Our research examines how ecological, financial, and institutional constraints intersect to produce lock-in at the landscape level, and what kinds of configurational change would allow communities and ecosystems to move toward renewal together. This includes the financial architectures that determine which farming trajectories remain reachable, the governance structures that fragment ecological knowledge across administrative boundaries, and the community-led initiatives that attempt to bridge what institutions have separated.

Regeneration, in our understanding, is not a return to a previous state. It is the structural reopening of trajectories that lock-in had foreclosed, for both people and the landscapes they inhabit.

Recent work