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

Jones, Gavin ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2627-6358 and Murphy, David F. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8416-5627 (2025) Landscape scale rewilding project management: exploring rewilding as a multi-project environment. PM World Journal, XIV (1).

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Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Article
Journal / Publication Title:	PM World Journal
Publisher:	PM World Inc.
ISSN:	2330-4480
Departments:	Institute of Business, Industry and Leadership > Project Management
Additional Information:	Gavin W. Jones, Senior Lecturer in Project Management and David F. Murphy, PhD, Associate Professor of Sustainability & Collaborative Leadership, both of the Institute of Business, Industry and Leadership, University of Cumbria, UK. This paper is a revised version of a paper originally presented at the 11th Annual University of Maryland PM Symposium in April 2024. Jones, G. and Murphy, D. F. (2024) The paradox of rewilding projects: exploring rewilding as projects, programs or portfolios - see https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/7699/
Depositing User:	Gavin Jones
Date Deposited:	14 Jan 2025 09:31
Last Modified:	14 Jan 2025 09:45
URI:	https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/8569

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