Knowing to care and caring to know : Negotiating modes of care and knowledge in peatland restoration in Denmark

Peatlands have become a silver bullet in climate mitigation policy globally. Restoring and rewetting agricultural peatlands is key for meeting reduction targets within the agricultural sector. But unlike other sectors, change rests on the decisions of individual farmers. In Denmark, a political aim towards restoring 100.000 hectares of agricultural peatlands by 2030 is challenged by uncertainty, disagreements and negotiations among farmers (who own the land), public authorities (who are tasked with realizing the policy goal) and soil scientists (who produce the data basis for the restoration efforts). Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in 2025 within a local peatland restoration project in Denmark, this paper sheds light on contradictory and overlapping ways of knowing and caring for peatlands among these key stakeholders. According to van Dooren, care requires contextual and critical knowledge about the object of care (van Dooren 2014). This paper explores what hierarchies of care are being constructed (Giraud 2019) when knowledge is being questioned and negotiated. Hence, the paper asks how knowledge is being negotiated to fit different perceptions of “good” care for peatlands in restoration efforts by investigating what emotional, political, temporal and epistemic frames orient caring acts in peatland restoration, what counts as care, and how else care might be imagined and practiced. References:Dooren, Thom van. 2014. “Care.” Environmental Humanities 5 (1): 291–94. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615541.Giraud, Eva Haifa. 2019. What Comes after Entanglement? Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion. Durham: Duke university press.