Saving the Olive Trees? Ontological Politics and Plant Disease Governance in Apulia, Southern Italy

In Apulia, everyone wants to “save the olive trees”—yet what is to be saved is far from clear. Since 2013, the spread of Xylella fastidiosa and Olive Quick Decline Syndrome (OQDS) has devastated Southern Italy’s groves and triggered a highly contested phytosanitary crisis. This paper argues that the controversy cannot be reduced to technical uncertainty, knowledge disagreement, or economic interests alone; it is also an ontological conflict—a struggle over the nature of the entities at stake. Drawing on qualitative interviews, documentary analysis, and ethnographic observation, the study follows two domains of contestation: the olive tree and the plant disease. Olive trees appear as relational beings, productive assets, or landscape elements to be preserved; the disease is variously enacted as a pathological invasion, a socio-ecological syndrome, or a political construct. Situating the case within broader debates on ontological politics, the paper brings conversations typically centred on extractivist and Indigenous settings to the governance of a plant disease in Southern Europe. Moreover, it advances two additional arguments to rethink political ontology engagement with socio-environmental conflicts. First, political ontology does not stop where science starts: ontological plurality runs through scientific practices in similar ways it does between science communities and other stakeholders. Second, ontology does not reduce to politics: disease claims still require robust empirical research and evidence from—to be constructed with—the natural sciences. The paper concludes with implications for plant-health governance in biocultural landscapes, including procedures that surface and negotiate ontologies and instruments that recognise cultural landscapes as collective goods.