Provincializing ecology: Anthropocene futures from ecological restoration to eco-developmentalism

This paper examines the philosophical, historical, and practical differences between two dominant paradigms of human-nature relations: restoration ecology and eco-developmentalism. Restoration ecology, rooted in Euro-American environmental thought, emphasizes historical fidelity, ecological integrity, and human responsibility toward community-based ecosystem relations. In contrast, eco-developmentalism, exemplified by China’s large-scale ecological engineering projects, prioritizes human development goals, such as modernization and sociospatial optimization, through mechanistic interventions that transform ecosystems for specific functional outcomes. Comparatively analyzing these frameworks allows us to provincialize ecology—that is, to demonstrate how ecology is shaped by sociocultural milieus. We argue that, far from universal, different approaches to human-nature relations affect the material practices that alter ecologies, as well as power dynamics, forms of dispossession, landscape aesthetics, and biodiversity. While both ecological restoration and eco-developmentalism have reinforced state power and displaced local and Indigenous land relations, they nonetheless represent two distinct pathways for governing nature-society relations in the Anthropocene. In provincializing these paradigms, we move beyond a critique of ecological universalism to situate eco-developmentalism as a powerful, alternative epistemic and political project. As both paradigms circulate across the Global South, they reconfigure not only environmental practice but also the geopolitics of sustainability.