A Dynamic View of Local Knowledge and Epistemic Bonds to Place

It is evident today that people’s relations to place are crucially relevant for their engagement with, or resistance to, measures adopted in view of climate change adaptation or biodiversity conservation (Nicolosi and Corbett, 2018; Raymond et al., 2017; Castro and Mouro, 2016; Adger et al., 2012). In biodiversity conservation, a considerable share of such measures today are legal ones. Many have supranational origins but are then transposed into national legal frameworks, where they become laws to be implemented at the local level. In this chapter I focus on one such supranational legal order: the one that created and now governs the European Union’s (EU) ‘Natura 2000’ network of protected sites, designed to assure the long-term survival of habitats and species that represent European biodiversity (European Commission, 2009).