Natura 2000 is a network of protected ecological sites across the EU considered important for biodiversity. Breaking with the traditional notion of “nature reserves”, designated sites include public, private and commonly held land.   In Ireland, as in many other EU Member States, implementation of the network has been fraught with conflict.   This paper considers the power/knowledge nexus that bedevils the scheme in terms of two competing performances: nature conservation and place conservation.

Nature conservation, as performed in Natura 2000 policy and management networks, relies on a ‘scientised’, disembodied nature which is taken out-of-time and out-of-place.  As nature-society boundaries are drawn, contested and re-drawn at various scales, places are narrowly translated into habitats and their hybridity and relationality is ‘lost in translation’.  

Local resistance to Natura 2000, on the other hand, relies on the performance of place conservation - an alternative discourse coalition employed to resist ‘colonial’ nature conservation agendas and the ‘scientisation’ of place from afar.  Local opponents of the scheme, thus resist ‘place as habitat’ through a reliance on locally legitimate ways of knowing and relating to nature and the habitual practices of dwelling-in-place. 

Against the background of extensive socio-ecological change, conservationists focus on protecting nature while local people focus on protecting their place. Through strikingly similar rhetorics of’ ‘loss and catastrophe’, both groups articulate anxieties regarding the changing nature of these places.  

This paper draws on empirical analysis of research conducted with those supporting/ implementing and opposing/resisting the scheme in rural Ireland.  It finds that within both ‘groups’ there are a myriad of concealed conflicts strategically expunged from the dominant performance.  To compete with other each effectively and have legitimacy in their respective knowledge-building contexts, each performance depends on the suppression of dissenting voices ‘from within’.   Moreover, in the battle to conserve particular articulations of nature and place, they both struggle with the inevitability of social-ecological change.   Underpinned by power struggles to define and capture the ‘authenticity’ and ‘integrity’ of nature-in-place, these precarious performances shape the trajectory of Natura 2000’s implementation and the contours of Ireland’s ever-changing hybrid landscape.