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Ecosystem restoration initiatives present natures as intervention-requiring problems. However, not all stakeholders may be able to recognise and relate to the issues that motivate restoration. Instead, they may put forward alternative understandings of natures as problematic issues in need of management and collective action. Therefore, ecosystem restoration can turn generative into new forms of publics that are brought together – and drawn apart – by distinctive configurations of nature-issues. This paper analyses such a reorganisation by focusing on three restoration projects carried out in Finland. The projects sought to engage farmers in restoring agricultural streams while proposing the practice of stream restoration as an extensive ecosystem revitalisation. In the studied cases, farmers could become attentive to the potential of stream habitats to develop into viable and rich ecosystems, while their neighbours only showed interest in improving the drainage functions of streams. The restoration initiatives generated connectedness between farmers, streams habitats and the restoration projects, but also disconnectedness between natures and publics. The possibilities of the studied projects to carry out their restoration plans rested mostly on the specification of the restoration plans as a means to manage ontological differences. The findings indicate that instead of promoting ecosystem restoration as a tightly coupled practice, it can be useful to generate space for collective action that unfolds in terms of partially different natures and nature-issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To an increasing extent, the management of natural resources rests on planning as a means to enhance collaborative deliberation and policy integration. But even before a planning process can start and any joint meeting be held, a lot of organisational and ontological work needs to be done. 'Plan-ability' requires the shaping of an analytical and operational platform that allows making sense of, and relating to, natural resources and their evolution. Moreover, the setting must be acceptable for those viewed as important collaborators. By focusing on two regional planning processes in Finland, this paper analyses how plan-ability is created and maintained in practice. The results suggest that the planning of natural resource management depends on material arrangements that operate at two levels. Those of the first level enable focusing of analytical sight and deliberation. As a result, a planning object shapes up. However, what emerges is unlikely to stabilise automatically. Further work is needed, and this may happen at the second level of arranging. At this level, acceptance of the object configuration can be enhanced by disconnecting the plan, or parts of it, from the operational core of policy making. Through the ontological work at the two levels, an ordering of actors and concerns develops that has passed the test of plan-ability. The concept points to the experimental nature of planning, inviting attention to the forces and trajectories that condition policy integration and collaborative policy making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientific knowledge is the outcome of a collective, for example, of experts, methods, equipment, and experimental sites. The configuration of the collective shapes the scientific findings, allowing some interactions to become visible and meaningful at the expense of others. PROTEE is a methodology that aims to increase the reflexivity of research and innovation projects by helping to sensitize practitioners to the demarcations their projects enact and to think through how these may affect the relevance of the outcomes. We used PROTEE to structure a series of dialogues with a research project that wanted its findings to make a contribution to the heated debate on transgenic trees. Through this process, the project did indeed become more articulated while we ourselves became engaged with the project in a very particular way, by becoming loyal to it. The dialogues also made the risks that engagement with public debate entails for scientists very apparent. Like us, the scientific project chose its loyalties, but what PROTEE did was to help make these explicit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]