Abstract
Over the last years, debates in political ecology and research on human-environment relations in human geography have stressed the importance of competing understandings of nature during planning conflicts. Contested processes are shaped by debates around what counts as nature, which nature should be protected and how natural conservation should be conducted. Linking poststructuralist approaches from human geography to existent research on water, flood protection and restoration along rivers, this article contributes to these debates. Based on a case study located at the Upper Rhine, this research uncovers multifaceted and changing entanglements between conflict positions and underlying understandings of nature. The article thus refuses and expands a rather narrow perception of a clear-cut and one-dimensional allocation of a single understanding of nature for each conflict-related position. The presented results provide new explanations for shifts and the ambiguity in water-related controversies. Valuable contributions from discourse theory are discussed as well as suggestions for further research in human geography.
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