A legal geography of wolves in Swedish landscapes: a morphogenetic approach Open Access

The wolf’s recent comeback to western and northern Europe has been hailed as a conservation success and with a 58% increase in the wolf population only in the past decade, the success seemingly continues (Di Bernardi et al., 2025). However, the large influx of wolves causes friction between wolves and diverse political interests in the human-dominated European landscapes, leading to escalating controversies over the wolves’ presence. Therefore, a broad complex of challenges lies ahead to sustain the conservation success, ranging from designing adequate conservation laws to keeping wolves out of culture wars (Di Bernardi et al., 2025).

Law has played a vital role in the wolves’ comeback, and the wolves’ legal protection will continue to be an important factor in sustaining the success. In recent scholarship on law in the Anthropocene (e.g. Grear, 2020; Burdon and Martel, 2023; Burdon, 2023; Horst, 2024), scholars have emphasised the need to protect individual animals through measures such as granting rights or reconstructing the legal systems through broader paradigmatic changes. Nonetheless, an important challenge for progressive legal scholarship also lies in acknowledging that the problems with, and solutions for, species protection often concern issues that lie beyond legal constructions or paradigms. Imagining how law can facilitate the wolf populations and a wider regenerative transformation of Europe, it is not least essential to situate laws and legal constructs in the landscapes in which they emerge and function.

To understand how the legal protection of wolves works on a landscape level, I in this article trace the legal geography of wolves in the specific context of Sweden with a process-oriented theoretical framework that starts in the landscape rather than in law. By connecting process-oriented, relational thinking with geographical and legal research on landscape, I explore what landscape as a process-oriented relational concept might mean for law and construct a theoretical framework that can be used for further research. The theoretical framework is presented in Section 2 and expresses a morphogenetic approach which centres on the concepts of process, relation and landscape. The morphogenetic approach helps articulate the underlying relationality of the processes that shape law in its landscapes and focuses on the relations of processes that produce phenomena that appear stable (rather than on the topography of the phenomena themselves). This enables an analysis of the legal protection of wolves through changing processes in the landscapes rather than through mapping its formal appearance.

In Section 3, I analyse the morphogenesis of legal protection of wolves by its emergence through bundles of diverse entangled processes, where the implementation of, for example, EU law emerges in relations of processes in local landscapes. I show how the legal protection of wolves is constituted by clusters of relations of processes that themselves do not appear as legal.

In Section 4, I discuss further implications for practice and research on wolf and species protection and the potential of a morphogenetic approach in legal geography and in law and the Anthropocene scholarship.

Legal geography has a long history of research analysing how law emerges and functions in spaces, places and landscapes (Braverman et al., 2014; Delaney, 2015; O’Donnell et al., 2019; Bartel and Carter, 2021; Nicolini, 2022; Kymäläinen, 2024) and is therefore well suited to provide tools for a more situated understanding of the emergence of the legal protection of wolves. A key theoretical insight from these works, imported from human geography, is the acknowledgement of a process-oriented and relational understanding of space. Instead of viewing space as a backdrop or emptiness, space is understood as emerging through the processes, relations, and things it contains (Unwin, 1993, pp. 194–195; Agnew, 2011). In her seminal For Space, the geographer Doreen Massey defines space as the product of “interrelations; as constituted through their interactions, from the immensity of the global to the inimitably tiny” (Massey, 2005p. 9). She emphasises that space is a sphere of coexisting heterogeneity, constantly becoming in the relations between multiplicities of trajectories. Using this definition, Massey describes the concept place as a “particular constellation within the wider topographies of space”, a coming together or “throwntogetherness” of trajectories, a “locus of generations of new trajectories and new configurations” (Massey, 2005, pp. 131, 140–141). In this sense, place is always a spatio-temporal event, a conjuncture of processes appearing to inhabit the same moment in time and space. The related concept landscape, which is particularly central in this article, is similarly often understood as a process-oriented concept denoting the ongoing relations of processes that constitute a specific area (Stenseke, 2018; Phillips, 2023). It can be defined as a particular area, a particular part of space, coproduced by every process, event and relation it consists of while entangled with other places and landscapes.

A landscape perspective focuses on how processes studied in geology, geography, nature, economy, social sciences and law intertwine in the ongoing flow of existence. The holism of this perspective, where an area is not reduced to either natural or social forces, has made it a central concept in Geography (Dubow, 2019; Mason and Riding, 2023) and is also what makes it a promising concept for understanding law. Compared to, for example, a socio-legal approach, a landscape approach further directs the focus to more non-human processes such as kinetic, tectonic, climatological and ecological processes and how these diverse processes contribute to producing what appears as law (Buffery, 2015; Marusek, 2021). In consistence with a process-oriented understanding of space, law does not enter the landscape from the outside (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2014) but emerges from relations of processes in the landscape that in themselves are not considered legal (Latour, 2013). What appears as law or legality in a specific moment is, hence, with this view produced by continuous changes within the earth system and in the socio-ecological systems in which law appears rather than in a specific legal sphere. In a sense, law, legal and legality are therefore understood as words or concepts we use to make sense of these assemblages in specific contexts.

The shapes and forms these law-assemblages take are not stable but meta-stable patterns produced by constant interrelated processes in the landscapes (Nail, 2024). In this article I study these meta-stable patterns of legal protection of wolves through their constant emergence, their morphogenesis in the landscapes. While morphology deals with forms and structures, most commonly used within biology and geology, morphogenesis concerns the processes in which forms and structures become. In social science and philosophy, the term has been used in slightly different ways by diverse process-oriented scholars such as Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Luhmann (1995), Archer (2024) and Delanda (2000) to articulate the interdependent processes of change that shape the fabric of reality. Studying the morphogenesis of law in the landscape hence implies a focus on how law emerges in the relationship between apparent human and non-human processes in a specific area rather than on what appears as legal as a product of said processes.

A central aspect of a morphogenetic approach to law in the landscape concerns the relationship between change and stability. In accordance with a general process ontological view of reality, stability and substances are contingent upon constant changes on various scales (Seibt, 2012). The process is seen as primary, foregoing any stable substances or things (Whitehead, 1979). Change is, therefore, not viewed as the opposite of stability. Instead, what appears as stability is understood as something produced by continuous changes (Li, 2024).

Process-oriented approaches often imply a relational ontology (Harman, 2014). A principal characteristic of a relational ontology is the view that objects cannot exist prior to their relations. Instead, objects are made up of relations and hence appear only as a consequence of relations. Every process becomes in its relation to other processes, and the property and identity of a process are therefore dependent upon its relations to other processes. For example, in Karen Barad’s relational onto-epistemology, an object is defined as a phenomenon constituted by the relations between intra-acting agencies (Barad, 2007). A key point is that neither the relations nor the relata actually “comes first” but appear through the intra-acting agencies in the phenomena.

Viewing reality as relations of processes implies vast entangled multiplicities. A recurrent characteristic of process-oriented ontologies is, therefore, various efforts to picture reality as a fabric, weave, mesh, network or web of relations between processes (e.g. Massey, 2005; Latour, 2007; Hägerstrand, 2009; Ingold, 2015). What appears as a delimited entity is often described as a collection of specific nodes or relations in the network. The processes’ relations can also often be described with more liquid metaphors, such as being part of the same flow or river (Nail, 2024). In this paper, I use the above-discussed concept of landscape as an alternative to web, network or fluid metaphors. Although web or weave metaphors are also common in landscape theories (Hägerstrand, 2009; Ingold, 1993, 2015), they are somewhat superfluous if the landscape itself is understood as constituted by the relations of processes that it consists of.

In sum, analysing the morphogenesis of law in the landscape articulates a research approach that centres on the landscape of relations of processes in which what appears as law continuously forms rather than on the product of these processes. By starting in the landscape rather than in the law, tracing the processes, the relations between them, and how they assemble in bunches that appear as legal, law is approached as becoming through dynamic processes where legal structures adapt to and are reshaped by the ongoing transformations in the landscapes where it emerges. Acknowledging that legal norms arise from and are continuously shaped by the ecological and social environment, the mutable character of law is entangled in the changes in its specific environmental conditions, societal values and technological advancements. Studying the law from this perspective highlights the continuous evolution and responsiveness of legal norms to the changing conditions and interactions within particular landscapes. It focuses on the organic development of legal structures, acknowledging that laws are not imposed from outside but arise within the landscape’s processes. It also underscores that law is embedded in and inseparable from the broader landscape, interacting with and influenced by various ecological, social and cultural factors in this way. The morphogenetic approach thus emphasises how legal systems are not isolated or static but are constantly shaped and reshaped by the ongoing dynamics of the landscapes they inhabit.

In this section, I analyse some bundles of related processes in the Swedish landscape that contribute to shaping the legal protection of the wolves. In line with the theoretical framework, the analysis starts in the landscape, and legal protection is traced through the relations of processes and changes that continuously form law. The analysed processes together point towards a legal geography of wolves where changes in regulations are an aspect among others in the morphogenesis of legal protection of wolves.

The wolf population in Sweden presently consists of around 375 individuals, dwelling mainly in the south-central parts of the country (Wabakken et al., 2024). After becoming extinct in the 1970s, the wolves returned in the 1980s and grew in numbers for three decades. Since 2014, the amount of wolves has fluctuated around 300–450 individuals. It is still quite a porous population with a poor genetic status due to inbreeding (Wabakken et al., 2024). Together with the risks of diseases due to their genetic status, the most severe threats to the population are illegal and legal hunting (Liberg et al., 2020). The state of the legal protection of wolves is hence related to how these threats develop.

One crucial aspect that contributes to shaping the forms of the wolves’ legal protection concerns their viable habitats and conditions for migrations. This aspect actualises several interrelated processes in the landscapes. More contact with the populations in Finland and Russia or Germany would have positive consequences for the genetic status of the wolf population, as well as for its overall size, and hence also for what the EU Habitats Directive (92/43/EEC) defines as the wolves’ “favourable conservation status”. For example, if southern Sweden were still connected to the European continent through a land bridge in the south (as it was 10,000 years ago because of the low sea level associated with the retreating glacial sheets; see Björck, 1995), the Swedish wolves would be able to connect with the Dutch and German populations. They would hence be a part of a larger continental population, which would positively impact the genetic status of the Swedish wolves and make the population more resilient.

As Sweden is currently connected by land to Europe just in the northeast, wolves can only enter from Finland or Russia. However, for Finnish or Russian wolves to connect with the populations in the southern part of Sweden, they must pass through the vast reindeer herding area that covers the northern half of the country (see Figure 1, where the dots indicate the presence of wolves and the line indicates the border for the reindeer herding area).

The wolves’ hunting methods make it especially difficult for reindeer to coexist with wolves. As expressed in a report to the Sami national organisation, the presence of wolves will never be accepted in reindeer husbandry (Lindberget and Blom, 2010), and Swedish legislation also somewhat reflects this sentiment (Prop. 2012/ 13:191, 2012, p. 39). Hence, there are no stable wolf populations in the northern half of Sweden, and many wolves are killed by legal and illegal hunting on their way south (Recio et al., 2018). With a slightly colder climate, the extent and duration of the ice cover on the Baltic Sea would enable more contact between the wolf populations in Finland and Russia without passing the reindeer herding area (Linnell et al., 2005). On the other hand, as the current climate change is a threat to traditional reindeer herding (Rosqvist et al., 2022), the rising temperature could also, in this particular aspect, benefit the Swedish population of wolves.

A declining gulf stream resulting in colder winters or a change in the relationship between reindeer herding and wolves would hence affect legal protection even without new laws or adjudications. In these and similar ways, tectonic, glaciological and climatological changes entangle with cultural and political processes in creating the possibilities of wolf migrations and the appearance of viable habitats, which contributes in important ways to the continuous shaping of the forms of legal protection of wolves.

Another bundle of processes contributing to shaping the form of legal protection of wolves consists of interconnected, continuous social and demographical changes in the landscapes. The rapid decline of the wolf population in Sweden during the 19th century, after which the wolves became practically extinct in southern Sweden, coincided with a rise in the human population. Changes in technologies used for hunting wolves also affected the hunters’ effectiveness, contributing to the eradication of wolves in Sweden during the 20th century (Larsson, 1988). Economic changes after the Second World War and the migration from rural to urban areas, together with shifts in political opinion, the rise of the environmental movement, as well as changes in national and international laws, resulted in better preconditions for wolves in Sweden (Chapron et al., 2014; Boitani and Linnell, 2015; Cimatti et al., 2021). The paradigm-changing laws that appeared in the second half of the 20th century and transformed the wolves formally from vermin to protected species on European and national levels were in much entangled in these broader changes in the landscape after the Second World War.

For example, the Bern Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats, which came into force in 1982, represents a great leap forward for the legal protection of wolves as it established a common legal protection status for the wolves in Europe. Yet, it is also a product of the particular historical situation in the European landscapes in which it was created and operationalised. When the situation in the landscapes changes, changes in laws tend to appear sooner or later. This point can be exemplified by the fact that the EU recently succeeded in moving the wolf from one appendix to another in the Bern Convention, diminishing the wolf’s protection status in the convention and effectively paving the way for diminishing its protection status in the EU Habitats Directive (T-PVS(2024)MISC, 2024). These changes are connected to the recent large influx of wolves in Europe in the landscapes, which have led to increased conflicts between wolves and humans (and, in effect, between humans and humans) (Trouwborst, 2014; Di Bernardi, 2025). In Germany, for example, the wolf population has risen from 1 pack to 209 packs and 46 pairs in only 20 years (DBBW, 2025) (and one of these wolves infamously killed Ursula von der Leyen’s pony in 2022 see Barkham, 2024). It is not yet clear how the legal changes on the European level will affect the situation in Sweden. However, the Swedish government is currently working towards cutting the already porous population by half (Government Offices of Sweden, 2024). This development exemplifies how law is an intrinsic part of everchanging landscapes, and that the fluctuations in the legal protection of wolves are therefore caused by processes that in themselves are not apparently legal.

The extent of the legal protection of wolves in Sweden is also deeply entangled with a bundle of social-ecological processes through which the legal and illegal hunting of wolves emerges. Even though the wolves returned to Swedish landscapes in the 1980s, several anthropogenic processes, such as the development of the hunters’ communities and their practice of elk hunting with the use of dogs, the rise of the populist movement, the decline of the welfare state, a perceived rural/urban conflict, has contributed to holding back the growth of the population. Institutional changes in wildlife management, Sweden’s entrance into the EU, fluctuating opinions, changing laws, a constant flow of administrative, legal and political decisions, and recurrent formal legal processes on various levels are all processes of change that contribute to the fluctuations of the legal protection of wolves (Stenseke Arup, 2021). The illegal hunting of wolves is for example connected to relations between factors such as the difficulty of controlling vast forests and technologies of hunting wolves discreetly, as well as the silence culture surrounding wolf hunting and the acceptance of illegal hunting in some social spheres (Krange et al., 2022). Similarly, the annual licensed hunting of around 10% of the population, motivated by its alleged positive effect on tolerance for wolves, is a dynamic assemblage consisting of various relations of historical, socio-ecological and political processes in the Swedish landscapes where laws and judgments constitute minor components. The present situation, where the growth of the wolf population has halted on quite low levels, is therefore not primarily caused by loose regulations. Similarly, the future of the wolves is hence not so much dependent upon stricter regulations as on institutional designs that can facilitate co-existence between humans and wolves and foster tolerance for the species (Larsson et al., 2022).

A vital agent in this landscape of interrelated processes is the wolf itself. When wolves move, their movements affect law like waves in a pond and cause intense vibrations in the landscapes, influencing elections, legislation, as well as legal and illegal hunting. Through their actions, such as attacking reindeer, livestock, elks, hunting dogs or just wandering around being wolves, they affect ecological and social processes, which contribute to shaping laws, their interpretations and effects. However, the wolves’ actions are constantly entangled with, and given meaning in society and law through, diverse human discourses. For wolf opponents, the aversion towards the wolves often seems to emulsify with aversions towards wolf management (Krange et al., 2022). Some see the wolf as imposed upon their landscapes by politicians in Stockholm or Brussels, merging the wolves with a broader populist discourse of an urban elite threatening a rural lifestyle (Larsson et al., 2022). In extent, the wolves and their actions are blended with a general sense of declining quality of life, loss of jobs and welfare state on retreat (Skogen et al., 2017), making the wolves’ attacks on hunting dogs interpreted as attacks from a perceived urban establishment (Sjölander‐Lindqvist, 2015; Ratamäki and Peltola, 2021). As Krange et al. (2022) put it, “For these people, the wolf becomes an activator of a wide body of interconnected grievances”. Rather than acting alone, the wolves’ movements hence stir up eddies in the landscape through their relations with other social and ecological processes. Even in legal discourses, the agency of wolves is presently by some understood through these toxic entanglements with human phenomena. Not least, keeping wolf issues away from becoming a part of the so-called culture wars will, therefore, be essential for maintaining their legal protection status (Di Bernardi et al., 2025).

Understanding the legal geography of wolves through the morphogenesis of their legal protection in the landscape highlights how the law fluctuates with the ongoing interrelated processes that constitute the landscape. If the legal protection of wolves emerges in landscapes of diverse entangled processes where the implementation of, for example, EU law is produced in relation to processes in local landscapes, agency within law becomes a quality that is distributed in the landscape through ties between humans, laws, non-humans and other phenomena in the landscape (Bennett, 2010). Increasing their legal protection in our anthropocentric landscape is, therefore, an issue where changes in their formal protection status are just one component. Instead, strengthening the legal protection of wolves must become a question of targeting the assemblages of processes in the landscape with the most potential to change the material outcomes of laws in a progressive direction. For example, the possibility of decreasing illegal and legal hunting of wolves through granting the wolves certain rights depends on the effects these measures would have on the broader nexus of related processes through which law forms in the landscapes.

One implication of this study concerns the recurrent question within legal geography of how to situate law in space and conceptualise the intrinsic entanglement between legal and spatial (Braverman et al., 2014; Bartel and Carter, 2021). A general challenge has been to explain how law can be understood as a specific phenomenon while at the same time emphasising its interrelationships with everything else. If the distinction between law and its landscapes becomes too accentuated, too much agency risks being devoted to legal phenomena on their own. If the distinction between law and everything else instead becomes too blurred, it becomes difficult to at all analyse legal phenomena. In discourses concerning the ontology of law in the landscape, researchers sometimes refer to the legal landscape (Delaney, 1998; Kymäläinen, 2024) or construct neologisms that are similarly directed towards specifically legal aspects of space such as nomoscape or lawscape (Delaney, 2010; Graham, 2011; Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2014). The emphasis is often put on concerns about how law shapes space, how law is materialised in space, becomes an invisible part of the atmosphere or how space or place shapes law. These concepts have contributed to legal theory with much-needed spatial and platial perspectives, and are useful in explaining the entanglement of law and space while maintaining a clear idea of the legal. However, as shown in the wolf study, it is sometimes to trace law with an even less distinction between law and space. By starting in the landscape and tracing law as an emergent phenomenon in landscapes, a morphogenetic approach can hence complement the above mentioned concepts by understanding legal phenomena more as aspects of entangled prevalent non-legal processes than as distinct legal entities.

For example, with a too clear cut separation between law and everything else in the landscapes, changes in the legal protection of wolves tend to be understood mainly through changes in formal laws and in adjudication. Saving wolves, thereby, risks becoming an issue of primarily arguing for formally stricter protection laws without a full analysis of these particular legal solutions’ potentiality or efficiency in specific landscapes. As shown above, the wolves move in landscapes where their actions entangle with other processes and from which an assemblage that can be labelled legal protection of wolves emerges. The law is hence not a distinct part of the landscape or the atmosphere that can be uncovered or distilled and separated to be analysed. Instead, saving wolves, even from a legal perspective, must build upon an acknowledgement that law emerges in vast bundles of interrelated changes that we do not consider primarily as legal. As for example regulations affect the atmosphere or the landscape through their entanglement with other processes, their effects on the wolf population must be analysed through their relations in relevant assemblages. What kinds of legal solutions the wolves need to prosper is therefore contingent upon the situation in specific landscapes rather than on general legal restrictions. For legal scholars it means that questions concerning conflict management, institutional arrangements and economic incitements, must become as central as questions of rights or formal protection statuses. These aspects are more often present in social science research concerning the government of wolves, where law is treated more as one aspect of many in constructing policies and institutions (Stenseke Arup, 2024). Using a morphogenetic approach to situating law and laws in its landscapes might help bridge this gap while retaining the focus on law as a phenomenon.

A morphogenetic approach to law in its landscapes also has potential to enrich the ongoing post-anthropocentric turn in legal scholarship (e.g. Grear, 2020; Burdon, 2023; Burdon and Martel, 2023; Chapaux et al., 2023; Horst, 2024; Rodriguez-Garavito, 2024; Arvidsson and Jones, 2024). The multiple civilization-threatening environmental crises of our time have made it all too apparent that any clear separation between society and nature is not possible to uphold (Latour, 2017). Post-anthropocentric theories hence move beyond anthropocentrism and ecocentrism, instead emphasising the inherent entanglement of all matter, whether it appears as human or non-human (Malone and Bozalek, 2021). A central theme in the literature on law in, of or for the Anthropocene concerns the question of how to construct new legal paradigms that are attuned to the earth system, to posthuman ideas, or ideas of rights of nature, more than human rights or animal rights (e.g. Anker et al., 2020; Deckha, 2020; Grear et al., 2021; Kotzé et al., 2022; Rodriguez-Garavito, 2024; Fleurke et al., 2024). While these perspectives are fruitful in imagining new ways of writing laws, the material conflicts and other processes in landscapes that are involved in shaping law are sometimes overshadowed by more abstract ideas on general legal solutions (Burdon, 2023). A morphogenetic landscape approach further emphasise that what appears as a social or legal process is always contingent upon its entanglement in broader socio-ecological processes. As a consequence, legal paradigm shifts ought to be understood as aspects of broader paradigm shifts in the landscapes. Starting in the landscape, tracing the emergence of law through its morphogenesis, can therefore facilitate a less legal-centric analysis where changes in laws and regulations become even more situated in their specific landscapes. Hence, the necessary paradigm shifts within law can be more attenuated to the necessary paradigm shifts in the landscapes which could be fruitful when analysing how general legal solutions such as earth system law, ecological law or rights-based frameworks could work in different contexts.

As shown in the wolf study, the laws protecting wolves that emerged in Europe from the 1970s and onwards appeared as new legal paradigms but were perhaps foremost parts of a recurrent flow of changes in the European landscapes that created opportunities for the wolves to return. Likewise, the legal protection of wolves in Sweden is not dependent on laws or regulations as much as on the wolf’s entanglement with toxic discourses and inability to dwell in Sweden’s northern part and connect to the populations in Finland and Russia. Hence, increasing the legal protection of wolves is not so much about changing legal paradigms as to use ways to use law to affect the broader spectrum of anti-wolf processes in the landscape in progressive directions. This more modest approach, to situate law more as an aspect in the wider landscapes than as a catalyst for general eco-centric paradigmatic changes, can contribute to a more nuanced discussion on law’s ontology and potential in the Anthropocene.

One of the most important contributions of legal geography to legal scholarship has been to reformulate the eternal question “What is law?” into the more materially grounded question: ‘Where is law?’ (Davies, 2017, p. 30). A morphogenetic approach contributes to the understanding of this question by further blurring the conceptual borders between the legal and everything else in the landscape and articulating law as an emergent phenomenon constituted by relations of processes that in themselves are not viewed as legal. Hence, it becomes even more apparent that law is not a unified abstract entity in our biosphere but something continuously emerging in different ways in different landscapes. In the study of the legal protection of wolves this was manifested in the analysis of their legal protection as an everchanging phenomenon that rely as much on cultural, political, ecological or climatological processes as on laws and regulations.

As a general approach, understanding law through its morphogenesis could be applied in any legal field. This is not least true in planning and environmental law, where taking account of the entangled processes in the landscape is already a central concern. I hope this process-oriented, relational approach to law will inspire fresh research perspectives while offering practical value beyond academic discourses in legal geography and legal theory.