Abstract
Dutchmen like to pride themselves on having ‘successfully conquered nature’ through engineering, management and design. Currently, however, this triumphant spirit has been dampened by global, regional, and local developments that expose established Dutch notions of malleability and control as fallacies. This paper uses the unsolicited return of wolves to the Netherlands as an explanatory case study to illustrate how in this unfolding controversy problem and solution spaces co-evolve and thus call for all-but-reductionist design and management approaches. Building on the crucial difference between problems (that can be solved) and issues (that can be stabilised), a model is proposed that explicates how problem and solution spaces can nest inside an overarching issue space. After analysing how Dutch citizens and officials respond to uncalled-for circumstances caused by the wolf’s uninvited homecoming, this model is used to argue for co-evolutionary thinking and acting to support harmonious more-than-human cohabitation in the Netherlands and beyond.
Keywords
human-nonhuman co-evolution, paradigm shift
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1361
Citation
Kolks, L. (2026) Co-evolution in practice: The wolf's disruptive return to the Netherlands, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1361
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Co-evolution in practice: The wolf's disruptive return to the Netherlands
Dutchmen like to pride themselves on having ‘successfully conquered nature’ through engineering, management and design. Currently, however, this triumphant spirit has been dampened by global, regional, and local developments that expose established Dutch notions of malleability and control as fallacies. This paper uses the unsolicited return of wolves to the Netherlands as an explanatory case study to illustrate how in this unfolding controversy problem and solution spaces co-evolve and thus call for all-but-reductionist design and management approaches. Building on the crucial difference between problems (that can be solved) and issues (that can be stabilised), a model is proposed that explicates how problem and solution spaces can nest inside an overarching issue space. After analysing how Dutch citizens and officials respond to uncalled-for circumstances caused by the wolf’s uninvited homecoming, this model is used to argue for co-evolutionary thinking and acting to support harmonious more-than-human cohabitation in the Netherlands and beyond.