Greece’s escalating wildfire crisis over 140,000 hectares burned and 20 lives lost in 2023 alone (IAWF, 2024) is inextricably linked to the silencing of pastoral communities, whose traditional land management practices have sustained Mediterranean landscapes for centuries. Pastoral peoples possess deep intergenerational knowledge of grazing, seasonal migration, and landscape stewardship. Traditional cooperative governance structures once coordinated the movement of flocks across mountain and lowland pastures naturally reducing fire-fuel loads (Campbell, 1964; Salvati et al., 2020). Yet these communities have been systematically marginalised by modernisation, rural policy neglect, and a wildfire management paradigm that invests billions in suppression technologies while ignoring voices and practices of the very people whose knowledge constitutes Greece’s most effective, lowest-cost, nature-based fire prevention.

This project places pastoral community voice at its centre. Working with the Livestock Cooperative of Thracian Lambs—whose membership includes descendants of traditional transhumant pastoral communities—in the region devastated by the 2023 Evros fire, we co-produce with community members a ‘regenerative service supply chain’ framework: a governance model that formally integrates traditional pastoral knowledge with scientific evidence to reconnect grazing, commercial production, and wildfire resilience. Theoretically, the project bridges wildfire science, supply chain governance (Gereffi et al., 2005; Pagell and Shevchenko, 2014), and commons theory (Ostrom, 1990; De Angelis, 2017) by introducing concept of regenerative service supply chains: governance structures that internalise ecosystem restoration through community-embedded cooperative institutions rather than external regulation. It further advances co-production scholarship(Jasanoff, 2004) by demonstrating how civic epistemologies can be reconstructed to revalue marginalised pastoral knowledge within policy frameworks. The methodology centres on knowledge co-production (Miller and Wyborn, 2020), participatory mapping where community members overlay their experiential knowledge onto GPS/GIS grazing data, and financial-econometric modelling. Outputs include journal article, community co-produced policy brief, and transferable model for amplifying marginalised pastoral voices in Mediterranean fire governance.