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Across contemporary China, city governments are unevenly territorializing peri‐urban villagers’ land and housing by creating new urban ecological conservation sites. I analyze this emerging form of what I call ‘ecological territorialization’ through three interrelated spatial practices: comprehensive urban–rural planning, peri‐urban ‘ecological migration’, and the distribution of institutional responsibility for conservation site financing, construction and management. Detailing this triad of territorializing practices renews attention to the relationship between conservation classifications that justify state intervention, uneven displacements of people from rural land and housing, and site‐specific capitalizations that collectively consolidate urban government control over rural spaces. These practices emerge stochastically as state, private, and semi‐state institutions capitalize on conservation projects in the context of legally and constitutionally underdefined land use rights and ecological land designations. In the current post‐socialist moment of urban ‘greening’, these practices are key to producing frontiers of land‐based accumulation and extending local state control across the peri‐urban fringe. Urban ecological enclosures not only remake city‐level state power but also shape rural people's relationships to land, labor and housing.

This article discusses methodological adaptations to participatory methods for reflexive environmental management. Reflexive approaches to research methods as process, this article contends, can elucidate social dynamics that standard sampling frames and rote procedures may elide. This argument is supported through a discussion of key insights from scholarship about participatory research methods, as well as auto-reflections on methodical adaptations undertaken while conducting photovoice research on environmental management in peri-urban villages of Southwest China. Reflexive adaptations to participatory methods discussed in this paper include ethnographic attention to forms of refusal, suspended participation, and individual interviews with and without visual aids. These methodological adaptations highlight relations of power between researchers and participants, as well as amongst participants. They also highlight diverse social needs and uneven environmental management processes. Although reflexive approaches to participatory methods are key to producing more widely representational findings and socially just sustainability practices, they are not a panacea for universal inclusivity. Reflexive methodological adaptations have their own limitations and introduce new power relations between participants and researchers. The article concludes with a discussion of how reflexive methodological adaptations bear on research praxis. In particular, the conclusion highlights how reflexive adaptations to research methods are crucial to socially just environmental management and sustainability practices.