Paper short abstract:

Forest Landscape Restoration could impact millions of rural livelihoods but as currently framed risks magnifying existing conservation injustices. We argue that centring social and environmental justice in restoration can enable realisation of its unsettling, transformative potential.

Paper long abstract:

Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) is gaining widespread support as a conservation and development approach, with the UN designating the 2020s 'the Decade of Ecosystem Restoration.' Advocates often proclaim that the approach will produce 'triple wins' - for biodiversity, carbon and human wellbeing.

FLR could impact millions of people, but its justice dimensions remain largely unexamined. Of 228 SCOPUS-indexed papers on FLR published since 2010, only 15 mention justice; none discuss it in detail. FLR literature rarely engages with the socio-political histories shaping present landscapes, with the variations in environmental values arising from these histories, or with how past inequities are 'baked in' to present land management institutions. Participatory decision-making processes are proposed as remedy to these challenges but with minimal attention to historically-produced power relationships. This creates risks that FLR will magnify existing injustices and cause harm to less powerful peoples.

We argue that FLR does have transformative potential from both development and conservation perspectives. But it will only realise that potential if it centres social and environmental justice. This means abandoning 'triple win' narratives, recognising the inevitability of trade-offs, and being transparent about the processes by which those trade-offs are negotiated. We also argue for restoration as a form of healing, drawing on examples of decolonial approaches where restoration has been used to further reparative justice.

We conclude by arguing for a humble restoration, in which past and present harms are explicitly recognised and restoration actions taken to redress these harms in pursuit of more just and sustainable futures.