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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how power, decision-making and knowledge intersect with climate justice in forest governance. Using governmentality and decolonial frameworks, it examines top-down approaches and colonial legacies, while exploring co-production’s potential to foster just climate governance.

Paper long abstract

Forests play a crucial role in mitigating and adapting to climate change and climate rationales have increasingly shaped forest governance. However, technocratic policy responses, from community to global frameworks and mechanisms, have been plagued by challenges, including power inequities both within and across national contexts.

This conceptual paper examines how global climate rationales and policies get translated at ‘local’ levels through knowledge paradigms and decision making processes in forest governance. The first section examines structural critiques of climate governance that surface injustices, including the disparity between the responsibility for climate change and the harms experienced. In this context, climate knowledge is framed as a discursive practice that extends power, categorising and ordering complex local realities in ways that can reinforce hegemonic systems. Further, decolonial perspectives that draw on Foucault's governmentality expose how post-colonial power structures perpetuate inequities in forest governance. At the same time, this section points to the limitations of top-down, technocratic approaches and the role of informal, contextual dynamics in shaping climate outcomes, drawing on Scott’s critique of high modernism.

The second section turns to co-production frameworks, examining their transformative potential. By synthesising insights from environmental governance and development studies, the paper critically examines the potential of co-production to challenge entrenched knowledge hierarchies, integrate diverse knowledge systems, and promote equitable decision-making. By interrogating the intersections between equity, knowledge, and power, the paper argues that locally led and co-produced forest governance models hold potential for transformative justice, provided they challenge colonial legacies and prioritise procedural, distributive, and cultural equity.