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Paper short abstract

The concept of resilience has witnessed a marked rise in forest policy and management discourses. Drawing on an ethnography of the Dutch State Forestry Agency, this contribution analyzes the political and more-than-human dimensions of efforts to promote forest resilience.

Paper long abstract

European forests have become focal points of intensifying hopes, economic speculation, and green ambitions (Konczal and Asselin 2025), even as they suffer the compound effects of human encroachment, pollution, and accelerating global warming. In response, national and supranational actors, including the EU in its Forest Strategy for 2030, position forest resilience as a key policy imperative, calling for sustained investment in forests’ capacity to recover from or adapt to stressors while continuing to deliver multiple ‘ecosystem functions’.

Yet resilience is a fraught horizon. As an essentially contested concept (Grove 2018), it generates persistent management and governance challenges (Nikinmaa et al. 2023) and foregrounds deeply political questions about how forests should be valued, managed, and related to. This contribution intervenes in these debates by critically examining what resilience does and how it is mobilized within a forestry organization operating at the intersection of competing interests and sharply divergent conceptions of forest value.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among foresters employed by the Dutch State Forestry Agency, this article traces how resilience became adopted as a guiding principle while also analyzing its enactment in highly situated management practices, including planting and felling. I argue that resilience operates as a multispecies project that both depends on neoliberal imaginaries of management and care and requires ongoing tinkering with more-than-human relations. As resilience is emerging as a promissory horizon across diverse forest worlds, this analysis foregrounds more-than-human valuations as central to contemporary resilience imaginaries and pushes scholarship on the state–forest nexus in new analytical directions.