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Presentation short abstract

Preservation of The Market has superseded forest conservation as a global policy priority. At climate COP30, the carbon trading industry rejected UNFCCC experts' more scientifically stringent rules in favor of weak rules for 'nature-based' forest conservation that would preserve the industry itself.

Presentation long abstract

The ostensible goal of conserving tropical forests has long driven global environmental policy discourse. At the core of policy models for 'saving the Amazon' promoted in the UNFCCC by World Bank experts is the idea that forest conservation is possible insofar as it is made profitable enough to attract billions in private capital. This market-centric thinking has given rise to a carbon trading industry: agencies and companies that manage markets in carbon offsets and biodiversity credits and themselves depend upon such trading. Transnational trade in offsets is further justified by the theory that climate investments in the global South are a global conservation bargain. This approach has already failed: CDM and REDD+ projects financed by offset sales have achieved neither conservation or decarbonization gains nor substantial transfers of funds. The voluntary carbon market is in trouble, undermined by its own contradictions. Nevertheless, in the recent run-up to COP30, the carbon trading industry successfully pushed for weakened rules to support “nature based solutions” that would preserve the industry, rejecting more scientifically stringent rules proposed by the UNFCCC expert panel. Their arguments illustrate how preservation of “the market” has come to supersede preservation of forests as a policy priority. Those most vulnerable to losses from offsetting projects – local and indigenous communities, as well as governments in the global south – are portrayed as the main beneficiaries of transnational carbon trading, making the “opportunity to participate in the market” the prize for which low-income communities and debt-burdened states are urged to compete.

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Presentation short abstract

Emerging initiatives focusing on “greening deforestation” in Argentina’s Dry Chaco highlight the importance of discussing how ecomodernist sustainability discourses recast native forests as replaceable, legitimizing extractivism under renewed developmental logics.

Presentation long abstract

Argentina’s Dry Chaco Forests have been long dismissed as “unproductive”, a view rooted in colonial imaginaries that portray native forests as obstacles to progress. This historical framing has justified repeated attempts to convert this region into an agricultural and livestock frontier over the past century. This paper examines emerging initiatives that signal new forms of “greening deforestation” in the Chaco province: a group of ideas, projects and policies as part of development discourses that increasingly suggest that slow-growth native forests are replaceable by allegedly more productive and equally sustainable land uses. Drawing on political ecology, we analyse how these initiatives mobilize ecomodernist narratives to legitimize ongoing and future extractive activities. We argue that these enable the upcoming conversion of native forests into forest monoculture plantations, renewable-energy enclaves, artificial carbon-sequestration infrastructures, and “circular economy” schemes based on deforestation byproducts –processes that supposedly decouple some ecosystem functions from forest ecologies. The Chaco case reveals broader contradictions at the core of contemporary green extractivism and highlights how “sustainability” discourses are deployed to advance frontier expansion under renewed developmental logics.

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The article shows how Brazil's Cerrado agribusiness uses policy dismantling and digital tools to legalize deforestation while feigning green compliance, amid emerging regulatory frameworks like EUDR, exposing state-private co-responsibility in ecosystem loss.

Presentation long abstract

As the European Union adopts new regulations targeting imports linked to deforestation, we examine how the Brazilian agribusiness sector both relies on and benefits from the legalization of deforestation in the Cerrado while cultivating an image of environmental compliance. Building on Christian Brannstrom’s work (2005) on western Bahia, we first show how the dismantling of environmental protections has intensified through decentralization, emerging through instruments meant to regulate large-scale agriculture, especially concerning deforestation and water use.

Since the 2000s, even as large agricultural enterprises have multiplied their average size and expanded their environmental footprint, successive Bahia administrations have anticipated—and at times deepened—reforms later adopted at the federal level, seeking to attract investors to the agricultural frontier. This dismantling involves not only relaxed rules through exemptions, amnesties, and legal loopholes, but also the simplification of administrative procedures through digitalization and self-declaration, supported by remote monitoring systems based on fragmented data infrastructures.

We then analyze how the digitization of environmental management tools has facilitated the legalization of deforestation, focusing on legal reserve compensation at a regional scale. Finally, we question the “land sparing” narrative, situating it within dynamics of green extractivism that allow agribusiness to promote sustainable intensification while masking its role in driving new deforestation fronts.

These perspectives stem from collaborations among French and Brazilian scholars and highlight the shared responsibility between agribusiness and the State in the accelerating degradation of Brazilian ecosystems, as well as the “biased transparency” produced by digital environmental governance.

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This paper attempts at discussing the debates surrounding 'green growth' in a massively-scaled banana producing region of Assam, India wherein the indigenous groups are routinely bargaining and adapting the global plantation patterns and neo-liberal policies yet time and again faces the brunt of it.

Presentation long abstract

The Daranggiri region, located at Assam, Northeast India is known for its massive banana plantations and carries a historic affiliation with its residing tribes, who have been generationally growing bananas not out of their ‘pesa’ (passion) but has lately turned out their prime ‘jibika’ (livelihood). How these communities have improvised their life-chances from a deprived economy to an industrial monoculture, to now back again at a realisation towards inclusive growth is a trajectory at itself and needs critical appraisals. These Rabha, Garo and Koch communities’ strategic desire to advertise their banana fields as modern ventures of 'green growth' pinpoints to the multi layered, complex dynamics of 'development' and 'developmental notions' and needs negotiations within the global Anthropocene. Perhaps, the transition from ‘green forest lands’ to ‘green banana plantations’ has reached a current saturation point when it started questioning back on, how much green is too much green and how does this green politics subtly divide the erstwhile egalitarian tribal belt? While it is no surprise that with capitalist encounters comes inequities and unequal resource allocations; how these communities faced, responded and dealt with these concerns remains vital interrogations.

Conducting rounds of ethnographic encounter, prolongated fieldwork to expose these layered dilemmas, the paper tries voicing out the alternative narratives from a Global South banana site to the readers; on why these communities verdicts banana monocultures as slow poison and compares penetrative capitalism to cancer cells yet hypothetically themselves generating wealth out of it; both controversial and justifiable at their own rights.

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Sustainable cacao is gaining terrain in the Amazon. Drawing on a case study, we analyse the sustainability claims and how it contrasts farmers’ realities. Social, cultural, and institutional barriers hinder sustainable practices, while vague “sustainability” enables the expansion of a cacao frontier

Presentation long abstract

The increasing global demand for sustainably produced cacao (Theobroma cacao) and fine chocolate has led to a cacao boom in its centre of origin, the Amazon basin. The Peruvian cacao sector is the fastest growing in Latin America. Cacao is widely promoted by state actors and development and conservation agencies as a strategy to counter various societal and environmental threats, including rural poverty, deforestation, and climate change. In this study, we address the main sustainability claims of cacao production systems and, based on semi-structured interviews with smallholder cacao farmers (n=95) and representatives of public and non-governmental organizations (n=44) in Madre de Dios, Peru, we contrast claims with local realities. We’ve analysed three ‘myths’: cacao as a deforestation strategy; sustainable cacao through agroforestry; and high-quality cacao by means of fine flavour varieties and certification. We found a clear contrast in what is promoted and local realities with a number of social-cultural factors and the institutional environment that form barriers to smallholders adopting sustainable cacao production systems. We argue that the loose definition of ‘sustainable’ cacao allows organisations to implement low-diversity cacao plantations and cacao projects that challenge the resilience of smallholders livelihood and forest protection, thereby contributing to the expansion of the cacao commodity frontier in biodiverse regions.

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Nepal’s community forestry is presented as a story of success, but its ‘scientific’ management has failed to deliver outcomes. Singular focus on technical forestry led to declining biodiversity and dismissing local needs. We suggest reducing state control and empowering people in decision making.

Presentation long abstract

Nepal’s community forestry is typically presented as a story of success. Its management has been built on scientific forestry ideology, with an imperative to make forestry outcomes achievable through management that involves measurement, calculation and regulating forest yield. Drawing on a critical review of over five decades of Nepal’s forest policies and ethnographic field studies this research provides insights on how community forest management driven by a scientific forestry framework and global forest priorities have been designed to control forest outcomes. However, the desire to achieve controllability has not generated anticipated outcomes; rather it has resulted in uncontrollability and subsequent uncertainty. The singular, official focus on expanding forest-cover has come at the expense of local needs and nourishing biodiversity within the forest, thereby changing the character of forests in Nepal.

The operational plan prepared for forest user groups to guide the forest management is a highly bureaucratic exercise, rigid in design but discretionary in practice, which often restricts communities from the management and use of the forests. As a result, forests are gradually turning into either monoculture timber stands or unmanaged, dense ‘jungle’ with reduced biodiversity and local benefits. Further, the emergent forest ecology has created new uncertainties with the decline in local water sources and increased human–wildlife encounters. While the communities have come to regret forest management outcomes, authorities appear oblivious to these concerns. We argue for rethinking the process of development and implementation of operational plans towards making them more operable by reducing technical and bureaucratic control.

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This research traces the complex geographic, social, and political contours of REDD+ in Guatemala, and how, ultimately, the program was molded by the interests of a kleptocratic elite driving expanding agro-extractivism while vulnerable forest communities were rendered invisible.

Presentation long abstract

REDD+ is an international program focused on using financial incentives to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, exemplifying the trend towards market-based conservation and climate initiatives. This research examines the development of REDD+ in Guatemala in its many facets, from the projects seeking to sell carbon credits on the private market, to the decade-long process for the country to be deemed “REDD Ready,” to the creation of the Emissions Reduction Program to receive results-based payments under the World Bank’s Carbon Fund. Pairing contextual analysis with detailed content and discourse analysis of REDD+ documents, along with semi-structured interviews with public officials, NGOs, and affected communities, the research explores the geographic, social, and political contours of REDD+ in Guatemala. Building on extensive research on the complex effects of forest carbon initiatives, findings demonstrate the challenges in making carbon a marketable commodity, and the simplistic social ‘reality’ cultivated for compliance with international safeguard policies. Ultimately, Guatemala’s Emissions Reduction Program did not address the drivers of deforestation—but it did have other productive effects. Findings explore how politics and power shaped the program in the interests of the oligarchic elite and served to legitimate the State’s climate program, while rendering invisible communities who posed potential challenges to their political project. The research concludes with reflection on the synergies between market-based climate initiatives like REDD+ and the interests of kleptocratic groups driving deforestation and large-scale agro-extractivism, and the implications for environmental protection and the rights of marginalized communities.

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Mining for transition minerals (TM) threatens to replace forests and displace forest-connected communities. This paper examines the role of land rights in mitigating these threats, considering which land tenure types best protect communities and forests in areas where TM mining is taking place.

Presentation long abstract

Forests have long been highly contested spaces where the rights and needs of forest-connected communities exist in tension with different users and uses. These tensions are now mounting as the world pursues a transition to a more sustainable future through rapidly expanding decarbonisation agendas, including mining for transition minerals, renewable energy development and carbon sequestration. Somewhat counterintuitively, these activities often replace forests and displace forest-connected communities in the name of sustainability.

Recent research has explored the socio-environmental impacts of decarbonisation agendas for forest-connected communities, including land degradation, water and air pollution, loss of livelihood and displacement. Our research asks whether land rights help mitigate these impacts. Drawing on preliminary findings from mix methods research in Mexico, we consider whether land rights help balance trade-offs between the rights and needs of forest-connected communities and Mexico’s decarbonisation agenda. Specifically, we ask which type of land tenure best protect forest-connected communities and forests in areas where critical minerals mining and exploration is taking place. In cases where forests are being subsumed by critical mineral development, we consider whether different types of land tenure shape people’s agency to push for more just outcomes for themselves and forests.

This research is being carried out by the Observatory for Forests and Just Transitions, an international and transdisciplinary research group, which has been established to research the role land rights play in a just transition to a decarbonised future through large-scale geospatial and socioeconomic analyses and in-depth qualitative case studies in Mexico, Brazil and Ghana.