- Convenors:
-
Grace Wong
(Stockholm Resilience Centre)
Maria Brockhaus (Helsinki University)
- Format:
- Panel
Format/Structure
The session will be organized with 4 paper talks, and a workshop-structured discussion session with the audience.
Long Abstract
Forest frontiers are spaces of contestation where state authorities, private sector actors, conservationists, development actors, indigenous peoples and local communities, and other members of civil society jostle with their divergent interests. Yet, there are persistent power imbalances among the actors and persistent inequalities in the outcomes, often a relic of underlying politics, histories and institutional path dependencies which we term as the ‘infrastructures of inequalities’. Over time, narratives that are used to legitimate dominant interests in the frontier are repeatedly embedded within mainstreamed discourses of sustainable development, green growth or agrarian reform. A moral economy of finance flows and commitments towards ‘ethical’ development often accompany such narratives. Where there are innovative initiatives and policies to foster transformations toward more equitable forest and land use governance, there are also powerful institutions and discourses that attempt to silence alternative proposals and diverse perspectives. Silence have been used – strategically – to delay, undermine and misdirect meaningful policy action. Silence can be violent in redirecting responsibility and blame to those that suffer most from dominant business-as-usual activities. Science as well have silenced by putting forward particular knowledge and understandings, and privileging certain narratives.
This session will focus on the underlying mechanisms that produce and reproduce silence and inequalities in the stories that are told, and highlight how silences can have voice. We highlight papers with novel and mixed-media methods, critical discourse analyses and transdisciplinary approaches, and include different voices and knowledges in examining who is silenced, by whom, and who is using silence as resistance. Recognizing that transformations will require ‘shared spaces’ of multiple ways of knowing, being and doing, our session will include social and political academics, land rights and indigenous activists, and artists from across the Global South and North.
Accepted papers
Presentation short abstract
To advance more more ‘just’ transitions, our analysis of the intersection of land use, climate change and gender indicates that 4 mechanisms (history, geography, expertise and measurement) are at play when silence is produced and producing inequality across the diverse contexts and policies.
Presentation long abstract
Numerous national and international policies related to development, sustainability and green growth have been produced at the intersection of gender, land use and climate change. This intersection however shares a history of often highly unjust outcomes -and opportunities- for people and nature alike.
Current research provides increasingly insights into these policies and their relation to inequality, asking what these policies say, who is problematised, how they come about through which processes, and to the benefit (and burden) of whom. In this paper we argue that more attention is needed to identify where policies at this section have been silent, what is left unproblematized, who are the marginalized and silenced. When aiming at enabling social-ecological just transitions, we need to understand what are the mechanisms that underly these silences to then be able to break with them.
While silence as resistance has been studied more frequently in the literature, we aim to unpack further how silence is coming about when it is reproducing inequality? We take a comparative perspective and building on five seemingly different cases that however all link land with gender and climate policies from Burkina Faso, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Vietnam, we find surprising congruence in how silence is constituted.
Our analysis indicates that four main mechanisms (history, geography, expertise and measurement) are at play when silence is produced and producing inequality across the diverse contexts and policies. Engaging more systematically with silence and the mechanisms that silence, might allow for more ‘just’ transitions.
Presentation short abstract
Our study in Öland, Sweden examines how Swedish national policies and EU finance have ‘silenced’ multifunctional landscapes with farmers’ relational values lost within dominant production values, through critical discursive analyses of policies and media and dialogues with diverse local actors.
Presentation long abstract
The “Mittlandet” in Öland is a heterogeneous mixed landscape of smallholder farming, grazing areas and high biodiversity forests. Continued grazing in wooded grasslands and forest management is a long cultural practice and considered necessary to maintain biodiversity and heritage, but the smallholder mosaics are not aligned with Swedish and EU subsidies that are only targeted for either production or conservation.
We carried out critical discursive analyses of Swedish biodiversity strategy and print media, and examined financial subsidies flowing into the region to identify what types of farming are considered as politically viable in rural landscapes, and what opportunities are available for farmers and other actors to be nature-inclusive in their activities. The dominant policy narrative separates forests and agriculture as distinct systems, where both systems are production spaces for economic profitability, and legitimized as necessary for maintaining biodiversity and cultural heritage.
Through a series of participatory workshops and dialogues for co-producing knowledge and action with the Mittlandet landscape at the core, we examined how diverse actors relate to farming, forests and nature in different ways, as managers, farmers and stewards. The engaged process brought out ‘unusual’ dialogues in how issues of landscape governance are normally discussed and highlighted relational values such as sense of place and care for the Mittlandet. Farmers feel a sense of disquiet that their landscape knowledge, practices and culture remain silenced in policies and subsidies, and practice everyday resistance to counter what is perceived as unjust policies or unnecessary bureaucracies.
Presentation short abstract
We examine social roots of vulnerability to understand farmers' experience, struggle and response to wildlife problem. We find that farmers’ differential experience and struggle to the problem has reshaped traditional social relations and local responses that is creating new sociocultural relations.
Presentation long abstract
Socio-economic and ecological changes are driving new human- wildlife relations in the Himalaya. Certain wildlife are growing in numbers due to some farmers abandoning farmland that is creating new habitats. Others are suffering from wild animals, particularly the monkeys, raiding crops. The problem has now turned into an agrarian crisis which is reproducing vulnerability and inequality among smallholder farmers. We explore social roots of vulnerability to wildlife problems to understand differential experience, struggle and response of different social groups and ways to adapt with the crisis. We draw on Bourdieu’s ‘field of practice’ to examine how rural farmers’ exposure and responses are socio-politically shaped and how new socio-cultural relations emerge. We draw on ethnographic enquiries such as life stories of rural farmers across caste, class and gender-based groups, landscape reading, participant observation and in-depth interviews in the study areas. We argue that the farmer’s differential experience and struggle to deal with wildlife problem has reshaped the traditional social relations based on castes and classes. For instance, households with large parcel(s) of land and off-farm incomes suffer less than the households with smaller land parcels. While economically well-off farmers with disposable income afford to leave some of their land fallow or migrate altogether whereas people with smaller land bear the brunt of it. Some households have also adapted to new cultural practices which were not socially accepted in the past. We argue that vulnerability to wildlife damage is socio-politically produced and local responses often reproduces new socio-cultural relations and inequalities.
Presentation short abstract
This contribution examines how the EU biodiversity strategy’s “strict protection” goal is translated into a national wilderness area target in Germany, and how this translation catalyzed a conflict in the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve Spreewald ('Spreeforest').
Presentation long abstract
The EU biodiversity strategy’s target to expand “strict protection” has travelled quickly into national policy arenas, yet its meaning changes as it moves through governance levels, reaching orest frontiers. This paper examines how the EU biodiversity strategy’s “strict protection” goal is translated into a national wilderness area target in Germany, and how this translation catalyzed a conflict in the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve Spreewald ('Spreeforest'). By combining insights from Critical Discourse Analyses of EU and German Bioviersity Strategies as well as Net-Map and participatory workshop data, I argue that this translation is not technical but political: it privileges particular imaginaries of nature, its protection as well as long-standing land use—while marginalizin others.
This case shows how discursive translation operates through discursive power, using mechanisms such as equivalence-making, responsibilization and depoliticization. While silence was first used as a governance communication strategy, it unintentionally gave space for public outcry, enabling open conflict. This conflict reveals inequalities embedded in institutional path dependencies: whose knowledge counts in defining “wilderness,” which land-use histories are acknowledged as legitimate, and who bears the costs of meeting distantly set targets. The paper contributes to political ecology debates on conservation frontiers by showing how discursive translation and value-mismatches can produce new sites of contestation.
Presentation short abstract
This article synthesizes findings from my Doctoral Dissertation with the same title, a case study of the implementation of the Kigoma REDD+ Test Pilot Project implemented from 2009-2012, from the perspective of Anthropology of Social Change. Plus additional material on National scale corruption.
Presentation long abstract
Implementation of this REDD+ pilot project ignored recommendations to clarify land tenure disputes, yet received little formal condemnation. Even experienced development practitioners have been uncritical.
This illustrates how actors forming networks engaging in questionable legal practices do not see their own actions as corrupt. Therefore, corruption appears very subtly and only becomes apparent in the cases by careful comparison to the moral condemnation from those subjected to the negative consequences of REDD+ implementation, or environmental degradation, after corrupt agro-pastoral land conversion, and triangulation with legal review and interviews with Human Rights lawyers. The case study addresses how the moral economy of corruption manifests through 1) conditional REDD+ payments shaping fragmented actor configurations, power dynamics of predatory authority and accountability relations 2) the justice implications of transnational REDD+ implementation in a post-colonial context and 3) the moral economy of leakage beyond the boundaries of the formally defined project area, incorporating agro-pastoralist conflicts as unanticipated consequences.
These findings have implications for the environmental effectiveness of the REDD+ pilot project, social equity and the livelihoods of those subjected to the project and lastly, efficiency of the REDD+ test payments and biodiversity conservation within the wider landscape. This study indicates severe challenges for the REDD+ mechanism and the technical conditions it requires, along all three axes of effectiveness, equity and efficiency. However, it does demonstrate scope for more carefully developing other kinds of programmes to address the drivers of forest degradation and deforestation observed in the wider study area.
Presentation short abstract
This paper examines how the Batak people in the Batang Toru landscape employ a state of being silent to actualise demands for sharing and draw powerful outsiders involved in a nexus of conservation and extractive projects into a relation of interdependence.
Presentation long abstract
This paper aims to analyse how the Batak people interact with conservation in the midst of an ongoing process of de/frontierisation of their environments and living spaces, exonymically called the Batang Toru landscape. The presence of powerful outsiders—a nexus of extractive and conservation projects that encompasses mineral and energy companies, state forestry agencies, and conservation organisations—has produced messy encounters characterised not only by unequal power relations but also by an inherent contradiction that follows such ignorant interventions. The conservation projects hinge on their ignorance of the chronic injustices faced by the Batak people, adopting state spatial regimes and so-called participatory activities to accomplish the ultimate goal of habitat protection while simultaneously defeating the Batak people. Concomitantly, the Batak people also turn around and productively employ a state of being silent to actualise demands for sharing and hence draw the powerful outsiders into a relation of interdependence. In this process, being silent is often required as an integral part of neutralising outsider power and maintaining possibilities of being in relation with other powerful outsiders. Rooted partly in Batak kinship structures, being silent means not only allowing others to be determinative entities, but also assigning them a newly acquired role as affluent givers by subscribing to newly established moralised relations. This dynamic process of interdependency is key to proposing a relational, rather than negational, understanding of de/frontierisation in a highly contentious landscape such as Batang Toru.
Presentation short abstract
This research examines how campesinos navigate legal liminality, exclusion, and environmental governance in the Colombian Amazon. It shows how state narratives silence local knowledge, while campesino strategies of voice and silence shape more just, grounded visions for forest futures.
Presentation long abstract
In Colombia’s Amazon Forest Reserve, a powerful discourse circulates with bureaucratic certainty: campesinos should not own land in the forest. This moralized statement—echoed by the national government, the far right, and the progressive left—frames campesino presence as illegal, temporary, and environmentally destructive. Yet behind this narrative lies a long history of displacement, state-led colonization, and the systematic erasure of campesino Amazonian citizenship. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation, focus groups, interviews, and participatory mapping, alongside a critical analysis of over fifty years of Colombian agrarian and environmental law and policy, this paper examines how the discourse of “no property in the reserve” operates as an infrastructure of inequality. It legitimizes the exclusion of campesinos who were ignored until the territory became valuable under neoliberal conservation agendas. This exclusion is reinforced by the silencing of campesino claims to belonging, care, and stewardship. This paper listens to stories rarely heard: those of campesinos navigating a moral and legal terrain where their very existence is framed as a problem. Though vocal and politically active, their voices are often muted by state narratives. At the same time, campesino silences function as strategies of endurance, protection, and refusal in a frontier where speaking out can bring danger or dispossession. By examining the intersections of legality, morality, and discourse, this work shows how protectionist narratives reinscribe colonial boundaries over who may inhabit, or claim, the forest, arguing that attending to these silences is essential for more just and plural forms of forest governance and peacebuilding.
Presentation short abstract
Focusing on a Peruvian Amazon community, this presentation examines how Indigenous Peoples’ local decisions challenge dominant global narratives of environmental stewardship. It reflects on moralized binaries, local pressures, and the intersections of Indigeneity and environmental justice.
Presentation long abstract
In recent decades, the visibility and participation of Indigenous Peoples in global environmental forums have grown significantly, reflecting the recognition of their role as exemplary stewards of the ecosystems within their territories. However, this celebrated status can become exclusionary as access to environmental platforms can depend on conforming to this narrative that present all Indigenous actors as protectors of nature. A growing body of academic literature has documented cases in which Indigenous communities challenge these expectations, engaging in environmentally harmful activities that complicate dominant representations.
This presentation will offer preliminary insights from my ongoing doctoral research with an Indigenous community in the Peruvian Amazon whose members—formerly mobilized against large-scale oil palm expansion— have recently started a partnership with the company responsible for deforesting 13,000 hectares of their ancestral territory. Their shift has resulted in political marginalization within the Indigenous organizational structure and has compelled them to establish an autonomous movement in response. Rather than reproducing analytical frames that position Indigenous peoples only as victims of structural conditions, this research explores the heterogeneous motivations, pressures, and aspirations informing the community’s contentious stance.
By examining the various social, economic and political pressures influencing community choice, the study discusses moralized binaries that separate “good” stewards from “failed” Indigenous subjects. Ultimately, the presentation reflects on how these stories—and their silences—invite a critical rethinking of Indigeneity, environmental justice, and power within the Indigenous political system, illuminating the complex political ecologies that arise when global expectations collide with local realities.
Presentation short abstract
Based on 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines how the superfood commercialisation of the aguaje palm fruit (Mauritia flexuosa) is being promulgated through the language of sustainable development and planetary health to promote a “one-world world” (Law 2015).
Presentation long abstract
In the Peruvian Amazon, the aguaje palm fruit (Mauritia flexuosa) is being heralded as the next big superfood. Behind the scenes of several commercialisation efforts, we find multinational corporations, conservation organisations, as well as state institutions (local and foreign aid) working together to try to bring aguaje to the international market. Since the aguaje palms grow in peatland swamps, the logic goes that the commercialisation of aguaje will incentivize rural harvesters to climb instead of cutting down the aguaje palms, customers will have an exciting new product to try, and the carbon-rich swamplands remain undisturbed and the forest remains intact—a win-win scenario for all. Based on 24 months of ethnographic research, this paper examines how the language of sustainable development and planetary health have been harnessed to promote a “one-world world” (Law 2015). The paper presents on the case study of the state government of Loreto’s Proyecto Aguaje scheme, which promised to “reactivate” the post-Covid-19 economy in one of Peru’s poorest regions, and in a country that suffered from some of the highest Covid-19 mortality rates. Given the moral overtures of superfood commercialisation—for harvesters, consumers, and the planet—there is little room for nuance or alternative stories, even as harvesters are targeted as problematic actors and their livelihoods radically reshaped.
Presentation short abstract
This paper explores how Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and Afrodescendant Peoples are responding to climate and biodiversity finance not only through resistance or withdrawal, but also by actively shaping emerging instruments to secure funding that protects land rights and livelihoods.
Presentation long abstract
This paper explores how Indigenous Peoples (IPs), local communities (LCs), and Afrodescendant Peoples (ADPs) are responding to the expansion of climate and biodiversity finance not only through resistance or withdrawal, but also by actively shaping emerging instruments to defend territorial rights and knowledge systems. Frontiers are conceptualized in two ways: as a physical place where conservation and production zones overlap, as well as through the making of ‘new’ commodity frontiers in nascent markets of biodiversity credits and other biodiversity finance regimes, which emerge as market responses to the biodiversity crisis. Drawing on empirical research, we examine how environmental governance interventions, often framed in normative assumptions of sustainability and participation, can reproduce territorial enclosures and control through technocratic forms of measurement and engagement.
IPs, LCs, and ADPs are engaging in diverse political strategies: from silences and protests to visible strategic mobilization such as in Indigenous or community-led funds. Certain groups engage with climate and biodiversity finance on their own terms through Indigenous-led funds that aim to leverage climate and biodiversity finance while pursuing customary governance, land tenure rights, and self-determined priorities. These efforts reflect a dual imperative: securing funding streams to protect lands and livelihoods, while resisting business-as-usual narratives that often accompany mainstream climate and biodiversity finance. Such engagement explores the binary framings of market versus resistance, and reveals the nuanced and often precarious ways IPs, LCs, and ADPs navigate global conservation finance.