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.

This Panel has 6 pending paper proposals.
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