Presentation short abstract

We examine how long-term tree-planting interventions intersect with people’s everyday lives to better understand the diverse values and meanings derived from these landscapes, and the lessons it holds for the future of restoration practice.

Presentation long abstract

In the backdrop of ambitious international goals, forest restoration has emerged as an important policy agenda, along with the emergence of a range of different (and often competing) definitions and practices. However, in several countries such as India, landscape-level interventions have had a longer, contentious history that strongly influences contemporary ways of pursuing ecosystem interventions and future imaginaries of restoration.

Macro narratives tend to focus on the social impact of such long-term ecosystem interventions in terms of livelihoods or other limited aspects of non-material costs and benefits. However, not many studies examine the concrete ways in which people’s ‘everyday’ lived realities are shaped and reshaped through these interventions, or what this means for how they relate to the landscapes they are embedded in.

Using a case study of long-term tree-planting from Himachal Pradesh, India, we examine how people’s values and place-based relationships with the landscape have evolved over time, and how their hopes for the future of restoration are intertwined with broader life needs. Drawing from feminist political ecology, we emphasize the importance of looking at the ‘everyday’ – the practice of daily life – to uncover complex ways in which seemingly mundane experiences are tied to broader socio-ecological and political processes. Deconstructing scalar boundaries to examine the ‘local’, while recognizing interconnections across scale, helps render visible aspects often overlooked in analysis.

By foregrounding these lived experiences rooted in values and processes of meaning-making, this work seeks to advance understanding on what a just, people-centred restoration practice may look like.