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.