Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how Nature-based Solutions in Chiapas and Pará interact with rural inequalities and political economies. Comparing agroforestry programmes, it shows how governance, funding, and local contestation shape autonomy, conflict, and alternatives to market-driven climate policy.

Presentation long abstract

Nature-based Solutions (NbS) have become central to climate and conservation policy, yet in frontier regions of the Global South they often reproduce uneven ecological exchange by embedding rural livelihoods within market-oriented logics, extractivist development agendas, and donor-driven conditionalities. This paper draws on early findings from a comparative study of agroforestry interventions in Chiapas, Mexico, and Pará, Brazil, to examine how NbS projects are designed, governed, and contested. Both regions—marked by deforestation, agrarian inequality, and strong Indigenous and traditional farming systems—have become testing sites for state- and donor-led NbS programmes such as Sembrando Vida in Mexico and Florestas Produtivas in Brazil. While framed as pro-poor climate solutions, these interventions intersect with land conflicts, large-scale infrastructure development, fraught rural political economies, and broader agricultural frontiers shaped by export-driven (green) extractivism and logistics to promote it.

Drawing on policy analysis and interviews, we show how institutional arrangements, funding mechanisms, and civil society participation approaches shape communities’ autonomy, programme legitimacy, and the reproduction or disruption of rural inequalities. NbS interventions emerge as contested terrains where agribusiness actors, municipal governments, and traditional communities clash over meanings of “restoration” and resources for environmental protection, often normalizing new forms of conflict, enclosure, and top-down territorial planning. By foregrounding local perceptions and participatory action research, the paper contributes to debates on counter-practices that strengthen community protagonism, accountability, and alternative agroecology models beyond market-oriented approaches, as well as reflecting on the conditions to challenge the development patterns driving the climate crisis at different scales.