Presentation short abstract

This research shows how different forms of labour shape engagements with the forest in Bahía Málaga. Logging creates tactile, affective knowledge, while conservation monitoring reifies it. On the green frontier, loggers-turned-monitors use bureaucratic labour to assert claims and agency.

Presentation long abstract

What happens when the forest you have frequented for decades gains importance because it stores something called carbon? How does this affect the way you engage with it, while instead of cutting trees, you measure their diameter? Drawing from ethnographic research in the Colombian Pacific, this research addresses these questions by tracing how two forms of labor, logging and conservation monitoring, enact different forest landscapes within the same geographical coordinates. In Bahia Malaga, logging has been practiced for generations, cultivating tactile and socially embedded relationships with individual trees, species, and landscapes. Therefore, logging can be conceptualized as a form of affective labor (Hardt and Negri, 2000) that relies on situated knowledge and moral economies of reciprocity and obligation. In contrast, over the last decade, conservation monitoring has introduced a new type of waged, extractive labor, enacted through reporting, photographing, and generating data for NGOs and state agencies. Even when performed by former loggers, these labor arrangements position them as producers of verification, reifying the forest as an object of surveillance and mediating their agency through institutional protocols and technological oversight. This research analyzes how, even within these constraints, loggers-turned-monitors mobilize counterpowers through performative conservation. By skillfully performing bureaucratic requirements, producing verifiable data, and meeting institutional expectations, they assert territorial claims, demonstrate stewardship, and ensure continued funding for local livelihoods. This analysis illustrates how green labor regimes simultaneously alienate, reorganize, and create spaces for agency, reshaping human forest relations and the production of value in the forest frontier.