Presentation short abstract

Ewa Domanska describes the ‘non-absent past’ as a past that refuses to go away. I highlight the continued struggles over resource access and economic opportunity across generations. Seeing history as a ‘non-absent past’, reveal how the transformative biodiversity economy fail to disrupt coloniality.

Presentation long abstract

Processes of value chain upgrading in biodiversity-based economies often result in the displacement of traditional users of non-timber forest products. Over time, these forest products have been reshaped by scientific and industrial revolutions and by sustainable development agendas that privilege scientific authority, market logics, and environmentalism aligned with capitalist interests - often at the expense of other forms of biodiversity economies. Although marginalized actors such as biodiversity and knowledge custodians have been formally recognized as key participants in biodiversity value chains ‘only’ since the late 1980s and early 1990s, efforts to include them frequently fail to dismantle entrenched access hierarchies or to restore the sovereignty lost under colonial and apartheid regimes. As a result, inclusion initiatives overlook silences, erasures, ongoing harms, material residues, and nonhuman actors that could otherwise illuminate transformative possibilities. Drawing on qualitative interviews, ethnographic archival analysis, and engaged scholarship, this paper shows that the honeybush sector, built around an endemic tea plant Indigenous to South Africa, mirrors these patterns of displacement and implements interventions that ultimately fail to disrupt coloniality in the biodiversity economy. Instead, such interventions often reproduce the hierarchies that historically excluded Colored, Black, and Indigenous South Africans from land, epistemic authority, and economic benefits associated with honeybush. Positioning history as a present past, the paper examines these hierarchies and forms of value-chain displacement, centering the generational voices of harvesters, cooperatives, and honeybush tea makers to identify pathways for restoring traditional users’ sovereignty and advancing economic justice in policy and in practice.