Decolonial environmental justice in landscape restoration

This chapter presents ways of enhancing justice in international landscape restoration. Departing from the three-dimensional environmental justice framework, we draw from decolonial and indigenous justice perspectives, placing particular attention on epistemic justice, relational ontology, self-determination, and self-governance. Current international landscape restoration is embedded in (neo)colonial and neoliberal protection efforts, which risk injustice, violence, and oppression; including denying, ignoring and/or erasing local epistemologies, politics, and histories; and weakening local people’s rights and access to territories and livelihoods. Major barriers to effective, just, and equitable landscape restoration include: (i) prioritizing global over local knowledge systems, logics, and politics; (ii) targeting small-scale over large-scale drivers of land degradation; (iii) offshoring burdens onto local peoples; and (iv) relying on state authority and institutional structures, thereby bypassing customary and indigenous authorities. We propose a set of questions and conditions for policymakers and scholars to reflect upon when designing and analyzing landscape restoration efforts.

Sustainable and fair forest and land restoration: Balancing goals, interests, and trade-offs

The chapter synthesizes the findings of the 11 chapters of this book and situates them in current debates on forest restoration and related literature. It explores forest restoration histories and trends; summarizes projections of what can be expected of future forest restoration; discusses the goals, costs, and actual and potential social, economic, and environmental benefits of forest restoration; and estimates how likely it is that benefits will be achieved in practice. The chapter deliberates on international, national, and local restoration governance, including how international restoration governance takes shape, how it relates to other international processes, and how it links to national and subnational forest restoration governance. The chapter, furthermore, discusses fairness and justice of local level governance. It ends by summarizing the major challenges of forest restoration and suggests how they might be overcome, reflecting on the best ways to translate the global restoration project into feasible pathways of doing restoration in a just and sustainable manner.

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