By responding to the climate solutions proposed by local women around the world, funders can catalyze long-term change that benefits the environment and entire communities.
Full-merged PDF also available in Gender and Climate Change : evidence and experience
This Special Section explores the plurality of professional practice in the environment and development sector, and centers the possibilities this offers for more transformative and just futures. We bring together and foreground a uniquely (feminist) political ecology perspective on those working in environment and development, centering power and politics as a necessary component of political ecology as ‘hatchet’, and unpacking the often-stereotyped category ‘professionals’, extending solidarity and care to them as a necessary component of political ecology as ‘seed.’ Each of the eight articles in this Special Section offers their own version and vision of a political ecology of professional practice, articulating and evidencing a plurality of practices, perceptions and politics among the professionals they engage with. They bring to the fore the contradictory positions some professionals find themselves in, and the ways in which structural factors limit their opportunities for engaging in or promoting transformative change. They also highlight the importance of sharing ideas and practices, both in creating tensions in the workplace, but also as offering opportunities for learning and doing things differently. With regards to possibilities for more transformative and just futures, the articles may be read as both disheartening and hope-ful. Whilst the limits of individual agency are a source of despondency, it is in the coming together and collective efforts of individuals that hope emerges. The everyday ‘implicit activism’ of some professionals is amplified and accelerated when others learn of/from them and join with them, and when care is centered in these relationships and actions, the emotional labor is shared and thus the ultimate cause is better supported. Political ecologists have an important role to play in creating new or engaging with existing collective efforts that actively pursue more transformative and just futures.
This study focuses on the impacts of decentralisation on forests and estate crops in the original districts of Kampar and Indragiri Hulu, located in Riau Province, Sumatra, Indonesia. The research was conducted during 2000, preceding the beginnings of decentralisation in January 2001, with a brief follow-up to March of that year. It was important to chart attitudes to decentralisation at provincial level, as well as examine the deconcentration of the regional office of the Jakarta-based Ministry of Forestry and Estate Crops. The demands for fibre of the two immense pulp and paper companies (RAPP and Indah Kiat) was analysed on a province-wide basis. Both of the original districts were recently subdivided: Kampar became three, adding Rokan Hulu and Pelalawan, while Indragiri Hulu was halved to add Kuantan Singingi. The existence of these new entities, struggling to create separate infrastructure and administrations, has complicated the decentralisation process. Much of Indragiri Hulu is occupied by Bukit Tigapuluh National Park and its buffer zone, with many stakeholders and conflicts over illegal logging, while Kuantan Singingi has large areas under pulp plantations. Kampar and Rokan Hulu are dominated by oil palm, the plantations’ occupancy of the land being contested by local populations. Pelalawan still has natural timber, the swamp forests of the sparsely populated lower Kampar basin, but is also the headquarters of RAPP in the rapidly expanding centre of Pangkalan Kerinci. The study found that during 2000, the most serious impact on the forests was a result of political reformation and the economic crisis, with the Soeharto government’s rules being ignored and timber being cut for its quick return under conditions of high demand. Depressed rubber prices gave further impetus to forest clearing. After decentralisation, despite greatly increased available income in the districts, serious environmental and social problems remained to be tackled. While local pride was a positive outcome, signs of both xenophobia and a rush to develop at all costs were worrying aspects.
Since 2009, CIFOR has conducted a multi-donor funded Global Comparative Study on REDD+ (GCS-REDD+) in 10 countries (Indonesia, Brazil, Bolivia, Cameroon, Peru, Tanzania, Vietnam, DR Congo, Nepal and Mexico). The project began as a four-year global research study on first-generation REDD+ demonstration and readiness activities and has since expanded to address a number of related topics, including multilevel governance in REDD+ benefit sharing and land use decisions.
REDD+ is a multilevel process, and issues of scale, power and politics apply to both land use decisions and the institutions set up as part of REDD+ and other initiatives aimed at improving landscape governance. The nature and extent of multilevel communication and coordination influence the legitimacy of the institutions and processes established. It is thus necessary to analyze the political and economic challenges and opportunities behind technical processes such as Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) systems.
This occasional paper focuses on Mexico’s approach to REDD+ MRV and the interplay between national and state levels. It aims to increase understanding about the interests and levels of understanding of the different actors involved in REDD+ MRV, why their visions vary, how coordination functions across actors and scales and the underlying factors that affect it. The paper identifies challenges and opportunities and provides insights on how the process can be improved to create a multilevel REDD+ MRV system that responds to the different needs and interests of national, state and local actors. The lessons from Mexico are also relevant for other countries engaged in this process.
The urgency of restoring ecosystems to improve human wellbeing and mitigate climate and biodiversity crises is attracting global attention. The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021–2030) is a global call to action to support the restoration of degraded ecosystems. And yet, many forest restoration efforts, for instance, have failed to meet restoration goals; indeed, they worsened social precarities and ecological conditions. By merely focusing on symptoms of forest loss and degradation, these interventions have neglected the underlying issues of equity and justice driving forest decline. To address these root causes, thus creating socially just and sustainable solutions, we develop the Political Ecology Playbook for Ecosystem Restoration. We outline a set of ten principles for achieving long-lasting, resilient, and equitable ecosystem restoration. These principles are guided by political ecology, a framework that addresses environmental concerns from a broadly political economic perspective, attending to power, politics, and equity within specific geographic and historical contexts. Drawing on the chain of explanation, this multi-scale, cross-landscapes Playbook aims to produce healthy relationships between people and nature that are ecologically, socially, and economically just – and thus sustainable and resilient – while recognizing the political nature of such relationships. We argue that the Political Ecology Playbook should guide ecosystem restoration worldwide. © 2021
We address two aspects of forest lives—violence and care—that are central to forest outcomes but often invisible in mainstream discussions on forests. We argue that questions of violence and care work in forests open up debates about what forests are, who defines them, and how. We draw primarily on feminist work on forestry, violence, and care to examine the gendered nature of forest conflicts and the ‘quiet politics’ of resistance to violence grounded in the everyday work of care that are crucial to understanding forests and their governance. We show how varied practices of resistance to violence and injustice are grounded in cooperative action of care and are an intrinsic part of shaping and regenerating forests. We highlight the importance of close attention to seemingly mundane actions rooted in people’s daily lives and experiences that shape forests.
This article examines the meeting of local and national reconstruction priorities in the wake of Peru’s internal war (officially, 1980-2000). I focus on the impact of the state’s extractivism-led agenda on indigenous Asháninka people’s projects of remaking themselves into Asháninka sanori (‘real Asháninka people’). Taking an Asháninka sanori-centred analysis of their experience of war and post-war violence, I propose an approach to understanding the impact of mainstream reconstruction efforts on survivors that centres on the latter’s articulations of personhood. This approach, possible through ethnographic engagement, sets anthropology at the forefront of the necessary rethinking of mainstream reconstruction interventions to foster approaches that are supportive of survivors’ priorities. The article explores a continuum of violence through war and extractivism that is undoing the networks of relations through which a group of survivors constitute themselves as people and communities and set their aspirations for the future.
This chapter identifies key trends in International Forest Governance1 (IFG) over the last decade. The trends are analysed through a combined lens of political ecology and political economy that considers how the shifting coalitions of actors, interests, ideas, and institutions in IFG have intersected with broader political and economic trends across global and regional scales, and how these international dynamics interact with different national and local contexts. Overall, we find that IFG continues to expand in scope and complexity to address an increasingly wide range of forest-related environmental, social, and economic priorities. At the same time, it faces ongoing contentions over who writes the rules, for what purpose, and for whose benefit. In general, we see a growing expansion of market-based approaches, in tandem with the adoption of increasingly ambitious global performance targets and the financialization of forest values. These trends exist in tension with efforts to decentralize and devolve forest and land rights to Indigenous peoples and local communities. One key trend at the global level is the expansion of decision-making on forests within institutions, agreements, and processes outside the forestry sector. This includes a ‘climatization’ of forest policy within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), for example through the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) mechanism, as well as the growth of public and private markets for forest carbon. Largely in parallel, it includes rising ambitions under the United Nations (UN) Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to halt biodiversity loss and expand protected areas while protecting Indigenous rights. At the same time, other institutions, agreements, and processes have aimed expressly to bridge sectoral divides, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the promotion of landscape approaches in the public and private sector as a strategy for integrating the governance of forest, agriculture, climate, and other sectors. While these various global initiatives often struggle to reach consensus on binding commitments and finance, an increasing array of actors have turned to regional, bilateral, and unilateral approaches to pursue their particular interests among smaller ‘coalitions of the willing’. This is observed within and across the Global North and South. This bypassing of international negotiation has recently gained momentum with the passage of the European Union’s (EU) Deforestation Regulation 2023/1115 (EUDR). The EUDR bans the import of forest risk commodities such as palm oil and soy unless due diligence is demonstrated that they are deforestation-free, regardless of whether the deforestation is legal according to the laws of the producing country. In other words, the EU aims to leverage its large market share to stop deforestation without the need for agreement from non-EU countries on whether and how this goal should be prioritized and achieved. In terms of outcomes, there is some evidence of decreasing global rates of tropical deforestation, but also a rising sense of crisis over climate change, biodiversity loss and increasing social and economic inequalities (McDermott et al., 2022). IFG has failed to transform the power dynamics driving these crises (Brockhaus et al., 2021; Delabre et al., 2020). Yet, as was noted over a decade ago in the 2010 “Embracing Complexity” report on IFG (Rayner et al., 2010) may still be the best hope, in that the wide diversity of actors, ideas, and institutions expands the possibilities for positive change and transformation through the co-creation and sharing of power, benefits, and knowledge, both within and beyond IFG.
Data and information are central to policy processes, as they frame the policy problem, the design and the implementation of policy, and evaluation of policy impacts. Better data and information infrastructure is expected to lead to better policies and outcomes, for example, by enabling transparent decision making and enhancing capacity and accountability. However, the collection, selection, representation, framing and application of data are not merely technical and apolitical procedures, but are dependent on the interests represented in the policy processes they aim to inform. Social scientists have pointed to the “politics of numbers” and their effects on forests and trees and on the people relying on them, as well as on those involved in their measurements. We use the case of the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) international initiative and focus on the central aspect of understanding drivers of deforestation and measures of REDD+ performance to unpack the politics of policy processes. Data and information are socially constructed, and their interpretations are shaped by the contexts in which they emerge. Dominant beliefs in the transformative power of new data and technologies cannot explain why, often, new information does not translate into policy change and action to halt deforestation. Technological advances in making new and ever larger amounts of data available for analysis are a necessary yet insufficient condition for changing the business as usual in deforestation. Through openness, reflexivity and the tackling of silences in data and information related to the global political economy of deforestation the scientific community can make a key contribution to more equitable policy change.
Forest and land fires are among the major catastrophic events that occur in Indonesia. They are a major cause of deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions. Their multiple sources are most diverse and root in nature and society. The immediate fire effects directly and the long-term landscape ecosystem degradations indirectly cause major and persisting and serious problems of public health and ecosystem service. Smoke haze from the forest and land fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan in 2015 caused significant environmental and economic losses in Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. We describe the different types of land uses and land cover where fires and smoke haze took place, and how local politics have affected fire use from 2001 to 2017. We calculated hot spots from satellite imageries as proxies for fire occurrences and applied regression analysis to understand the link between fire and local politics in Sumatra and Kalimantan. The results show that the greatest frequency of hot spots occurred in wood and oil palm plantations and logging concessions (47%), followed by conservation areas (31%) and community land (22%). Local elections involve land transactions, and fires were used as a cheap way to increase the land value. The use of fire as means of land clearing was strongly influenced by local politics. Their frequency and abundance obviously increased about a year prior to local elections. The reasons behind the correlation need to be understood so that appropriate incentives and sanctions can be put in place and deter political leaders from using fire as an incentive to their advantage.