Tropical forests in the global states system

The purpose of this article is to point to an inherent ambivalence within international society related to tropical forests. As peripheral and often relatively insulated terrestrial spaces, tropical forests have been subject to enduring attempts by state structures to consolidate political authority and their connection to nodes of economic power. However, as they have come to be increasingly degraded and cleared, policy reform agendas have been enacted to promote their conservation. Involving a range of state and non‐state actors at a national and international level, forest policy reform agendas have sought to create a structure of economic incentives aimed at their ‘sustainable management’ and thus their preservation as forests. Paradoxically, a key impact of these evolving agendas has been to further the extension of state power. Arguing that this points to a deep‐seated tension within international society related to the governance of peripheral spaces, it will be suggested that state‐making ambitions have tended to shape and ultimately negate international tropical forest conservation initiatives.     

Gender,Identity and Agency in Philippine Upland Development

Conventional feminist political analysis has considered male interests as historically institutionalized by the state, thereby claiming that women are largely ‘edged out’ in state programmes. By studying a state programme of granting ancestral domain tenurial rights to the Kalanguya in the northern Philippines, this article argues instead that women also edge themselves out. Kalanguya village women have linked with markets and are less interested in tenurial struggles with the state since such struggles underscore their indigeneity and their special role as resource managers, an identity they wish to discard. Men, for their part, attach themselves to the past and identify themselves as being ‘indigenous’ to make claims on land in the present, strategically aligning themselves with the state agenda on sustainable resource management. This article explores perspectives that provide more nuanced understandings of the different ways in which women and men may position and identify themselves as ‘indigenous’ as they engage with state programmes and markets, and argues that, under certain conditions, women through their agency may not be the natural constituency for natural resource management‐related programmes that they are often assumed to be.     

The Changing Regime: Forest Property and Reformasi in Indonesia

This article explores the dominant explanations of the failure of forest management in Indonesia within the public discourse of the late New Order period. Drawing on a review of salient literature and relevant case studies, the major part of the article discusses the underlying historical, institutional and political causes of the failure of the state property regime. By taking a narrow view of the issues, public discourse during the New Order (1966–98) avoided discussion of the structure of property relations and the power relations that supported them. However, the forest fires of 1997–8 and the ensuing ecological crisis have revealed that the forest policy that allocated property rights over vast areas of the nation’s forests to well-connected conglomerates and politico-business families was inequitable and lacked legitimacy. While new legislative initiatives open up possibilities for co-management, the reforms so far barely engage with the underlying structure of property rights. These issues will need to be more thoroughly addressed if Indonesia is to tackle the bitter legacy of the Suharto period.     

Narco-Cattle Ranching in Political Forests

In Central America, drug traffickers are deforesting the region's remaining forests and protected areas through a process known as narco-ganadería, narco-cattle ranching. Drawing on the case study of Laguna del Tigre National Park, this article argues that narco-cattle ranching is a key driver of deforestation in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve. Using ethnographic and remote-sensing methods, we describe narco-cattle ranching's money-laundering practices, its territorial dynamics, and its environmental impacts. We draw on theorisations of “political forests” to explain how drug trafficking organisations transform land use in the reserve, and along the way, remake its ecology, territories and subjects. Our work illustrates that drug policy is inextricably linked to conservation policy in the Americas. More specifically, we argue that community-based resource management improves forest and protected area residents’ abilities to resist drug-trafficking related land use change by strengthening local governance and land tenure regimes.     

Transitions in Payments for Ecosystem Services in Guatemala: Embedding Forestry Incentives into Rural Development Value Systems

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programmes increasingly reflect multiple stakeholder demands and rarely operate in market form. In Guatemala, the earliest forestry incentives — a form of PES — benefited larger landowners and functioned as subsidies for both extractive forest production and ecosystem services. Smallholders and indigenous communal land managers in Guatemala campaigned for PES programmes to meet their needs, leading to the creation of a second programme that focuses on improving rural development, coupled with ecosystem services. This article examines how these historically marginalized groups have used PES as an opportunity to engage with the state and demand embedded development that more strongly reflects their values of forests and their desired relationship with the Guatemalan state. As a result of this activism, these Guatemalan forestry incentives reach smallholders more successfully than PES programmes in many other countries. However, more far-reaching changes in land use are tempered by power imbalances and structural inequalities that are unaddressed and, in fact, reinforced by PES programmes, such as underfunding, narrow conceptions of land ownership, and unequal representation.     

"The Experts Taught Us All We Know": Professionalisation and Knowledge in Nepalese Community Forestry

Environmentalist concerns over the state of Nepal's "fragile forests" resulted in the establishment of Community Forestry projects. These community‐based projects are partnerships between the state and community user groups that invest user groups with a great deal of control over their forests. Project implementation, however, begins with the assumption that users have little prior knowledge of forest management and need to be taught modern silviculture. I examine the extent to which different community members embrace notions of professional forestry materially and symbolically. The development of written management plans, the need for careful accounting records and the promotion of silviculturally based management strategies by District Forest Officers serve to (re)inscribe differences between users based on education and literacy. Which users embrace these discourses and practices and for what purposes lends insight into the workings of neoliberalism and how it is implicated in the reconfiguring of social and power relations within localities and, in this case, the consequences of this for ecological change. It is argued that the promotion of expert knowledge and professional practices in Community Forestry is often used as a somewhat contradictory vehicle for educated elites to retain control over forest management, thus undermining some of the key objectives of the program.     

Gender and environmental struggles: voices from Adivasi Garo community in Bangladesh

Based on an ethnographic field investigation conducted on the matrilineal–matrilocal Garo community of Bangladesh, this article provides a historical account of local environmental struggles to draw attention to the interconnections between gender, environment and sustainable resource management. From a feminist political ecology perspective, the article argues that interacting with traditional culture, forest ecology and changing processes of centric resource governance, gender remains a salient variable in environmental issues. Local contexts of gender dynamics help configuring local people's mode of participation in environmental struggles as well as being the consequence of those struggles. Findings suggest that Garo women and men have sustained gender specific roles and interests through their struggles to ensure control over forest lands and tree resources. Furthermore, they have developed a class-based relationship with forest ecology which must be acknowledged in forest policies.     

Carbon Nullius and Racial Rule: Race,Nature and the Cultural Politics of Forest Carbon in Canada

Abstract: Critical geographers have paid remarkably scant attention to issues of climate change, even less so to forest carbon management policy. Building on geographic debate concerning the ontological production of nature and race, this paper argues that at stake in the climate change debate are not simply questions of energy geopolitics or green production. Also at issue in the climate debate are powerful questions of identity, the national form and race. This paper considers how a particular slice of the climate debate – forest carbon management discourse pertaining to Canada's boreal forest – enacts a political geography of racial difference, one that seeks to accommodate an imagined mode of traditional aboriginal life to the exigencies of global climate change mitigation and, importantly, to a logic of global capital now well into its ecological phase.     

Revisionism Reconsidered: 'Property-owning Democracy' and Egalitarian Strategy in Post-War Britain

Revisionist socialists of the 1950s and 1960s are typicallydepicted as advocates of the ‘Keynesian welfare state’route to economic equality. This article argues that this isan oversimplification: while the revisionists supported thewelfare state, they also aimed to promote equality by redistributingprivate property and expanding social ownership, endorsing anegalitarian version of a ‘property-owning democracy’.The article first discusses the political ideals and calculationsthat motivated the revisionists’ interest in this modelof egalitarian strategy and then examines in turn the threemutually reinforcing strands of policy that this goal generated:greater progressive taxation of wealth; measures to diffuseprivate property ownership and access to marketable skills;and the expansion of novel forms of social ownership.     

Ownership matters: Natural resources property rights and social conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa

Empirical tests of the “resource curse” thesis have provided inconclusive evidence for the claim that natural resource abundance increases the risk of social conflict. The present article argues, based on a novel political economy framework and a new data set, that it is important to analyze how states regulate the access to their natural resources to understand the interrelationship between resources and public resistance against resource extraction arrangements. We claim that international rather than state resource ownership fosters the regional protest potential and overshadows the efficiency gains that foreign investment might create. Especially the siphoning of resource rents to international owners instigates resentment among the local population. Distinguishing between private, public, domestic and international ownership arrangements, we assess the effects of natural resources control rights regimes on state repression using new GIS-based data on diamond and gold mines as well as oil and gas fields in Sub-Sahara Africa. Our multilevel analysis shows that repression as an answer to societal dissent is particularly likely in grids hosting international oil companies. Furthermore, we find that international oil firms further state repression especially under insecure property rights.     

Co‐opting Conservation: Migrant Resource Control and Access to National Park Management in the Philippine Uplands

The history of political and economic inequality in forest villages can shape how and why resource use conflicts arise during the evolution of national parks management. In the Philippine uplands, indigenous peoples and migrant settlers co‐exist, compete over land and forest resources, and shape how managers preserve forests through national parks. This article examines how migrants have claimed lands and changed production and exchange relations among the indigenous Tagbanua to build on and benefit from otherwise coercive park management on Palawan Island, the Philippines. Migrant control over productive resources has influenced who, within each group, could sustain agriculture in the face of the state's dominant conservation narrative — valorizing migrant paddy rice and criminalizing Tagbanua swiddens. Upon settling, migrant farmers used new political and economic strengths to tap into provincial political networks in order to be hired at a national park. As a result, they were able to steer management to support paddy rice at the expense of swidden cultivation. While state conservation policy shapes how national parks impact upon local resource access and use, older political economic inequalities in forest villages build on such policies to influence how management affects the livelihoods of poor households.     

Russia and China: converging responses to globalization

This article compares the impact of globalization on the political systems and political economy of Russia and China since the beginning of their respective reform periods. Overall, it argues that both should now be viewed within the paradigm of ‘developmental states’. The article first presents some comparative economic statistics on the changes that have taken place. Second, it looks at the converging attitudes of the two regimes towards industrial restructuring and privatization, highlighting the continued role that they both reserve for state direction. This includes an orientation towards national industrial champions. Third, the evolution of policies of both states towards guided democratization are discussed leading to an assessment of the importance of nationalism in their responses to globalization, particularly in the recent doctrine of ‘sovereign democracy’ of Putin's United Russia party. Finally, the article argues that a greater wariness towards western recipes for political and economic development will frame the efforts of both states to construct a more cooperative bilateral relationship.     

State power and protected areas: Dynamics and contradictions of forest conservation in Madhya Pradesh, India

The traditionally coercive and state-controlled governance of protected areas for nature conservation in developing countries has in many cases undergone change in the context of widespread decentralization and liberalization. This article examines an emerging “mixed” (coercive, community- and market-oriented) conservation approach in managed-resource protected areas and its effects on state power through a case study on forest protection in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. The findings suggest that imperfect decentralization and partial liberalization resulted in changed forms, rather than uniform loss, of state power. A forest co-management program paradoxically strengthened local capacity and influence of the Forest Department, which generally maintained its territorial and knowledge-based control over forests and timber management. Furthermore, deregulation and reregulation enabled the state to withdraw from uneconomic activities but also implied reduced place-based control of non-timber forest products. Generally, the new policies and programs contributed to the separation of livelihoods and forests in Madhya Pradesh. The article concludes that regulatory, community- and market-based initiatives would need to be better coordinated to lead to more effective nature conservation and positive livelihood outcomes.     

The Political Discourses of three Contemporary Muslim Scholars: Secular,Nonsecular, or Pseudosecular?

It is well‐known that the quest for an Islamic state was a desire common to most Islamists of the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries. This article discusses three contemporary political theories that stand in sharp contrast to the Islamists’ theory of an Islamic state. These political theories are developed by three prominent contemporary Muslim scholars, Nasr Hamid Abū Zayd, Ablodkarim Soroush, and Muhammad Mujtahed Shabestari. The article attempts to discuss the common themes between the views of these scholars concerning governance. It argues that the political theories presented by them significantly differ from those developed by most Islamists, who share the idea that Islam is a self‐sufficient political system. It also argues that while these political theories challenge the idea that incorporates the maximal role for government in religious matters and thus are close to certain aspects of regulations of governance in Western countries, they are different from those political theories in the West that focus on a sharp distinction between religion and state because religion, for such scholar, plays an important role in developing civil society.     

Conservation as counterinsurgency: A case of ceasefire in a rebel forest in southeast Myanmar

We demonstrate how international conservation practices in a rebel forest during ceasefire are shaped by and contribute to legacies of racialized political violence. Nature conservation has been shown in some cases to be implemented by armed forces and directly contribute to acts of “green violence” and the makings of “green war”. Less explored in the critical conservation literature, and the focus of our study, are the ways in which conservation projects can also be implicated in the continuation of counterinsurgency through “softer” non-militarized means. Based on ethnographic field research, interviews, and document analysis conducted by both authors, we present a field case study from the lowland forests of Tanintharyi Region in southeast Myanmar. The proposed Lenya National Park falls within territory contested by an ethnic Karen rebel group, who have been under a tenuous ceasefire since 2012 but who have not yet reached a political settlement to end armed conflict. We find that the mapping of Lenya during ceasefire by foreign conservationists legitimizes past forced displacements of Karen civilians by the Myanmar military during decades of war, and impedes the potential return of refugees and internally displaced persons to their customary lands now zoned for the park. Conservationists working to establish the park invoke and build upon racialized discourses of Karen forest dwellers as criminals, first as dangerous rebel supporters, and now as forest destroyers. The ceasefire has also opened up political space for Karen leaders to challenge the making of state forests, who envision an alternative model of community-led conservation based on indigenous rights.     

Empire forestry and the origins of environmentalism

When and where did the environmental movement begin? To understand how a public endued with the principles of laissez-faire reversed in such short order a century-old policy of government land disposal, this paper examines how public ownership of land came to be celebrated, with a newly defined professional corps of government foresters such as Dietrich Brandis and Gifford Pinchot feted as popular heroes. Hard-headed environmentalists and legislators found in empire forestry a ready-made model to construct vast areas of the public domain as a utensil for not only environmental but state purposes—industrial, settlement, and budgetary. The empire forestry matrix of government reservations, fire protection, and revenue-enhancing forests solved the tension between romantic preservationist notions and laissez-faire ideals and gave the compromise from which modern environmentalism emerged: it posed environmental problems and solutions as a means to construct the state. This article traces the international trail of modern environmentalism from India, under Lord Dalhousie's forest charter, to the British colonies in Africa and Australasia where it matured, and finally to Canada, the United States and other parts of the globe where environmentalism permanently entered the pantheon of democratic political creeds.     

Corridors of Power: Assembling US Environmental Foreign Aid

Using the US Agency for International Development's environmental program in Madagascar as a lens, I offer a historically grounded, relational, and multi-sited methodology for understanding the transnational processes that constitute political forests in the contemporary era. I argue that neoliberal reforms conditioned the emergence of a public–private–non-profit alliance, which promoted biodiversity conservation as a US foreign aid priority. As these reforms weakened state capacity and liberalised economies, the downsized Madagascar and US governments became reliant on conservation actors to mobilise political support for their programs. This reinforced the need to maintain strategic relationships with capital-city actors, undermining prior efforts to devolve forest management to local communities. By isolating deforestation as a peasant problem “over there” and by expanding protected areas to meet global biodiversity targets, the conservation alliance created an avenue to be green that did not threaten extractive industries or key constituents. In this manner, saving the environment via protected areas expansion offered politicians a pathway through the inherent contradictions of green neoliberalism.     

Forbidden and sublime forest landscapes: narrated experiences of Latvian national partisan women after World War II

At the beginning of the Cold War, tens of thousands of Baltic people headed for the forests. It was the largest and longest such experience of human and forest interaction in the history of the three Baltic countries. The forest was turned into a political concept and had abruptly become a doubly sensitive zone: to the authorities it was a space of revolt subject to their control; to the locals, the forests were transformed into sites of both resistance and shelter when life was endangered. Based on recorded life story interviews, this article examines how women experienced the changes in their native landscapes after World War II in the occupied Baltic states, and what it meant for them to be labelled “forest outlaws”.     

Writing Political Forests

In this essay, we highlight the intellectual context that shaped our initial conceptualisation of political forests as dynamic spaces and political ecologies, and how our fieldwork and comparative approach shaped our subsequent elaboration of the concept and its empirical manifestations. Of particular significance was our emphasis on incorporated/relational comparison and our multiscale analysis. These approaches allowed us to locate subjects and processes in specific field sites within an emergent global forestry network produced through multiscale interactions and movements within and among colonial and FAO forestry empires. We revisit the key processes through which we learned to see common and contrasting mechanisms that have made forests inherently political in our six research sites in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, linking these “classic” mechanisms to concepts in wide use today. These concepts include understanding political forests as co-produced, the significance of expertise in their reproduction, and the interactions between politics and the lively materialities of political forests. Among other conclusions, we suggest that the political forest is being replaced by what could be called “political conservation”, which has its own knowledge networks and expertise that displace but also build on political forestry. Finally, we reflect on how these ideas are being further developed by the authors in this symposium, whom we gratefully acknowledge for demonstrating that the politicisation of forests continues to be significant today.