SignificanceWhile infrastructure expansion has been broadly investigated as a driver of deforestation, the impacts of extractive industry and its interactions with infrastructure investment on forest cover are less well studied. These challenges are urgent given growing pressure for infrastructure investment and resource extraction. We use geospatial and qualitative data from Amazonia, Indonesia, and Mesoamerica to explain how infrastructure and extractive industry lead directly and indirectly to deforestation, forest degradation, and increasingly precarious rights for forest peoples. By engaging in explicit analyses of community rights, the politics of development policy, and institutions for transparency, anticorruption, and the defense of human rights, Sustainability Science could be more effective in examining deforestation and related climate-change impacts and in contributing to policy innovation.

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With large tracts of forested land planned for, or already converted to, industrial palm oil concessions, there is a need to better understand the gendered implications for, and responses by, communities affected by such landscape change. This paper examines the differentiated gendered responses and livelihood strategies of Dayak Modang women and men in a hamlet in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, surrounded by industrial palm oil plantations. Informed by feminist political ecology, we investigate how the compounding impact of industrial oil palm – the basis and outcome of enclavement – curtails livelihood options and reinforces gender differentiation in terms of access to and use of customary resources. Gendered inequalities and food insecurity dynamics emerge as a result. We show how, however, that despite gendered exclusions, Dayak Modang women use their own knowledge and practices to diversify livelihoods to negotiate emerging constraints over resource access and use. Our paper demonstrates that ways in which Dayak women ‘sustain livelihoods’ reflects forms of everyday negotiations and resistance to intensifying constraints over life and livelihood.

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