The Political Forest in the Era of Green Neoliberalism

Abstract

Nancy Peluso and Peter Vandergeest first used the term "political forest" to denaturalise forests, refiguring them as political-ecological entities. Across three moments of colonialism, post-colonial independence, and counter-insurgency struggles, they analyse how states in Southeast Asia (re)made forests as a means of territorialising power. More recently, they identify a fourth, contemporary moment characterised by the entry of diverse non-state actors into the making of forests, and a shift in the rationalities and technologies of forest management. We label this fourth moment "green neoliberalism" to identify an era of global environmental governance characterised by market-based solutions to socio-ecological problems, biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration priorities, and new moral and scientific claims to forests spanning a variety of sites and scales. The papers in this symposium transport the analytic of the political forest to Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, Indonesia, Madagascar, Singapore, and Thailand to examine how green neoliberalism's discourses and practices have created new sites and expressions of territorialisation, governance, knowledge production, and subject formation. In doing so, they illuminate the multiplicity of actors (re)making political forests at a moment when forests' virtues as carbon sinks and biodiversity hotspots draw massive flows of capital and justify remaking socio-ecological relations across the globe.

Negative emissions and the long history of carbon removal

“…That being said, such outcomes are tendential but by no means predetermined. A growing literature stresses that opportunities do exist for a variety of nonspecialist actors to make use of global accounting methods, and to appropriate, transform or repurpose scientific techniques and framings so as to advance their own interests (Devine & Baca, 2020; Forsyth, 2020; A. Gupta et al, 2012; McAfee & Shapiro, 2010; Shapiro‐Garza, 2013).…”

Writing Political Forests

“…Our comparative method was partially based on what Philip McMichael (1990) called “incorporated comparison”, described by McMichael as a grounded theory that explored global connections, and “used comparison in reconstructing historical configurations” composed of multiple trajectories rather than what he called “self‐forming whole[s]” (1990:387). This approach helps capture how we traced political forests as a historical configuration of multiple and complex trajectories, an approach that Devine and Baca (2020) describe in more contemporary terms as “relational comparison”, drawing on Gill Hart’s (2001, 2018) work. We were also concerned with gaining a multi‐scalar understanding of colonial and postcolonial forestry, one which positioned the making of political forests not only as a state‐making process, but also as a maker of global networks that included colonial scientists and administrators, the FAO, and both connected and grounded insurgencies and counter‐insurgencies.…”

“…As we wrote in Vandergeest and Peluso (2015), and as discussed in Corson (2018) and Devine and Baca (2020), conservation forests are Political Forests. Further, the broad displacement of scholarly and practitioner attention from “scientific forestry” to forest conservation has been enabled by the invention of new terms and fields such as “conservation science”.…”

“…The central argument inherent in the concept of political forests is that forests are never entirely natural: political forests are created and always in the process of being created through politics and cultural ways of seeing, as well as through “nature’s agency” or biological, ecological, and socio‐natural processes. Devine and Baca (2020), in their Introduction to this symposium, call this our effort to “denaturalize forests and refigure them as political ‐ ecological entities”: products of political‐economic change, cultural politics, and their materialities. Terms such as “socio‐nature” or anthropology’s “natureculture” were not yet in circulation when we wrote our key articles on political forests; today a political forest conceived as either a socio‐nature or a natureculture is an obvious fit.…”

“…Much of the critical scholarship on forest conservation has focused on exploring elements of what we called “green neoliberalism” in our 2015 essay in Raymond Bryant’s book, The International Handbook of Political Ecology (Vandergeest and Peluso 2015), as noted by Devine and Baca (2020) in their Introduction to this symposium. Green neoliberalism in conservation involves a package of policies and practices including the imposition of market logics and an increasing governance role for non‐state agencies, especially transnational conservation organisations.…”