FairFrontiers is an inter- and transdisciplinary research project
examining transformations of tropical forest-agriculture frontiers
in Cameroon, DR Congo, Indonesia, Laos and Malaysia;
with a focus on issues of politics, power, precarity, and equity.
The winning pieces of the FairFrontiers Haiku Festival can be read here !
Proliferation … is a key principle of capitalist expansion, particularly at capitalist frontiers where accumulation is not so much primitive, that is, archaic, as savage.
TSING (2004), Friction, p. 27
Today’s frontiers of capitalism are not remote or ‘‘newly discovered’’ spaces. Instead, these frontiers are new commodity forms within the confines of already formalized state lands.
Some of these lands were set aside in reaction to the most rapacious forms of capital, and some were a product of capital’s working through the state to dispossess competing land claimants.
KELLY & PELUSO (2015), Frontiers of Commodification: State Lands and Their Formalization
The history of the making of the modern world is a history of the expansion of commodity frontiers, a historical process so spatially, socially and structurally all-encompassing that it still awaits its persuasive analysis.
BECKERT, BOSMA, SCHNEIDER & VANHAUTE (2021), Commodity frontiers and the transformation of the global countryside
Reflections from the field
Some observations and thoughts by our project members
- Mongabay: What have we learned from 15 years of REDD+ policy research? (analysis)This article presents an analysis of more than a decade of comparative research in REDD+
- Histories (and the dead) in paths for a just futureProject leader Grace Wong shares her relfections from Oaxaca, Mexico, where the 5th Global land Programme was held.
- Photo Story – Feeling like a farmerThis ArcGIS Story, created by FairFrontiers researcher Wai Phyoe Maung, was made to share some preliminary insights from our ongoing research in Northern Laos.
Get to know our project members!
Our FairFrontiers project members and collaborators are of diverse backgrounds and expertise surrounding forest frontiers. This interview series will introduce some of their experiences and personal thoughts on the issues that the project is examining.
Recent publications and resources
- Paper: Fatal attraction to win-win-win? Debates and contestations in the media on Nature Conservation Agreement in Sabah, Malaysia
- Book review: Transforming Borneo: From Land Exploitation to Sustainable Development
- Paper: Radical incrementalism: hydropolitics and environmental discourses in Laos
- Paper: When Policies Problematize the Local: Social-Environmental Justice and Forest Policies in Burkina Faso and Vietnam
- Paper: Data and information in a political forest: The case of REDD+
- IUFRO Report: International Forests Governance: A critical review of trends, drawbacks, and new approaches
Our publications translated in French
- Can REDD+ finance compete with established and emerging land investments? The case of Mai-Ndombe, Democratic Republic of Congo
- Book chapter: State of Congo Basin Forests on Local Communities and Indigenous Rights in Central Africa
Latest news / Upcoming events
FairFrontiers Seminar at RIHN – The Political Frontier: Bridging political economy & political ecology
An international seminar featuring presentations by Nancy Lee Peluso and FairFrontiers project members, Maria Brockhaus, Kelvin Egay and Muhammad Alif Sahide was held at RIHN on January 2025. To view a recording of their talks, click here
Transformations Community/Earth System Governance Conference 2025: Navigating Sustainability Transformations Towards Justice and Equity
August 18-21 2025
Johannesburg, South Africa
FairFrontiers is co-organising a session and panel titled: History, science and data in forest land frontiers – breaking silence within infrastructures of inequality.
Transformations towards just and sustainable futures in frontier regions have been often derailed by disruptive economics, politics and historical path dependencies that reinforce business-as-usual interests and practices. Where there are innovative initiatives and policies to foster more equitable forest and land uses, there are also powerful institutions and discourses that silence alternative voices and diverse perspectives. This session aims to identify the underlying mechanisms that produce and reproduce silence and injustice, and highlight how silences can have voice.
The case studies featured in this session will highlight different methods, critical analyses and transdisciplinary approaches to bring in different voices and knowledges to examine who is silenced, by whom and who is using silence as resistance. Recognizing that transformations will require ‘shared spaces’ of multiple ways of knowing, being and doing, we invite session speakers who are social, political and ecological academic scholars, and land rights and indigenous activists from the Global South. We aim to foster an interactive discussion with our session participants, particularly to learn with those who have experienced silences, whether in academia, activism or in land and forest governance practices.
Call for papers – Special Issues!
Following the 5th International Forest Policy Meeting (IFPM5) that was held in April 2024 at University of Helsinki, two journals are now calling for papers, as part of special issues originating from IFPM5:
Forest Policy and Economics
Special issue: “A political forest – an examination through critical political economy and ecology perspectives”, for contributions that apply critical political economy and/or political ecology lenses. The deadline for manuscript submissions for is 31 July 2025.
Forests Monitor
Special issue: “Political forests of Europe”, on forest policy related issues, specifically within EU or member states. The deadline for manuscript submissions is 15 April 2025.
More details regarding aims and scope of the special issues can be read here.
Forest and Society Special Section/Issue
Navigating change in forest-agriculture frontiers: Centering equity and justice in land use transformation in the Global South
The journal Forest and Society now has a Special Section/Issue in collaboration with FairFrontiers. The aim of this special section is to highlight existing research and practices that can contribute to advance our understanding of equity and justice during the processes of land-use change in the Global South. To read the articles under this section, check the Forest & Society website.
FairFrontiers Research Brief Series:
The series will highlight and share new/emerging research findings from the project worth sharing publicly. Briefs are available to read in the Publications section.
1 Panel and 4 Papers accepted at GLPOSM5
A panel and four papers by FairFrontiers team and collaborators was presented at the Global Land Programme’s 5th Open Science Meeting (GLPOSM5), on 4-8 November 2024 in Oaxaca, Mexico.
For those interested in the talks, please email us at ayami.kan*chikyu.ac.jp (replace asterisk with at mark).