FairFrontiers – FairFrontiers Project Website

FairFrontiers is an inter- and transdisciplinary research project
examining transformations of tropical forest-agriculture frontiers
in Cameroon, DR Congo, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, and Myanmar;
with a focus on issues of politics, power, precarity, and equity.

A frontier is an edge of space and time: a zone of not yet – not yet mapped, ‘not yet’ regulated…
Frontiers are not just discovered at the edge;
they are projects in making geographical and temporal experiences.

KELLY & PELUSO (2015), Frontiers of Commodification: State Lands and Their Formalization

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.

TSING (2003), Natural Resources and Capitalist Frontiers

Reflections from the field

Some observations and thoughts by our project members

Blog post about land grabbing in Cameroon
Researcher Niina Pietarinen, who was with FairFrontiers researchers during their first trip to Cameroon, explains some of the implications of land grabbing for local communities in West Cameroon in a blog post published by the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation.
Blog post from SRC about paper on scientific narratives
A blog post at the Stockholm Resilience Centre talks about the paper “Scientific narratives risk reinforcing colonial structures in tropical forests.”
Surviving above the water: A visit to Bidayuh Dayak Community in Sarawak
It was just before mid-day in May 2022 when we arrive at the Bengoh Dam, after about an hour’s drive from Kuching, the capital of Sarawak..
The Ground Underfoot
We walk, single file, past patches of thick fallow dominated by various species of bamboos…

Recent publications and resources