10-12 April 2024
University of Helsinki, Finland
The International Forest Policy Meeting (IFPM) is a biannual event addressing forest and forest-related issues from a social science perspective and bringing together scholars and research from different parts of the world.
Panel: The intersection of discourses, finance and politics driving ‘development’ in forest frontiers
Over the past decades, forest and agrarian ‘frontiers’ have rapidly been transformed into sites of export-oriented resource extraction, whether in the conversion of vast swaths of forests to oil palm and rubber plantations across Southeast Asia, to soy farms and cattle ranches in the Amazon or to mining and oil extraction in the Congo Basin. The causes of this expansion are various and nuanced, but broadly they have been stimulated by a boom in investments by transnational companies and institutions to fill consumption demands elsewhere, and in collaborations anchored in global supply chains. Forest frontiers are also spaces of contestation where government authorities, private sector actors, conservationists, development actors, indigenous peoples and local communities, environmental defenders and other members of civil society jostle for their divergent interests. Yet, there are persistent power imbalances among these actors and persistent inequalities in the outcomes, often a relic of the underlying politics, histories and institutions. More recently, narratives that are used to legitimate dominant interests in the frontier are often embedded within discourses of sustainable development, green growth or agrarian reform, and tapping into diverse flows of finance and capital such as REDD+, blended public-private funds, value chain commitments, green bonds and ESG funds that all aim to support more ‘ethical’ development.
We argue that the assemblage of actors, interests and discourses in forest frontiers are shaped by histories and distal flows of ideas, commodities and finance. And these assemblages have largely not served the interests of smallholders, indigenous peoples and local communities. This panel features research that examine the intersection of actors, discourses, finance and politics in frontiers, and the diverse responses to the politics in frontiers.
For details of the papers presented in this panel, see the Presentations section.