Transforming the Classic Political Forest: Contentious Territories in Java

Lukas, Martin C.; Peluso, Nancy Lee

doi:10.1111/anti.12563

Cited by 13 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 39 publications

(46 reference statements)

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“…The creation of the legal category of customary rights in Indonesia, for example, is a product of forest residents’ resistance to lost usufruct and land rights defining the creation of political forests. Extending this tradition in this issue, Martin Lukas and Nancy Peluso (2019) illustrate how neoliberal reforms in post‐Suharto Java have fragmented the state’s territorial hold on forests and opened up forest understory sites of production, ecological change, and contentious politics.…”

Section: Green Neoliberalism: the “Fourth Moment”mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Political Forest in the Era of Green Neoliberalism

Devine

Baca²

2020

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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.

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Section: Green Neoliberalism: the “Fourth Moment”mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Political Forest in the Era of Green Neoliberalism

Devine

Baca²

2020

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“…What strikes us about the collection of papers in this symposium is that they show that both state and non‐state (conservation‐oriented) projects aiming to control what happens in a Political Forest are just as incomplete today as they were during the periods we studied—although in the interim, the number of organisations competing with forestry agencies for governing through territorial projects have proliferated. State and non‐state authorities and constituents with varied interests in forests continue to struggle with powerful land users who undermine the maintenance of political forests as zones of state sovereignty, notably drug trafficking organisations (Devine et al 2018); international conservation groups and aid agencies (Corson 2018), Afro‐Colombian groups (Asher 2018), or coalitions of land reformers and social forestry constituents seeking to enable local forest users to control forest understories (Lukas and Peluso 2019).…”

Section: Key Arguments and Conceptsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The most important plantation tree species administered by agricultural agencies in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand today include oil palm (Asher 2018; Goldstein 2019; see also Cramb and McCarthy 2016; Potter 2015; Pye and Bhattacharya 2012), rubber, cacao, coffee, and fruits. However, through social and community forestry institutions, and other mechanisms such as surreptitious planting by farmers, these agricultural trees are becoming more common on land classified as forest—though rarely as the main tree species (Lukas and Peluso 2019; Peluso et al 2011). Plantations in their contemporary “shareholder” models are often also on non‐forest lands whether private, customary, or village land held by smallholders or state lands slated for conversion to industrial tree crop production.…”

Section: Materialities In the Political Forestmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Struggles around the classification, reclassification, and access to land associated with the expansion of plantations are a theme in this symposium in the articles by Asher (2018), Goldstein (2019) and Lukas and Peluso (2019). Asher describes how oil palm plantations are understood in Columbia as one of the “monsters” that are violently wresting control of land from Afro‐Columbian communities in the Pacific Region of Columbia, by converting land used by forest communities to industrial land uses.…”

Section: Materialities In the Political Forestmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Current patterns in the countries where we conducted political forest research are an example: In Indonesia, transnational conservation organisations are frequently brought into government conversations about which lands to preserve and which to develop outside of Java. At the same time, in Java, one of our “classic” political forest sites, the State Forestry Corporation (SFC), continues to fight for its long‐held monopoly on decision‐making authority on forest lands, even though the laws have changed (Lukas and Peluso 2019). The SFC is now outside the Forestry Ministry, and is under the Ministry of State Enterprises (BUMN).…”

Section: Materialities In the Political Forestmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Writing Political Forests

Peluso

Vandergeest

2020

Antipode

Self Cite

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In this essay, we highlight the intellectual context that shaped our initial conceptualisation of political forests as dynamic spaces and political ecologies, and how our fieldwork and comparative approach shaped our subsequent elaboration of the concept and its empirical manifestations. Of particular significance was our emphasis on incorporated/relational comparison and our multiscale analysis. These approaches allowed us to locate subjects and processes in specific field sites within an emergent global forestry network produced through multiscale interactions and movements within and among colonial and FAO forestry empires. We revisit the key processes through which we learned to see common and contrasting mechanisms that have made forests inherently political in our six research sites in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, linking these "classic" mechanisms to concepts in wide use today. These concepts include understanding political forests as co-produced, the significance of expertise in their reproduction, and the interactions between politics and the lively materialities of political forests. Among other conclusions, we suggest that the political forest is being replaced by what could be called "political conservation", which has its own knowledge networks and expertise that displace but also build on political forestry. Finally, we reflect on how these ideas are being further developed by the authors in this symposium, whom we gratefully acknowledge for demonstrating that the politicisation of forests continues to be significant today.

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