Niak Koh, Maria Brockhaus, Niina Pietarinen, Alizee Ville and Grace Wong
5th International Forest Policy Meeting
Panel 4.4a
11 April 2024
University of Helsinki, Finland
Forest-agriculture frontiers are being converted either to agro-industrial practices and conservation interests throughout the tropics, often pursued under the guise of ‘sustainable development’. These transformations have not led to expected win-win social and ecological outcomes and benefits are often reaped by powerful and capital-rich actors (and the State) who are remote from these landscapes. We argue that such outcomes are a consequence of infrastructures that have persisted since colonial times – from the “infra” or underlying material, social and political framework, the physical infrastructure of roads, mills or tourism, to the paper infrastructure of lists, accounts, laws, and regulations which enables the capture of economic or ecological rent (Li 2019).
This study examines the material flows of finance, and the different actors and interests they represent, in the case study of Mai Ndombe in DR Congo, a forested region highly coveted for conservation values and development aspirations. Understanding that frontier change is driven not only by local people’s behaviours and land-use practices nor national policies alone, this paper applies a telecoupling approach and leverages on diverse opensource data (LandMatrix, Global Forest Watch, Forest Carbon Partnership, ORBIS, OCCRP Aleph) to examine global flows of public and private finance and trace corporate ownership of diverse investments in the region. We find financial and discursive flows in activities such as logging, sustainable forestry management, mining, conservation and REDD+, while the problem framing of deforestation drivers remain at the local. Our preliminary analysis highlights the complexity of transnational influences on frontier change and competition development and conservation interests, the reach of persistent infrastructures beyond boundaries and their consequences on local contestations and forest commons governance.