Authors: Ayonghe Nebasifu, Edmund Asare, Geethanjali Mariaselvam, Enrique Aliste-Almuna, Ida Herdieckerhoff, Anna Mustonen, Violeta Gutiérrez-Zamora, Anna-Emilia Haapakoski, Salla Jutila, & Aina Guinart
Written based on insights from a working group (WG4) at the Development Days 2025 conference. The working group was organised by collaboration of the International Forest Policy Research Group and the Helsinki Institute Of Sustainability Science (HELSUS) Postdoctoral project “Future ‘Ecotopias’ of Sustainability in Nordic Forests Systems”, University of Helsinki.
Between 27-28 February 2025, sustainability-minded researchers come together to rethink ways to foster social environmental justice. This policy brief highlights some maldevelopments in forestry using eight case studies. Inspired by Ernest Callenbach’s ‘ecotopia’, envisaging an ecologically balanced future, it deliberates on future policy options for promoting the wellbeing of people and forests.
Forest, maldevelopments, and policy
Both the Global North and South are entangled and affected by colonial and imperialist legacies that adversely impact forests and people due to the growing demand for raw materials and profit in forestry. This is especially troubling for forest-reliant communities affected by conflicts, climate change, ecosystem degradation, and overlaps between access rights and forest conservation projects. It is difficult for the forest industry to sustain the current economic value of forests while mitigating climate change and protecting biodiversity. The 2024 “Transformative Change Assessment Report” by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) stresses the urgent need for fundamental shifts in how people interact with the natural world.
Similar calls feature in international regulatory frameworks. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) encourages member states to adopt best practices for climate mitigation, wellbeing, and equality. The Conference of the Parties (COP29) pressed demands to finance climate adaptation and promote green growth in Africa. The EU Nature Restoration Law, adopted in 2024, aims to restore at least 20% of the EU’s land and sea areas by 2030 and all ecosystems in need of restoration by 2050. In the Nordic region, the policy ambition is to transition from fossil fuels to a greener bioeconomy.
Case studies in WG4: From tensions to justice?
Despite this optimism for change, tensions persist in forestry. WG4 addressed this problem and reflected on what a forest ecotopia (forestopia) might look like, for whom, and what enables or impedes a just transition towards a forestopia. The session featured eight case studies.
Global case studies. Sketch by Ayonghe Nebasifu on Maploco tool, 2024.
Three of the cases highlight fragile government policies and the conflict between conservation and imperialist development. In Somalia and Serbia, land use conflicts and deforestation raised the need for clear land tenure frameworks and financial incentives for sustainable forestry to ameliorate governance gaps. In Abohar Wildlife Sanctuary in Punjab, the wild habitats and wild animals are threatened by increase in agriculture and horticulture and human aspirations, despite the cultural values of the local people to protect Nature and biodiversity. In Siswan Community reserve (CR) in Punjab, India, the natural forests in the lower Himalayan region have been protected by legislation, but the local people wish to exercise more rights to extraction of forest resources and feel threatened by the wild animals in the conservation area. In situations like these, approaches to compensating local communities through Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) can help in promoting conservation. Also alternative revenue generation activities like ecotourism can replace traditional extractive uses of forests like timber, firewood etc., In Patagonia, green grabbing and ecological neoliberal accumulation through the operationalization of transnational ENGOs and extractive industries has led to a surge in the price of land and tensions between actors. Similarly, there are processes of green accumulation reinforced by a neoliberal model for expanding protected areas, and enriching the owners of extractive industries elsewhere in the globe.
The rest of the session reflected on solution-based alternatives through collaborative thinking, resilience, care, and self-agency. A research team from Eastern Finland showcased the importance of participatory tools and practices, and their capacity to support collaboration and implementation of integrated landscape approaches if well adapted to local contexts. In Tanzania’s Southern Highlands, participatory mapping among local communities to integrate fire-related traditional knowledge in adapting to dynamic fire regimes presents potential for future adaptive pathways. Madagascar provided lessons in applying biocultural approaches to environmental education, as a tool to encourage and support local communities performing as custodians and partners to conserve biodiversity while strengthening their cultural heritage. COP15 emphasized the important roles and contributions of indigenous peoples and local communities in conservation, restoration, and sustainable use of natural resources, but traditional knowledge still lags in these efforts.
In Laos and Mexico, a feminist political ecology approach to ‘ecological care’ offered insights into how attempts to reduce or repair harm to socio-ecological systems, may also risk being overshadowed by inequities in labour practices triggered by the demands of transforming to greener economies. It was generally understood in WG4 that everyday life presents many ‘fast-paced’ societal pressures that require slowing down. A case from Finnish Lapland exemplified ‘slow travel’ as a sense of self-agency– which creates a safe space for the self to identify own needs, desires, and values related to forests whilst generating unique enabler-opportunities for ecological appreciation. Similarly, this slow agency was recognised to be called forth in forest policies, to enable the life of a forest in their own right and for their inhabitants of all species.
Visit to Tuntsa forests, based on the ‘slow travel’ case in Finnish Lapland. Photo by Outi Rantala, 2024.
Future policy prospects for people and forests
Learning from the case examples, what would it take for policies to advance a ‘forestopia’ that embraces justice? For people and forests in marginalized circumstances, what alternatives exist for empowering their agency and wellbeing?
Recognizing collaboration as a dynamic process: Amid the global challenges of climate change and the injustices that plague socio-ecological systems, collaborative approaches are increasingly popular in steering sustainability transitions despite complexities and gaps due to the dynamic nature of collaboration, entrenched by the path dependencies of private and state actors. We thus need policies to promote principled engagements that prioritize feedback loops, shared motivation, and shared capacity among actors. Policies may optimize for flexibility and creativity in tailoring tools and practices based on local contexts, balancing between the higher valuing of locality and maintaining the important benefits of “universality” in co-producing knowledge for preserving forests and biodiversity.
Promoting safe access rights and land tenure where PES exists: With the global crisis of biodiversity loss through deforestation, incentivizing forest owners to restore forests has become increasingly crucial. Payments for ecosystem services (PES) could help to better deliver ecosystem services to improve societal wellbeing. However, PES are voluntary policies that focus on conditional contracts between land users and service providers (forest managers and owners). As observed in the cases in Punjab, a lack of clearly defined access rights and land tenure jeopardizes the ability to establish effective contracts that ensure biodiversity preservation and compensation.
From ‘harm’ to ecological ‘care’: As the policy ambition for a sustainable transition from fossils towards greener economies advances, care practices that aim to reduce and repair harm to nature and human society risk being masked in oppressive relations, such as overlogging, disputes over land use and access, land grabbing, and intensified industrial activity in cultural heritage sites and in high nature value (HNV) areas. We need to foster awareness in policy of the value(s) created by ecological care within and in forests.
Action for ‘slowness’ and self-agency: Finally, today’s global ecological crises shape and (re)enact other turbulences as conflicts over rights of access and ownership of forestlands. We need regulations that rethink society through ‘slowness’, beyond human-centeredness. Living forests take care of us and we need to adjust our actions to reciprocal relations. Here, slowness envisions ways for people to slow down and creates a safe space for people to identify their actual needs, desires, and values through unhurried interactions with forests – which build a sense of hope, empowerment, and ecological appreciation, and then a desire to act and take responsibility to make a better world for both people and forests.
Contact: Ayonghe Nebasifu is Postdoc Researcher in the Helsinki Institute Of Sustainability Science (HELSUS), and is member of the International Forest Policy group at the Forest Science department, Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry, University of Helsinki. Email: akonwi.ayonghe@helsinki.fi