The social and ecological costs of reforestation. Territorialization and industrialization of land use accompany forest transitions in Southeast Asia

Melanie Pichler, Manan Bhan and Simone Gingrich

Land Use Policy, 2021, vol. 101, issue C

Abstract: Five Southeast Asian countries (Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Philippines and Malaysia) have experienced forest transitions, that is, a shift from net deforestation to net increases in forest area, since the 1990s. Climate change mitigation policies such as REDD+ actively promote reforestation, especially in the Global South, where they have been accompanied by exclusionary effects, known as green grabbing. In a regional analysis, we highlight some of the political and biophysical dimensions that come along with forest transitions in the five Southeast Asian countries, interrogating these with respect to the spatial injustices they produce. We propose to read forest transitions as a combined process of separating and industrializing agriculture and forestry – at the expense of more integrated land use such as shifting cultivation. We use the concepts of state territorialization and socio-ecological transition to analyze the separation of agricultural and forest land, an eventual marginalization of shifting cultivation and an increasing use of fossil energy carriers (that enables the industrialization of land use and other economic activities). These complex processes attenuate and compromise acclaimed benefits of the forest transition for climate change mitigation.

Keywords: Forest transition; Political ecology; Shifting cultivation; Territorialization; Southeast Asia; Socio-ecological transition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837720325187
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:lauspo:v:101:y:2021:i:c:s0264837720325187

DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2020.105180

Access Statistics for this article

Land Use Policy is currently edited by Jaap Zevenbergen

More articles in Land Use Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joice Jiang ().