People and forests at the legal frontier: Introduction

Abstract

Across the globe, deforestation and conflicts over forests are taking place on a frontier of competing claims, narratives and worldviews, expressed through territoriality, normative orders, and forms of violence against people and nature. Policymakers have yet to find solutions that effectively address this crisis over human-forest relations in ways that are also equitable for forest peoples. This special issue responds to this challenge with an interdisciplinary collection of theoretical and empirically grounded studies that explore human-forest relations at the legal frontier. The authors explore how law affects the ecological, cultural and moral foundations of human-forest relationships, and the need to go beyond dominant economic and rights-based legal framings, towards developing further legal dimensions of socio-ecological relations for forest governance. The contributions as a whole highlight the importance of co-constructing laws that are culturally situated in local meanings of forest and interact with global, state and other local normative orders in decolonial, transformative ways. This opens the possibility of a new legal frontier for people and forests of multidimensional more-than-human forms of interlegality.

Keywords:

• deforestation
• forests
• indigenous peoples
• interlegality
• legal pluralism
• more-than-human

Acknowledgments

Articles in this special issue were originally presented at a workshop on human-forest relations at Westonbirt Arboretum, England on 13-15 May 2019. The workshop was funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (UK) as part of a Leadership Fellows grant. My thanks go to the collaborators in this special issue: Neil Ravenscroft, Pingyang Liu, Mattias Hjort, Melis Ece, Estair Van Wagner, Andrea Vásquez Fernández, Maria Shuñaqui Sangama, Cash Ahenakew, Miriam Pérez Pinedo, Raúl Sebastián Lizardoe, Judith Canayo Otto and Robert Kozak, and to the Chief Editor, Dik Roth, and the anonymous peer reviewers for making this special issue possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In United Nations contexts the general practice is to use lower case for “indigenous peoples” except in a restricted sense or specific context where upper case is used, for example in Australia and Canada. However, there is no consensus on the use of initial capitals and lower case, and practice varies according to context, editorial style guides, and the preferences of organisations and individuals. This editorial introduction and the special issue acknowledge this variation in practice and authors have exercised their own discretion.

2 The UN FAO definition of forest as “a land area of more than 0.5 hectares, with a tree canopy cover of more than 10 percent, which is not primarily under agricultural or other specific non-forest land use” is widely accepted at an international policy level (UN FAO 2014).

3 Vásquez Fernández et al. observe that many Asheninka and Yine Peoples prefer the word “Originary” to “Indigenous”. Peru’s Prior Consultation Law of 2012 recognises both terms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Arts & Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellows Grant number AH/R003513/1.