Woodfuel Discourses and the Re-framing of Wood Energy

Abstract

This article capitalises on the global resurgence of interest in energy issues to reflect anew on discourses surrounding woodfuel production, use and change. Three extant discourses (forestry, conservation and sustainability) are examined, with an emphasis on their origins, structure, content and links to policy. In addition, the processes implicated in the evolution of a fourth, emergent, discourse are also highlighted. Here, the focus is the ongoing conceptual reframing of existing policy and practice to reflect new preoccupations. Overall, the article illustrates the multiple, complex, dynamic and contested forms which woodfuel (and wider environment and development) discourse takes; points to the increasing mainstreaming of such ‘energy talk’ within wider neoliberal political economies and ecologies; and cautions, in passing, against allowing the dominant discourses reviewed to crowd out alternative ‘popular’ discourses and their differing trajectories of woodfuel experience and understanding.

Keywords:

• Woodfuel
• discourse
• renewable energy
• fossil fuel
• forestry
• conservation
• sustainability
• neo-liberalism
• development
• environment
• climate change