Project

Forests and forestlands in the tropics are supposed to serve a multitude of global and domestic interests, including development, climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation. All these interests have explicit assumptions in common over their positive contribution to the economic wellbeing and social equality of society. However, who - and whose society - benefits from ongoing deforestation and forest concessions in the tropics? The research project aims to answer this question by analyzing global and historic data to gain an understanding of the inequalities embedded in trade and investment patterns in relation to forests and forestland in the Global South, and the mechanisms that produce and reproduce these inequalities. The project will focus on the Congo Basin, specifically Cameroon and DRC, and the former colonial empires in Europe; in addition, it looks at China as a relatively new 'external partner' to this sort of trade. It analyses comparatively the institutions and incentives structures, power relations, and discursive practices in and beyond the forest sector, and investigates if international initiatives and agreements risk reproducing social inequalities. The research team explicitly aims to engage with actors across all levels and sectors and to share their findings and knowledge with wider society and publics; this constitutes the main impact pathway to inform the design of policy instruments aiming to halt deforestation and to contribute to discursive shifts in current understandings of "who should benefit from forests".

• Prof. Dr. Maria Brockhaus

  University of Helsinki
  Department of Forest Sciences
  Helsinki
  Finland
  

• Dr. Symphorien Ongolo

  Universität Göttingen
  Chair of Forest and Nature Conservation Policy
  Göttingen
  

• Patrice Bigombe Logo

  Université de Yaoundé II
  Faculty of Judicial and Political Science
  Group for Administrative and Political Science
  Research
  Yaoundé
  Cameroon
  

• Dr. Blaise-Pascal Ntirumenyerwa Mihigo

  University of Kinshasa (UNIKIN)
  Faculty of Law
  Department of Public International Law
  Kinshasa
  Congo (Democratic Republic - Kinshasa)
  

• Dr. Jianmin Xiao

  Chinese Academy of Forestry
  Research Institute of Forestry Policy
  and Information
  Beijing
  China (People's Republic)
  

• Impact of industrial logging concession on deforestation and forest degradation in the DRC

• Power Dynamics in African Forests. The Politics of Global Sustainability.

• Implementing SDG in Africa. A comparative approach of Burkina Faso, Morocco and Democratic Republic of Congo