Forest at the Earth Systems Governance Conference #ESG2023

The panel on 25 October on the European Union’s Regulation on Deforestation-free Supply Chains: Green Protectionism or Paving Way for Global Decarbonization Pathways looked at the Europe Union and its member states latest policy intervention for reducing tropical deforestation. The plenary and rousing dialogue stimulated discussions about the challenges and opportunities in the EU’s new policy for “deforestation free” supply chains, a narrower and more controversial attempt to avoid the forest footprint entering Europe than previous “voluntary partnership agreements” (VPAs). Moderated by Benjamin Cashore, Georg Winkel explored the impacts of EU deforestation regulation policy on timber supplying countries, the opportunities and challenges for governance restructuring and inclusive socio-economic development. Following the interesting discussions in the plenary, his main reflection point was about the ambiguity of the ambitious new EU environmental policy (to tackle deforestation) in the interplay of economic interests (exploiting forest lands versus protecting markets), environmental ambitions (to accelerate the forest transition) and social consequences (potentially problematic effects on the most vulnerable groups).  The example was deforestation, but these dilemmas appear relevant for many environmental policies. An example was given of of how cocoa farmers in Africa are likely to be negatively affected by these new regulations which are also foreseen not to guarantee addressing deforestation.

Verina Ingram and Albertine Vandenbussche presented Concepts to Understand and Research Transformative Change for Biodiversity & Equity (TC4BE) – drawing on work in the TC4BE project that brings together concepts on transformation change including leverage and leverage points, telecoupling, relationality, social learning, co-produced knowledge plural knowledge and values.

For Arjen Buijs, who presented on Mosaic governance and urban environmental justice: Can civil society contribute to just transformations? a key message was the nice mix in the presentations and discussions of very place-based inspirational examples of sustainability governance and the more high-level evaluations of what we have already learned from governance studies, for example on the effects of the specific design of public participation on the output legitimacy of projects (based on the CUBE theory of participation) or on possible justice effects on the ground of top-down initiated transformational policies.

Nowella Anyango-van Zwieten noted how often ‘energy’ came up even in sessions that were about something else. She noticed a tension between reforming our current systems or bringing about completely new transformation, for example in discussions about green growth or degrowth. The highlights for her were the sessions where the Dutch Urgenda Foundation shared the power of small wins (how tangible concrete steps can be taken to bring about change, though arguably not transformational yet) and the panel session including the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs where tensions, misunderstandings and possible collaboration between policy, practice and academia showed up. Overall, the conference was a conducive space for both low threshold very early career presentations and sessions by more experienced researchers.

Except for Georg Winkel, the FNP team all participated in a Fishbowl dialogue on the opportunities and pitfalls of value-oriented transformative governance for biodiversity led by Jeanne Nel and scientists in other EU HORIZON-CL6-2022-BIODIV-01-08 projects on ‘enabling transformative change’ in relation to biodiversity and climate change. Assuming that bending the curve of biodiversity loss requires transformative changes to societies and economies, catalysing such transformative changes requires addressing the underlying drivers that cause biodiversity loss, including structural factors such as policies, institutions and strong vested interests. We discussed the many values that lock in unsustainable practices and behaviours and if and how these can be shifted and governed towards more equitable and just transformative pathways to sustainability. We emerged hopeful, but also recognised, as main take-away thought, the importance of action-research, in which scientists are much more conscious of their positionality and the roles they can and do adopt in specifically transforming systems rather than reforming them, at every scale (local, national, regional, global).