Data and information are central to policy processes, as they frame the policy problem, the design and the implementation of policy, and evaluation of policy impacts. Better data and information infrastructure is expected to lead to better policies and outcomes, for example, by enabling transparent decision making and enhancing capacity and accountability. However, the collection, selection, representation, framing and application of data are not merely technical and apolitical procedures, but are dependent on the interests represented in the policy processes they aim to inform. Social scientists have pointed to the “politics of numbers” and their effects on forests and trees and on the people relying on them, as well as on those involved in their measurements. We use the case of the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) international initiative and focus on the central aspect of understanding drivers of deforestation and measures of REDD+ performance to unpack the politics of policy processes. Data and information are socially constructed, and their interpretations are shaped by the contexts in which they emerge. Dominant beliefs in the transformative power of new data and technologies cannot explain why, often, new information does not translate into policy change and action to halt deforestation. Technological advances in making new and ever larger amounts of data available for analysis are a necessary yet insufficient condition for changing the business as usual in deforestation. Through openness, reflexivity and the tackling of silences in data and information related to the global political economy of deforestation the scientific community can make a key contribution to more equitable policy change.

Justice and human well-being are increasingly used as key considerations when assessing the socio-economic impacts and trade-offs associated with forest conservation on local and indigenous populations. This paper incorporates environmental justice framework and human well-being bundles to get a more comprehensive understanding of the social-economic impacts of forest conservation. Through household surveys, focus group discussions, and in-depth interviews in three villages adjacent to the Campo Ma'an National Park (CMNP) in Cameroon, we examine how the creation of the national park amidst expanding large-scale commodity plantations affects perceptions of well-being bundles and justice among local and indigenous communities. Specifically, we look at how the establishment of CMNP influences forest-dependent people's freedom to access forest resources, food sufficiency, health, security, social relationships, life satisfaction, and perception of fairness in benefit distribution, participation and recognition. The results reveal a concerning state of relatively low wellbeing evaluation and diminished perception of justice among local populations which, we argue, lead to a deterioration of overall capabilities among local and indigenous communities. The lack of sense of justice was associated with the loss of freedom in accessing common resources, hindered cultural-spiritual practices, lack of compensation, and unresolved human-wildlife conflicts. Comparative analysis reveals variations in well-being bundles among the three communities, influenced by various factors such as the different histories of displacement and law enforcement, ethnicity, level of dependence towards forest resources, external NGO support, and the expansion of extractive industries in the area. Reflecting on these findings, this study offers insights into how justice and human well-being can be more integrated into the process of co-constructing and reimagining future interventions aimed at improving the quality of life of local communities and promoting sustainability goals in Cameroon and beyond.

The Nam Theun 2 dam is an influential case of applying safeguards to mitigate social and environmental impacts from hydropower, being used as a model for large dams globally. However, these safeguards have produced mixed results. We examine the role of safeguards in hydropower, and how stakeholders have discussed its use. Based on a literature review and stakeholder interviews, we conduct a discourse analysis of narratives used to frame hydropower. We find four discourses being used for different purposes: Green Neoliberalism to legitimize, Ecological Modernization to operationalize, Green Radicalism to criticize, and Radical Incrementalism to repurpose hydropower. Whereas green radicalism in high-income countries challenges over-consumption, we find that green radicalism in low-income countries highlights environmental justice and shortcomings of conventional development models. We argue for a broader understanding of discourses to include Radical Incrementalism as one strategy for change of careful and considered actions over time.

We examine social-environmental justice in forest governance by asking who is problematized as drivers of deforestation and forest degradation. We adapt Bacchi’s “What is the problem represented to be” approach to the community forest (CAF) model in Burkina Faso and the Payment for Forest Environmental Services (PFES) in Vietnam and examine the implementation of these policies in specific sites through disaggregated focus group discussions (men, women, youth, ethnic minorities). We delve into the discursive, lived and subjectification effects of the policies’ problematizations, highlighting tensions and contestations relating to forest access and benefits. For both countries, what is left unproblematized in the implicit policy focus on the local is a “communal fix” of indigeneity tied to idealized and collective governance of fixed areas of land and exclusionary processes for those that do not fit the ideal. We argue that market-oriented approach in policies such as CAF and PFES absent of the wider underpinnings of the political and historical forest will only exacerbate social-environmental injustices.

Gender equality in natural resource management is a matter of sustainability and democracy for Sweden’s government, however the country’s forest remains a highly gender-segregated sector. We examine how gender inequality is problematized within Swedish forest and rural policy documents using the What’s the problem represented to be? (WPR) approach. We build on previous efforts to investigate gender inequality in the forest sector by expanding the critical analysis to rural development policy. We conduct interviews with forest experts, owners, and practitioners to shed light on where there are gaps within the policy representations and uncover alternative policy options that are presented. Our findings corroborate that gender inequality is represented to be a technical problem, with policy measures aiming to increase the number of women within a forest sector that continues to maintain rigid conceptions about forestry production values. While there are claims of success in the increase of women within the sector in aggregate, there is little change in the numbers of women in decision-making positions. Forest policy relies upon women to bring growth and sustainability to the forest industry, while rural policy expects women to halt rural population decline. Our findings suggest that merely trying to fit more women into a mold that has been shaped for and by inflexible forestry and masculine values is an impediment not only to gender equality but also to the inclusion of other social groups and ideas in the changing rural landscapes of Sweden.

Forest frontiers are rapidly changing to sites of commodity agriculture throughout the tropics, with far-reaching transformations in landscapes and livelihoods. Many of the dynamics that drive frontier commodification are well-rehearsed since colonial times. Policies to deregulate markets, privatize or formalize land tenure and open borders to trade have stimulated resource exploitation. The accompanying territorial interventions such as new enclosures, reconfigured property regimes and claims are purposefully employed to create space and labor, and have radically reconfigured the relationships of millions of people to land and rule. Narratives of what is an opportunity for whom, who should benefit from these spaces, and what is a problem in need of a solution have shaped policies and development choices in frontiers over time. Science plays a critical role, by putting forward particular knowledge and understandings, contributing to problematisations and promoting or legitimating certain solutions. In this paper, we review how science has portrayed forest frontiers in the Congo Basin and Southeast Asia. We analyse storylines put forward in the scientific literature and find three dominant narratives that intersect and reinforce each other to legitimate colonial exploitation of forest and land resources, and the enactment of colonial forest and land codes that have laid a deep-seated path in post-colonial policies. The narratives focus on imaginings of frontier regions as spaces that are idle or empty, and where possibilities for extraction, conservation and development appear unlimited; the problematization of smallholder and shifting cultivation farming as practices in need of change; and the legitimation of capitalist and market-based rationales as solutions. We find these narratives to be largely similar across both the Congo Basin and Southeast Asia and persistent in contemporary policies and global development strategies. This analysis allows for a deeper understanding of how commodification of frontiers came about, and what role science can play for a more just development.

Halting forest loss and achieving sustainable development in an equitable manner require state, non-state actors, and entire societies in the Global North and South to tackle deeply established patterns of inequality and power relations embedded in forest frontiers. Forest and climate governance in the Global South can provide an avenue for the transformational change needed—yet, does it? We analyse the politics and power in four cases of mitigation, adaptation, and development arenas. We use a political economy lens to explore the transformations taking place when climate policy meets specific forest frontiers in the Global South, where international, national and local institutions, interests, ideas, and information are at play. We argue that lasting and equitable outcomes will require a strong discursive shift within dominant institutions and among policy actors to redress policies that place responsibilities and burdens on local people in the Global South, while benefits from deforestation and maladaptation are taken elsewhere. What is missing is a shared transformational objective and priority to keep forests standing among all those involved from afar in the major forest frontiers in the tropics.

The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are described as integrated and indivisible, where sustainability challenges must be addressed across sectors and scales to achieve global-level sustainability. However, SDG monitoring mostly focuses on tracking progress at national-levels, for each goal individually. This approach ignores local and cross-border impacts of national policies and assumes that global-level progress is the sum of national, sector-specific gains. In this study, we investigate effects of reforestation programs in China on countries supplying forest and agricultural commodities to China. Using case studies of rubber and palm oil production in Southeast Asian countries, soy production in Brazil and logging in South Pacific Island states, we investigate cross-sector effects of production for and trade to China in these exporting countries. We use a threestep multi-method approach. 1) We identify distal trade flows and the narratives used to justify them, using a telecoupling framework; 2) we design causal loop diagrams to analyse social-ecological processes of change in our case studies driven by trade to China and 3) we link these processes of change to the SDG framework. We find that sustainability progress in China from reforestation is cancelled out by the deforestation and cross-sectoral impacts supporting this reforestation abroad. Narratives of economic development support commodity production abroad through unrealised aims of benefit distribution and assumptions of substitutability of socioecological forest systems. Across cases, we find the analysed trade supports unambiguous progress on few SDGs only, and we find many mixed effects - where processes that support the achievement of SDGs exist, but are overshadowed by counterproductive processes. Our study represents a useful approach for tracking global-level impacts of national sustainability initiatives and provides cross-scale and cross-sectoral lenses through which to identify drivers of unsustainability that can be addressed in the design of effective sustainability policies.

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) aims to transform and reorient farming systems to decrease greenhouse gas emissions, boost adaptive capacity, and improve productivity while supporting incomes and, ostensibly, food security. In Ghana-the world's second biggest cocoa producer-the cocoa sector is challenged by increasing global cocoa demand, climate change impacts, as well as mounting consumer pressure over cocoa's deforestation. Climate-smart cocoa (CSC) has emerged to address these challenges as well as to improve smallholder incomes. As with CSA more widely, there are concerns that CSC discourses will override the interests of cocoa smallholders, and lead to inequitable outcomes. To better understand if and how the implementation of CSC in Ghana can meet its lofty ambitions, we examine (1) the dominant CSC discourses as perceived by stakeholders, and their reflection in policy and practice, and (2) subsequent implications for cocoa smallholders through an equity lens. Through semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with key stakeholders in Ghana's cocoa sector, we find overwhelming consensus for an ecological modernisation discourse with the promise of a triple win narrative that simultaneously stops deforestation, supports climate mitigation and adaptation, and increases smallholder livelihoods. Moreover, we find that implementing CSC on the ground has generally converged around sustainable intensification and private-sector-led partnerships that aspire to generate a win-win for environment and productivity objectives, but potentially at the expense of delivering equitable outcomes that serve smallholders' interests. We find that the success of CSC and the overly-simplistic sustainable intensification narrative is constrained by the lack of clear tree tenure rights, complexities around optimal shade trees levels, potential rebound effects regarding deforestation, and the risks of agrochemical-dependence. More positively, local governance mechanisms such as Ghana's Community Resource Management Area Mechanisms (CREMAs) may give cocoa smallholders a stronger voice to shape policy. However, we caution that the discursive power of dominant private sector actors may risk side-lining equity which could prove detrimental to the long-term wellbeing of Ghana's similar to 800,000 cocoa smallholders.

The Anthropocene presents a set of interlinked sustainability challenges for humanity. The United Nations 2030 Agenda has identified 17 specific Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a way to confront these challenges. However, local initiatives have long been addressing issues connected to these goals in a myriad of diverse and innovative ways. We present a new approach to assess how local initiatives contribute to achieving the SDGs. We analyse how many, and how frequently, different SDGs and targets are addressed in a set of African initiatives. We consider goals and targets addressed by the same initiative as interacting between them. Then, we cluster the SDGs based on the combinations of goals and targets addressed by the initiatives and explore how SDGs differ in how local initiatives engage with them. We identify 5 main groups: SDGs addressed by broad-scope projects, SDGs addressed by specific projects, SDGs as means of implementation, cross-cutting SDGs and underrepresented SDGs. Goal 11 (sustainable cities & communities) is not clustered with any other goal. Finally, we explore the nuances of these groups and discuss the implications and relevance for the SDG framework to consider bottom-up approaches. Efforts to monitor the success on implementing the SDGs in local contexts should be reinforced and consider the different patterns initiatives follow to address the goals. Additionally, achieving the goals of the 2030 Agenda will require diversity and alignment of bottom-up and top-down approaches.