Wither the coloniality of the forest transition

Comment to: Rudel, T.K., P. Meyfroidt, R. Chazdon, F. Bongers, S. Sloan, H.R. Grau, T. Van Holt, and L. Schneider. 2020. Whither the Forest Transition? Climate Change, Policy Responses, and Redistributed Forests in the Twenty-First Century. Ambio 49:74–84. 10.1007/s13280-018-01143-0.

In their recent paper, “Whither the forest transition? Climate change, policy responses, and redistributed forests in the twenty-first century,” Rudel et al. (2020) outline new perspectives on global reforestation processes. Rather than the gradual reforestation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century western Europe that became an influential global model for forest transition theory (hereafter FTT), Rudel et al. note a series of changes that fundamentally challenge this thesis. In southeastern Asia and Latin America, strong national and international policy responses to crises such as flooding and climate change have led to rapid forest renewal through large-scale, government and NGO-induced tree-planting. In boreal forests, changing climatic conditions extend the capacity of forest species to colonize spaces previously off-limits. Payment for ecosystem service programs have financialized forest transitions, compelling private and public actors to plant forests, yet often with reduced biodiversity and oriented towards plantation agriculture.

In short, rather than slow changes induced by urbanization and reduced land pressures that characterized FTT 1.0, FTT 2.0 is dynamic, highly variable across regions, and often quicker, as forests are perceived as a desirable land cover rather than a secondary outcome of shifting resource needs.

Yet, while attempting to chart more nuanced forest transitions that allow for multiple pathways compared to earlier deterministic formulations of FTT, the authors unwittingly reproduce deeper fundamental flaws. Endemic to both perspectives are colonialist worldviews positing the economic, social, behavioral, and political transitions of Europe and the United States as norms against which the rest of the globe can be characterized by various degrees of deviance. Rudel et al. establish two pathways through which the forest transition can be achieved, where “the awareness of earlier examples distinguishes the latecomers from their pioneering predecessors” (p. 77). Here we see that while Rudel et al. leave behind some of the crass language of modernization theory, they retain a vision of history as an economic trajectory that is already established to which colonized states ought to set their sights upon.

Modernization theory, where nation-states are set on a linear economic development trajectory leading to decreased income inequality and decreased natural resource pressures, underlies FTT. Forest transition, like industrialization, has most often been perceived as the result of internal, endogenous dynamics including labor markets, urbanization, and rural-out migration. This focus omits relational historical differences such as between colonies and colonizers (Perz 2007). Emphasizing consumption rather than industrial production invalidates a conception of forest recovery as an outcome of reduced resource use (Mansfield 2010). That capitalist development trajectories in Europe and the US have been correlated with forest regrowth patterns is an insufficient basis for causal, process-based theories that can be universalized (Mansfield 2010). Capitalist logics are fundamentally anti-ecological (Moore 2015) and economic growth-as-conservation policy is more hopeful than empirical (Gingrich et al. 2019). Market-facilitated reforestation efforts respatialize deforestation rather than limit extraction.

Recent studies demonstrate how circuits of capital shape ecological processes like carbon emissions (Bergmann 2013) and infectious disease (Wallace et al. 2015), highlighting the “infinities of indirect interconnections” underpinning uneven development’s relational dimensions (Bergmann and Holmberg 2016, p. 2). Capital, often with Global North origins, influences an array of land-uses and supply chains in the Global South whose net benefits flow back North. This troubles FTT’s conceptual premise, where the problem of deforestation/reforestation is contained to the edges of specific forest matrices at extraction sites. Rudel et al., along with others prospecting a forest transition (Walker 2013), conceptualize in situ interventions without contending with the accumulatory and consumptive processes which largely drive deforestation to begin with (Mansfield et al. 2010). Forest regeneration in one place is likely predicated upon the parasitism of forest resources from another. This can happen across smaller scales as well, for example, in Thailand where reforestation patterns followed investments by wealthier farmers at the demise of poorer farmers forced to abandon land through economic distress (Leblond 2019).

Responding to modernization theory’s limitations, Rudel and co-authors attempt to shift FTT in a more dynamic, situated direction. As forest transition theory’s allure is “capturing in a single concept a pattern…with potential beneficial effects throughout the globe” (p. 74), the authors must overlook the uneven extraction characterizing capitalist development to maintain this vision. Uneven extraction’s dynamics, through which the Global North consumes and transforms raw materials into global commodities and the Global South acts as purveyor of primary resources, maintains uneven socio-material colonial relations that shape global capitalism in the present (Amin 1985). Within neoclassical economics, markets appear as self-evident arbiters of economic development and are posited as causal mechanisms for reforestation rather than driving their demise.

Rudel et al.’s main intervention is adopting the “latecomer effect” to account for distinct forest transition trajectories which they believe require different interventions to ‘speed-up’ transitions. The “latecomer effect” was economist Alexander Gerschenkron’s (2015) capitalist adaptation of orthodox Marxian theory, a stagist, non-relational understanding of development through industrial proletarianization in which “the place of a transition in an historical narrative shapes the culture, organization, and speed with which it occurs” (Rudel et al. 2019, p. 75). While ‘backwards’ countries had to overcome social and infrastructural obstacles, they might develop rapidly by adopting the expertise and equipment of ‘pioneer’ countries. Gerschenkron’s unified historical theory was characterized by racist and colonial explanations for resistance to capitalism and normative notions that nation-states should have similar development outcomes despite divergent trajectories.

Gerschenkron sought to explain differences in industrialization trajectories as a historical model. By dividing early industrial powers and “latecomers,” he sought to explain the “relative backwardness” of these follower countries while also positing that there might be certain advantages to this historical position. As pioneer countries moved through technological and organizational hurdles, newfound innovations could be borrowed or imported. Gerschenkron’s ideas continue to influence development studies (Mathews 2006; Pegels and Altenburg 2020) despite falling into many of the same ideological traps of modernization theory in general. Technological transfer is unidirectional, states of “backwardness” (aside from all of the term’s clear teleological violence) are essential rather than relationally produced, and isolated, non-networked economies are an internal failing rather than an outcome of (neo)colonialism. Furthermore, theories do not travel unencumbered by the historical specificity from which they arose (Marx 1963). Part of Gerschenkron’s theory hinges upon the importance of instilling a faith in the futurity of capitalist development. In his account of the Russian peasantry, the opposition to industrialization and the economic and cultural norms of ‘advanced’ countries is viewed as a cultural debilitation, rather than rooted in the defense of a particular way of life. He ends his essay by espousing Malthusian predictions of societal collapse and social revolution if industrialization did not proceed in “backwards” countries. Written at the height of the Cold War and within the strategic helm of United States economic foreign policy—the Harvard Economics Department—it would be disingenuous to work with Gerschenkron’s theories without directly addressing and complicating their historical context.

Rudel et al. ask if, rather than the slow processes of forest transition characterizing Europe, might “latecomer” countries throughout the Global South rebound quickly, learning from European environmental governance models and benefitting from institutional mechanisms supporting reforestation. Yet it strikes us as odd that Rudel et al. resort to Gerschenkron’s theory when robust suggestions from contemporary economic geographers offer nuanced approaches to the historically and spatially embedded economic and ecological processes of (neo)colonial capitalism.

While attempting to account for diverse drivers of transitions across case studies, Rudel et al. hold steadfast to the idea that the Global South must mimic Global North forest transitions, if not in process than in environmental governance. Further, the Global South is expected to ‘speed-up’ reforestation to make up for the devastation wrought by colonial capitalism. The authors also cast the state and international NGOs as the main actors to facilitate forest regeneration. Thus, they replicate a geopolitical constellation of knowledge production where knowledge and technology transfer is facilitated by the elite and overwhelmingly flows from North to South. The authors invisibilize the role of smallholder farmers and Indigenous communities in combating forest destruction and the ravages of capitalism, revealing the neoclassical assumptions that continue to animate forest transition theory.

While land-use change science, seeking to integrate social science methodologies and move across scalar differences professes theoretical deficiency (Meyfroidt 2018), we argue that these seeming methodological impasses disguise deeper class and colonial anxieties. In recycling deterministic development models, the authors describe nation-states as fixed entities, locate politics with elite leaders and NGOs rather than working class movements, and adhere to narrow productivist definitions of forests. By articulating models of forest conservation divorced from critiques of capitalist accumulation to legitimize “strong” governance, Rudel et al. propose a suite of questionable (at best) and authoritarian (at worst) responses to interlinked crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. For example, recent work addressing forest destruction and infectious diseases in light of COVID has promoted punitive surveillance measures to protect forests (cf. Gibb et al. 2020), rather than addressing the financial drivers that favor extraction interests over smallholder livelihoods. The “latecomer forest transition” does little to debunk FTT’s coloniality. Despite paying attention to socio-environmental stochasticity and variable transition patterns, we suggest that the “whithering of the forest transition” should be a withering, stymying the reanimation of colonialist and exclusionary approaches to conservation.