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About this episode

A presentation by Alan Grainger, Professor in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds, UK.Part of the University of Chicago Program on the Global Environment's inaugural conference on the Social Life of Forests, held May 30-31, 2008.The Global North has attempted to impose order onto tropical forests ever since 'scientific forestry' was introduced in colonial times. Yet even then, owing to widespread reliance on 'indirect rule', there was a painfully weak correspondence between the image and social reality. External interventions have continued in the post-colonial era, initially through the establishment of national parks and other protected areas, and most recently with such linguistic and symbolic impositions as "illegal logging" and sustainability labels. The production of knowledge about what happens in tropical forests has also been influenced by fitting often questionable global statistical data into positivist ordering structures such as cross-sectional regressions. These purport to show, among other things, that deforestation is principally a response to population growth, while civil wars are not explained by political grievances but by rebel groups wanting to loot timber and other natural resources. But how do societies really relate to forests in the tropics once the modernist lens of the North is removed? This paper argues that simple dichotomies, such as those between sustainable and unsustainable forest management, and between ordered and disordered societies, are not helpful. By means of case studies from the Philippines, Sierra Leone and Thailand it examines the full spectrum of disorder, from civil war, to insurgency and endemic informality. It finds that while there may well be extreme conflicts between the discourses of participating actors, the one source of continuity - albeit in different forms - is the prevalence of informal institutions which are closely entangled with forest resources. While this undermines Northern expectations of the adoption of formal modernist institutions, it is entirely compatible with features of dominant social, economic and political institutions, which also subvert Northern imaginings. The result is two, quite different, social constructions of forests, the divergences between them being finessed by ambiguity when can no longer be rendered invisible by discursive constraints.

• Category

  Learning

• Release Date

  May 31, 2008

• Runtime

  39:38