Publications

Wong, G. Y., Holm, M., Pietarinen, N., Ville, A., Brockhaus, M. The making of resource frontier spaces in the Congo Basin and Southeast Asia: A critical analysis of narratives, actors and drivers in the scientific literature. World Development Perspectives. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2022.100451

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 interventi...

Brockhaus, M., Di Gregorio, M., Djoudi, H., Moeliono, M., Pham, T., Wong, G.. 2021. The forest frontier in the Global South: Climate change policies and the promise of development and equity. Ambio. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13280-021-01602-1

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 ...

Downing, A., Wong, G.Y., Dyer, M., Aguiar, A. P., Selomane, O., Jimenez Aceituno, A. 2021. When the whole is less than the sum of all parts – Tracking global-level impacts of national sustainability initiatives. Global Environmental Change Volume 69, July 2021, 102306, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2021.102306

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 ...

Delabre, I., Boyd, E., Brockhaus, M., Carton, W., Krause, T., Newell, P., Wong, G.Y. and Zelli, F., 2020. Unearthing the myths of global sustainable forest governance. Global Sustainability, 3.

Despite efforts to address the global forest crisis, deforestation and degradation continue, so we need to urgently revisit possible solutions. A failure to halt the global forest crisis contributes to climate change and biodiversity loss and will continue to result in inequalities in access to, and benefits from, forest resources. In this paper, we unpack a series of powerful myths about forests and their management. By expo...

Nasser, F., Maguire-Rajpaul, V.A., Dumenu, W.K. and Wong, G.Y., 2020. Climate-smart cocoa in Ghana: How ecological modernisation discourse risks side-lining cocoa smallholders. Front. Sustain. Food Syst., 28 May 2020, https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2020.00073

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....

Sahide, M.A.K., Fisher, M.R., Verheijen, B., Maryudi, A., Kim, Y.S. and Wong, G.Y., 2020. Sequential power analysis framework in assessing social forestry outcomes. MethodsX, 7.

We extend the Actor-Centred Power framework to consider dimensions beyond the life of community natural resource management partnership initiatives by examining social forestry partnership projects in Indonesia. We do this by examining how power constellations realign across the temporal phases that operationalize project partnerships. We propose a sequential power analysis framework that examines power in three parts. The fr...

Wong, G., Moeliono, M., Bong, I.W., Pham, T.T., Sahide, M.A.K., Naito, D., Brockhaus, M. 2020. Social forestry in Southeast Asia: Evolving interests, discourses and the many notions of equity. Geoforum Volume 117, December 2020, Pages 246-258 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.10.010

Southeast Asia has long promoted social forestry (SF) in conservation areas, fallow forests, tree plantations, areas in timber concessions and locally managed agro-forest systems, with the engagement of diverse actors and objectives. SF has evolved from early aims of empowerment and devolution of rights advocated by global reform movements, and is now reframed in the market ideal as a win–win–win endeavor for sustainable fores...

Sahide, M.A.K., Fisher, M.R., Supratman, S., Yusran, Y. et. al. 2020. Prophets and profits in Indonesia's social forestry partnership schemes: Introducing a sequential power analysis. Forest Policy and Economics Volume 115, June 2020, 102160

Studies on power dynamics have helped to develop a better understanding of the role of actors and interests influencing community forestry initiatives. This article introduces a sequential power analysis as a framework for expanding research on power dynamics to better understand the various stages that shape benefit sharing outcomes in community forestry. The research is based on the increasingly popular “partnership” scheme...

Jiménez-Aceituno, A., Peterson, G.D., Norström, A.V., Wong, G.Y., Downing, A.S. 2019. Local lens for SDG implementation: lessons from bottom-up approaches in Africa. Sustainability Science

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 achievi...

Masterson, V.A., Vetter, S., Chaigneau, T., Daw, T. et al. 2019. Revisiting the relationships between human well-being and ecosystems in dynamicsocial-ecological systems: Implications forstewardship and development. GlobalSustainability 2, e8, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1017/S205947981900005X

We argue that the ways in which we as humans derive well-being from nature – for example by harvesting firewood, selling fish or enjoying natural beauty – feed back into how we behave towards the environment. This feedback is mediated by institutions (rules, regulations) and by individual capacities to act. Understanding these relationships can guide better interventions for sustainably improving well-being and alleviating pov...