Pathways to Sustainability in the Forest? Misunderstood Dynamics and the Negotiation of Knowledge, Power, and Policy

This paper addresses the challenges of building pathways to Sustainability in the context of contested knowledge and power relations in environment and development. Drawing on two case studies concerning tropical forests in West Africa and the Caribbean, it explores clashes between the conceptions of social–ecological systems embedded in dominant scientific and policy practices, and the more dynamic, nonequilibrial perspectives that emerge from understandings of forest history and users' own experiences. Forest and conservation policy, I find, have persistently ignored these dynamics. Yet, as people and nature have ‘bitten back’, forest histories are revealed as mutually constituting interplays of ecological process, social practice, policy and intervention, and response. Policy makers often do not see this, and are thus surprised when their schemes fail. In this paper, I argue that alternative analytical approaches are needed that take seriously human-ecological dynamics, history, path dependency, and the ways in which different people frame or construct problems, linked with notions of Sustainability that respect diverse goals—including forest users’ own. This, in turn, suggests the need for alternative approaches to the governance of environment and development issues that are more adaptive, deliberative, and reflexive, and for politically engaged efforts to institute these in contexts where pervasive power–knowledge relations perpetuate less dynamic views.