Global forest governance today faces intensifying demands at multiple scales. In this doctoral dissertation I aim to answer the question: Why do forest governance interventions fail to produce transformational change in the forest sector despite ambitious commitments, extensive knowledge, and new policy instruments? I engage with critical institutionalism, discourse theory and the Plantationocene lens, and apply a qualitative research approach, to demonstrate how sustainable forest use is framed across forest arenas in the European Union, Southeast Asia, and the Congo Basin, yet often in ways that legitimise continuity rather than transformation. I argue that plantation logic delays change in forest governance and stabilises and expands business as usual practices.
I study this topic in diverse political, environmental, and socio-economic contexts. I first review literature of forest frontiers in the Congo Basin, to understand how forests are framed historically and today in the scientific literature. I then analyse through a discourse analysis, how climate and environmental ambitions are politically delayed in the Global North, using the adoption of EU Forest Strategy 2030 in Finland as a case study. Subsequently, I analyse how the globally spreading plantation ideal unfolds in a local landscape, using an industrial tree plantation in Sabah, Malaysia as a case study. Finally, I study the potential of climate finance to transform forest use, by using REDD+ in the province of Mai-Ndombe, in the Democratic Republic of Congo as a case study.
I find that colonial scientific framings underlie the contemporary forest policy initiatives that privilege large-scale, industrial, export-oriented forest uses. This legitimises land privatisation and dispossession, public-private control over forests, and marginalises alternative land uses. The embedded path dependencies and priorities reproduce persistent policy–practice gaps, dominant discursive framings shape political resistance to environmental ambitions and legitimise solutions that reproduce inequality and environmental degradation.