People and forests at the legal frontier: Introduction

Abstract

Across the globe, deforestation and conflicts over forests are taking place on a frontier of competing claims, narratives and worldviews, expressed through territoriality, normative orders, and forms of violence against people and nature. Policymakers have yet to find solutions that effectively address this crisis over human-forest relations in ways that are also equitable for forest peoples. This special issue responds to this challenge with an interdisciplinary collection of theoretical and empirically grounded studies that explore human-forest relations at the legal frontier. The authors explore how law affects the ecological, cultural and moral foundations of human-forest relationships, and the need to go beyond dominant economic and rights-based legal framings, towards developing further legal dimensions of socio-ecological relations for forest governance. The contributions as a whole highlight the importance of co-constructing laws that are culturally situated in local meanings of forest and interact with global, state and other local normative orders in decolonial, transformative ways. This opens the possibility of a new legal frontier for people and forests of multidimensional more-than-human forms of interlegality.