‘Tradescapes’ in the forest: framing infrastructure’s relation to territory, commodities, and flows

Abstract

• Tradescapes are cross-border regions that facilitate the free movement of goods and commodities. • The tradescape helps unpack the relationships between forest change, infrastructural projects, and trade policies across political borders. • Emerging Hot Spot Analysis and tradescape analysis help identify new fronts of deforestation and investment, and where strengthening environmental and social protections are important. • For sustainable infrastructure development, social and environmental analysis tools need to consider the synergistic relationship between positive and negative impacts of the network. Pressure to facilitate the flow of commodities and capital across global and national markets has translated into narratives and programs prioritizing integration and development of forested regions. The 2009 World Bank Development Report argues that to reduce distance, infrastructure development is crucial. The infrastructure imperative, however, reworks a broader array of investment flows, property regimes, forest cover, and socio-political rights across scales as it drives increases in the speed of commodity extraction, production, mobility, and consumption. With illustrations from Amazonia and Selva Maya, the paper proposes ‘tradescapes’ as a useful framework to analyze infrastructure projects as part of multi-scalar mega-corridor networks and financial flows. Tradescapes transform relations between society, territory, and environment, with implications for infrastructure governance , resilience, and sustainability .