4.1. Myth 1 – states manage forests independently for societal benefit: institutional/legal lock-in

States are ultimately responsible for the conservation, management and use of forests, and land and natural resources are exploited under claims of action in the ‘national interest’, ‘public good’ and in the name of ‘development’ for societal benefit. However, states are not wholly independent institutions autonomous from other interests, and forestlands are governed by powerful actors – often working alongside, or influencing, government agencies at different levels – who have strong interests in how they are exploited or protected, and on whose behalf (Ding et al., Reference Ding, Veit, Blackman, Gray, Reytar, Altamirano and Hodgdon2016; Stevens et al., Reference Stevens, Winterbottom, Springer and Reytar2014; Sunderlin et al., Reference Sunderlin, Hatcher and Liddle2008). Distinctions between state-owned and industry-owned, public and private, often poorly describe the everyday governance of forests by tightly knit social and economic networks of actors that transcend these categories. Work on forests in Southeast Asia (Dauvergne, Reference Dauvergne1998) and globally (Humphreys, Reference Humphreys1996) shows a murky political economy at work where corruption, lack of transparency, violence and dispossession are the norm. This is often sustained by family-based, clientelist and patronage networks where timber industries – and agribusiness driving deforestation – are either owned by state officials ostensibly charged with their regulation and management or payments are made by private actors to those with responsibility for forestry stewardship to influence their decisions. Although these problems are often particularly acute in many developing country settings, which presents particular challenges for initiatives such as REDD+ (Kronenberg et al., Reference Kronenberg, Orligóra-Sankowska and Czembrowski2015), the concentration of land in the hands of elites is a worldwide phenomenon (e.g., in England, less than 1% of the population controls over half of the land; Shrubsole, Reference Shrubsole2019) that creates significant obstacles to the pursuit of equitable and sustainable forest governance in relation to the SDGs.

This murky political economy extends beyond intra-elite transactions at the national and international level. It also prevails at the local level, around the conduct of consultations and the exercise of supposedly free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) used, for example, in gaining consent for land acquisitions for plantation agriculture. Although the success of private supply chain sustainability initiatives depends upon clear property rights, including the recognition of local and customary land tenure rights (Lambin et al., Reference Lambin, Gibbs, Heilmayr, Carlson, Fleck, Garrett and Nolte2018), as instruments, they have also created new forms of land enclosures in some cases (Johnson, Reference Johnson2014). In the case of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), REDD+ specifically and carbon forestry more broadly, this has resulted in conflicts in places as diverse as Uganda (Bachram, Reference Bachram2004, Cavanagh & Benjaminsen, Reference Cavanagh and Benjaminsen2014; Edstedt & Carton, Reference Edstedt and Carton2018), Mexico and Bolivia (Leach & Scoones, Reference Leach and Scoones2015) and Southeast Asia (Corbera et al., Reference Corbera, Hunsberger and Vaddhanaphuti2017; Howson, Reference Howson2018; Milne et al., Reference Milne, Mahanty, To, Dressler, Kanowski and Thavat2019). In contexts of high inequality, low levels of literacy and an absence of accountability to and within communities, scope for corruption, misinformation and appropriation of forest land is rife. Although REDD+ has been found to draw attention to local and customary tenure rights, interventions have been largely piecemeal and insufficient in the absence of broader land tenure reform that disrupts business as usual (Corbera & Schroeder, Reference Corbera and Schroeder2010; Larson et al., Reference Larson, Brockhaus, Sunderlin, Duchelle, Babon, Dokken and Huynh2013; Weatherley-Singh & Gupta, Reference Weatherley-Singh and Gupta2015).

Undoing this lock-in means moving away from assumptions about the neutrality and independence of the state from the forestry industries and agribusiness interests it has to regulate and an uncritical approach to property rights in forest governance. Regulatory gaps, institutional fragmentation and lack of coordination and conflicts in relation to land-use rights and responsibilities must be taken into account before agreeing and implementing multilateral tools, policies and measures. In the first instance, this implies greater scrutiny over transactions in the forest sector by following the money and over records of ownership, payment of taxation and distribution of benefits from the exploitation of forests and forest products. This would help to address the paucity of information about ownership and property regimes. Over time, it implies addressing the far more contested and thorny politics of access and (re)distribution of forested land. Despite the rhetoric of the World Bank about the prospects of a “smooth evolution from communal to private property regimes” (World Bank, 2003, 3.22; see also Mousseau, Reference Mousseau2019), in reality this transition has been far from ‘smooth’, igniting struggles – often violent – the world over (Hecht & Cockburn, Reference Hecht and Cockburn2010) whether between the Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra) and the latifundi landowners in Brazil, or over forest clearance in Argentina for soy production (Newell, Reference Newell2009), or attempts to uphold tribal rights over forests in India. Many deaths around the world of environmental defenders are of people from poorer communities defending their forests (Global Witness, 2017). Moreover, forest lands held under formal and customary communal land tenure are often better protected and have lower rates of deforestation than state-owned or private forest lands, thus questioning the effectiveness of individual property rights in addressing deforestation (Blackman et al., Reference Blackman, Corral, Lima and Asner2017; Ding et al., Reference Ding, Veit, Blackman, Gray, Reytar, Altamirano and Hodgdon2016; Garnett et al., Reference Garnett, Burgess, Fa, Fernández-Llamazares, Molnár, Robinson and Collier2018).

4.2. Myth 2 – sustainability is threatened by small-scale farmers and people seeking a living on the forest margins: social lock-in

Alarmist discourses simplistically blame local people for deforestation (Boyd, Reference Boyd2009; Thompson et al., Reference Thompson, Baruah and Carr2011), without paying attention to the broader political economy or the complex underlying social drivers of deforestation (Agrawal & Angelsen, Reference Agrawal, Angelsen, Angelsen, Brockhaus, Kanninen, Sills, Sunderlin and Wertz-Kanounnikoff2009). Such narratives have persisted for decades and are often rooted in colonial policies to control upland farmers and agrarian revolutions, despite being frequently challenged (Forsyth, Reference Forsyth1994). These colonial policies not only relate to North–South trade and investment relations (e.g., Galaz et al., Reference Galaz, Crona, Dauriach, Scholtens and Steffen2018), but are very much implicit in national policies and institutional structures around land and forest use, tenure systems and concession models (Galudra & Sirait, Reference Galudra and Sirait2009; Ongolo et al., Reference Ongolo, Kouamé Kouassi, Chérif and Giessen2018; Peluso & Vandergeest, Reference Peluso and Vandergeest2001).

The ways in which drivers of deforestation are understood have significant implications for how problems are addressed. By treating smallholders as inefficient, unproductive and backward, policy-makers allow agricultural intensification and the promotion of the large-scale production of a few ‘profitable’ commodities (Ravikumar et al., Reference Ravikumar, Sears, Cronkleton, Menton and Pérez-Ojeda del Arco2016). While large-scale land conversion for agricultural commodities is a significant driver of deforestation (Curtis et al., Reference Curtis, Slay, Harris, Tyukavina and Hansen2018), proposed policy instruments, such as within REDD+ (Salvini et al., Reference Salvini, Herold, De Sy, Kissinger, Brockhaus and Skutsch2014; Skutsch & Turnhout, Reference Skutsch and Turnhout2020) and through private governance arrangements such as TFA 2020, corporate and jurisdictional zero-deforestation commitments, sustainability roundtables, certifications and standards (Austin et al., Reference Austin, Mosnier, Pirker, McCallum, Fritz and Kasibhatla2017; Garrett et al., Reference Garrett, Levy, Carlson, Gardner, Godar, Clapp and Barr2019; Gibbs et al., Reference Gibbs, Munger, L'Roe, Barreto, Pereira, Christie, Amaral and Walker2016) are not matching this scale of land-use change. Targeting local communities is perhaps politically easier than tackling powerful large-scale drivers of deforestation such as the increasing contribution of large-scale commercial agriculture observed in Cameroon and anticipated in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Tyukavina et al., Reference Tyukavina, Hansen, Potapov, Parker, Okpa, Stehman, Kommareddy and Turubanova2018). These drivers are often tied to ruling parties and state officials and dominant development ideologies (Cole et al., Reference Cole, Wong, Brockhaus, Moeliono and Kallio2017, Thaler & Anandi, Reference Thaler and Anandi2017), as we see in an extreme way in Brazil today under Bolsonaro. Notwithstanding a recognition that in some contexts small- and medium-scale farmers do cause deforestation (Curtis et al., Reference Curtis, Slay, Harris, Tyukavina and Hansen2018), the persistence of prevailing discourses by private, public and civil society actors and in private governance initiatives (Daubach, Reference Daubach2019; WWF International, 2017) that blame small-scale farming for forest degradation and deforestation obscures diverse drivers that require more appropriate and diverse policy responses (Curtis et al., Reference Curtis, Slay, Harris, Tyukavina and Hansen2018; Leach & Mearns, Reference Leach and Mearns1996; Pendrill et al., Reference Pendrill, Persson, Godar and Kastner2019). In contexts where farmers do cause deforestation, it is important to understand these dynamics in the context of persistent poverty, displacement and marginalization within national, regional and global market dynamics. Addressing the underlying drivers behind why local communities resort to deforestation requires more substantial social and economic transformation than is offered by the narrow focus of many forest and development policies.

Such political and social lock-ins are produced and reproduced by different ways of governing at different scales, including through the internalization by local communities of dominant political and economic discourses. While faced with the moral burden of the assumptions of local deforestation in REDD+, local communities also seek alignment with global carbon forestry discourses to resist land dispossession by the state for infrastructure development (Asiyanbi et al., Reference Asiyanbi, Ogar and Akintoye2019), and communities are invoked both as beneficiaries and implementation agents (Skutsch & Turnhout, Reference Skutsch and Turnhout2018). This opens up opportunities for participation and for communities to take advantage of dominant framings and access knowledge and resources (Erb, Reference Erb2012), but it also contributes to lock-ins and the side-lining of alternatives.

Undoing political and social lock-in requires significant shifts in narratives through alternative counter-framing based on transparent and scientific analyses (e.g., for assessments of deforestation drivers), which emphasize notions of environmental justice, ecological sustainability, equity and local knowledge systems (Nielsen, Reference Nielsen2014). These discourses are currently often dominated by powerful voices defending the status quo, and hence successful strategies to overcome these lock-ins might also require shifts in power and strategic coalition-building (Brockhaus et al., Reference Brockhaus, Di Gregorio and Mardiah2014). Discursive diversity and complexity should be embraced rather than simplified (Arts et al., Reference Arts, Appelstrand, Kleinschmit, Pülzl, Visseren-Hamakers, Atyi and Yasmi2010). New discursive spaces would accept more open and plural narratives, allow for serious consideration of alternatives to current forest governance mechanisms and ask questions that go beyond retrofitting existing approaches. This could be done by involving a wider range of forest-dependent communities in the co-production of such assessments, as well as discussions about their implications.

4.3. Myth 3 – markets are the solution to deforestation and forest degradation: economic lock-in

Contemporary approaches to forestry often demonstrate a commitment to ecological modernization, which assumes that economic growth and environmental protection are compatible and that ecological degradation can be decoupled from economic growth (Arts et al., Reference Arts, Appelstrand, Kleinschmit, Pülzl, Visseren-Hamakers, Atyi and Yasmi2010; Bäckstrand & Lövbrand, Reference Bäckstrand and Lövbrand2006). Technocratic governance mechanisms and voluntary sustainability standards promise a ‘win–win–win’ scenario where the complexities of deforestation are managed in a ‘synergetic’ and ‘cost-effective’ way (Cashore et al., Reference Cashore, Auld and Newsom2003; Nielsen, Reference Nielsen2014). This narrative is also prevalent in the TFA 2020, which actively promotes the idea of forests providing a ‘triple win’ of eliminating deforestation, boosting agricultural productivity and reducing poverty (Weber & Partzsch, Reference Weber and Partzsch2018). Arguably, however, the ‘sustainable intensification’ narrative is then used to promote increased productivity of export commodities, which may exclude considerations of alternative agricultural production systems (Spann, Reference Spann2017). A commitment to neoliberal governance also means that forest politics at times seem reduced to a question of finance; to the idea that what is lacking is above all more funding, or new and innovative ways to make forest conservation pay for itself through PES. Commonly side-lined in this voluntary, financialized approach are governance tools that directly regulate offending industries or recognize the structural drivers of deforestation.

The persistence of this myth is evident in the emphasis on market mechanisms in forest politics. Since the establishment of the Kyoto Protocol's flexibility mechanisms, the promise that ecosystem markets can help deliver much-needed financial investments in forest conservation has dominated the political debate. Underlying this is the argument based on neoliberal theories in environmental economics (Carton, Reference Carton, Castree, Hulme and Proctor2018), that simply internalizing the environmental costs and benefits of (avoided) deforestation will conserve forests and steer the sector in a more sustainable direction. By pricing forests and the ecosystem services they provide, their value can be compared and equated with other economic losses and benefits and their protection relies on demand for their services. If the gains from deforestation outweigh those of preservation, we are left with very little basis to contest their destruction.

Despite the perceived efficiency of market-based solutions to pre-empt or avoid costly or ineffective regulations (Gulbrandsen, Reference Gulbrandsen2004; Jones et al., Reference Jones, Comfort and Hillier2008), the implementation of market approaches is highly technical and bureaucratic. For example, in order to enact supply chain zero-deforestation initiatives, experts, consultants, third parties and review panels are enrolled into forest governance, responsible for setting technical requirements, with the promise of ensuring independence and objectivity. In this complex assemblage, new (private) actors are made responsible for forest governance. The voluntary nature of market-based forest governance initiatives presents an important challenge for accountability, and their effectiveness is strengthened in favourable institutional and governance contexts (Garrett et al., Reference Garrett, Levy, Carlson, Gardner, Godar, Clapp and Barr2019; Lambin et al., Reference Lambin, Meyfroidt, Rueda, Blackman, Börner, Cerutti and Walker2014). Furthermore, supply chain initiatives could also be used by lead firms to support a “sustainability-driven supplier squeeze” whereby corporations address sustainability issues in ways that facilitate continuous capital accumulation (Ponte, Reference Ponte2019, p. 16).

The emergence of market-based mechanisms is often argued to result from the failings of existing state-led and regulatory initiatives. Yet, the legacy of PES or forest-based carbon offsetting projects highlights significant shortcomings and obstacles to implementation and ensuring the overall sustainability of market-based forest projects (Corbera & Schroeder, Reference Corbera and Schroeder2017; Edstedt & Carton, Reference Edstedt and Carton2018; Fairhead et al., Reference Fairhead, Leach and Scoones2012; Milne et al., Reference Milne, Mahanty, To, Dressler, Kanowski and Thavat2019). Real-world market mechanisms often end up looking very different from how they were originally conceived. REDD+, for example, has largely transformed from what was meant to be a market in forest carbon credits into a more institutional, nation-scale approach (Angelsen et al., Reference Angelsen, Brockhaus, Duchelle, Larson, Martius, Sunderlin and Wunder2017), and PES has evolved into more hybrid forms that are not ‘purely’ neoliberal in nature (Van Hecken et al., Reference Van Hecken, Kolinjivadi, Windey, McElwee, Shapiro-Garza, Huybrechs and Bastiaensen2018). These shifts are in essence made by local actors (state, community, civil society), demonstrating variegated ways and degrees to which the PES model has been adapted from its original neoliberal model to fit different contexts, ontologies and purposes (Shapiro-Garza et al., Reference Shapiro-Garza, McElwee, Van Hecken and Corbera2019). Despite the development of increasingly complex forms of forest governance mechanisms, as well as their shortcomings, the commitment to ecosystem markets remains alive, as illustrated in the ongoing development of the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) mechanism for airline industry emissions and the establishment of a follow-up mechanism to the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) in the Paris Agreement. Ongoing efforts to ‘fix’ and resuscitate failing market-based mechanisms may distract from consideration of alternative and potentially more effective forms of forest governance.

Undoing this lock-in requires explicit acknowledgement of the political character of both deforestation drivers themselves and of the various solutions that are proposed to address them. Similar to countering the first myth, embracing the political character of forest governance would question the logic behind financializing nature and the reducibility of forest protection to a market transaction when natural resource-dependent and alternative livelihoods of many of the world's poor are at stake. Opening up discussions of valuation can potentially create spaces for engagement, negotiation, conflict and debate over how (and if) it takes place (Shapiro-Garza et al., Reference Shapiro-Garza, McElwee, Van Hecken and Corbera2019; Sikor & Newell, Reference Sikor and Newell2014). Questions of who leads such processes, who is engaged and what is being valued are, therefore, of critical importance for avoiding the flattening of non-human nature for commodity capture, as is seen in predominantly outsider and expert-led valuations (Büscher et al., Reference Büscher2012). It is thus critical that policy-makers, researchers and civil society call out powerful interests and prevailing business practices and question their supposed sustainability initiatives rather than seeking to accommodate them.

4.4. Myth 4 – what is counted – through valuation – counts: (a)political lock-in

Carbon accounting portrays forests as ‘carbon sinks’, where calculative practices turn stocks and flows of carbon into objects of governance (Lövbrand & Stripple, Reference Lövbrand and Stripple2011). Although there are hundreds of definitions for forests, those used in policy mainly define forests based on lands covered by trees with a tree canopy cover of a minimum of 10–30%, or even as ‘zones’ in land-use planning. Thus, forests are effectively rendered a sum of trees that provide resources (e.g., timber, carbon storage or leisure spaces). Most mainstream forest definitions do not consider forests as social-ecological systems (Messier et al., Reference Messier, Puettmann, Chazdon, Andersson, Angers, Brotons, Filotas and Levin2015), with few definitions referring to forests as ecosystems containing fauna. Rarer still are definitions that include people (Lund, Reference Lund2014), invoking myths of an untouched wilderness or the ‘Garden of Eden’, effectively separating people from forests and rendering forest governance a merely technical (Li, Reference Li2007) rather than social issue.

These definitional issues also plague corporate-led efforts to address deforestation. The proliferation of corporate ‘zero deforestation’ in recent years demonstrates the growing attention and ambition of corporate actors to deforestation in their supply chains. However, such commitments are extremely complex to implement in practice (Lyons-White & Knight, Reference Lyons-White and Knight2018), and the commitments vary significantly on issues as critical as the definition of ‘forests’ and ‘deforestation’, implementation mechanisms and success metrics (Garrett et al., Reference Garrett, Levy, Carlson, Gardner, Godar, Clapp and Barr2019). This ambiguity makes it difficult to evaluate their efficacy in reducing deforestation in commodity supply chains. Treating the definition of forests as a technical rather than political problem has led to the emergence of increasingly complex methodologies being developed through extensive (elite) consultative processes to undertake land-use zoning for agricultural expansion and environmental protection (Rosoman et al., Reference Rosoman, Sheun, Opal, Anderson and Trapshah2017), which can then be audited against. In the palm oil sector, for example, the High Carbon Stock approach frames environmental protection as the result of conflicting land uses and the need to maximize the utility of a particular concession, thus obfuscating conflicting forms of valuations of the environment, such as local dwellers’ plural uses or attachments to place (Cheyns et al., Reference Cheyns, Silva-Castañeda and Aubert2019).

Only recently has there been a shift towards a vision of earth stewardship that sees forests as complex adaptive systems in which resilience is linked with society (Chazdon et al., Reference Chazdon, Brancalion, Laestadius, Bennett-Curry, Buckingham, Kumar and Wilson2016). Yet, forest governance at national levels, such as in Sweden (Lindahl et al., Reference Lindahl, Sténs, Sandström, Johansson, Lidskog, Ranius and Roberge2017), often maintains a technical and bureaucratic view of forests and neglects a social-ecological systems perspective. Within REDD+, technical and bureaucratic views of forests have become more prominent, and most of the reporting, measuring and verification (MRV) methods are cases in point. Current MRV methods predominantly focus on units of carbon stored or hectares of tree cover preserved, which risks side-lining local peoples’ rights to access and use of forest products, but these are also weak indicators of the ecological quality of a forest, which still constitutes a viable habitat for forest fauna (Krause & Nielsen, Reference Krause and Nielsen2019).

Interlinkages between local populations, forests and forest biodiversity are highly contextual and anchored in the profoundly different ways in which forests are viewed, used and experienced. Forest governance is reduced to bureaucratic issues fixed by institutional coordination and the establishment of assessable socio-environmental ‘safeguards’, including centralized and remotely sensed assessments of forests. The carbon storage mitigation potential of forests represents a major ‘business case’ for international organizations, national governments, companies and some non-governmental organizations involved in forest governance. In the quest to establish a common denominator and base value (i.e., the metric tons of carbon not emitted and stored in living and dead, above- and below-ground biomass), the multi-functionality of forest ecosystems and cultural meanings of forests risk are becoming less important to our collective understanding.

Expectations of REDD+ as a global project for environmental governance should not be consigned to this narrow view of what constitutes a forest and what makes sustainable forest governance important. Weakening the power of the myth of forests being measurable units of stored carbon or being untouched and people-free wildernesses is a first important step towards breaking the cognitive lock-in we are currently in. Global assessments such as the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services offer inspiration by adopting a plural-value lens that assesses the interdependence between nature and societies through more holistic approaches (IPBES, 2015).

4.5. Myth 5 – sustainable forest governance initiatives currently ‘include’ local communities in decision-making: social/procedural lock-in

Acknowledging the rights of women and indigenous and marginalized people in accessing and governing forests, REDD+ projects and supply chain sustainability initiatives often claim to involve local communities in decision-making on forest governance and land use through FPIC and community consultations. However, the ways in which such participation is conducted in practice – without being part of a wider political project – may pose new risks and exclusions and make local people responsible for the most difficult decisions and trade-offs (Airey & Krause, Reference Airey and Krause2017; Collen et al., Reference Collen, Krause, Mundaca and Nicholas2016; Krause & Nielsen, Reference Krause and Nielsen2014). Despite recognition of tokenistic processes of ‘participation’ in natural resource management, exclusions continue to occur, risking the further alienation of already marginalized communities and indigenous peoples (Airey & Krause, Reference Airey and Krause2017) and social groups, foremost women (Khadka et al., Reference Khadka, Karki, Karky, Kotru and Darjee2014; Larson et al., Reference Larson, Dokken, Duchelle, Atmadja, Resosudarmo, Cronkleton and Selaya2015; Stiem & Krause, Reference Stiem and Krause2016; Westholm & Arora-Jonsson, Reference Westholm and Arora-Jonsson2018). Viewing ‘women’ as “a homogenous and undifferentiated social category” risks depoliticizing gender (Elmhirst, Reference Elmhirst2011, p. 7), and while mainstream policy approaches focus on including more women, these emphasize the ‘efficiency’ of development practices that invest in women, as women are claimed to be ‘closer to nature’ (Leach, Reference Leach2007).

Exclusions are also observed in land-use consultations in the palm oil sector in Indonesia (de Vos & Delabre, Reference de Vos and Delabre2018), where participation practices required by supply chain sustainability initiatives interact with social and cultural norms and wider power dynamics. These are exemplary for contexts where large-scale monocrop expansion integrates the lands and resources of local and indigenous peoples into national and global markets, supported by policy narratives aligned with a pragmatic ‘politics of development’ that generate lucrative revenues not only for corporations, but also for politicians, bureaucrats and their allies (Cramb, Reference Cramb2011; Li, Reference Li2017). Participation is not just often tokenistic, but depoliticizes a political process (Cooke & Kothari, Reference Cooke and Kothari2001) and occurs on contested grounds, responsibilizing individuals through processes of eco-governmentality (Goldman, Reference Goldman2001) and creating an ‘eco-precariat’ whereby participants take on disproportionate risks and precarious, low-wage and seasonal jobs (Neimark et al., Reference Neimark, Mahanty, Dressler and Hicks2020).

The TFA 2020 and the 2014 New York Declaration on Forests, as transnational multi-stakeholder initiatives with strong goals around stopping deforestation, indigenous and local participation and protection of environmental rights defenders, may counteract this myth through the empowerment of new alliances of actors, bringing new possibilities for sustainability governance. Importantly, these initiatives help to raise awareness of the importance of inclusive governance. At the same time, these initiatives risk reinforcing existing inequalities, granting power over marginalized actors to secure consent for development projects and bringing about new conflicts and contestations as new complexities emerge. For example, global sustainability standard-setting fora that emphasize ‘multi-stakeholder participation’ risk legitimizing powerful groups that can exclude or suppress actors deemed ‘too radical’, ‘too emotional’ or non-technical (Cheyns, Reference Cheyns2014; Von Geibler, Reference Von Geibler2013).

Unlocking this myth requires serious reflection on the invisible contributions of peoples’ forest-based work, the different identities of groups and how peoples’ roles intersect with social structures and the distribution of power (Stiem & Krause, Reference Stiem and Krause2016). It also requires a move away from framing women or indigenous peoples as either vulnerable or virtuous in relation to climate change and thus denying the possibility of agency (Arora-Jonsson, Reference Arora-Jonsson2011; Lima et al., Reference Lima, do Vale, de Medeiros Costa, dos Santos, Correia Filho, Gois and da Silva Junior2020). Such reflection may require a lens of intersectionality as part of understanding underlying power relations within forest governance and discrimination against women and indigenous peoples (Colfer et al., Reference Colfer, Sijapati Basnett and Ihalainen2018; Djoudi et al., Reference Djoudi, Locatelli, Vaast, Asher, Brockhaus and Sijapati2016), as well as understanding that vulnerabilities change over time. A focus on intersectionality looks towards emerging proactive collaboration and movements (Colfer et al., Reference Colfer, Sijapati Basnett and Ihalainen2018), available institutions and support for challenging the myth that there are indeed equal opportunities for all. Progressive regulation, quotas, juries and access to education, which tackle prevailing discriminatory norms and rules, may help counteract these dimensions. There is a need to recognize the political nature of participatory processes as sites of knowledge production – rather than ‘add-on’ processes – and their important effects. Careful attention is needed to consider who is responsible for undertaking participatory practices, how and what options, futures and benefits are discussed. When isolated from a wider political project of empowerment, participation in forest governance at the local level risks strengthening historical and current exclusion and leading to erasures of complexities and diverse ways of knowing.