Announcements

[Special Section/Issue] Navigating change in forest-agriculture frontiers: Centering equity and justice in land use transformation in the Global South

Mar 16, 2023

Editors: Grace Yee Wong, A Dhiaulhaq, Nurhady Sirimorok, Helena Varkkey, Micah R. Fisher, MAK Sahide, Paula Sanchez Garcia, Felicien Kengoum

Backround

Forest frontiers are changing rapidly across the tropics in the Global South mainly due to expansion of commodity and monocrop agriculture, resource extractions and development, and efforts to conserve the last remaining forest frontiers (Kelly & Peluso 2015). Such transformations are often imposed on landscapes that are traditionally managed by vulnerable smallholders and indigenous groups, significantly affecting their access to both material and non-material benefits of nature (also known as ecosystem services) that are essential for their livelihoods, resilience and overall well-being. Moreover, these forest-agriculture transformations are often happening without villagers having full grasp of potential implications on the cost and benefits of changing institutions and commodities, creating new vulnerabilities and precarity for those that lose access to land or are ‘unsuccessful’ during land-use transformations. 

The premise of this call is that current models of development in frontiers is largely inequitable. This model is often based on the narrow (economic) development narratives and political discourses that push certain forms of commodity agriculture in forest frontiers, which are often also used as instruments of power that may empower some, but also deepen and reinforce existing inequities (Wong et al. 2022). Even when mechanisms of benefit sharing are in place, institutional factors and underlying power relations often constrain their fair share of benefits.

In this special section, we put equity and justice at the center of analysis and discussion of forest-agriculture frontier change in the Global South.  We encourage authors to engage – fully or partially – with multidimensional equity/environmental justice framework (Schlosberg 2007; McDermott et al. 2013; Sikor, 2013; Pascual et al. 2014) to provide a rich and in-depth examination of who benefits and who bears the burdens of these transformations. The framework put attention to four key dimensions: (1) Procedural justice: degree of involvement and inclusiveness in rulemaking and decisions around land, development and conservation programs. (2) Distributional justice: distribution of costs, benefits, burdens, risks, access and rights derived from changed land and forest governance. (3) Recognition justice: respect for knowledge systems, values, social norms, and the rights of stakeholders in design and implementation of development and conservation programs. (4) Contextual justice: the surrounding social conditions (e.g., power dynamics, gender relations, education) that influence actors’ abilities to gain recognition, participate in decision making, and lobby for fair distribution.

see more here 

Collaboration: Partnership with Web of Science Reviewer Recognition Service, a third-party reviewer recognition service by Clarivate

Jan 12, 2023

Forest and Society is pleased to announce that it has joined with the Web of Science Reviewer Recognition Service (by Clarivate) to formally acknowledge your peer review contributions. Your evaluations for participating issues of Forest and Society will be uploaded to your reviewer profile on Web of Science if you choose to take advantage of this arrangement.

Web of Science Reviewer Recognition Service , a third-party reviewer recognition service is a service that reviewers can sign up for and record their peer review history as a way of getting credit for peer review.” Their goal is to improve research efficiency by leveraging high-quality peer review, and they do so by collaborating with publishers, academic institutions, and individual researchers to transform peer review into a quantifiable output that can be used to establish a researcher's credibility, impact, and influence.

Therefore, for editors/reviewers who have pre-reviewed articles that have been published in this journal, please immediately process the claims on the manuscript in their respective accounts. Meanwhile, Editors/Reviewers who do not yet have an account, please immediately create an account at Clarivate - Web of Science (register) or by logging in through the ORCiD account.