Analysing the Inequality Machine: a Critical Examination of the Global Forest Sector in the Congo Basin

Forests feature prominently in commitments, agreements and policies aiming at mitigating climate change, maintaining biodiversity and contributing to development and the well-being of people and societies. They involve state, civil society and the private sector within and beyond the forest sector and across levels of governance. In many tropical forest-rich countries, among them Cameroon and the DRC, the exploitation of forests and forestland is justified by the promise of development and increased societal welfare. Yet, inequality in benefits and burden sharing is persistent, across and within societies, human and non-humans. Over the longer term, the forest sector appears to have contributed more to the National Incomes of European countries that have historically organised forest exploitation and forestland conversion in the Congo Basin as colonial powers, namely Belgium, France and Germany. More recently, China emerged as a new power in the region, engaging with a dual agenda in linking promises of development for societal welfare in exchange for the exploitation of forests and forestlands and large-scale land acquisitions. Not least, state bureaucracies and national elites are also entangled in rent seeking throughout historic and current politics of land, trade and finance. How can we explain differences in benefits and burden sharing, and what are the underlying mechanisms driving these inequalities? With an explicitly historic and critical political economy lens, we conduct a comparative analysis of factors (re)producing (in)equalities when forests and forest lands are exploited in the Congo Basin. To shed light on benefits and burden sharing, we apply a 4I lens, and investigate institutional stickiness over time, as well as actor’s interests, ideas and beliefs and the role of information in forest and land governance, it’s policies and practices Our data corpus entails policies, agreements as well as presentations and meeting notes, statistics from national and internationals sources, and interview transcripts and observations from exchanges with national and international actors in Belgium, Cameroon, China, DRC, France, and Germany. Our results indicate that while formally shifts in incentives, discursive practices and power relations have occurred at least to some extent and in some moments of time, the forest sector continues to operate largely as an inequality machine. Both institutional and agency related ‘sticky’ factors are at play. We find major differences among the different actors and their operational and discursive realities including their visions for a socially and environmentally just forest (and conservation) sector. Yet, they seem to be surprising similar in their policy preferences and the institutions they engage with and build up, the spaces in which agency is exercised, and in the silences, which are created when inequality is produced. Extraction, exclusion, and marginalisation and silencing as the main mechanisms maintaining the machine of inequality will need to be targeted in discourse, policy and practice for any ambition to engage the forest sector for more just future pathways, across geographies in the North and South.