At the Frontier of Forest Governance: Reflections from the 11th FLARE Annual Meeting

What does it mean to talk about forests not just as ecosystems, but as places where livelihoods, cultures, and futures are shaped? In October 2025, Daniel Pinillos, a researcher from Guatemala, explored this question at the 11th Annual Meeting of the Forests & Livelihoods: Assessment, Research, and Engagement (FLARE) network held in Lima, Peru. In this blog, Daniel reflects on the conversations he had with a global community committed to understanding how forests and rural livelihoods shape one another.

Forests are central components of the Earth’s ecosystem. They regulate climate, sequester carbon, sustain biodiversity, and underpin the well-being of millions of people worldwide. For rural and Indigenous communities in particular, forests provide food, income, medicine, and cultural identity. How forests are governed therefore has consequences that extend far beyond conservation outcomes, shaping everyday life and long-term sustainability.

These global challenges cannot be understood or addressed from a single perspective. That is why international collaboration and transdisciplinary research matter. FLARE brings together researchers, practitioners, policymakers, civil society organisations, and local communities to create a spaces where diverse perspectives interact rather than remain siloed. By connecting comparative data, long-term monitoring, and community-based insights across regions, these collaborations bring the reciprocal dependencies between forest ecosystems and livelihoods to light, and help shape governance strategies that are both locally and globally informed.

Participating in the Agrarian Frontiers Session

“Frontier regions are not simply sites of forest loss or agricultural expansion; they are lived, globalised landscapes where ecological processes, livelihoods, and social relations are continuously reshaped.”

Daniel Pinillos

I presented research at FLARE that was conducted during my doctoral work at Wageningen University & Research and Montpellier SupAgro as part of the Agrarian Frontiers session. Agrarian frontiers have traditionally been understood as zones where agriculture expands, resources are extracted, and deforestation advances. While this framing captures important dynamics, it is increasingly insufficient, particularly in the Global South. Today, these frontiers are better understood as complex socio-ecological spaces shaped by overlapping historical, economic, and institutional forces.

In many countries, colonial legacies continue to influence who controls land and how it is used, alongside ongoing shifting land-use regimes. These dynamics are reinforced by uneven infrastructure development, such as selective road expansion and export-oriented logistics, which open some areas to extraction while leaving others marginalised. At the same time, global market pressures, commodity demand, financial investment, and trade dynamics interact with changing governance arrangements that redefine who holds authority and responsibility over land and resources.

Because of these overlapping forces, conservation efforts, agricultural production, and local institutions interact continuously. Frontier regions are not simply sites of forest loss or agricultural expansion; they are lived, globalised landscapes where ecological processes, livelihoods, and social relations are continuously reshaped.

The goal of presenting our study at FLARE was twofold. Methodologically, we wanted to show how mixed-methods research can address questions that cut across ecological and social domains. Substantively, we sought to illustrate how attention to space and time helps explain how people living in forest landscapes perceive and respond to change.

The Baseline: Landholders’ Perceptions in 2018

In 2018, we carried out a study examining how landholders perceive conservation laws in the Brazilian Amazon and specifically, legislation that requires private agricultural properties to retain 50–80% of their land as native vegetation, known as Legal Reserves. The study explored how landowners understand these regulations and how their interpretations of the law affects their decisions about intensifying agriculture production. 

We used Q methodology, a mixed-methods technique that reveals patterns in how people think about complex issues. To implement Q-methodology, participants rank a set of statements according to their level of agreement. These rankings are then analysed statistically to identify shared patterns of perspectives. Researchers interpret these trends using participants’ explanations alongside contextual knowledge, making the method particularly well suited for understanding how different groups think about complex and contested issues such as environmental regulation and land use.

Although we did not use formal spatial models (such as mapping) in our analysis, we paid close attention to how physical and geographic variation across the landscape affected people’s views. Differences in soils, terrain, infrastructure, distance and market access, land-use histories, and property size consistently shaped how landowners and producers articulated their obligations, the challenges they faced, and how they cared for their land. By interpreting their perspectives in the context of their local conditions, we were able to identify clear types or patterns in how different groups of producers think about conservation and land management.

We identified three distinct groups: 

1. Land-use planning enthusiasts, oriented to discuss land-use planning and ecosystem-services optimisation including agricultural production. 
2. Agrochemical-based agriculture supporters, who prioritised productivity through agro-industrial technological packages and viewed forest conservation as a burden. 
3. Policy-complacent market responders, who comply with conservation rules mainly motivated by market signals and incentives aligned with their commercial interests. 

These perspectives were not simply individual opinions. They reflected shared, patterned ways of interpreting the landscape, shaped by personal trajectories and local conditions. This spatial grounding helped explain why certain viewpoints persist over time and clarified where interventions, such as inclusive dialogue, alternative markets, or payments for ecosystem services, might be more effective.

“Local environmental and geographic differences strongly shaped landholders’ views, and recognising those differences was key to identifying the main perspective groups in our study.”

Daniel Pinillos

Revisiting Landowners Perceptions Seven Years Later in 2025

Revisiting these findings in 2025 shows that mixed-methods research, where qualitative and quantitative perspectives inform and shape each other, remains essential for understanding how forest governance evolves across space and time. While the original study captured the conditions of 2018, land-use pressures in Paragominas (a municipality in the state of Pará in the Northern region of Brazil) and across eastern Amazonia have since changed. 

This gave us the opportunity to reassess whether landholders’ perceptions and views have persisted or changed in response to evolving market incentives, growing awareness of climate risks, and renewed worldwide attention on Amazonian deforestation. It also raises important research questions about which viewpoints have endured over time, which have adapted, and what forces help explain these changes. 

Recent developments in Paragominas highlight how local practices are evolving. Farmers are experimenting with new strategies such as growing soy and sesame together (known as intercropping), keeping bees (apiculture), developing ecotourism, and planting cacao in agroforestry systems to cope with climate stress and declining pasture productivity. These innovations reflect how farmers and producers are adapting to both economic uncertainty and the rules that require them to maintain legal reserves to maintain forested areas. Together, these adaptations illustrate how local governance, production strategies, and the ways that people understand and relate to the local landscape are co-evolving together. 

The broader regional and global context has also played a role. In recent years, the anticipation of COP30 held less than 300 km away in Belém, has brought increased policy attention and investment interest to the region. This has influenced how producers and local institutions in Paragominas adjust their expectations, plan their strategies for the future, and make sense of the forested landscapes surrounding them.

Discussions during the Agrarian Frontier Session at Flare 2025 highlighted several lessons: 

1) Conservation is shaped by everyday realities. What actually happens on the ground is strongly influenced by market pressures, access to financing, land tenure arrangements, and labor conditions. These factors shape how environmental commitments are translated into daily farming and management decisions. 

2) Perceptions develop through shared experiences: People’s views do not develop in isolation, but emerge from shared histories and are shaped by interactions with the landscape, with neighbours, extension agents, traders, academia, and state institutions. 

3) Frontier regions require transdisciplinary research approaches: Understanding these complex landscapes means bringing together insights from different academic fields and the lived experience of non-academic actors, treating both as equally important sources of knowledge for shaping how land and resources are actually governed. In these contexts, solutions cannot rely solely on technical fixes or prescriptive governance reforms. They depend on building trust, maintaining long-term engagement, and recognising people on the ground not merely as policy targets but as active decision-makers navigating complex choices and trade-offs.

FLARE’s Policy Messages and Systemic Transformations

In his opening keynote, Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, former Peruvian Minister of the Environment and leading figure in global climate policy, highlighted a growing tension in today’s sustainability agenda. Goals that once seemed achievable in the pre-pandemic world now appear far more fragile. They are being contested and reversed by weakened institutions, declining democratic norms, profound social divisions, armed conflicts and trade wars, and mounting pressures on ecological systems. 

A central question emerged from the keynote: Are we still capable of steering these large-scale transformations, or are societies being swept along by forces they can no longer control? This question urges us to confront the reality that systemic change is not automatic and does not happen on its own. It actually depends on the ongoing and continual renewal of our shared values, ethical commitments, respect and our willingness to follow rules, and the governance systems and social agreements that hold societies together.

FLARE’s concluding messages responded directly to this challenge. They called for moving beyond narrow, technocratic fixes and toward forms of governance that is rights-aware, takes a long-term  outlook, and embraces multiple and diverse forms of knowledge. Importantly, these messages are not aspirational statements. They were firmly grounded in the empirical work shared throughout the meeting — case studies, comparative analyses, and practitioner insights that collectively demonstrated why such governance approaches are necessary and achievable.

Taken together these five key policy messages from the FLARE meeting outline a concise, comprehensive transdisciplinary agenda for present and future: 

1) Strengthening collective land tenure through robust governance and political support for long-term stewardship.

2) Provide fair and stable finance so communities can sustain stewardship over time.  

3) Prioritise justice-centered adaptation ensuring that responses address inequalities rather than deepen them.

4) Decolonise knowledge systems by recognising and valuing Indigenous and local epistemologies.

5) Design and manage landscapes for multiple and forms of well-being, rather than just focussing on ecological or economic goals.   

Balancing Adaptation and Mitigation After COP30

It is hard to reflect on these insights without comparing them with the outcomes of COP30 in Belém. The summit delivered several politically significant steps including a call to at least triple adaptation finance by 2035, the creation of the Tropical Forests Forever Facility, and an Intergovernmental Land Tenure Commitment to secure 160 million hectares of Indigenous and community lands. 

At the same time, it still fell short of advancing binding commitments to phase out fossil fuels or stop  deforestation – issues that remain central to any credible global response to climate change. Uncertainty was also reinforced by the late adoption of indicators for the Paris Agreement’s Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) following last minute revisions and unresolved questions about its practicality. And even if the new financial targets materialise, they still remain well below what existing evidence shows is required. 

Why Transdisciplinary Networks Like FLARE Matter

Together, these dynamics risk turning “adaptation” and “resilience” into politically convenient terms that demand attention while enabling continued delays on mitigation. Yet mitigation and adaptation are fundamentally interdependent. Mitigation determines the scale of future climate impacts, while  adaptation strengthens society’s capacity to cope with those impacts already underway. Effective climate action depends on advancing both together. 

Against this backdrop, networks like FLARE are essential. They support initiatives that ensure adaptation finance is used in ways that genuinely strengthen forest governance while simultaneously keeping mitigation firmly on the global agenda. 

Even so, neither mitigation nor adaptation will be enough on their own unless there is broader commitment to transformative, systemic change — this is the core aspiration of the 11th FLARE Meeting theme, Forest & Transformative Change. Such transformation ultimately requires cultural and value-based shifts toward regenerative and life-supporting ways of living that are compatible with the biosphere. In this regard, transdisciplinary science plays a leading role. But it must go beyond diagnosing failures and instead make visible the communities, institutions, norms, and practices that have long sustained ecologically grounded ways of living.

Taking part in FLARE 2025 reaffirmed the importance of research that meaningfully bridges societal actors, and anchors forest-governance debates in the everyday, particularly the lived realities of the people most closely connected to forest landscapes. FLARE highlighted how transdisciplinary approaches and combining scientific inquiry with situated knowledge are essential for navigating complex social and ecological frontiers. The meeting was more than an academic space or research network; it plays a critical role in connecting knowledge across regions and sustaining informed, collective dialogue at a time when this it is needed most.

Acknowledgements 

My participation in the 11th FLARE Annual Meeting was made possible through the support of the Global South Colloquium Fund, which enabled me to contribute to these discussions and engage with colleagues across regions. I also thank Francisco Neto, Carl Timler, and William Cardona for their insightful remarks and critical exchanges during the preparation of my FLARE presentation, which helped shape the arguments and perspectives developed in this piece.