PhD Annual Seminars PhD researchers from the Post-Growth Innovation Lab present the results of the work they are carrying out as part of their doctoral thesis

Casa das Campás (Don Filiberto St., Pontevedra)

As we know, we urgently need an ecological transition, but the current structures and actors most involved in the current situation are those who have more power. This issue, the role and influence of power, has not been sufficiently explored in research on the transition to sustainability. My work will focus on this area in order to understand how and in what ways power affects the transition to sustainability.

The call for ‘better’ natural resource management has led to various proposals and initiatives to protect, restore, and conserve nature, with forests playing a particularly important role in this quest. Work within political ecology is rich with explorations into conflicts in forest management, spanning from issues regarding inequality and distribution towards more ontological questions of whose framings of the forest are made to count and whose are not. This thesis takes such concerns further to inquire into how imaginaries of what the Galician monte is and should be also informs how social actors are organized in pursuit of such intersecting visions. By contrasting visions and exploring their interactions, the historical contingency of interventions into forests is made explicit which furthers thought on human-nature relationality by drawing attention to the role of expertise and knowledge in constructing said visions. I engage with scholarship on the history of forestry in Spain and Galicia to elucidate visions of prosperity attainable through forestry management, to then engage with activists and local communities who contest, negotiate, and draw on these visions to shape their practices in the monte.