Form Submission: Participation Entry

Today, land degradation and the environmental restoration it inspires are taking a primary position in initiatives, commitments, and funding mechanisms of global environmental governance. The discourse of land degradation has many faces, from the Sustainable Development Goal of Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) to government pledges to rehabilitate millions of hectares of degraded land through the Bonn Challenge. This paper traces the genealogies of dominant land degradation discourse and the political ecology analysis that has accompanied it through concepts of desertification dating to colonial environmental management, through the formation of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, to today. I explore how land degradation is understood, rendered and informed within LDN and associated commitments leading us to consider how this may draw on or deviate from past international mobilizations. My research finds what has been identified by social scientists as qualities of uncertainty, ambiguity, or confusion over land degradation. I argue that this conceptual dissensus offers an opportunity to alter the disposition of the land degradation discourse and insert new future forest imaginaries.