“Exploring the Green Frontier within Europe’s Recent Forest Initiatives”

Abstract

In recent decades, there has been a global consensus on the urgent need for coordinated efforts to combat forest loss and degradation, given forests’ critical roles in climate change mitigation, biodiversity, and local economies. Major policy initiatives, including the Bonn Challenge, the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, and the European Green Deal, reflect this consensus. However, the development and implementation of forest policies are complex and politically charged, often addressing ’wicked’ problems with diverse actors and conflicting values. The proposed solutions—such as conservation, rewilding, certification, and forest expansion—introduce their own challenges. At the same time, there is growing concern about the commoditization and commercialization of forests, where green initiatives can exacerbate inequalities and facilitate new forms of resource accumulation. This paper introduces the concept of ’green frontiers’ as a lens to better understand patterns and consequences of this new forest dynamic in Europe. Applying critical perspectives typically used for frontier studies in the Global South to the Global North, this paper addresses a gap in literature on frontier-making in Europe while highlighting how environmental discourses are reshaping landscapes and communities, often reflecting historical patterns of dispossession and exploitation. It argues that anthropology and like-minded disciplines that rely on ethnographic and comparative methods, offer valuable perspectives for analyzing this formation of frontiers, and that a coordinated forest anthropology is particularly well suited to trace this shift within communities, as well as the common patterns across nations and regions.