TreesForDev to have session in YHYS2026

TreesForDev project researchers Ossi Ollinaho and Sophia Hagolani-Albov will chair a session at YHYS2026 in Turku on 19.11.2026.

The session is titled, "Providing Facts and Imaginaries for ecological restoration: Towards environmental justice or legitimate territorialization". The hybrid session will be held from 13:30-15 Finnish time on 19.11.26, exact location tba. For more information, please visit the

The mainstream narrative around ecological restoration holds that damaged ecosystems can be rehabilitated to address environmental crises while improving local livelihoods and advancing environmental justice. This narrative, however, blends solid empirical grounding with aspirational imaginaries that warrant closer scrutiny.

On the factual side, the political ecology of ecosystem degradation is well-documented. Decades of experience with restoration through agroforestry also demonstrate that meaningful transformation of degraded landscapes — transformation that creates sustainable livelihoods — is genuinely achievable. These are not empty promises; the evidence base is real.

Yet the claim that restorative schemes deliver environmental justice is better understood as an imaginary: a set of assumptions and aspirations that, in practice, tends to legitimise territorial control exercised under the banner of restoration. The dominant narrative positions the global North as initiator and funder, and large international NGOs as coordinators, primarily in service of carbon credits and other compensation mechanisms. Livelihood improvements are possible, but they may carry little weight for project funders whose priorities lie elsewhere. And when restoration efforts remain narrowly focused at the local level, the broader political and economic structures driving degradation are left unexamined and intact — precisely the structures, and the exploitative relations they sustain, that produce local environmental predicaments in the first place.

This working group is anchored in the Trees for Development project (treesfordev.fi), but we welcome contributions from beyond it. We invite research that explores alternative narratives opening different pathways for restoration and lending legitimacy to locally grounded approaches. We are particularly interested in research that foregrounds counter-narratives -cases where restoration is initiated, defined, and led by local actors themselves. We also welcome work that critically examines the assumptions embedded in the claims of funders and other proponents of ecological restoration schemes.

Accepted abstracts

• Maria Ehrnström-Fuentes, Markus Kröger, Ossi Ollinaho, Marketta Vuola, Sophia Hagolani-Albov, Linda Annala-Tesfaye & Sergio Sauer:
  Ecological Restoration as a Contested Field of Action: Between Green Extractivism and Transformative Restoration
• Markus Kröger & Ossi Ollinaho:
  Towards a Socio-Tree Planting turn? New tree-planting initiatives in the Brazilian Amazon by socio-ecological movements
• Katherine Hall:
  Nature’s actors in the spotlight: investigating conservationist actor roles and influence on ecological restoration in authoritarian Central and Western Asia
• Matthieu Pierre, Marketta Vuola and Sophia Hagolani-Albov:
  Hybrid institutions and environmental governance: The role of dina in ecological restoration in Madagascar