Devastating wildfires and unparalleled precedent of extreme weather events like heat waves, droughts, floods, are sparkling questions about the human-nature connections and pathways towards sustainable and environmentally just futures. Amidst the growing concerns regarding justice and equity aspects, decarbonization regimes and market-driven biodiversity conservation approaches have emerged as instrumental strategies to governing natural resources and addressing the sustainability crisis. However, these solutions are often critiqued for remaining deeply connected with certain colonial approaches and hegemonic narratives that reinforce pre-existing marginalization and nature-society division, leading to disruptions in the management of local commons with contested outcomes such as territorialization, bureaucratic violence, systemic injustice, and impacts on traditional livelihoods, rights, and epistemology, etc. This panel critically analyzes the sustainability and efficacy of current conservation practices and decarbonization narratives by asking human-centric questions of the emerging regimes that seek to enclose the commons and obscure alternative imaginaries and possibilities through greenwashing, land grabbing, and fortress conservation, etc. The panel organizers are members of the POLLEN (Political Ecology network) node at the University of Calgary which is an interdisciplinary group of post-graduate scholars focusing on human-nature relationships in multiple global south locations (Bangladesh, Colombia, Peru, and India).
