Just GLOBE in a nutshell
The Justice and Politics in Global Bioeconomy (Just GLOBE) project researches environmental justice, politics, policy discourses, power relations and cultural and political hegemony in the emerging global bioeconomy. It does so from political ecology, decolonial, degrowth and feminist perspectives.
It analyzes how transformations to bioeconomy relate to and affect the existing socio-ecological injustices and power asymmetries and what kind of conflicts are emerging between those who do not share same aspirations, values, interests, and ideas about bioeconomy, transitions, justice, and transformations.
The overall research question can be summarized as follows: What policy actors and societal groups make decisions in the emerging global bioeconomy, with what goals and socio-ecological consequences and how this affects different societal groups, in particular the most marginalized and made vulnerable ones?
It includes three research themes:
- Politics, power and hegemony
- Environmental Justice,
- Socioecological transformations.
These themes are studied at different scales, in the context of three case studies, including the EU policymaking level (i.e. European Commission bioeconomy project), and bioeconomy interventions as they unfold in Ghana and Laos, affecting lives, meanings and territories. In and across those cases, we study the influence of leading political and economic organizations (such as OECD, the European Commission) on the bioeconomy practices, policies, direction, and discourse, examining alignments with the neocolonial and neoliberal patterns of extractivism and green transition, more broadly. Power dynamics between state and traditional authorities in terms of land tenure and land use, and the socio-ecological conflicts and injustices resulting from the African Plantations for Sustainable Development (APSD) biomass fuel project in Central Ghana, and the politics of exclusion in the Ghana Cocoa emission reduction programmes in Jabeso landscape in South-west Ghana are also explored. In the case of the Lao bioeconomy, bamboo value chains in relation to bioeconomy are studied, where particular attention to (re)productive work, the recognition of diverse knowledges, and the diverse ways of valuing bamboo species, including aesthetic, and ecological values. For more about each case, please click here.
Just GLOBE builds on multiple disciplinary orientations, emerging from critical and feminist political ecologies, and the emerging field of socio-ecological transformations. The project relies on and thinks with the concepts of decoloniality, degrowth, postdevelopment, green extractivism, feminist degrowth, decolonial and climate justice. For more about the project outputs, please click here.
Just GLOBE is a five-year research fellowship project, funded by the Research Council of Finland, formerly the Academy of Finland (Grant Number: 332353). It is coordinated by the PI, Sabaheta Ramcilovic-Suominen, and conducted at Natural Resources Institute Finland, Luke.
