Paul Thung is the winner of the “Best Student Oral Presentation” at the 2022 FLARE Annual Meeting for his presentation titled “The practice of representing reduced emissions: REDD+ as a regime of visibility in a social forestry project in West Kalimantan, Indonesia.” His presentation focused on the regime of visibility of a Community Forest project funded by REDD+. The practices that made local realities visible to the outside world, paradoxically also created new invisibilities. As international commitments to sustainability create new resource frontiers, he argues, such politics of visibility will become more important.
Paul is currently writing up his Ph.D. at Brunel University London. His ethnography compares frontier dynamics in illegal logging and nature conservation in Indonesian Borneo. Resource frontiers arise when outsiders gain special interest in local resources. While logging removes resources from the landscape, nature conservation extracts narratives, calculations, and images of natural value that is kept in place.