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# The problem of social justice in environmental peacebuilding: Between thin and thick justice in Liberia

Jacobo Grajales, Kou Gbaintor Johnson, Hueward Neal

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## To cite this version:

Jacobo Grajales, Kou Gbaintor Johnson, Hueward Neal. The problem of social justice in environmental peacebuilding: Between thin and thick justice in Liberia. Environment and Security, In press, 10.1177/27538796251345218. hal-05128472

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Submitted on 25 Jun 2025

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**Citation:** Grajales, Jacobo, Kou Gbaintor Johnson, and Hueward Neal. 2025. 'The Problem of Social Justice in Environmental Peacebuilding: Between Thin and Thick Justice in Liberia'. *Environment and Security*, 1–26. doi:10.1177/27538796251345218.

# The problem of social justice in environmental peacebuilding: between thin and thick justice in Liberia

Jacobo Grajales, Kou Gbaintor Johnson, Hueward Neal

## Abstract

Recent research on environmental peacebuilding has encouraged scholars to move away from technocratic definitions of peace and to pay greater attention to how peacebuilding policies interact with pre-existing relations of power, domination and capital accumulation. This article builds on this work to examine a rarely explored dimension of environmental peacebuilding: social justice. Using the case of Liberia, we argue that environmental peacebuilding policies offer a context for the expression of diverse claims and expectations framed in terms of social justice. Our analytical framework argues that these competing conceptions of justice can be categorised along a continuum ranging from ‘thin’ to ‘thick’ approaches. Empirically, we examine how thick and thin conceptions of justice are elaborated by multiple actors, including aid agencies, NGOs, advocacy organisations, and ordinary people. As we move from the analysis of policy design to the study of forestry at the local level, we show how a thin conception of social justice is adopted by governments and the development industry, and what the implications of this choice are. We conclude that thin conceptions can contribute to the consolidation of exploitative and unequal power relations.

**Keywords:** environmental peacebuilding, community forestry, deforestation, conservation, timber industry, Liberia.

Peace has many different meanings, whether seen from the office of a UN aid agency, the streets of a war-torn city, or the tents of a refugee camp. While many peace practitioners tend to define peace simply as a reduction in violence, researchers tend to gather much more diverse ideas from their fieldwork (Finnström, 2008; Lefranc, 2022): people often see peace as a moment for redressing past
wrongs, stabilising their lives, or curbing flagrant injustice. These popular meanings ascribed to peace are often structured by competing visions of justice and injustice; they denote different expectations of what a transition from war should bring, structured by moral judgements about the world (Courtheyn, 2018; Lai, 2020b; Larzillière et al., 2021). In this article, we use this observation as a starting point to question the place of social justice and injustice in environmental peacebuilding.

We contend that environmental peacebuilding refers to a set of ideas, concepts, and guidelines for international intervention. It 'comprises the multiple approaches and pathways by which the management of environmental issues is integrated in and can support conflict prevention, mitigation, resolution and recovery' (Ide et al., 2021, pp. 2–3). This fits into a broader peace-environment nexus which, over the past two decades, has increasingly tied issues of conflict management and resolution, peacebuilding, and consolidation, to environmental factors (Dresse et al., 2019; Ide et al., 2023; Maertens, 2019; Matthew et al., 2002). These factors include the existence of environmental conflicts, competition for resources, histories of exploitative extraction, and the impact of radical environmental transformations (large-scale deforestation, soil and water degradation, etc.) on conflict-affected societies. In short, environmental peacebuilding is both a field of knowledge and a broader 'label' that can help identify the emergence of new concerns about environmental issues among peacebuilding practitioners.

Recent analyses have examined the link between environmental peacebuilding and a wider range of social, political and economic struggles. Particularly important has been the conclusion that while peacebuilding actors often ostensibly espouse a technical and apolitical stance, their interventions are deeply political, rooted in 'long-standing cleavages, unequal power relations and persistent welfare gaps' (Ide, 2020, p. 3). However, attention is seldom paid to social justice and injustice in particular. This paper engages with an emerging research agenda that encourages researchers to draw more systematic connections between environmental peacebuilding and social justice claims, expectations and representations (Davis et al., 2023a; Hsiao, 2022; Hsiao & Le Billon, 2021). This is an important step in advancing a critical agenda that does not uncritically accept technocratic representations of peace, conflict and security. Such an agenda should ask how different social groups are affected in different ways by policies that purport to build and consolidate peace (Cohn & Duncanson, 2020; Pugh et al., 2008). It should look carefully at how bureaucratic structures and power relations shape the understanding of peace (Chandler, 2017; Mac Ginty, 2012). Lastly, it should analyse peacebuilding activities in light of longer-term processes of capital accumulation and state formation (Berdal & Zaum, 2017; Cheng, 2018; Grajales, 2021a).

In this article we examine how different conceptions of social justice and injustice emerge in environmental peacebuilding interventions. We argue that they can be categorised along a continuum from 'thin' to 'thick' forms of social justice. The metaphors of thick and thin have a long history in the social sciences (Geertz, 1973; Ryle, 2009). Our use of them draws particular inspiration from critical works in the field of transitional justice, especially those that highlight the contradiction between different conceptions of social justice (Arbour, 2007; Evans, 2019; Gready 2022; Lai, 2020b; Sharp, 2011; Uprimny, 2009). For this body of research, transitional justice is often trapped between aspirations for deep transformation and operational considerations that tend to err on the side of a much more conservative stance.<fnref n="1" /> As a result, transitional justice is often more

<footnote n="1">¹ Of course, this metaphor echoes the classic work of Galtung (1969) who differentiated negative and positive peace,</footnote>
‘corrective’ than ‘transformative’, i.e. it tends to address the most visible consequences of war rather than transforming the social and political system that constituted the substrate of the war (Lai, 2016; Sharp, 2013). In particular, Uprimny and Sánchez (2010), use the terms ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ to refer to the relationship between transitional justice and the political economy of transition. While thin interventions focus on redressing the direct consequences of armed conflict, a thick view recognises that addressing wartime violence requires a broader view of structural inequality, political marginalisation and economic exploitation.

Applied to environmental peacebuilding, the ideas of thin and thick justice help shed light on the role of post-conflict environmental policies in the transformation or reproduction of exploitative and grossly unequal relations of production and domination. We argue that environmental peacebuilding interventions are often ensnared in a tension between thin and thick approaches. While thin approaches are often favoured by aid bureaucracies, ‘thicker’ alternative approaches are elaborated by a wide variety of social actors. In this paper, we present our analytical framework before applying it to the case of community forests in Liberia, a policy that can be seen as emblematic of environmental peacebuilding interventions.

Our case study is based on data collected during fieldwork in Monrovia and rural areas of Nimba County between April 2022 and January 2023. Part of our analysis is based on a case study on conflicts around the Big Gio Forest, where four community forests were created during the 2010s with the support of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). We chose this case in part because it was one of the flagship USAID interventions in Liberia in the field of community forestry, but also because the four neighbouring forests differed in terms of governance, exploitation, and conservation, thus offering a unique opportunity for comparison within the same territory. We conducted 57 interviews with farmers and other rural residents, local and national authorities, and NGO and donor staff. In Monrovia, we met with policy actors who have played a role in forestry policy over the past two decades. Four online interviews were conducted with people involved in these policy processes based in Canada and the UK. These policy actors were selected based on a preliminary analysis of the policy networks that have been active in the sector, using data from policy reports and donor websites. Our aim was to obtain a comprehensive picture of all the institutions that have played a role in the development of forestry policy in Liberia. In Nimba, we met with members of the governing bodies of the four community forests established by USAID. We also interviewed local political figures who had played a role in the establishment of the community forests, as well as ordinary people we met during our visits to the villages. We used a snowball sampling approach to track the positions of different social groups with competing positions on forest use (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 1997). We also used local contacts made during our two field trips to locate several former USAID contractors. The interviews in Nimba were semi-structured and conducted in English by the three co-authors; the fact that two of the co-authors are Liberian and one of them speaks two of the local languages helped us to formulate our questions in terms that made sense to those we interviewed. Oral sources were supplemented by documents collected during our fieldwork. With the help of the Sustainable Development Institute, a research and advocacy organisation based near Monrovia, we were able to access the archives of

with the former referring to the absence of direct violence and the latter consisting of the absence of both direct and indirect (i.e. structural) violence. However, we focus on the parallel with transitional justice, as we see both a similar tension between conflicting agendas and the weight of liberal norms on the implementation of diverse conceptions of justice.
the Liberia Forest Initiative. These documents helped us to refine our analysis of the forest reform
process. In addition, we used GIS data provided by the Liberia Forest Atlas, complemented by data
on deforestation collected and continuously updated by Hansen et al. (2013). This was particularly
useful in identifying the reasons and main locations of deforestation, as well as locating the oral
data in time and space.

Conceptualising justice and injustice in environmental peacebuilding

Our approach to social justice is mindful of the existence of inequalities and exploitation, of the
intersecting forms of domination (class, gender, race, etc.) exercised over people’s lives, and of the
recognition of people’s aspirations to make their own decisions about their lives and livelihoods and
about what government and corporate actors are allowed to do in their territories (Borras Jr. &
Franco, 2018; Moreda et al., 2020). Social justice claims and struggles result from people’s attempts
to shape or transform a given socio-economic order, i.e. the forms and relations of production and
social reproduction (Levien et al., 2018; Shattuck et al., 2023). Moreover, our approach takes into
account the specificities of societies where violent ruptures such as wars have taken place. In that
respect, social justice can be thought of as ‘the process through which violations of social and
economic rights occurred during conflict are redressed’ (Lai, 2020a, p. 1401). But social justice in
post-war contexts cannot simply be ‘backward-looking’, merely recognising the need for restitution
and redress; it should also be ‘forward looking’ and consider that that dealing with past injustices
only makes sense if it is a part of a broader agenda of structural transformation (Arbour, 2007;
Gready & Robins, 2014). Lastly, our approach is largely empirical and sociological, as it is
primarily concerned with the different, competing, and sometimes conflicting conceptions of social
justice, with the ways in which they are entangled in relations of economic, political, and symbolic
domination, and with the uses people make of these conceptions of justice (Bourdieu, 1993;
Gamson, 1992).

The relationship between peacebuilding policies and social justice is the subject of a growing body
of literature in critical peace studies. One observation made by these authors is that demands for
social justice during post-war transitions can be analysed from two complementary perspectives: the
demands and aspirations expressed by people, whether in organised forms or in private spheres
(Lai, 2020a), and the policies elaborated by national or international authorities that purport to meet
these demands (Berdal & Zaum, 2017; Cohn & Duncanson, 2020). This is because many people see
moments of transition as favourable contexts for the expression of diverse claims framed in terms of
justice and injustice. However, as Daniela Lai has highlighted in the case of Bosnia and
Herzegovina (Lai, 2016, 2020b), such claims are not necessarily limited to the direct consequences
of war, and can also extend to the effects of pre-war discrimination and post-war economic
restructuring. The horrors of war are but one of many sources of injustice. This view contradicts the
approach of most peacebuilding actors, who tend to isolate the consequences of war from broader
forms of exploitation (Grajales, 2021b; Lai, 2020b). In addition, peacebuilding interventions have to
walk a fine line between the demands and expectations of the people and the ideal of capitalist
peace, which posits that transitions out of war generally ought to entail greater integration into
global markets (Ottaway, 2002; Pugh et al., 2008). A consistent body of research shows that this
contradiction often results in socially conservative peacebuilding outcomes: aspirations for greater
social justice associated with post-war transitions are rarely achieved. On the contrary, today’s post-
conflict conjunctures often lead to the consolidation of inequalities and the legitimisation of exploitative models of extraction (Grajales, 2020; Johnson et al., 2024; Lund, 2018; Millar, 2016; Torjesen, 2017; Vélez-Torres et al., 2022).

We build on this body of research and seek to contribute to an important discussion on the ways relations of domination, extraction, and marginalisation relate to the implementation of environmental policies in ‘violent environments’ and politically uncertain conjunctures (Peluso & Watts, 2001; Devine & Baca, 2020; Marijnen et al., 2020). These discussions raise important questions for environmental peacebuilding. Researchers working at the intersection of environmental policy and post-conflict transition should recognise that the interventions they study contain implicit or explicit conceptions of social justice that are the result not only of donor and state agendas, but also of interactions between NGOs, activists, policymakers and ordinary citizens. This article argues that environmental peacebuilding interventions can be conceptually categorised in terms of their transformative ambitions, i.e. their desire to alter existing relations of power and ‘value grabbing’ (Andreucci et al., 2017). From this perspective, interventions can be placed on a continuum between two opposing positions: at one end, a formal and procedural position concerned with the establishment of rules and institutions to adjudicate conflicts; and at the other end, a transformative and more substantive position that sees post-conflict conjunctures as moments in which structural inequalities and histories of exploitation and domination need to be addressed. These can, respectively, be called ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ conceptions of justice.

The central tenet of this article is that environmental peacebuilding policies are caught in a tension between thick and thin approaches. Peacebuilding interventions are moments when people express aspirations for alternative social orders. Social movements, advocacy organisations, and even ordinary people might see the transition out of war as a critical juncture poised for change, in which established hierarchies and balances of power can be shifted. In many contexts, the fact that deep-seated inequalities in access to and use of natural resources are often at the heart of wartime politics makes them potential issues for post-war political realignments (Berdal & Zaum, 2017; Cramer, 2006). By contrast, aid organisations tend to embrace a thin conception of environmental peacebuilding, eschewing questions of structural injustice and power imbalances, which they often see as ‘too political’ (Louis & Maertens, 2021). We will argue that this is not merely a matter of specific failings, contextual effects, or clear policy intentions, but rather a consequence of how international bureaucracies have integrated environmental concerns into the peacebuilding agenda. This article aims to analyse the tensions between thin and thick approaches, showing how they emerge, change and are challenged, as well as the effects they have on post-conflict politics.

The claim that aid bureaucracies tend to adopt a thin justice approach warrants further unpacking. This tendency is related to the fact that currently dominant conceptions about the link between environment, peace, and security tend to consider that ‘governance failures’ are one of the main reasons that conflicts over natural resources escalate and become violent (Bruch et al., 2016; Unruh & Williams, 2013; Young & Goldman, 2015). Both doctrinal discourse and real-world peacebuilding interventions espouse an institutional approach, which posits that conflict is often a reflection of the weakness or lack of legitimacy of institutions. The inability of institutions to act as credible arbiters between conflicting parties leads people to feel that their needs are not being recognised or that they cannot trust institutions to represent their interests and enforce their rights (Davis et al., 2023b; Ide, 2020; Krampe et al., 2021). Here, governance failures are generally seen
by aid bureaucracies as the result of weak decision-making processes, unaccountable institutions,
and corruption-prone procedures. Governance failures of this kind can be exploited by politico-
military entrepreneurs who leverage perceived injustice as a means of recruiting supporters, fuelling
communal violence and legitimising their rule (Gaston & Brown, 2023).

This perspective holds that the role of peacebuilders is to strengthen existing institutions or build
new ones in order to promote local governance capacities (Bruch et al., 2009, 2016; Carius, 2006;
Conca & Dabelko, 2002). The ‘theory of change’ that guides most environmental peacebuilding
interventions is that once an institution becomes efficient and legitimate, not only will it be better
able to adjudicate conflicts (and thus prevent the risk of escalation), but it will also become a site
for establishing trust and cooperation between different social groups, thus having an overall
positive effect on peaceful coexistence beyond the specific problem of natural resource
management (Ide & Eckert, 2019; Johnson, 2019; Johnson et al., 2021; Krampe et al., 2021;
Matthew et al., 2009).

This approach to environmental peacebuilding has been applied in myriad cases. At the global level, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has promoted the idea that environmental governance can have a twofold impact on conflict: preventing the escalation of tensions over the use of natural resources and creating interdependence between parties, potentially creating space for cooperation rather than conflict (Conca & Dabelko, 2002; Dalmer, 2022; Krampe et al., 2021; Matthew et al., 2009). Over the past two decades, this approach has spread to a number of places. In Colombia, the relationship between governance and environmental degradation has been amply documented in the Amazonian forest, where the demobilisation of the FARC rebels and the subsequent fighting over territory has favoured a rapid spike in deforestation (Murillo-Sandoval et al., 2020; Vanegas-Cubillos et al., 2022). Donors and government agencies have attributed this to the ‘governance vacuum’ left by the end of rebel rule and the insufficient presence of the national government (ICG, 2021; for a critical assessment, see Johnson et al., 2024). A different narrative of governance failure can be seen in the Sahel, where UN agencies have identified farmer-herder conflicts as a major threat to peace because they create an environment conducive to the intervention of jihadist groups (Allouche et al. 2025). Again, this is seen by international peacebuilders as a consequence of the collapse of existing forms of governance, which is the combined result of a weak state apparatus, the lack of legitimacy of local authorities and climate change (Gaston & Brown, 2023). A similar approach was taken in Darfur in the 2010s, where donors promoted the development of greater local capacities for natural resource management as a way of supporting social cohesion and preventing new waves of violence (Castro, 2018). These kinds of natural resource management issues are often framed in terms of ‘resilience’ (Johnson et al., 2023). In Sierra Leone and Liberia, for example, donors have supported localised natural resource management on the assumption that local solutions play a fundamental role in preventing conflict and generating ‘social cohesion’ (Ryan, 2022). Donors have often associated these local institutions with notions of ‘traditional’ legitimacy, as in the case of Afghanistan, where USAID believed that local assemblies were better placed than state institutions to adjudicate land disputes (Baczko, 2016; Murtazashvili & Murtazashvili, 2021).

A number of research questions arise from this analytical framework: first, we should examine how
and which policy instruments (e.g. local natural resource management) are used by environmental
peacebuilding initiatives and what their power implications are. This includes an analysis of how
policies determine ownership of, access to and decision-making power over natural resources.<fnref n="2" /> It also involves examining the expectations that policies create among different social groups (see Courtheyn, 2018). Second, we should ask how competing approaches to social justice are promoted and legitimised. This involves identifying the coalitions of actors that promote them, the relationships between them, and the resources they have to shape policy (e.g. Curtis 2013). A study of different approaches to social justice should also look at how they account for the past and the present, or in other words, how they understand trajectories of domination and dispossession and their impact on people's situations (Pugh et al., 2008). Finally, we should ask what impact these thin approaches have on the observable outcomes of policy interventions. This requires identifying who is empowered by environmental peacebuilding policies and how these policies affect and reshape relations between different social groups with competing interests and expectations.<fnref n="3" /> The table below summarises these three dimensions of our framework. The rest of the article uses these questions as a guide to the our case study of Liberia.

<table><caption>**Table 1. Analytical framework and research questions.**</caption><thead><tr><td>Policy instruments</td><td>Competing approaches to environmental peacebuilding</td><td>Effects</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>How do they determine ownership, access and decision-making power?</td><td>What are the coalitions of actors? Their characteristics, their resources?</td><td>Who is empowered by environmental peacebuilding policies?</td></tr><tr><td>What expectations do they create?</td><td>How do they account for past and present injustices?</td><td>How do these policies have an impact on the relations between different groups?</td></tr></tbody></table>

## Environmental peacebuilding in Liberia

### Forests of war and peace

Liberia is a foundational case for environmental peacebuilding. It is one of the first places where development agencies and other international organisations actively promoted natural resource management reform as an antidote to war (Beevers, 2019). It is also a place where this reform is generally seen as a reasonable success, at least on paper (Roesch, 2020). While the country remains one of the poorest in the world and ranks very low on any development index, it has some of the most progressive legislation in Africa in terms of recognising people's rights to farmland and forests. And also interestingly, Liberia is one of the places where a broader doctrine of

<footnote n="2">2 On access, ownership and decision making power see Ribot & Peluso (2003) and Peluso & Lund (2011).</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 On how environmental policy in general reshapes the relations of production and social reproduction, see Paprocki (2021).</footnote>
environmental peacebuilding was articulated; the very intense international intervention that took place there between the end of the war in 2003 and the 2010s created a favourable context for people to meet and work together, and the country somehow became a hub on the global environmental peacebuilding scene (Altman et al., 2011; Blundell, 2011; Blundell & Christie, 2007). Lastly, while Liberia is arguably a typical ‘liberal peacebuilding’ case in which market-friendly policy and political liberalism served as the bedrock of reconstruction (Pailey, 2014), it is also home to vibrant civil society and grassroots movements who articulated alternative approaches to the transition out of war (Grajales, 2025). From that point of view, it is a suitable case to observe how diverse and competing conceptions of environmental peacebuilding and social justice emerge.

For most of Liberia's history, timber has been one of the country's main exports. In the 2010s, timber represented between US$35 to 50 million per year,<fnref n="4" /> accounting for 15 to 25 percent of total export earnings. Timber exports have declined since 2019, but remain an important source of foreign currency. With 4.2 million hectares of forest (43 percent of its total landmass), timber is one of the country's most significant natural resources. We will focus mainly on community forest policy, which is one element of the post-war reform of forest management and the timber industry (Beevers, 2015, 2019). Community forestry is an interesting case for our research, mainly due to the fact that – at least during its early years – this policy was seen by the donor community as a way of addressing the legacies of the war while promoting sustainable management of Liberia's forest resources. More broadly, forests were at the centre of the development community's efforts to reform natural resource management in the post-war years (Blundell, 2003; Rochow et al., 2006). This was largely because Charles Taylor and other warlords financed their armies through timber smuggling. Taylor traded timber for weapons to circumvent the UN arms embargo and used the proceeds to fund an extensive patronage network and increase his own personal wealth (Global Witness, 2002; UNSC, 2001, 2002). After Taylor's regime was toppled in 2003, timber industry reform became a key priority for USAID, supported by the World Bank and FAO. This opened a window of opportunity for people to advocate for reform that went beyond regulating the industry (Alden Wily, 2007; Brown, 2008; Global Witness, 2006; SDI, 2006). The scope of the reform was broadened in two directions: conservation, with new legislation strengthening the protection of Liberia's forests; and community rights, with the idea that rural communities had a legitimate right to manage their own resources and decide who could access their forests and for what purpose (Forest Peoples Programme, 2006; Lomax, 2008). The result of this process was a 2009 law, the Community Rights Act, which gave legal existence to community forests.

Community forests are quite representative of ‘local governance’ approaches to environmental peacebuilding. These approaches are related to a broader shift toward more locally driven peacebuilding practices, which have specifically emphasised techniques aiming to foster peaceful attitudes, democratic participation, and respect for institutional frameworks from the bottom up (Korosteleva & Flockhart, 2020; Mac Ginty, 2016; Ryan, 2022). Community forests are demarcated areas where the management of, access to, and use of resources is regulated by local governance bodies (a community assembly, a management board, and an executive commission). The policy was conceived both as a way of compensating the rural population for the fact that their resources had been massively plundered during the war, and as a way of fostering cooperation between

<footnote n="4">4 Source: see an updated database on the website of the International Tropical Timber Organisation: https://www.itto.int/</footnote>
different communities at the grassroots level in a context where peaceful coexistence was
threatened by the consequences of ethnically based violence, forced displacement, and exile.<fnref n="5" />
Moreover, in the 2000s and 2010s, community forestry was a common policy used to make
conservation projects more acceptable. In short, community forestry was a useful approach that
combined conservation and social cohesion objectives, and it was promoted in a context in which
the place of forestry in the peacebuilding agenda had given environmental policy great relevance
and visibility.

But today, 15 years after their creation, community forests have fallen short of expectations. Even as they were being implemented, it became clear that community forests were becoming a useful vehicle for timber companies to gain easy access to the country's resources (Forest Trends, 2024; O'Hagan et al., 2020). Since the law gave communities the power to enter into contracts with 'third parties', timber companies teamed up with local elites and regional political figures to enter into these contracts (Global Witness, 2018; Roesch, 2021). For many investors, community forests were a cheaper way to harvest timber. They offered less bureaucracy, lower taxes and simpler procedures (SDI, 2019a, 2019b). With control in the hands of local communities, the balance of power was in favour of the companies. By April 2022, the Forest Development Authority (FDA, the state agency in charge of forest management) had approved 49 community forest applications covering more than 1 million hectares of land. Forty of these had signed contracts with companies or were under negotiation.<fnref n="6" /> As a result, by 2020, two-thirds of Liberia's timber exports were sourced from community forests (LEITI, 2022, p. 112). The law has also failed to deliver significant benefits to the people with legal rights to these forests. Extensive research shows that company commitments are seldom honoured and that companies have failed to pay massive amounts of land rent (CS-IFM, 2023; Kanneh & Geeplay, 2021; Manwell, 2019; SDI, 2018). Corporate exploitation of community forest policy has led foreign donors to reduce their support for community forest creation and management.<fnref n="7" /> This was particularly the case for USAID, which had been a major supporter of community forestry since 2008. After 2018, it became clear that the massive use of community forests as a shortcut to obtaining forestry contracts was becoming politically costly for USAID.<fnref n="8" /> This encouraged the agency to shift its focus to supporting new parks and nature reserves.<fnref n="9" />

Thin and thick justice within community forestry

In the forestry debate, thin and thick notions of justice have competed to shape the legal framework
and policy.<fnref n="10" /> Initially, most foreign donors took a thin view, in line with that of Liberian officials
involved in the discussions. Between 2004 and 2006, a group of donors who were members of the
Liberian Forest Initiative (LFI) worked on a comprehensive reform of forest legislation (Altman et

<footnote n="5">5 This representation was recurrent in multiple interviews: USAID programme manager (Monrovia, 16 April 2022), a regional project coordinator (Tappita, 24 and 28 January 2023), and a consultant having worked for the community forest project (Monrovia, 3 February 2023).</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 Interview, Forest Development Agency, Head of the Community Forestry Division, 14 April 2022.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 The representation of community forests as a failure was shared by our interviewees at USAID (Monrovia, 13 April 2022), the World Bank (Monrovia, 19 April 2022), and the European Union (Monrovia, 20 April 2022).</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 USAID, *Forest Incomes for Environmental Sustainability (FIFES) midterm performance evaluation*, Washington, DC, United States Agency for International Development, 2018.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 Interview, USAID programme manager, Monrovia, 11 April 2022.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 In addition to the sources listed in the text, we interviewed the former FDA director (Monrovia, 16 April 2022), the former head of the UN panel of experts (online, 10 May 2022), the former director of the Liberian Sustainable Development Institute (Duarzon, 15 April 2022), and the former coordinator of a global NGO advocacy campaign (online, 6 April 2022).</footnote>
al., 2011; Rochow et al., 2006). This was based on the idea that the massive corruption and weaponisation of timber money under Taylor had been made possible by a weak and opaque governance system. The reform was driven by an alliance between LFI donors and Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (Beevers, 2019). The result of these efforts was the National Forestry Reform Act, passed by the Liberian Congress in 2006.

Despite its ambitious aims, the 2006 law did not fundamentally alter the fact that the state remained the only authority with the right to regulate access to and use of forests (Beevers, 2019). Forests still belonged to the state, and local people had no say in decisions about forest access and use (Lomax, 2008). This position reproduced the historical disenfranchisement of so-called ‘tribal’ communities whose lands had been appropriated by the Monrovia elite, who acted as intermediaries between international markets and domestic resources. This pattern of exploitation, which has been studied across Africa under the name ‘extraversion’ (Bayart, 2000), was the fundamental characteristic of Liberia’s position in the capitalist world (Ellis, 2001; Sawyer, 2005).

Nevertheless, forest policy debates offered a context in which this ‘thin’ view could be challenged through the idea of community forestry. Under the 2006 law, community rights were reduced to receiving a share of timber industry profits. After the law was enacted, this vision began to be challenged by a group of NGOs formed in the context of the international peacekeeping intervention; these included the Sustainable Development Institute (SDI), Green Advocates, and the NGO Coalition for Liberia.<fnref n="11" /> These organisations had been formed in the previous years, in the context of actions against Taylor’s regime and the ‘war timber’ economy (Beevers, 2019). They had attracted the support of western allies such as the UK-based NGO Global Witness and gained access to funding from European official development assistance and US charitable foundations. The Liberian activists and their allies did not manage to obtain any substantive change to the law, but they did succeed in having an interim measure included in the final version of the 2006 law that required authorities to commit to passing a forthcoming bill ‘governing community rights in relation to forestland’.<fnref n="12" /> This legislative provision laid the groundwork for further mobilisation to secure robust protection of land rights.

Within this context, activists launched a major advocacy campaign, arguing that the state needed to move away from centralised forest management toward recognising that rural communities were entitled to participate in the management of their forests (Forest Peoples Programme, 2006). But their demands, which corresponded to a ‘thick’ conception of justice, actually went beyond mere participation. For them, this was not just about forest governance, but about the more fundamental issue of reversing the history of dispossession and accumulation wrought by the Monrovia elite, who had historically seen the country’s hinterland as little more than a reservoir of natural resources to be plundered. Many in civil society argued that the centralised and predatory nature of the land and forest administration was one of the factors that had contributed to the escalation of social tensions that led to the 1981 military coup and the 1989 war (NGO Coalition for Liberia, 2008; SDI, 2009). Rural people’s dispossession was intimately connected to the attempt made by Liberian elites to take advantage of Liberia’s subordinate place in global value chains. Indeed, ‘tribal’ (commonly held) lands had been transformed into government lands by a series of legislative

<footnote n="11">11 Interviews with SDI leadership (Duarzon, 13, 15 and 23 April 2022), and with the NGO Coalition for Liberia (19 April 2022).</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 National Forestry Reform Law, section 10.1, paragraph C.</footnote>
changes in the 1950s, within the context of an investor-friendly ‘open door’ policy (Alden Wily, 2007, p. 121). This was further reinforced by Charles Taylor, who bolstered these legal provisions and made all forest resources in the country the property of the state (Alden Wily, 2007, pp. 234–235). Therefore, overhauling the historical marginalisation of rural people required reconsidering the position of Liberia within global value chains, as well as the lucrative brokering role played by Liberian elites.

Mobilisations of this kind in favour of thick justice in environmental peacebuilding were led by the Sustainable Development Institute (SDI), with crucial support from two international allies: FERN, a Dutch NGO based in Brussels, and the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), a British think tank. SDI coordinated a series of local consultations on rural people's expectations of community forestry across the country.<fnref n="13" /> This material was then used to produce two reports by Liz Alden Wily (2007) and David Brown (2008). Both are widely recognised international experts, with influential names in both the development aid community and the fields of agricultural and forestry studies. Their work advocated the direct allocation of forest rights to communities. Alden Wily, in particular, argued that while ‘forests [were] the least secure asset of rural communities’ rural people see them ‘as collective property and as an integral part of the community’s customary lands’ (Alden Wily, 2007, pp. 225, 253).

However, the idea of a complete transfer of rights over at least some of the country's forest land to locally elected bodies was not wholly compatible with the concerns of the government and the World Bank.<fnref n="14" /> This was reinforced by the fact that SDI and its allies advocated for a model in which grassroots organisations independent from state agencies would be entrusted with the responsibility of forest management. The Bank and the government each felt that such a policy would deprive the state of much-needed tax revenues. More fundamentally, government officials and many in the donor community still saw community forestry as more about sharing benefits than sharing power. However, the activists had an unexpected ally when USAID decided to throw its weight behind the idea of community forests. USAID had been active in forest policy since 2003 and had played a major role in the ambitious post-war reform agenda. The US was also the most influential donor in the country and had the strongest forestry expertise. This gave a decisive boost to community forestry. After 2008, USAID supported the drafting of the law and the implementation of the new policy through the creation of the country's first community forests. The final version of the law did not fully challenge the administration's jurisdiction over forests, but created the 'Community Forest Management Agreement' (CFMA). CFMAs are a sort of contract between a local community and the state, effectively delegating decision-making power over forest access and resource use to locally elected bodies for a period of 25 years. Between 2008 and 2020, the new policy received crucial support from USAID, which ran three successive community forestry projects for a total cost of US$39 million.<fnref n="15" /> The aim of these three programmes was to establish community forests in different regions of Liberia, to use this experience to develop a blueprint for the establishment of future community forests, and to strengthen the capacity of the FDA to implement the policy. But while USAID's intervention had briefly buoyed the activists' vision of overhauling the structures of

<footnote n="13">13 Interviews with SDI leadership (see previous note) and with a former consultant for SDI (16 April 2022).</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 Interviews with SDI leadership (see previous note).</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15 ‘Land rights and community forestry programme’ (LRCFP, 8 million US dollars), ‘People, rules and organizations supporting the protection of ecosystem resources’ (PROSPER, 9 million), and ‘Forest incomes for environmental sustainability’ (FIFES, 22 million).</footnote>
exploitation that had characterised the Liberian economy, the agency's approach was in reality
much thinner. This created a number of blind spots that ultimately undermined the implementation
of the policy and explain the fact that it did not live up to its promises. This will be the subject of
the remainder of the article.

Community forestry in practice

As is often the case with natural resource management programmes (Ryan, 2022), USAID's rationale was based on the idea of strengthening 'local capacity' through technical interventions such as forest mapping, training, and raising awareness about new norms and local institutions. USAID's programmes were therefore mainly focused on formal aspects of local governance and participation (Roesch, 2021). The focus on technical operations obscured the fundamental inequalities that Liberian forest management was rooted in, the contentious history that USAID was getting into, and the intricate connections between local spaces of power and national patronage networks, themselves connected to transnational value chains. Our case study illustrates these dynamics.

In 2012, the Big Gio Forest (BGF) was selected by the USAID PROSPER project (People, Rules and Organisations Supporting the Protection of Ecosystem Resources) as part of its promotion of community forestry. This area became a national forest in 1952, when the government gazetted 58,000 hectares under the official name of Gio National Forest. During the civil war, the region was the scene of large-scale displacement and brutal violence, with armed actors using ethnic narratives to pit the region's two largest ethnic groups, the Gio and the Krahn, against each other (Berkeley, 1993; Ellis, 2001, pp. 60, 313; Gershoni, 2022, pp. 216–222). Industrial logging in the BGF was documented as early as 1959 (Kraaij, 1983, p. 606). Under Taylor, the BGF was logged by the Ivorian company MGC, which took most of the harvested logs to Côte d'Ivoire and exported them to France, Germany, Spain and Greece (Global Witness, 2002, p. 8).

Since 2012, USAID interventions have carved out four community forests from the former national forest: Sehzueplay, Kparblee, Bo-Quilla and Gbear-Gblor (Map 1). This resulted in high expectations in the villages around the forests.<fnref n="16" /> People believed that the creation of a community forest would result in the return of forests that had been grabbed from customary land and appropriated by government elites for extractive purposes, thus undoing the dispossession wrought by the national forest system. In practical terms, this meant addressing some people's perception, that the enclosure of the forest had resulted in greater land scarcity. More broadly, redressing the historical injustice of forestry development also meant making forestry pay compensation to impoverished rural inhabitants, who had expected logging to improve their standard of living by bringing some of the most basic services they felt entitled to, such as roads, schools, or health facilities. However, neither land access nor forestry benefits were part of USAID's plans; instead, they saw community forestry as a way of promoting 'good governance' and 'people-friendly conservation'. This created an unbridgeable gap between people's expectations and USAID's approach, which again illustrates the way environmental peacebuilding is caught between competing conceptions of justice and the approaches used to address injustice.

<footnote n="16">16 These themes are recurrent throughout our interviews. We spent 20 days in the area during two stays in December 2022 and January 2023. We did 25 interviews in 10 different locations around the BGF. We also observed two governing body meetings in Sehzueplay and hiked through the forest to identify logging and farming areas.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>**Map 1. Research locations.** Source: the authors, created using data from Naturalearthdata.com (public domain), Liberia Forest Atlas (Creative Commons CC BY 4.0) and Hansen et al. (2013).</figcaption></figure>

***Land access: forestland or people's land?***

The establishment of a community forest requires its perimeter to be defined. This entails setting boundaries with customary farmland and other claimants such as neighbouring communities, private landowners, logging companies, and national parks. In the Big Gio Forest, USAID addressed these issues as though they were fundamentally technical in nature, and in doing so failed to recognise the fact that the existing boundaries were the result of a history of dispossession and disenfranchisement. As a matter of fact, the four community forests in the Big Gio Forest were created within the boundaries of a national forest. National forests were established by the Liberian government in the 1950s, and over the years, they benefited from the support of various donor
countries, including Germany and the United States. National forests were defined as state-
controlled areas, and their purpose was to set aside spaces where valuable trees could be harvested
(Sachtler, 1968). They were part of a broader policy of encouraging foreign interest in the country's
natural resources, known as the 'open door' policy (Kraaij, 1983). In this respect, they embodied
the disenfranchisement of rural people by the state in the name of economic development. In the
1970s, nature conservation was introduced into the debate around forestry, largely through the
activism of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which documented
areas of high biological value.<fnref n="17" /> By the 2010s, when USAID deployed its community forestry
programme in the area, the creation and demarcation of community forests as a new institutional
reality had to take place in the context of this long history of dispossession and conflict.

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>**Map 2. Deforestation in the Big Gio Forest.** Source: the authors, created using data from Naturalearthdata.com (public domain), Liberia Forest Atlas (Creative Commons CC BY 4.0) and Hansen et al. (2013).</figcaption></figure>

<footnote n="17">17 Interviews, former FDA director (16 April 2022) and former country representative for Conservation International (18 April 2022).</footnote>
Consequently, in some areas the delimitation process was extremely contentious. One remarkable illustration of this is the Bo-Quilla forest, which featured some of the most intractable conflicts for land and forest use in our study. In Bo-Quilla, people accused USAID of having grabbed land that they perceived as theirs – an indication of the fact that the national forest boundary was never fully accepted there. As argued by an inhabitant of the town of Marlay:

> PROSPER (the USAID project) traced the line here (showing on a map). We argued for six months. They took all this portion of the land from us and they added it to the forest. But people have their farms there. The forest is here, Marlay as a community is settled here (again showing the map). And here, maybe this is your father's land, and this is my father's place, and also, this is his father's place (talking to the co-authors), this is our customary land and we are the owners of Marlay, or the citizens of Marlay.<fnref n="18" />

Bo-Quilla has the highest level of environmental degradation of the four BGF community forests (see map 2). This is due to artisanal chainsaw logging – called ‘pit sawing’ in Liberia – and farming within the forest. This made USAID operations particularly controversial. In early 2017, USAID tasked surveyors with demarcating the forest based on a series of consultations held in neighbouring villages. However, as they reached the town of Marlay, the surveyors were stopped by a group of local men armed with cutlasses and hunting weapons, who claimed that the land being enclosed was their farmland. Two years later, a new attempt by another USAID project also failed to achieve a recognised demarcation between forestland and farmland. After USAID’s intervention reached an end, the matter was left in the hands of local community forestry bodies. The problem of demarcation, which is common in many other parts of Liberia, was then addressed through ‘capacity building’. The FDA and the National Union of Community Forest Management Bodies offered training in conflict resolution in 2022, and local bodies were instructed to finish the job where development professionals had failed. As of our most recent visit to the area in January 2023, no agreement had been reached.

A closer look at these conflicts reveals that the inability of local authorities to manage them has nothing to do with a lack of capacity, but is instead largely due to the political economy of agriculture and artisanal logging. When we asked people why they resisted the enforcement of forest boundaries, the common response<fnref n="19" /> was that they suffered from land scarcity, as their customary territory was enclosed between the land of neighbouring communities and the boundaries of the forest; as one Sehzueplay resident put it:

> People don't have anywhere else to sustain themselves, so they are in the forest doing their subsistence farming. Between here and Kparblee (their neighbours) all the land is taken. There is nowhere else to farm. The only option is to go into the forest. We grow plantain, rice, pepper, and also some rubber and cocoa.<fnref n="20" />

These claims have been shaped by the growth of commercial agriculture both within the Bo-Quilla forest and in neighbouring areas. The proximity of the cities of Ganta and Tappita (respectively north and south of the area studied, and located outside the map shown here) creates a demand for

<footnote n="18">18 Interview, 26 January 2023.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19 This was a recurrent theme in the interviews conducted in the towns of the Bo-Quilla area (Marley, Toweh, Sarlay, Yoelay 1 and Yoelay 2).</footnote>

<footnote n="20">20 Interview, 26 January 2023.</footnote>
agricultural products. Plantain has been a major crop since the end of the war, and our interviewees also reported recent growth in rubber and cocoa production (for export), further increasing the demand for land. The problem of land scarcity is exacerbated by the fact that participation in these cash crop markets is highly unequal: both customary farmland and forestland have been appropriated by small groups of local entrepreneurs who have the capital and market connections to take advantage of the demand for plantain or rubber gum.

The ties between these economic transformations and external markets can extend beyond the regional economy and are also determined by transboundary economic networks. A good illustration of this can be found in the conflicts we documented on the edge of the Kparblee forest.<fnref n="21" /> In this area, which is very close to the Ivorian border, members of the local elite and the Liberian diaspora in the US have recently begun to lease plots of forestland to Burkinabé farmers brought in from Côte d'Ivoire. These local sponsors have ties with intermediaries on the Ivorian side of the border. Fieldwork carried out as part of another project (Grajales & Toukpo 2025) suggests that some of the individuals working to recruit this labour force are former rebels from the Ivorian civil war who have already established cocoa trading networks in several of Côte d'Ivoire's protected areas. In any case, it is clear that the development of cocoa farming and the fact that workers are brought in through international connections suggest that this economic activity is closely related to circuits of capital accumulation and political power (IDEF, 2024).

A further example of the relationship between competition for land and circuits of capital accumulation is offered by the case of ‘pit sawing’. While artisanal chainsawing is a common practice well beyond Liberia, this activity underwent profound changes in the aftermath of the Liberian civil war. After the war, the massive demand for timber in a country in ruins led to a brutal increase in pit sawing. This demand was mostly met by groups of young men, many of them former militia members, hired by well-connected boss. This ensured protection in a context of post-war insecurity, as well as access to capital and trade circuits (Cheng, 2018). Today, two decades after the end of the war, pit sawyers are no longer just ex-combatants; their ranks now also include the impoverished youth of the post-war years. However, the market remains relatively concentrated, with many trade networks controlled by politicians and members of the security establishment. A good indication of this is the fact that a significant amount of timber harvested in eastern Liberia is illegally exported to Côte d'Ivoire with the complicity of customs officials, forest rangers, and Ivorian law enforcement (Toukpo, 2022). In the forests in our study, pit sawing is particularly intense in the cases of Sehzueplay and Bo-Quilla. In both places, the pit sawyers were protected by the community forest management bodies in place. In the town of Marlay, for example, members of the forest management executive committee told us that they demanded payment of a tax by pit sawyers harvesting timber from the community forest.<fnref n="22" /> In Sehzueplay, members of the forest management board were found to have funded pit saw crews to cut timber in the forest they were supposed to be guarding.<fnref n="23" />

USAID's failure to recognise the land access expectations of certain segments of the local population can be interpreted as a consequence of their thin justice approach: the agency was unable

<footnote n="21">21 Interviews: EC member, Kparblee Town, 24 January 2023; CFMB secretary, Old Yourpea, 25 January 2023; CFMB chair, Monrovia, 2 February 2023.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">22 Interview, former EC member, Marlay, 27 January 2023.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">23 Observation of Sehzueplay CA meeting, Korlay, 31 January 2023.</footnote>
to recognise that the very existence of a national forest was evidence of a history of land grabbing by the state. Seeing forest delimitation as a mere technical operation aiming to unearth the old limits of the forest and make them coincide with the contemporary demarcation belies the fact that inhabitants never recognised the enclosure of the forest to begin with and expected the intervention of USAID to offer solutions to their problems of land access. These failings were compounded by an overall failure to see and analyse the class relations running through the rural society. The representation of social groups as 'communities', which conjures an idea of overall homogeneity and cohesion, is certainly part of the problem (Gilfoy, 2015). The conflicts around pit sawing are a good illustration of this, as community forest management bodies are caught between different groups competing for access to the same forest, only some of whom have ties to external markets.

***Who benefits from community forestry?***

While the problems associated with the delimitation of forests illustrate the limited understanding that USAID had of people's aspirations for change, the gap between bureaucratic conceptions of aid and real-world understandings of development appears even wider when one examines the issue of the material benefits of forestry. As shown by Tania Murray Li in the context of Indonesia (Li, 2010, 2014), natural resource management projects that focus only on good governance and environmental protection overlook the fact that most people's primary aspiration is to improve their material living conditions and achieve a certain ideal of modernity. Again, this gap between policy design and people's aspirations can be captured by the ideas of thin and thick justice. A thin justice approach defines good governance and institutional capacity as the goal, whereas a thick justice approach sees them as the method for improving people's lives. In our case, USAID adopted a paradigmatic thin position, operating on the assumption that it was sufficient for a policy to simply establish local institutions and give them power over forest management. The agency never considered whether community forests were actually capable of bringing about positive change in people's lives.

This narrow view was determined by USAID's bureaucratic environment. People's aspirations for material gain and access to land were simply not part of the agency's community forest agenda. There were bureaucratic reasons for this: while the rhetoric of peacebuilding was often used to justify the projects, the money did not come from a peace or stabilisation fund, but from funds appropriated by the US Congress for biodiversity conservation. The upshot was that USAID was very reluctant to consider logging in 'their' forests,<fnref n="24" /> despite the fact that communities could legally choose to contract with loggers. This put the agency in an awkward position. They needed to build support for community forestry among local societies, but they could not really tell people what kind of material benefits they would get. In fact, the agents working for the project were explicitly instructed to offer evasive answers to villagers' requests in this regard.<fnref n="25" /> As a result, there was a constant lack of clarity about the financial benefits that communities could derive from the forest. The prospect of developing ecotourism or receiving payment for environmental services was mentioned to some of our interviewees, but nothing very concrete came of it. It was only in the final stages of USAID's interventions (particularly the FIFES project) that small-scale 'income-generating activities' – a classic tool of development assistance – were funded. Very limited in scale

<footnote n="24">24 Interview with a former project consultant for Nimba (Monrovia, 3 February 2023).</footnote>

<footnote n="25">25 Interview with PROSPER's former regional coordinator for Nimba County (Tappita, 24 and 28 January 2023).</footnote>
and profitability – the most common example being the installation of beehives – these projects
were unable to live up to the expectations of their intended beneficiaries.

This has created a fundamental gap between community forest policy and people's expectations. In a context in which rural Liberians have precious little faith in the state's ability or willingness to provide some of the most basic forms of public services, extractive companies and foreign aid are the only possible sources of investment in public utilities and infrastructure. When USAID was unable to meet their expectations, people were particularly keen to explore other ways of making community forests actually deliver on development promises. Logging companies saw an opportunity to enter into contracts with the newly created local management bodies, offering people what neither development agencies nor the state were prepared to.

Logging companies also had the advantage of relying on local brokers with extensive ties to national and international markets and local respectability. A common pattern emerged in Kparblee and Sehzueplay. In Kparblee, the community forestry management board signed a contract in 2018 with a company called KTC, Kparblee Timber Corporation. KTC was set up by three wealthy members of the community – one of whom was a former deputy minister – for the specific purpose of signing this contract. In Sehzueplay, the board approved a contract with Universal Forest Company (UFC), which was brought into the area by one of its shareholders, then-Minister Cooper Kruah, who also acted as the board's 'legal advisor'.

These land deals did not bring any substantial benefits to the region. KTC agreed to pay an annual lease of US$6,824.12, which would be matched by the same amount paid into a scholarship fund, but it also promised to construct 20 km of dirt roads, build ten new school classrooms, construct offices for the forest management bodies, upgrade the dispensary, and construct several hand pumps and latrines. However, none of these pledges listed in a 'social agreement' signed by the company had been fulfilled as of our most recent visit to the area in January 2023. As for the land rent, the company paid only half of what was due, and the balance at the time of our fieldwork, five years after the contract was signed, showed a debt of US$17,060. The story was similar in Sehzueplay, where UFC was in arrears on land rent and had not fulfilled any of its public works commitments. The company behaved similarly in other parts of Liberia, as by 2022 it had accumulated arrears totalling US$155,000 for all its Liberian operations (VPA, 2022, p. 35).

The pattern observed in Sehzueplay and Kparblee was replicated across the country as community forestry became the preferred way for many companies to access forest resources. (Global Witness, 2018; Roesch, 2021). This was clearly not in the plans of USAID, which was primarily focused on pushing people away from commercial forestry. When the agency saw 'its' forest falling into logging contracts, it decided to cease its support for community forestry. In 2018, an interim evaluation of the project concluded that communities were eager to sign contracts without consulting USAID, and that neither the FDA nor local governance bodies had the capacity to implement sustainable forestry and manage forestry revenues.<fnref n="26" /> As USAID withdrew from community forestry, other donors such as the World Bank and Norway followed suit. Today, our contacts in the development industry regard community forestry as 'a toxic policy that [they] want to stay away from.'<fnref n="27" /> The donors' diagnosis emphasises institutional weakness and overlooks the

<footnote n="26">26 USAID, *Forest Incomes for Environmental Sustainability (FIFES) midterm performance evaluation*, Washington, DC, United States Agency for International Development, 2018.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">27 Interview with USAID project manager, Monrovia, 13 April 2022.</footnote>
fact that development bureaucracies ignored people's expectations of community forestry.
Paradoxically, this blindness ended up creating a space for the development of unregulated and
unmonitored logging, the very situation they were trying to steer the country away from.

Conclusion

The case of community forestry in Liberia shows the consequences of an exclusive focus on 'getting institutions right' without recognising that institutions are embedded in relations of power and capital accumulation. Our example shows how this overly simplistic focus makes 'good governance' an inadequate response to the challenges of post-conflict natural resource management. As other researchers have shown (Ryan, 2022; Ryan & Martín De Almagro, 2024), representations of the 'local' as a bounded space in need of capacity-building place the responsibility for managing natural resources on the most vulnerable people, ignoring the extent to which their agency is shaped by powerful economic and political forces.

This article builds on these observations to explore an additional dimension. People's demands and expectations for social justice are a common blind spot in environmental peacebuilding, both in practice and in research. In Liberia, the development of natural resource governance institutions was seen by donors as an end in itself, rather than a method for delivering benefits to impoverished and vulnerable populations. This led them to ignore the fact that the implementation of environmental policies paved the way for people to express claims and expectations of justice. Justice-centric narratives of this kind saw resource management as more than a matter of good governance: they were rooted in the very idea that post-war transition should reverse a history of exploitative power relations and bring material and developmental benefits to rural people. The failure of donors to meet these expectations ended up creating a space for logging companies to seize control of community forestry policies and return the country to the throes of an extractivist economy.

Our conceptualisation of thin and thick justice aims to shed light on the multiple expectations and
claims that environmental policies are required to meet. Our analytical framework and case study
are an invitation to scholars to pay greater attention to the diversity of conceptions that may arise in
the design and implementation of these policies. Such conceptions may come from civil society
organisations, development bureaucracies, or ordinary people. In any case, they are one of the
central parameters around which post-war power relations are negotiated, resisted and contested.

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