What Kind of Future for the World Rainforest Movement?
Twenty Years after "Addressing the Underlying Causes of Deforestation"

In 1999, a report called Addressing the Underlying Causes of Deforestation and Forest Degradation was published. It resulted from a collaboration between the United Nations Intergovernmental Forum on Forests and a large group of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), including the World Rainforest Movement (WRM). The aim of the process was to help policy makers better understand the underlying causes of deforestation and to suggest how they might address them.

In 2019, amid continuing deforestation, the WRM International Secretariat decided to revisit this process, not only to update its findings, but also to pose the question: What lessons about forest activism has WRM learned in the past two decades?

The self-critical reflection that has resulted, What Kind of Future for the World Rainforest Movement?, tries to address four questions:

• What are the underlying causes of deforestation today?
• Who should WRM be talking to about them?
• Are different concepts of forests required by the ways that WRM engages in forest struggles today?
• In what ways do WRM's new forms of engagement entail fresh approaches to the process of understanding itself?

It is shared here in case it is helpful for other networks and NGOs who are also reviewing their movement strategies. Translations into Bahasa Indonesia, Spanish, French and Portuguese are forthcoming.

See also http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resource/translation-class-struggle-0.