When Green Policies Mask Colonial Control: The Dark Side of Conservation

More than 50,000 people marched through central Stockholm last weekend demanding stronger climate action ahead of Sweden's general election. It was a necessary crowd. Because the climate establishment it is pressuring is, at this very moment, building the infrastructure of its own discredit. On 9 September at the Danish Institute for International Studies, a seminar titled "Greening the margins: Climate action, militarised conservation and the reproduction of marginalisation" will put that infrastructure under a microscope — and ask, plainly, whether the global push to "green" the planet is simply reupholstering old colonial furniture.

The questions the climate sector prefers not to hear

Carbon credit schemes, biodiversity offsets, climate adaptation funds — the vocabulary of salvation is everywhere. The institute is asking scholars to trace how these instruments attach themselves to existing geographies of control. When does "protecting forests" become indistinguishable from counterinsurgency? When does a carbon project inherit the architecture of a dispossession project, and merely rebrand it?

The seminar draws on field research from Myanmar, India, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. The three scholars — Anwesha Dutta of Ghent University, Esther Marijnen of Wageningen University and Kevin Woods of Chulalongkorn University — have spent careers tracking how conservation becomes militarised, and how militarisation becomes environmental policy. Marijnen has worked in eastern DRC since 2013. Woods has spent years inside Myanmar's ethnic borderlands. These are not theorists speculating from armchairs. They are researchers who have watched armed rangers evict communities from lands now branded "biodiversity corridors."

Where this lands in practice

The Cambodia file makes the abstraction concrete. Khmer Times reports that the country's Environment Ministry has backed a cooperation framework with WWF focused on Tonle Sap — the great lake and floodplain that anchors Cambodia's food system and sustains hundreds of thousands of its poorest households. The press release language will lean on "resilience" and "co-benefits." What it will not say is who decides which fisheries, which forests, which villages fall inside a conservation boundary and which do not. The DIIS scholars will tell you, based on a decade of fieldwork, that the answer is usually displacement — quiet, bureaucratic, and permanent.

The Stockholm marchers are right to be in the streets. They would be smarter to specify which climate action they are demanding, and on whose land.

What to watch

The seminar sits inside two DIIS research projects — FRONTLANDS and MyCClimate — and its framing is pointed: can conservation and climate action be pursued without reproducing the marginalisation they claim to solve? The institutional answer, historically, is no — not without a fight over who controls the land, who writes the contracts, and who gets armed when the contract is broken.

Watch the Tonle Sap agreement. Watch who gets hired, who gets funded, and which villages get quietly reclassified as "buffer zones." Watch what militarised conservation looks like when it wears a green logo. And if we marched in Stockholm — and we hope some of us did — we should bring that scrutiny with us. The climate fight is not only about how fast we move. It is about who the speed serves, and who it sweeps aside.