In February 2026, the FOREQUAL project, now in its final phase, brought together researchers and doctoral and master students from various disciplines – law, agronomy, ecology, and environment – as well as NGOs at the University of Kinshasa for a three-day seminar. The aim was to share and debate what years of research on inequality in the Congo Basin forest sector have produced.
Day 1 - Learning together how to navigate contested forest lands in the Congo Basin
The first day was designed by the PhD and postdoctoral researchers of the project as a knowledge exchange with other colleagues doing research in the often highly contested forest and wider land sector. In this space, highly unequal actors compete for forest lands and access to resources - and aim to influence policy, but also research. The aim of this day was to learn from and with each other how to navigate such a space, and how to maintain integrity as a researcher, and which methods can facilitate this navigation.
The FOREQUAL team structured the day around various themes related to how to select a research topic, methodology, building a data corpus with an interdisciplinary approach, and why and where to publish. As the discussions unfolded, a harder question came from the participants: how do you conduct research, when it touches the interests of powerful actors? In the DRC, studying the forest sector means studying interests that are economically and politically significant. Researchers who ask uncomfortable questions, or whose findings can be interpreted by powerful actors as a threat to their public image and interests, risk facing pressure, harassment or worse. For early-career scientists without the protection of strong institutions or international networks, this is not an abstract concern. These points led the group to talk about censorship and self-censorship. When research touches sensitive subjects, the findings can make other actors feel exposed, and researchers sometimes choose not to say everything they know or not to say it plainly. One participant described this as a survival strategy, which prompted a frank exchange about what that means for the knowledge that eventually gets produced and shared.
The discussion then turned to access. One participant, a Congolese researcher affiliated with the University of Kinshasa, described being unable to reach a field site to collect data, while noticing that foreign researchers had entered the same area without difficulty. These exchanges kept bringing the group back to the same uncomfortable observation: the inequality that the project had spent years documenting in the forest sector was also present in the research process itself.
Day 2-3: Advancing research and sharing knowledge
The second and third days focused on the research findings on inequality and forest frontier dynamics. The day brought the FOREQUAL team together with the FairFrontiers team from the University of Lubumbashi to review the findings from both sides. The discussions moved across several themes. One explored how forest-dependent communities perceive and relate to ecosystem service value. Another examined why coercive conservation measures tend to persist while incentive-based approaches remain underfunded and politically marginal. The group also discussed transparency and whether it is an end point or a process to be negotiated. In a context where the EU Deforestation Regulation requires ever more data to be made available, what does meaningful transparency look like, and for whom is it being produced? Moving to international forest policy, the theory of everyday resistance offered a useful lens for looking at the power dynamics between the EU and the governments of the DRC and Cameroon in efforts to shift from illegal to legal timber trade. Through the sociology of law, a historical reading of forest legislation from colonial to contemporary times raises a question that the data make difficult to avoid: who has benefited from the legal frameworks governing the forest sector, and why do forest-dependent communities remain marginalised despite political discourse and even laws that were voted to protect their interests?
The wrap-up brought these findings together around the idea of inequality in the forest sector as a machinery, one that enables extractivism, systematically marginalises forest-dependent communities, and pushes those with the least power to use silences as a form of resistance. Inequality here is not incidental. It is structurally produced and reproduced through legal frameworks, extractive and conservation policies, international trade rules and the everyday exercise of power. Studying it also raises a moral question that cannot be set aside: who benefits from forest lands cannot be asked without also asking who should.
We thank all participants for making the seminar such an engaging and fruitful exchange.