Tosana Töben’s (GloFor cohort 2023–2025) first journal article has just been published in The Cambridge Journal of Climate Research!
Driven by research gaps about more-than-human agency and the dynamics of deforestation by fire, Tosana Töben’s article proposes a more-than-human political ecology framework that conceptualises and recognises more-than-human agents beyond their role as resources, drawing on land rights coding and a posthumanist reconceptualisation of agency. In the case of the tropical lowlands of Bolivia, attending to more-than-humans as actors in their own rights, rather than as a mere outcome of human activity, made it possible for her to become attentive to how forests and fires dynamically interact with regulatory frameworks, economic pressures, and local practices. Fire emerges from ecologically vulnerable landscapes and a governance system designed to promote deforestation-by-fire, yet its agency actively reassembles both territory and tenure, recursively intensifying the very conditions that fuel it. Tosana Töben’s research documents how Indigenous territories face systematic vulnerability as land tenure rights are hollowed out by selective enforcement of fire laws that criminalize traditional subsistence burning while enabling large-scale producers to operate with impunity.
Link to the article: https://diamond-oa.lib.cam.ac.uk/entities/publication/ac4f6a22-8887-494d-8528-a7144a683c25
Tosana Töben also recently uploaded an audiovisual report documenting the local effects of the catastrophic wildfires that raged through the indigenous territory of “Monte Verde” in 2024. The video, available at https://lnkd.in/eF39q46h, shows a snippet of life before the disaster and the community responses during and after, in the form of collective protest, agricultural adaptation and water monitoring.
