Traceable futures: the political temporality of forest facts in Peru’s tropical logging governance

Abstract

In Loreto, Peru’s largest Amazonian region, forest transport permits (or FTP) are the privileged accounting infrastructures by which the Peruvian state seeks to bring transparency to logging by making tropical timber traceable, thus securing its legality and sustainability in a context of rising national and international concern with tropical rainforests. But while FTP are often imagined as a means to secure a future where traceable forest facts can be established with certainty, they have also been enduringly suspected as artifacts prone to manipulation and deceit. In this article, I follow FTP as a way to explore the political temporality of forest facts in Peru’s tropical rainforests. I argue that foregrounding the ambivalent ontologies of FTP as both reliable accounting infrastructures and treacherous manipulable things allows us to appreciate the ways in which the past and the future are articulated in conflicting ways in the context of massive technocratic innovations in the governance of Peru’s tropical logging. By focusing on the political lives of a humble paper document, I thus examine how traceability becomes a fundamental condition of facticity as emerging regimes of global environmental governance drive the expansion of state data infrastructures onto previously untraceable terrains.

Keywords

• Political temporality
• Amazonia
• tropical logging
• forest facts
• traceability
• Temporalidade política