I am pleased to announce my latest publication “Land acquisition through bricolage? Politics of smallholder acacia plantation expansion in upland Central Vietnam” in the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Over the past three decades, Vietnam has increased its national forest cover through large-scale tree plantations. Millions of hectares of bare land, post-war forests, and natural scrub have been replaced by monocultures of fast-growing, flexible, multiple-use tree plantations such as acacia. Much of this work is done by individual households, which now control most of the country's forest plantations.

Delving into this new forest frontier, we examine the dynamics of land access and acquisition by smallholders and their agents. This dimension has yet to be explored in the literature on land grabbing/acquisition in commercial flex-tree plantations. Far from being the stereotypical victims or resisters in a land grab situation, villagers proactively and creatively navigate between customary institutions and state forestry and development policies to acquire land. We refer to these mechanisms as 'land acquisition through bricolage', as villagers have used the points of convergence between the state and their local tenure institutions to produce their new access opportunities and new mechanisms for securing land for acacia.

Looking beyond the case study and Vietnam, our article highlights the leverage point where bottom-up (local politics, power, culture, and such) and top-down (global commitments, national policies, and market) drivers connect and move the social-ecological system toward transition. We also provide evidence of the long-term impacts associated with large-scale tree planting and restoration efforts. It is a 'gateway' to a new frontier of land control by local smallholders - where new powers, enclosures, property regimes, and territorializations are created to produce new 'forests'. It also makes new labor and production processes, new actors, subjects, and network connections, new legal and violent means, new livelihood patterns, and new local identities. All of these have implications and are linked to broader transformations across levels.

In conclusion, our paper calls for a rethinking of the nature of peasant politics and assumptions about the positionality of local villagers in order to achieve the ambition of drastic post-2020 restoration commitments and to avoid negative consequences for sustainability outcomes related to land use worldwide.