Federal policy discourses, local agricultural knowledge, and regenerating forest dynamics in Mexico’s Mesoamerican Biological Corridor

Abstract Mexico’s neoliberal agrarian policies incentivize intensification, privatization, and field rotation regulations, often by stating that these practices conserve forest from inefficient land use. In Mexico’s Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, this policy discourse is interpreted by smallholders and preconditions land use decisions and subsequent local agriculture and forest cover configurations. Examining how discourses align with the reality of local land use and resulting agriculture-forest configurations is critical to understand the socio-ecological tradeoffs of implementing policies in local forests. We examine how one community’s understanding of land use and forest cover tradeoffs relate to the discourse of Mexico’s latest agrarian policy, Sembrando Vida (SV), using in-depth discourse network analysis. We show that while smallholders participate in multiple governmental programs, they interpret program policies based on their own independent land use histories and experiences. We shed light on how misalignments between policy aims, conservation discourses, and smallholder interpretations have material impacts on tropical forests.