At the International Forest Policy Meeting 6 held at the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Shizuku Sunagawa held a talk on ‘Gendered experiences of agency in forest governance research’. The conference was a great opportunity to share and discuss findings from the In-Forest project with scholars in the field we studied.  

The talk was situated as part of a panel entitled ‘Reimagining Forest and Forestry: How Gendered and Marginalised Subjectivities Matter,’ convened by Dr. Elias Andersson, Dr. Todora Rogelja, and Dr. Stephen Wyatt. It featured research focusing on whose perspectives, experiences and knowledge remain dominant and marginalised in forest governance research, and how gendered subjectivities shape practices and perceptions of forest owners, students or in forest organisations. 

On behalf of the team, Shizuku presented an analysis recently published in Science and Public Policy (see news item here) that revealed gendered and spatial patterns emerging in scientific career narratives. It is based on 19 interviews conducted as part of the In-Forest project, and used a reconstructive-interpretative analytical approach. Forest governance scholars from Europe tended to narrate their career path with agentic language, whereas their African counterparts were more likely to evoke luck and external circumstances to explain their choices. Moreover, the African scholars’ agency diminished in particular when speaking about their experiences in international collaborations, despite the fact that these were discussed as ‘great opportunities’ for their career.

With regard to gender, we surprisingly did not find significant linguistic differences, despite what literature may suggest about gendered ways of speech formation (e.g., use of active or passive sentence construction). However, it struck us that references to ‘luck’ and ‘chance’ appeared in our women’s accounts of their career in relation to their private life conditions — such as having partners, family or children — while it was almost completely absent in men’s narratives. 

We see such differences as significant, because narratives not only reflect, but also reproduce the stratification in science. These lived subjectivities matter because they highlight internalized social structures and gendered constraints which nevertheless shape the individual’s career paths, and by doing so, the composition of the workforce that produce knowledge on this field. 

The conference offered the opportunity to discuss these findings with the scholars who are members of the field under study. Taking place from May 12th to 15th, 2026, the 6th International Forest Policy Meeting (IFPM6) was held at the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, organized in conjunction with the Technical University in Zvolen. The theme of this year’s conference was “Perception versus Reality in Forestry Policy,” recognizing the myriad of discrepancies that emerge at the intersection of scientific knowledge, political agendas, forest ecosystems, and public perceptions. 

Our research presented at the IFPM6 is already available as a peer-reviewed paper:
Koch, S., Strelnyk, O., Boshoff, N., Sunagawa, S., Tetley, C., & Ngwenya, S. (2026). Agency and luck in scientific career narratives: Spatial and gendered patterns and their policy implications. Science and Public Policy, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scaf095