Maria Ehrnström-Fuentes

This article examines the ethical and legal dimensions of corporate land grabbing in Bahia, Brazil, focusing on the forestry sector’s use of fraud, legal manipulation, and violence to acquire land. Through a case study of Veracel Celulose, a joint venture between the Swedish-Finnish corporation Stora Enso and the Brazilian company Suzano, we analyze how corporations exploit legal ambiguity and manipulate land registries to dispossess local populations. Drawing on archival data from federal and state land governance institutions, we develop the concept of corporate (il)legal enclosure, defined as the process through which corporations transform contested, public, or informally held land into de facto corporate property by mobilizing intertwined legal and illegal practices that exclude local populations from access, use, and control over land. Our findings show how title forgery, cadastral manipulation, administrative procedures, and legal regularization operate together to convert fraudulent land claims into seemingly legitimate corporate property. We demonstrate that land grabbing increasingly occurs not only through violence or outright illegality, but through the strategic mobilization of legal and bureaucratic institutions that render dispossession lawful in practice. By integrating insights from agrarian studies, sociolegal scholarship, and business ethics, the article advances a contextually grounded understanding of land-based injustice and challenges compliance-oriented approaches to business ethics. In doing so, it highlights the need for business ethics scholarship to engage more directly with the role of law in enabling and legitimizing corporate dispossession.

This Speaking Out essay critically interrogates the hegemony of net-zero as the dominant framework guiding climate and environmental governance. We argue that net-zero is not a neutral technical climate mitigation target but a world-making practice that restructures ecological relations through calculative, managerial, and market logics. Drawing on political ontology and pluriversal thinking, we conceptualise net-zero as enacting interconnected forms of economic, material, temporal, and epistemic violence that displace responsibility, legitimise extractivism, and marginalise alternative lifeworlds. As net-zero increasingly shapes how sustainability is organised – also extending into biodiversity and conservation domains – we call on organisation and management scholars to scrutinise its assumptions and engage more deeply with its political and ontological consequences.

Contemporary human-centered organization and management practices endanger the planet’s health, affecting the life and death of multiple species—including humans. Drawing on insights from multispecies ethnography and feminist new materialism, this article contributes to the business ethics literature by developing a theoretical framework for multispecies organizing as a matter of care. Going beyond existing understandings of human-animal relations, we show how ethico-political dynamics shape multispecies relations in three ways: how we and other species relate to ecologies-in-place (affective relationalities); what we and other species do (vital doings); and, finally, what kinds of worlds we—through our ethical sensibilities—commit to bringing into being (ethical obligations). Using an illustrative example of a rewilding site in England, this article shows how multispecies organizing plays out in a specific ecology-in-place. Our argument has important implications for the conception and contemporary practices of the organizational ethics of life and death.

The rise of the globalized, industrial food system has widened the distance between producers and consumers. Over the last several years there has been a call for closing the distance between producers and consumers, and for more transparency in food systems. This need can be filled via procurement of local food, but there are often barriers to connect producers and consumers even when they live in proximity. The REKO model (short for Fair Consumption in Swedish) offers space for virtual reconnection via Facebook, which is used as its communication and ordering platform. The use of an already existing platform, which is often already widely in use among producers and consumers, has allowed the REKO concept to replicate and diffuse very effectively. Thus, REKO is a situated example of how digital interaction can radically alter the producer/consumer interactions in a local food community without having to invest heavily in infrastructures and technological developments. Drawing on experiences from the REKO network, this article explores the opportunities for food system reconnection, as well as the limitations of utilizing an existing technological platform to reconfigure local food interactions.

How does transformative change that restructures humans’ relations to the Earth come into being? The proposal for degrowth calls for a drastic reorganization of societies in order to deal with the current planetary socioecological and climate crises. Yet, there is a lack of understanding of how such socioecological transformations are brought into being. In this article, we examine prefigurative processes of socioecological transformations. We introduce the concept of the act of (de)growing, a prefigurative practice in which individuals engage at a personal level as they disentangle from organizational spaces governed by growth (act of degrowing), while entangling with nonhumans (cows, sheep, plants and seeds) to consciously make something else grow (act of growing) in the place that they inhabit. Drawing on 10 personal stories of degrowth in the Nordics, we identify four interlinked dimensions of socioecological transformations that bring new degrowth inspired organizational landscapes into being (disentangling from growth; organizing with nonhumans in place; the emergence of novel subjectivities in place; and the formation of translocal networks of support). We discuss the implications that these dispersed situated forms of socioecological transformations have for breaking with the systemic inertia of societal institutions built on economic growth.

This article examines corporate social responsibility (CSR) through the lens of political ontology. We contend that CSR is not only a discursive mean of legitimization but an inherently ontological practice through which particular worlds become real. CSR enables the politics of place-making, connecting humans and nonhumans in specific territorial configurations in accordance with corporate needs and interests. We discuss three CSR mechanisms of singularization that create a particular corporate ontology in place: (1) community engagements that form ‘stakeholders’; (2) CSR standards and certifications that produce singular sustainable environments; and (3) CSR reporting that erases ontological conflicts and enables the singularized representation (of the environment and the community) to travel to other locations of the corporate world. We argue that these ontological CSR practices obscure the pluriverse of other world and place-making practices that would create different kinds of sustainabilities based on less extractive and non-corporate ways of being in place.

The aim of this paper is to examine how territorial movements, as distinct forms of place-based social movements, organise in defence of life against the threat of resource extraction on their land. Based on the experiences of Indigenous Lafkenche-Mapuche members of a protracted struggle against a pulp mill in southern Chile, the study seeks to address the following research questions: (1) How do territorial movements emerge and organise the defence of their threatened lives? and (2) How do diverging (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) territorial relations shape the dynamics of the struggle? Combining insights from Enrique Dussel’s ‘ethics of liberation’ with that of Indigenous ontologies, this study suggests that territorial movements emerge out of the awakening of a critical consciousness of the threat of death and the collective ‘desire to live’ that define the dynamics of the struggle. The findings demonstrate how the diverging territorial relations, the societally embedded ‘coloniality of power’, and the state and corporate induced violence shape the movement dynamics. Changes in the movement dynamics also occur as a result of the struggle itself, as the movement actors’ unified desire to live continuously transforms the people and shapes the territory they inhabit.