About Project | Corporate Forest

What is Corporate Forest?

Corporate Forest is an interdisciplinary research project that bridges disciplinary boundaries by combining computational analysis, socio-legal research, and a posthumanist perspective. Its aim is to understand why the protection of forests and forest species from human activities so often fails.

Forest loss is not merely an ecological problem, but it is also shaped by the ways in which forests are discussed, defined, and classified in laws and regulations. These frameworks influence which forms of harm become possible, permitted, or invisible.

Background

The research project is based on the idea of the multidimensionality of law and on examining these different dimensions through a mixed-method approach.

The Future of Forest Regulation

By analyzing legal and political texts on a broad scale, the project uncovers subtle patterns and structures that allow the exploitation of forests to persist even when protection has been set as a goal.

The future of our forests is in our hands. In the project, we aim to envision future forest regulation. Such regulation that supports the preservation of biodiversity, enables the multiple uses of forests, and does not place humans on a pedestal above other species, but rather alongside them.

Mixed-method research

Posthumanist theory challenges the traditional view that places humans at the center of law and society. Instead, it examines the world as a web of relationships between human and non-human actors, such as animals, ecosystems, and material environments. In posthumanist thinking, the forest is not merely a resource to be managed, but a complex whole in which different forms of life interact with one another. This approach asks how law defines what is meant by “forest,” whose interests are taken into account, and which forms of life remain invisible.

In the Corporate Forest project, posthumanist theory is used to explore how law and regulation shape ecological reality. By analyzing legal language, policy frameworks, and decision-making processes, the project investigates how law may emphasize certain uses of forests while overlooking other perspectives. The posthumanist approach makes visible the assumptions embedded in law and opens up possibilities for developing forest use toward multispecies well-being and ecological sustainability.

Socio-legal research examines law as part of society—not merely as a system of rules, but as a social institution shaped by power relations, politics, and practical action. It studies how laws are enacted, interpreted, and applied, and how they affect relationships between people, institutions, and the environment. In the context of forest use, socio-legal approaches help to understand how legal structures and decision-making processes guide the use of forests and whose perspectives become visible or are marginalized.

In the Corporate Forest project, socio-legal research is combined with computational methods and case studies. By examining legislative drafting, legal language, and concrete instances of forest-related harm, the project reveals how power operates through law—and how certain practices become permitted, normalized, or contested. This approach produces new knowledge about how legal systems can both enable and prevent environmental harm, and how they can be developed in a more sustainable and equitable direction.

The development of language models and natural language processing methods opens up possibilities for processing large bodies of legal texts in ways that could not even be imagined before.

In the Corporate Forest project, various transformer-based classifiers are used to pre-analyze extensive political and legal text corpora for deeper examination by researchers.

Metsän puolella

The research has received funding from Kone Foundation’s Metsän puolella initiative from 2026 onwards.

The project supports the objectives of the Kone Foundation’s Metsän Puolella initiative by revealing hidden mechanisms shaping forest governance, strengthening legal practices that respect forests, and helping prevent future harm