‘Green’ jobs, invisible workers: Scalar politics of indecent forest landscape restoration labour in Ethiopia

Restoring forest landscapes requires extensive human labour in ecologies across the globe. The labour underpinning restoration efforts is increasingly labelled as ‘green’ jobs. Despite prominent narratives of ‘green’ jobs to simultaneously address climate change and unemployment, the actual forest restoration labour in the global South remains largely invisible. We examined the government-led Green Legacy Initiative and the regional African Great Green Wall in Ethiopia through a qualitative approach, comprising 33 interviews and 5 focus group discussions with restoration and nursery workers as well as representatives of governmental, non-governmental and research organizations. Our findings show that the invisibilization of indecent work is actively produced and maintained through multi-scalar processes that serve to hide decent work deficits within forest landscape restoration labour through cultural, legal and spatial processes as well as scalar politics. Ultimately, the study contributes to emerging scholarship on decent work deficits of ‘green’ jobs in the forest sector that are disproportionately pronounced in global South contexts. We aim to reposition restoration labour as a critical issue in climate justice scholarship by centering the processes that enable the invisibilization of indecent labour.