Growing up between Brazzaville, Congo, and France, Gildelen Aty-Biyo’s relationship to the forest began early. “I grew up with this idea of the forest,” she recalls, “but I was still a city girl, so it was something far away. I think I really romanticised it.”
Her interest in the environment deepened with time. The 2015 Paris climate summit was the first time she encountered discussions positioning forests as central to both climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation on the international stage. Later, during her studies in Australia, she encountered Indigenous perspectives that shifted her thinking. “It was my first time connecting Indigeneity with the fact that most of the world’s biodiversity is protected by Indigenous people,” she says.
Yet she realised she knew little about similar dynamics in her home region, the Congo Basin, the second largest rainforest on earth. This awareness led her to question how colonial histories shaped the ways land, law, and nature were understood in Central Africa.
Gildelen’s research challenges one of the most basic assumptions of law that private property is natural and universal. “We are taught about property and private law as if it is natural.” She adds, “but not all people in the world have this relationship to the land.”
Among the ethnic group of the Baka community she studies, land ownership as understood in Western legal systems simply does not exist. Instead, relationships to land are communal, fluid, and spiritual. By comparing these practices to French-style civil law, the legacy of colonial administration, her research exposes deep legal pluralism in Central Africa.
This comparative lens also raises urgent questions about the climate crisis. “It seems like the institutions we have inherited are not fit for the crisis we are facing,” she argues.
In her fieldwork in Congo and Cameroon, Gildelen found that global environmental regulations, including the EU Deforestation Regulation, had local repercussions. “Everyone was talking about the EUDR,” she recalls, surprised at how often it came up. Local actors even called it green colonialism: when powerful nations impose environmental norms on others in the name of sustainability. She recently reflected on this issue in a blog post and explores it further in a forthcoming chapter for the Routledge Handbook on Doing EU Studies Otherwise, examining how the EUDR affects African countries.
The concept has historical roots. European empires justified colonial expansion by appealing to ideas of ‘pristine nature’ that needed protection, even as they extracted vast resources. “National parks were created to keep local people out of lands they had always lived in,” Gildelen explains. “In Europe, people could still live in national parks, as in the case of the Cévennes Park in France, but in Africa they were excluded.”
Her analysis exposes how well-intentioned environmental policies can reproduce old hierarchies of control, turning the ‘green’ transition into another form of domination.
For Gildelen, combining law and anthropology in her research was both intellectually rewarding and personally challenging. “Fieldwork is not really a legal method,” she admits, yet it became essential for understanding how people actually experience law.
Conducting research in politically sensitive settings required care. Many interviewees were reluctant to be recorded, so she relied on handwritten notes and memory. “Forest governance is very political; it’s linked to GDP (Gross Domestic Product), money, and corruption,” she explains. Ensuring participants’ anonymity and safety became a constant concern.
Her own position in the field was also complex. “I’m not fully external to the fieldwork, but not fully internal either,” she says. “Sometimes I was seen as a Congolese researcher coming home, and sometimes as the European one. I was sometimes jokingly called the white girl with a French accent.”
This dual identity shaped both her access to communities and her sense of responsibility. “You don’t want to mischaracterise what people told you, or present it in a way that may cause harm,” she reflects. “You have to find a balance between engaging critically and staying truthful to their voices.”
In Gildelen’s view, doing a PhD is like a constant process of refining and readjusting. “You start with something so big, and your supervisor always tells you to make it more specific,” she smiles. At the European University Institute, this process has been grounded in a strong sense of community. “You’re not alone, you are part of a bigger community and you can really just go to people and ask them questions.”
Conversations with peers across disciplines — in law, anthropology, and environmental governance — have helped her refine her methodology and navigate the ethical complexities of fieldwork. “There’s something great about just having coffee at the university café with someone who just came back from fieldwork,” she states.
Her approach draws inspiration from Black feminist epistemologies, particularly the idea that knowledge is shaped by experience. “No one is fully objective, fully neutral,” she explains. “Your position informs the way you will view something. Why did I decide to do this type of research, why was I drawn to this methodology, is informed by my lived experience.”
She pauses when reflecting on how the research has shaped her personally as well as professionally. “If I did my fieldwork today, I would do it so differently,” she says. “But you grow up, and you learn, and you change.”
Gildelen Aty-Biyo is a PhD researcher at the EUI Department of Law. Her research draws on critical and decolonial approaches to rethink forest ownership and governance through the lens of Indigenous Baka onto-epistemologies. Her PhD thesis, ‘Whose Forest, for What End? Rethinking Forest Ownership and Sovereignty through Baka Cosmologies’ is supervised by Professor Martijn Hesselink.