Yet a new commentary published in Nature Ecology & Evolution by an international team of researchers argues that this revolution in visibility carries costs that the scientific community has largely failed to confront. Led by Gabriel Hes of the University of Toulouse and corresponding author Patrick Roberts, director of the Department of Coevolution of Land Use and Urbanisation at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, the paper contends that remote sensing research has too often been framed as a purely technical exercise in support of more efficient management and observation. Mapping, the authors insist, is never only a technical practice. Decisions about what is revealed, how it is revealed, and where the scanning takes place are inherently ethical and political, with consequences that can fall hardest on the very communities who live in and depend on the forests being scanned.

The central concern is that high-resolution mapping can strip away what have long functioned as cultural refuges against dominant powers. Dense forest has historically shielded Indigenous peoples and marginalized groups from state surveillance, colonial incursion, and resource extraction. When an external research team produces a centimeter-scale digital model of a forest understory, it does not merely document trees. It can reveal the locations of settlements, gardens, sacred sites, and resources that communities may not have consented to expose, and once that data exists it can circulate in ways the scanned communities cannot control. Governments, corporations, or armed actors may gain access to information that facilitates dispossession, even when the original researchers intended their work to serve conservation or science.

To organize these concerns, the authors group the ethical dimensions of tropical forest remote sensing into three broad areas. The first concerns knowledge, access, and control: who decides when to map, why the mapping occurs, and who controls the resulting data. In much of current practice, those decisions are made by universities, agencies, and funders in wealthy countries, while the people whose territories are scanned may learn of the projects only after the fact, if at all. The second area addresses population rights, exposure, and dispossession, asking how remotely sensed data might be used to expose communities, marginalized groups, or resources targeted for extraction. The third, and perhaps least examined, area concerns the material costs of seeing itself, including the climatic and environmental footprint of the aircraft, drones, sensors, and computing infrastructure that remote sensing depends upon, impacts that can ironically contribute to the very environmental degradation the technology is deployed to prevent.

Hes frames the problem as a challenge to a slogan that recurs throughout conservation and development discourse. Mapping is frequently promoted as being for the greater good, yet the greater good is rarely defined. Whose greater good, the authors ask, is being served when a forest is scanned, and are forest mapping technologies reinforcing existing imbalances in knowledge production, political power, and environmental impacts? They urge colleagues to reflect on the ethical costs of their methods and to consider the potential intersectional impacts of high-resolution mapping, examining how consequences may differ along lines of race, age, gender, wealth, and class within affected communities. A mapping campaign that benefits an international carbon market, for example, may simultaneously restrict the land-use flexibility of women who gather forest products or of Indigenous groups whose tenure claims are not formally recognized.

The commentary is careful to acknowledge the genuine value of remote sensing rather than dismissing it. Lidar has enabled remarkable scientific advances, from quantifying carbon stocks across millions of hectares to revealing the scale of pre-Columbian urbanism in the Amazon, and it has been used by local communities themselves to safeguard their territories and rights. Community-led mapping projects have leveraged the same technology to document land use, strengthen legal claims, and monitor illegal logging and mining. Roberts emphasizes that the authors are not arguing remote sensing is inherently bad. The point, rather, is that scientists should consider the varied ethical dimensions of their research whether they carry out mapping at local, regional, or global scales, and that these considerations should be integral to research planning rather than an afterthought once data has already been collected.

Part of the problem, the paper suggests, is structural. Ethical discussions about remote sensing have occurred within individual disciplines, but they have tended to focus on technicalities of research practice and data presentation, such as resolution standards, processing pipelines, and visualization choices, rather than on the more fundamental question of whether and under what conditions to map at all. A journal may require that archaeological site locations be blurred in published figures, but that safeguard does little if the raw point clouds, flight plans, and derived products remain accessible to parties whose interests conflict with those of local residents. Data governance, consent, benefit sharing, and the political economy of who commissions and pays for scans are questions that fall between the cracks of disciplinary ethics boards, which are typically designed around human-subjects research rather than landscape-scale observation.

The material footprint of the technology deserves particular attention, the authors argue, because it is so often assumed away. While a single drone flight may seem trivial, large-scale campaigns rely on crewed aircraft burning fuel over remote regions, on repeated monitoring flights that multiply emissions over time, and on energy-intensive data processing and storage in data centers with their own water and carbon costs. When the stated purpose of scanning a forest is to support climate mitigation or biodiversity protection, the authors contend that researchers have a responsibility to account for the climatic and environmental impacts of the act of seeing itself, and to weigh whether those impacts are justified by the benefits the mapping will actually deliver, and to whom.

To move from critique to practice, the paper concludes with a framework intended to help researchers decide when mapping is inappropriate, and to guide the design of projects that proceed. The framework prompts scientists to interrogate the purpose of a proposed scan, the consent and participation of affected communities, the control and accessibility of the resulting data, the distribution of benefits and risks, and the environmental costs of the campaign. By reframing environmental science as an asset for transformative change rather than a neutral generator of data, the authors hope these considerations will ensure that tropical forest mapping best serves the needs of those impacted most by the current global ecological crisis. As Lidar becomes cheaper, more portable, and more ubiquitous, the window for embedding such reflection into standard practice is open now, and the paper makes the case that the scientific community should walk through it before the next flight takes off.

Subject of Research: The ethical and social implications of Lidar remote sensing in tropical forest research

Article Title: The Local Costs of Remote Sensing: Examining the Ethics of Laser Scanning in Tropical Forests

Article References: The Local Costs of Remote Sensing: Examining the Ethics of Laser Scanning in Tropical Forests. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Lidar, remote sensing, tropical forests, research ethics, Indigenous rights, data governance, conservation, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Nature Ecology & Evolution, environmental justice, mapping, dispossession

The conceptual shift at the heart of the review is deceptively simple but far-reaching. Most research on deprivation, from early town surveys such as Seebohm Rowntree’s 1901 study of poverty to contemporary multidimensional indices developed by Sabina Alkire and Maria Emma Santos, has focused on measuring the extent of poverty: how many people are poor, how deep their deprivation runs, and which dimensions of life it touches. Majumdar argues that for tribal India this approach misses the essential point. The more urgent question is not how much poverty exists but how it is produced and governed. Understanding tribal poverty, the review contends, requires attention to the unequal distribution of resources, risks, institutional authority and political voice.

The historical roots of this argument reach back to colonial rule. The review traces how the British colonial state dispossessed tribal communities of land, forests and customary rights while simultaneously imposing bureaucratic control, administrative classifications and the criminalisation of resistance. Scholars cited in the review, including historians such as Bhangya Bhukya and Ramachandra Guha, have documented how colonial agrarian and forestry policies enclosed land and forests that tribal communities had long used and governed. In central India, colonial agriculture and forest legislation transformed common resources into state property, and in regions such as the jangalmahal of West Bengal, imperial forest management directly undermined tribal livelihoods. Resistance to these enclosures was met with criminalisation, establishing what the review describes as enduring structures of marginalisation.

Crucially, the review argues that these colonial logics did not end with independence. Postcolonial development and welfare regimes, in Majumdar’s analysis, show continuity as well as transformation. Inclusion can co-exist with exclusion, and development with dispossession. The very categories through which the state administers tribal communities, including the Scheduled Tribe designation and the label of Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups, carry colonial afterlives. Recent scholarship on the politics of tribalisation in eastern India suggests that state categories created for governance continue to shape identity, entitlement and political struggle long after the contexts that produced them have disappeared. Welfare, in this reading, is never politically neutral: it names its beneficiaries, defines their needs and disciplines their behaviour.

The review then turns to regional experiences to demonstrate that these processes assume differentiated forms across India’s tribal heartlands. In mineral-rich states such as Jharkhand and Odisha, extraction and displacement dominate the picture. Research on development-induced displacement shows that tribal populations have borne a disproportionate share of the costs of mining, dams and industrialisation, losing land and livelihoods while gaining little of the resulting prosperity. Studies of uranium mining at Jadugoda in Jharkhand, co-authored by Majumdar, document the health risks and environmental injustice that accompany such extraction. In Odisha, mining-induced displacement has repeatedly provoked tribal resistance, illustrating how the politics of development is contested on the ground.

Elsewhere, the pathways into marginality run through unequal access to livelihood resources rather than outright displacement. In central India’s tribal belt, scholars have documented the slow erosion of access to land, forests and common resources, a process that converts communities from relatively self-provisioning producers into precarious labourers. In the north-east, questions of land, agriculture and livelihood among Scheduled Tribes intersect with distinctive institutional arrangements, including the Sixth Schedule areas of Meghalaya, where research on the Khasi Hills shows that tribal representation in local land governance shapes outcomes in ways that differ markedly from mainland India. Environmental vulnerability compounds these inequalities: forest-dependent communities face the double burden of restricted access to the resources they once controlled and heightened exposure to ecological degradation.

The review also assembles evidence on the human costs of these political processes, particularly in health and education. Studies of Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups in Odisha reveal high rates of malnutrition and anaemia, elevated stillbirth and neonatal mortality compared with the general population, and a heavy burden of diseases such as tuberculosis. Health surveys across tribal India document persistent barriers to healthcare access, while research on mental health literacy shows how stigma and weak service provision interact to suppress help-seeking. In education, systematic reviews of girls from Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups identify layered barriers ranging from poverty and distance to language and discrimination. These outcomes, the review insists, should not be read as cultural deficits but as downstream effects of unequal institutional authority and political voice.

What gives the review its analytical coherence is the insistence that these varied pathways are interconnected. Extraction in one region, resource erosion in another, and health and educational exclusion everywhere are not separate problems requiring separate technical fixes. They are, in the article’s framing, distinct expressions of a single underlying dynamic: the reproduction of tribal marginality through political and institutional processes. This dynamic explains a paradox that has long puzzled observers of Indian development, namely how welfare expansion and dispossession can advance simultaneously. When poverty is understood as politically produced, it becomes clear that programmes can deliver benefits to the poor while the structures that generate poverty remain untouched, or are even reinforced by the same administrative apparatus.

The implications for policy are significant. If tribal poverty were primarily a problem of developmental deficit, the solution would be more programmes, better targeting and improved delivery. But if poverty is produced through the unequal distribution of resources, risks, institutional authority and political voice, then effective responses must address those distributions directly. That means strengthening genuine tribal participation in decisions about land, forests and extraction, recognising customary rights rather than merely cataloguing them, and treating tribal communities as political actors rather than passive beneficiaries. It also means scrutinising how welfare itself governs, asking whose categories define vulnerability and whose voices shape the design of interventions. Comparative work by Majumdar on indigenous welfare policies in Taiwan and India suggests that such questions travel across borders, wherever states administer indigenous populations.

The review ultimately offers a broader lesson about the study of poverty everywhere, not only in India. Global scholarship on the politics of poverty governance has increasingly recognised that naming the poor, measuring them and designing programmes for them are themselves exercises of power. Majumdar’s contribution is to apply this insight systematically to India’s tribal communities, connecting colonial history to contemporary welfare and showing how the archive of dispossession continues to structure the present. For a country that has made remarkable progress in reducing measured poverty, the persistence of acute deprivation among its indigenous populations is a standing challenge to triumphalist narratives. The answer, this research suggests, lies not in better statistics but in a more honest account of power: who holds it, how it is exercised, and why the institutions that claim to uplift the marginalised so often reproduce their marginality.

Subject of Research: The political and institutional production of tribal poverty and marginality in India

Article Title: Power, politics and tribal poverty in India

Article References: Majumdar, K. (2026). Power, politics and tribal poverty in India. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 499. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01790-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01790-1

Keywords: tribal poverty, Adivasis, India, colonialism, dispossession, governance, welfare policy, land rights, displacement, Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups, social inequality, indigenous justice

The study, published in April 2026, is built on semi-structured narrative interviews conducted between July and November 2025, including an on-site return to Leros itself. Baldi, trained in Franco Basaglia’s Department of Mental Health in Trieste, served between 1990 and 1995 as scientific consultant and training coordinator for the Italian team charged with dismantling the Leros State Hospital under European Community funding. The methodology deliberately preserves her first-person voice, following principles of narrative inquiry and the COREQ reporting guidelines, and pairs the testimony with photographic documentation of the hospital’s decaying pavilions. The researchers frame the account through Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou’s concept of dispossession and through Basaglia’s principle of institutional negation, the idea that the asylum itself, not merely its conditions, must be abolished.

What Baldi found when she first entered the wards in early 1990 defies easy description. More than 1,200 people were confined in the hospital, many of them deported decades earlier from overcrowded mainland asylums, some transported by military ships with numbered tags pinned to their chests that the wind had blown away, erasing their identities forever. Clinical records frequently contained question marks instead of names. Patients lived naked or in rags, unwashed, malnourished and anemic, crowded around a single stove in winter. Food was sometimes poured directly onto tables without plates or cutlery. In Ward 2 for women, Baldi witnessed three naked women crouched under a table, embracing, one of them throwing her own feces against a window. A visiting Irish priest fled the ward and fell to his knees outside, screaming at the sky. Baldi herself walked to a nearby beach and screamed into the waves.

The historical stratification of the island explains how such a place could exist at the heart of late twentieth-century Europe. Italian from 1912 to 1946 and transformed by fascism into a military stronghold, Leros passed to Greece in 1947 and was repurposed for successive waves of confinement: re-education schools for thousands of children of civil-war dissidents in 1949, a colony for psychiatric deportees from 1958, and a detention camp for roughly 4,000 political prisoners under the Colonels’ dictatorship between 1967 and 1974. The psychiatric population swelled from 650 beds to nearly 2,750 by 1981. The scandal finally broke in the 1980s through young doctors’ denunciations at international conferences, a 1982 documentary titled Azititi, and an Observer investigation in 1989 headlined Europe’s Guilty Secret, prompting the European Parliament to consider sanctions against Greece.

The deinstitutionalization project that followed was anything but smooth. An earlier EEC-funded reform in 1984 had produced almost nothing: barely a fifth of the money was spent, patients were merely sorted into diagnostic wards, and NGO-run hostels selected the quietest, most manageable inmates while leaving roughly a thousand untouched. The Trieste team, working with Greek psychiatrist Theodoros Megaloeconomou, secured a separate project covering the notorious Pavilions 11 and 16, funded at 465 million drachmas, about a third of the first program’s budget. Their approach clashed fundamentally with a rival conception of reform. Where English and Dutch teams defined humanization as cleaner walls and adequate food within the hospital enclosure, the Italians insisted on what they called deinstitutionalization: the negation of the asylum as such, the restoration of legal rights, freedom of movement, work, biographical identity and self-determination.

The practical mechanics of that transformation, recounted in granular detail in the testimony, read like a manual of radical patience. Team members entered the wards daily with cigarettes, biscuits and chocolate, washing and dressing patients who had not spoken in years, teaching them to use cutlery and to dress themselves. They battled the administration over padlocked personal wardrobes, bought padlocks with their own money when tenders stalled, and repaired punctured wheelchair tires every morning until the attendants understood the point being made. Medication, previously administered in massive doses, was gradually and almost entirely eliminated to avoid rebound effects. Former inmates were moved into officers’ villas and later into twenty apartments and small prefabricated houses across the island, supported by an agricultural cooperative, ceramics and painting workshops, and a theater group that performed at the Aegean Theater Festival. In one emblematic scene from Easter 1994, the Greek Deputy Minister of Health joined the cast on stage, chanting a refrain from the independence struggle: better one hour of free life than forty years of slavery.

The study is equally candid about the political economy that resisted every step. The hospital was the island’s economic engine, employing more than 900 attendants, and a network of suppliers, politicians and administrators profited from the status quo. The first hospital board obstructed the Italian team, denied resources, personally attacked the workers and even threw their scooters into the sea. Tourism operators feared the sight of former patients would repel visitors. Only when former inmates began frequenting taverns and shops, redistributing hospital money into the local economy, and when attendants realized that small community residences meant better working conditions, did the opposition crumble. Follow-up evaluations three to four years after the team’s departure revealed the limits of what five years could achieve: 92.6 percent of former patients reported satisfaction with their new lives, but 62.1 percent had no family contact and only 31.6 percent were employed, a measure of how profoundly decades of institutionalization had damaged the capacity for autonomous social life.

The bitterest irony anchors the study’s contemporary argument. When Baldi returned to Leros in 2015 for a twentieth-anniversary conference, she found the island beautified by tourism, and on a hill above the bay, a gleaming new structure built to hold two thousand migrants. The island of deportation had become, once again, a site of confinement, now hosting a massive migrant detention center. Drawing on Butler and Athanasiou, the authors argue that territories made economically dependent on managing confined populations will seek replacement populations when one group is liberated, and that dispossession operates relationally, with precarious communities participating in the confinement of those more vulnerable still. The asylum closes; its function is dispersed and renamed, surfacing in repatriation detention centers, forensic psychiatric units, involuntary treatment orders, mechanical restraint still practiced in European wards, and community mental health services that increasingly select patients by narrow diagnostic thresholds while excluding those whose suffering does not qualify as severe.

This displacement, the authors contend, falsifies the progressive narrative that the closure of the asylums represented irreversible humanitarian progress. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Italy extended involuntary psychiatric treatment to adolescents in acute crisis, a departure from the principles of Law 180 of 1978, the Basaglia Law that abolished Italian asylums. Baldi’s testimony defends that law fiercely, arguing that its apparent failures stem from political under-implementation and chronic underfunding of territorial services rather than from its principles, and that the Trieste department remains a World Health Organization collaborating center. What the Leros case demonstrates, technically and politically, is that deinstitutionalization cannot succeed as a purely clinical or administrative operation. It requires confronting the local political economies, the mafia-like supplier networks, the employment dependence, the cultural fear, that make total institutions desirable to the communities that host them, and it requires transforming economic and social relations so that territories no longer need confined populations to survive.

The study closes without romanticizing its own history. Baldi acknowledges what remained unfinished: legal status could not be changed, since discharge meant losing all assistance, so the hospital administratively persists, caring today for roughly seventy people from those years in small residential houses. Some stories ended in tragedy, including a young man who, after losing the friend who had anchored him, hid his medications and let himself die. Yet the testimony insists on what was proven possible, in Basaglia’s own phrase, that the impossible is possible when collective action is sustained by ethical commitment. As new walls and barbed wire rise across Europe around migrants, the poor and the diagnosed, the Leros archive stands as both warning and evidence: institutional violence is not a relic that progress buried, but a capacity that societies re-activate whenever collective trauma goes unprocessed and disposable populations remain economically useful to confine.

Subject of Research: Narrative testimony on the deinstitutionalization of the Leros psychiatric hospital and the persistence of institutional violence in Europe

Article Title: Beyond the Total Institution? Narrative Testimony from Leros Psychiatric Hospital Deinstitutionalization (1990–1995) and the Persistence of Institutional Violence in Contemporary Europe

Article References: Baldi, C., & Carbone, A. (2026). Beyond the Total Institution? Narrative Testimony from Leros Psychiatric Hospital Deinstitutionalization (1990–1995) and the Persistence of Institutional Violence in Contemporary Europe. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00514-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00514-x

Keywords: Leros, deinstitutionalization, institutional violence, Franco Basaglia, psychiatric reform, total institution, migrant detention, dispossession, narrative testimony, community mental health, Greece, Trieste