Vegetal Infrastructure: Rwanda's Eucalyptus Boom and the Material Politics of Tree Planting as a ‘Nature‐Based Solution’

ABSTRACT Planting trees has become a global obsession. Forest restoration and afforestation have been rebranded as ‘nature‐based solutions’ to climate change. Nations, corporations and non‐profits together aim to plant trillions of trees, roughly equivalent to a new Amazon. This article considers the local implications of this terrestrial transformation. It reports on empirical findings from Rwanda, where over fifty million trees—mostly eucalyptus species—have been planted during the past fifteen years. Based on fieldwork with four rural communities, I demonstrate how the material properties of eucalyptus intersect with state and market rationales to make tree planting profitable, scalable and legible. Building from geographic thinking on infrastructure and human‐plant relations, I develop the concept of vegetal infrastructure to analyse how trees are enrolled in political projects, producing durable inequalities that become a palpable fixture on the landscape. The article emphasises the urgent need to diversify global reforestation mandates and offers vegetal infrastructure as a lens to assess their local implications.