Key Points • Forestry cannot be thought of in isolation from its relations with other sectors and other parts of people’s lives – for both the health of the forests and the well-being of forest peoples. • Forest governance and everyday management are upheld by a superstructure of gendered forest relations – invisible to mainstream forestry – that often disadvantages women as a social group. • Well-intentioned gender programmes can backfire, causing adverse effects on forests and forest peoples, if the efforts are not cognisant of context and power relations. • Constant awareness of differences among various social groups – men, women, different classes, ethnicities – and how their interests intersect differently in various forest contexts is needed for everyone’s energy, creativity and motivation to contribute to sustainable forest management. • Research suggests that greater democratic governance of forests leads to better environmental outcomes. • The gender-neutral framing of some SDG goals undermines efforts towards achieving the outcomes called for in SDG 5.