A new theoretical framework is required to expose how the underlying political economic systems function and drive deforestation. The hypotheses and case studies are presented while situating deforesting processes in the international system and its many subsystems, which are composed of partially interlinked sectors that often compete for the same land areas. This is a detailed political economic analysis, based on regionally situated world-ecological analyses, which consider the power that different sectors have in causing the loss of forests, such as Brazilian ranching speculation, Amazonian gold mining, and Finnish pulp and energywood forestry. The chapter contends that there is a need to cultivate a deeper, comparative, and global crises-situated understanding of the role these forces have in driving deforesting. One must also understand the local-level enabling factors and the role of resistance. Insights are woven together from several disciplines and approaches such as political ecology and world-ecology into a new conceptual framework that can be widely applied to explain global development dynamics, beyond the specific application to deforestation.