Commodification of forest carbon: REDD+ and socially embedded forest practices in Zanzibar (original) (raw)
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Historia, 2021
In 2000, Sao Hill Forest, the biggest state-owned plantation in Tanzania, was forced to adopt "community forest management"-a paradigm usually adopted in protecting only natural forests. We hope to contribute to the scholarship on forest management by using this unusual case study-taken from plantation forests. Research on community or participatory forest management has focused on natural forests-but plantations offer different issues to consider. We argue that the state was compelled to adopt, but also adapt to the model of community management in order to fit a neoliberal donor context while, on a practical level, protecting it from local environmental hazards. To contextualise this historical case-study, we explain why Sao Hill stagnated and then examine the survival strategies adopted by the managers at the plantation. We then explore the relationship of the forest project with the surrounding communities, highlighting different local and vernacular responses to what came to be understood as "community forest management". We use this case study to examine this idiographic application of community resource management, in order to demonstrate the real-world use of environmental history in informing current policy decisions.
Assemblage approaches are increasingly being used to understand new social formations arising in relation to the multiple crises of capitalism, climate change and environmental degradation (Larner, 2013). The valuation of nature is key to these new formations, with the creation of new ‘valued entities’, through calculative practices, that can be accounted for, costed and circulated in monetised and financialised forms (such as within a market in which they have a price) in order to attempt to fix certain outcomes (Bracking et al, 2012). Through this intensification of the neoliberalisation of ‘nature’ (Castree, 2008) we have seen the rise of prices for carbon emissions, biodiversity offsets in varied contexts, as well as to land and water. Valuation structures and the new socio-natural assemblages that attend them however have been most prominent in regard to forestry, with the emergence of ‘global’ transnational projects and initiatives such as carbon forestry offsetting and REDD+; which aims to tackle global CO2 emissions by saving forests for the good of the globe through particularly complex, multi-scalar interventions within the global south (Mwangi and Wardell 2013). This paper uses an assemblage approach in relation to carbon forestry in Uganda, arguing that it has utility in this respect, but that the fixity of the assemblage should not be assumed a priori, or its stability or permanence assumed. Rather, there are multiple overflows, tensions, and counter-performativities – primarily attendant to unstable social relations – such that the forestry assemblage, as a governance form, offers multiple opportunities for reflexivity and resistance. Keywords. Assemblage approaches, valuation, neoliberal environmentalism, forestry, REDD+, Uganda
Carbon forestry projects claim to be ‘win-win’ solutions to climate change, contributing to climate mitigation through carbon sequestration and to community development through carbon payments. This thesis seeks to evaluate this proposition; but in doing so, it looks beyond carbon forestry as a set of three differentiated types of projects (REDD+, Clean Development Mechanism, and Voluntary Carbon Market) taking place in isolated contexts, and seeks to debunk meta narratives of win-win, and essentialised understandings of the places, scales and institutions that underpin contemporary forestry governance and project implementation. Rather, I argue, we should understand carbon forestry as a project to 'sequester' not only carbon but also market environmentalism, through the extension of market logics and rationale to the governance of 'nature' and the environment. Taking up a geographic lens, I seek to show what market environmentalism does in particular places, and how it works spatially. In so doing I claim that carbon forestry, as a component of market environmentalism, should be evaluated as an extension, and deepening, of a substantive change to the ‘conduct of conduct’ of forestry governance itself. In order to think through how market environmentalism literally 'takes place', I draw from both political economy critiques and post-structuralist perspectives in geography. I utilise the concepts of assemblage and territoriality, and apply them to a case study on neoliberal environmental governance in Uganda. I use assemblage – denoting how extended social structures are drawn together from heterogeneous elements (or actors) – to understand how forestry is controlled through an arborescent, trans-national hierarchy, which I term the Market Environmental Governance Assemblage (MEGA). I use the concept of territoriality to explore what this arrangement does to forestry territories in Uganda, where particular meanings, power relations and constructions of social space comprise what are considered as forest ‘natures’. A key argument of this thesis is that there are three movements that are crucial to understanding and evaluating carbon forestry and market environmentalism in Uganda; firstly territorialisation, which refers, simplistically, to the establishment and defence of particular territory, and subsequently reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation. Through the concept of territorialisation I explore the emergence of what is codified and 'managed' as the ‘forest estate’ in Uganda and chart its relationship to the complex set of political and social relationships through the colonial and post-colonial State formation. This perspective brings to light a history of violence and dispossession, and shows that contemporary forestry politics are immanently connected to the broader trajectories and political economy of the Ugandan state. Through the concept of reterritorialisation I show how market environmentalism reshapes forestry governance itself. I reflect on how the establishment of carbon forestry and the neoliberalisation of the forestry sector work as lines of articulation, that rescale forestry governance and in so doing to constitute the new MEGA. These movements directly and indirectly extend the control of non-state actors, and the privatization, deregulation and commodification of areas of 'forest nature'. Finally to the extent that this happens, I argue the re-territorialisation of forestry governance accomplishes a deterritorialisation of the sovereign forest estate territory itself. Through deterritorialisation I argue we can conceptualise, spatially, how market environmentalism may be both environmentally and socially damaging in Uganda. What this experimental approach makes visible is that setting carbon forestry as the telos, or end point of conservation, to which actors must aspire and dedicate a perpetual flurry of activity, can lead to both 'false promises', systematic violence against local communities, and a selective extension, evasion and accommodation of the complex-dynamic causes of deforestation in the country. However, the approach also shows us that that this arrangement was not inevitable and does not have to remain the case, and that there are lines of flight across the three movements that point to opportunities for alternative arrangements; as Deleuze (1991) puts it, there is no reason to fear or hope, only to look for new weapons.
Market-Based Conservation for Better Livelihoods? The Promises and Fallacies of REDD+ in Tanzania
Governments, multilateral organisations, and international conservation NGOs increasingly frame nature conservation in terms that emphasise the importance of technically managing and economically valuing nature, and introducing markets for ecosystem services. New mechanisms, such as REDD+, have been incorporated in national-level policy reforms, and have been piloted and implemented in rural project settings across the Global South. By reflecting on my research on REDD+ implementation in two case study villages in Tanzania, the paper argues that the emergence and nature of market-based conservation are multi-faceted, complex, and more profoundly shaped by structural challenges than is commonly acknowledged. The paper identifies three particularly important challenges: the politics surrounding the establishment of community-based forest management; the mismatch between formal governance institutions and actual practices on the ground; and the fickleness of income from carbon sales and alternative livelihood opportunities. I argue that these challenges are not merely teething troubles, but they question fundamental assumptions of market-based conservation, more generally. I end with reference to better ideas for achieving sustainable development.
REDD+ as 'inclusive' neoliberal conservation: the case of Lindi, Tanzania
Journal of Eastern African Studies, 2017
In recent years, market-based conservation has emerged as the ‘panacea’ to the environmental crises we face today. A prominent example of this trend is REDD+, which turns terrestrial carbon in the global South into fictitious commodities that can be sold for profit. In this paper, we conceptualise REDD+ as a form of ‘inclusive’ neoliberal conservation, highlighting how neoliberalism has embraced notions of good governance, local ownership, social safeguards and active citizenship when promoting global conservation markets. While demonstrating the genuine efforts by project proponents to practice ‘inclusion’, we highlight their limits due to larger structural inequalities and demonstrate how the commodification of carbon inevitably causes new forms of inclusion and exclusion to local forest users. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in two forest-dependent villages in the Lindi Region of Tanzania, where two different REDD+ projects were underway, we show how material and discursive powers shaped ‘inclusive’ strategies to market forest-carbon. We then locate these strategies, concerned with the commodification of forest-carbon, within a historical field of power struggles and local politics over forest resources, strongly evidenced in contestations around establishing community-based forest management. We argue that a sharp disjuncture operated between the ‘inclusive’ strategies to market forest-carbon and the historical dimensions and power relations within the area; resulting in new forms of inclusions and exclusions, both in and outside rural villages.
Bringing Discourse to the market: the commodification of avoided deforestation
Creating a mechanism for reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD+) in tropical developing countries has become, from 2005 onward, a central element in international climate protection discourse. The goal is to create financial incentives for forest protection by making avoided deforestation a tradable good that can be sold on the carbon market or to government funds. A discourse-analytical perspective on the process of commodification and market creation is developed in order to assess how avoided deforestation is being made tradable. Going beyond existing approaches, such a perspective enables us to highlight the contestedness and contingency of the commodification and market creation process. The extent to which on-going qualification and commensuration practices can result in a disentanglement of avoided deforestation as tradable good is discussed, and one of the consequences of a successful commodification of avoiding deforestation – the carbonification of forests – is highlighted.