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In pursuit of carbon accountability: The politics of REDD+ measuring, reporting and verification systems
Abstract
This article reviews critical social science analyses of carbon accounting and monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) systems associated with reducing emissions from deforestation, forest degradation and conservation, sustainable use and enhancement of forest carbon stocks (REDD+). REDD+ MRV systems are often portrayed as technical. In questioning such a framing, we draw on perspectives from science and technology and governmentality studies to assess how MRV systems may exercise disciplinary power (through standardization, simplification and erasing the local) but also mobilize counter-expertise, produce resistance and thus have necessarily contingent effects. In doing so, we advance the concept of 'carbon accountability' to denote both how forest carbon is accounted for in REDD+ and the need to hold to account those who are doing so.
... Through our case studies we demonstrate how REDD+ design is underpinned by and foregrounds ostensibly inclusive visions that are malleable, optimistic and all-encompassing, promising a win-win scenario for all parties [26][27][28][29]. Conversely, implementation of REDD+ has proceeded precisely through various forms of trade-off and exclusion of certain actors, interests, knowledges, practices, forest uses, and claims to resources [7,[30][31][32][33][34][35] . We note that both the ostensibly inclusionary nature of REDD+ design and the failure of its inclusionary visions to translate into reality must be understood partly in terms of the neoliberal provenance of this scheme [6,36,37]. ...
... Yet, exclusion in REDD+ implementation is not merely an unintended failure or ineffectiveness of the participatory vision; it is also a deliberate strategy, a tool for pragmatically rendering socio-ecological complexities governable and for furthering certain interests. For instance, the technicality and complexity of REDD+, which foreclose autonomous local and national actions have been linked precisely to the "approach taken by government officials, consultants, forestry, and development experts to operationalize the idea of REDD+" [41] (p.132), [30,33,43]. Both discursive inclusions at the level of policy design and exclusion at the level of implementation are also partly inherent to the REDD+ policy itself. ...
... Yet, the implementation of this goal was more than a mere technical intervention. Rather it entailed evaluating, discounting, and re-working existing institutional arrangements as well as authorising and legitimising new institutional arrangements, actors, knowledge, and practices which are REDD+ enabling [30,33]. In both countries, the processes of institutional restructuring involved blending of old and new institutional units; overhaul of forestry law and forestry policy; and everyday efforts to impart technical know-how in disciplines and expertise areas (such as remote sensing, participatory governance) that are considered critical for REDD+. ...
This paper analyses the design and implementation of REDD+ in the West African region, an important global biodiversity area. Drawing on in-depth interviews, analysis of policy documents and observation of everyday activities, we sought to understand how REDD+ has been designed and implemented in Nigeria and Ghana. We draw on tools from political ecology to examine how, and why REDD+ takes the form it does in these countries. We focus on three key dimensions that emerged as strong areas of common emphasis in our case studies -- capacity building, carbon visibility, and property rights. First, we show that, while REDD+ design generally foregrounds an ostensible inclusionary politics, its implementation is driven through various forms of exclusion. This contradictory inclusion-exclusion politics, which is partly emblematic of the neoliberal provenance of the REDD+ policy, is also a contingent reality and a strategy for navigating complexities and pursuing certain interests. Second, we show that though the emergent foci of REDD+ implementation in our case studies align with global REDD+ expectations, they yet manifest as historically and geographically contingent processes that reflect negotiated and contested relations among actors that constitute the specific national circumstance of each country. We conclude by reflecting on the wider implications of these findings for understanding REDD+ implementation more broadly.
... Through our case studies we demonstrate how REDD+ design is underpinned by and foregrounds ostensibly inclusive visions that are malleable, optimistic and all-encompassing, promising a win-win scenario for all parties [26][27][28][29]. Conversely, implementation of REDD+ has proceeded precisely through various forms of trade-off and exclusion of certain actors, interests, knowledges, practices, forest uses, and claims to resources [7,[30][31][32][33][34][35] . We note that both the ostensibly inclusionary nature of REDD+ design and the failure of its inclusionary visions to translate into reality must be understood partly in terms of the neoliberal provenance of this scheme [6,36,37]. ...
... Yet, exclusion in REDD+ implementation is not merely an unintended failure or ineffectiveness of the participatory vision; it is also a deliberate strategy, a tool for pragmatically rendering socio-ecological complexities governable and for furthering certain interests. For instance, the technicality and complexity of REDD+, which foreclose autonomous local and national actions have been linked precisely to the "approach taken by government officials, consultants, forestry, and development experts to operationalize the idea of REDD+" [30] (p.132), [33,41,43]. Both discursive inclusions at the level of policy design and exclusion at the level of implementation are also partly inherent to the REDD+ policy itself. ...
... Part of the problem, Lund et al [41] argue in their analysis of Tanzania, is the inherent and insidiously alienating technicality and complexity of REDD+ which "did not fall from the sky" but has been produced through the self-interested and self-reproducing ways in which actors in the state, civil society and international organisations project REDD+ [30,43,93]. Indeed, the hegemonic carbon measurement approach, notably through remote sensing, does not only exclude other forms of mensuration and valuation, but it also represents a regime of power which disciplines bearers of other knowledge [33]. ...
This paper analyses the design and implementation of REDD+ in the West African region, an important global biodiversity area. Drawing on in-depth interviews, analysis of policy documents and observation of everyday activities, we sought to understand how REDD+ has been designed and implemented in Nigeria and Ghana. We draw on tools from political ecology to examine how, and why REDD+ takes the form it does in these countries. We focus on three key dimensions that emerged as strong areas of common emphasis in our case studies -- capacity building, carbon visibility, and property rights. First, we show that, while REDD+ design generally foregrounds an ostensible inclusionary politics, its implementation is driven through various forms of exclusion. This contradictory inclusion-exclusion politics, which is partly emblematic of the neoliberal provenance of the REDD+ policy, is also a contingent reality and a strategy for navigating complexities and pursuing certain interests. Second, we show that though the emergent foci of REDD+ implementation in our case studies align with global REDD+ expectations, they yet manifest as historically and geographically contingent processes that reflect negotiated and contested relations among actors that constitute the specific national circumstance of each country. We conclude by reflecting on the wider implications of these findings for understanding REDD+ implementation more broadly.
... What is actually being traded?" Whitington went on to say that carbon has come to function as a metric of the verified (MRV) for their carbon sequestration abilities, processes known commonly as "carbon accounting" (Gupta et al. 2012;Lovell and MacKenzie 2011;MacKenzie 2009). In this paper, I focus specifically on accounting for forest inventories of carbon for sale on carbon markets. ...
... Analysis calls on Clarke and Fujimura (2014) to ask how the field of carbon accounting, as a tool for quantifying sequestered carbon is malleable and evolving. Empirical data is used to "open the black box" of carbon accounting and show that processes deemed technical or "outside the domain of politics" are, in fact, deeply political, or the result of a series of uneven social and power relations (Gupta et al. 2012;Clarke and Fujimura 2014). ...
... Furthermore, critical scholarship on these topics is lacking too. With some exceptions (Cooper 2015, Gupta et al. 2012Lovell and Liverman 2010;Bumpus and Liverman 2008;Bumpus, Liverman, and Lovell 2010;Lovell, Bulkeley, and Liverman 2009), carbon accounting research has largely focused on the procedural and technical contributions made within the profession, and not on the critical implications of ordering and classifying carbon via these practices. ...
This article takes on the political and contested nature of forest carbon accounting via three “points of engagement” that articulate forest carbon initiatives as representations of tradable carbon. The three points of engagement—(1) baseline determinations, (2) the calculation of additionality, and (3) the role of uncertainty—are used to show how processes framed as technical are often spaces where uneven social and political interests are manipulated or obscured and contribute to varying environmental and conservation outcomes. The article begins by reviewing how carbon counting emerges in critical social science literature on forest carbon projects. Next, it explains carbon accounting broadly, the specifics of forest carbon accounting and why forests are popular spaces for financialized carbon sequestration. It concludes by arguing that carbon accounting is an uneven technical and political process that makes multiples forms of carbon legible on financial markets but does little to physically address atmospheric carbon concentrations.
... While supported by advocates for Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) (Bulte et al, 2008;Farley & Costanza, 2010), REDD+ is heavily critiqued within the literature on neoliberal conservation (Büscher et al., 2014;Fletcher, 2010;Fletcher et al., 2016;Holmes and Cavanagh, 2016). Thus far, researchers have focused on the process and social effects of monitoring technologies that enable market-based policies (Gupta et al., 2012;Turnhout et al., 2014) and on the underlying operational governing logics through which the behaviour of subjects is shaped (Fletcher, 2010(Fletcher, , 2017, often analyzed through the post-structural lens of governmentality (Astuti and McGregor, 2015;Boer, 2017;Collins, 2019;Holmgren, 2013;Sheng and Qiu, 2018). More recently, however, researchers have begun to highlight the relevance of colonial histories to REDD+ outcomes (Asiyanbi, 2016;Benjaminsen, 2014;Chomba et al., 2016;Lund et al., 2017). ...
... Monitoring, Reporting and Verification systems (MRV) are generally portrayed as a technical exercise encompassing activities such as enabling satellite imagery and analysing data on the carbon stored within a given swathe of forests (Ramcilovik-Suominen, 2019). However, as outlined by Gupta et al (2012), carbon accounting and MRV, are political exercises with social and political effects (Gupta et al., 2012) belying a reliance on measurements as fodder for global environmental policy making (Turnhout et al., 2014). Notably, as demonstrated in the R-PPs of Guyana and Suriname, a land dispute hampers REDD+ in a 7 The agreement continues to be operational since all funds have not been disbursed and an extension was granted by Norway. ...
... Monitoring, Reporting and Verification systems (MRV) are generally portrayed as a technical exercise encompassing activities such as enabling satellite imagery and analysing data on the carbon stored within a given swathe of forests (Ramcilovik-Suominen, 2019). However, as outlined by Gupta et al (2012), carbon accounting and MRV, are political exercises with social and political effects (Gupta et al., 2012) belying a reliance on measurements as fodder for global environmental policy making (Turnhout et al., 2014). Notably, as demonstrated in the R-PPs of Guyana and Suriname, a land dispute hampers REDD+ in a 7 The agreement continues to be operational since all funds have not been disbursed and an extension was granted by Norway. ...
In this paper, I argue that the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) mechanism , a globally driven, market-based environmental policy, is racialized in practice. Yet, consideration of how the uptake of these policies is challenged by racialized relations is insufficiently addressed in the neoliberal conservation literature. Colonial histories are sedimented in racialized subjectivities and land management practices where certain economic activities, geographical sites and interactions with the natural environment became the stronghold of different groups. In this paper, I demonstrate how the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) mechanism, one such globally driven, market-based environmental policy, is challenged by the legacy of these racialized land use practices and social relations rooted in the defining colonial period in Guyana and Suriname. I outline the relationship between the processes of politically demarcating forests and of shaping subjectivities, drawing attention to how these processes are impacted by REDD+. Through a focus on gold mining, explored here as a historically conditioned, economic relationship with the natural environment, I show how REDD+ contributes to state territorialisation, complicates pre-existing racialized subjectivities and increases the legibility of forests and their amenability to state management.
... 37 The process of commodification implies commensuration across diverse types of carbon emissions, regardless of the location, or social conditions of their generation, so that they can be traded and exchanged. 38 According to many, this is risky because it could result in forests only being valued for their carbon content, a process termed carbonification 37 or carbonization, 36,39,40 thereby neglecting local realities and the needs of forest-dependent communities. 21,41,42 These criticisms resonate with broader debates and critiques of a 'Payments for Ecosystem Services' (PES) approach to environmental governance. ...
... [43][44][45] Further criticism has emerged about the potential of REDD+ to become an offset mechanism for developed countries to compensate their own poor greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation performance. 40,46 However, in the absence of a global compliance market for forest carbon, and with the current low demand for and price of carbon, the claim that REDD+ is contributing to a large-scale commodification of the forest remains empirically unfounded. In fact, the forest is already very much commoditized and has been brought under global extractivist markets, unrelated to REDD+. ...
... As much scholarly analysis has documented, monitoring and accounting technologies, approaches, and technical and institutional capacities are unevenly distributed across scales, domains and REDD+ countries. 40,[50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57] The availability of robust and credible data, particularly in developing countries, remains a key challenge, given uncertainties and political considerations associated with calculating baselines or reference levels against which to assess REDD+ performance. This is also the case in determining the scale (national, sub-national, or local) at which to account for avoided carbon emissions. ...
... 14 It thus becomes important to ask: who selects the variables that are measured, what assumptions about relevance and representativeness underpin these choices, 37 and what is rendered visible versus what is left obscure? 38,39 This is pivotal because digital technologies always involve a translation of the complexity of the world into computable digits understood against a certain interpretative frame. As a ''critical transparency studies'' perspective has thus long argued, the uptake, institutionalization, and effects of environmental disclosure (including digitally enabled disclosure) need to be scrutinized within the broader normative and political contexts of its generation and use. ...
... This is especially important because, as also noted above, digital technologies always involve a translation of the complexity of the world into computable digits, highlighting that what can be counted counts. 37,38,46 This translation thus necessarily involves certain ''black boxes.'' 47 As critical social science scholarship of these phenomena notes, the need to create uniform datasets that are interoperable and allow for computation ''subsumes all contextual, indexical, symbolic or lived differences in data.'' ...
Digital technologies play an increasingly important role in addressing environmental challenges, such as climate change and resource depletion. Yet, the characteristics and implications of digitalized environmental governance are still under-conceptualized. In this perspective, we distinguish three dimensions of governance: (1) seeing and knowing, (2) participation and engagement, and (3) interventions and actions. For each dimension, we provide a critical perspective on the shifts that digital technologies generate in governance. We argue against the assumption that the use of digital technologies automatically results in improved outcomes or in more democratic decision-making. Instead, attention needs to be paid to the wider political and normative context in which digital technologies are proposed, designed, and used as environmental governance tools. We conclude with key questions for academics and policymakers to broaden the debate on responsible design and use of digital technologies in environmental governance.
... Forest carbon finance frequently leads to complicated chains of responsibility in which neither those providing financing, those receiving financing, nor those making management decisions are accountable to each other. Forest-dependent people are often poorly represented in the decision-making processes, and pre-existing accountability relationships are often weak [74,75]. ...
... The expense of employing these experts has largely prevented small landowners from engaging in carbon markets [20,80]. Much initial REDD+ funding went to the development of monitoring systems rather than to storing carbon [75], and these consultants now play a major role in creating new finance programs, raising a potential conflict of interest [20,21]. ...
Interest in forest-based carbon storage has led to growth in financing for carbon forestry. Most financial strategies rest on strong assumptions which are not valid in many parts of the world. We use cases drawn from tribal forestry in the US and government forestry in India to illustrate how carbon finance relies on the presence of enforceable rights, representative and accountable institutions, clear incentives, and symmetrical power relations. In the absence of these conditions, carbon finance provides perverse incentives that undermine biodiversity and human rights without storing carbon. We suggest that for forest-based carbon storage to be successful, more attention needs to be paid to underlying political reforms, as well as to policies that are not reliant on finance.
... Furthermore, although accurate understanding of PFES impact also depends on the availability and accuracy of data, data is also influenced by the interests of powerful agents (Brockhaus and Angelsen, 2012;De Sy et al., 2018). PFES monitoring systems are generally seen as a technical matter, while what is measured, reported, and verified, how and by whom, are politically driven (Gupta et al., 2012;Gupta et al., 2014). Therefore, rather than accepting available data on PFES impact at face value, this paper also adopts a political lens to analyze the politics of numbers related to PFES. ...
... Son La was selected as the case study site to assess PFES impact in Vietnam for several reasons. First, the impact of PFES on forest ecosystem services are more valid with longer-term temporal and longitudinal data (Gupta et al., 2012;Gupta et al., 2014;Hasan et al., 2019;Jebiwott, 2016;Wang et al., 2020). Son La, as one of the first two provinces to conduct PFES in Vietnam (from 2008 to the present), provides more than a 10-year timespan to evaluate PFES impact. ...
Payments for forest environmental services (PFES) is a major breakthrough policy in the Vietnamese forestry sector because it contributes 25% of the total investments in the forestry sector and serves as the first market-based instrument employed to protect forests. However, there is little empirical evidence of its effectiveness. Is the policy meeting the core objectives of improving forest cover and forest quality and is it also achieving its claims of supporting local livelihoods? This paper analyses the environmental, social, and economic impacts of PFES in Son La province, the longest standing implementation of a PFES scheme in Vietnam. Our study uses a sampling method that incorporates pre-matching and a before-after-control-intervention approach. Data was collected from government statistics, remote sensing analysis, focus group discussions involving 236 people, surveys with a total of 240 households, and key informant interviews with 45 people. Our findings show that additionality of PFES in Son La is controversial and depends on who collects the data and what data is used to evaluate the impacts of PFES. Data collection is also politicized to serve central, provincial and district government interests. Evidence shows that PFES has provided little additional income to individual villagers to protect forests in Son La. However, total PFES revenue paid to communities generates significant income for village communities. Moreover, not all villagers can receive continuous payments from PFES, meaning that PFES has not become a stable source of income, rendering the permanence of PFES limited. Improving monitoring and evaluation policies coupled with transparent, inclusive, independent mechanisms are essential to providing a more accurate reflection of impacts from PFES in Vietnam.
... Governmentality studies make the techniques and discursive concepts visible through which power and legitimacy are produced (A. Gupta et al., 2012;Lövbrand & Stripple, 2013;Oels, 2005). Thus, governmentality scholars are interested "in the procedures by which carbon markets are made thinkable and operational as administrative domains" (Stripple & Lövbrand, 2010, p. 659). ...
... Scholars of governmentality have emphasised that calculation, monitoring and certification are techniques of power in the carbon markets (A. Gupta et al., 2012). Moreover, the CDM has been described as a governance experiment in which epistemic and political authority are coproduced (Voß, 2016). ...
In a time, when climate change impacts become increasingly visible and different policy responses are debated, this thesis explores what forms of market-driven climate governance have been considered to be legitimate and desireable (or not) by different stakeholders at the global and local level. Doing so, it critically interprets discursive struggles, which surround the market mechanisms under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. Moreover, it provides a novel conceptual approach to analyse the discursive (de-)legitimation of transnational climate governance and thereby advances the theoretical fondations of sociological legitimacy. As from a governance perspective, non-state actors are considered to be key actors in the Kyoto and Paris regime, this thesis has analysed how the Gold Standrad - a prominent voluntary carbon standrad- has shaped the (de)legitimation of the carbon offset markets.
... Most research on REDD+ governance has emphasized how less interest has been devoted to the apparently soft capacity-building and educational practices 2 in REDD+ that complement the financial incentives paid for forest conservation, and that occur intermediate between global and local levels (cf. Arora-Jonsson et al. 2015;Gupta 2012;Methmann et al. 2013;Mickels-Kokwe and Kokwe 2015). Especially in the case of community-based REDD+ we see how local actors -small-scale farmer communities, forest-dwellers, and Indigenous communities -become addressed and valued as responsible subjects within complex stakeholder regimes. ...
... This comes at a price, not only as it requires intense training and time-consuming engagement, but also as the adoption of standardizing and quantifying methodology may eventually change the perception of nature in a remarkable way, i.e. towards a quantification of nature. Yet this may also culminate in productive engagements with the local meanings given to nature, forest, and political ecology (Gupta et al. 2012; also see Astuti and McGregor 2015a on governmentality analysis). Nevertheless, community-based carbon monitoring, and thus the creation of hybrid carbon knowledge is portrayed as a universal and empowering methodology that is useful for any community, for instance in order to counter allegations of unsustainable land use, or in order to be in a better negotiation position towards governments (RECOFTC 2012: 112). ...
REDD+ regimes are accompanied by capacity-building and educational practices, which play an important role in REDD+ governance. These practices address subaltern local and indigenous actors, seek their compliance and thereby contribute to the stabilization of otherwise all-too-fragile global carbon governance systems. In this article I analyze the governing effects of such practices by drawing on Robert Fletcher's concept of "multiple environmentalities" and Tania Murray Li's "analytic of assemblage." Empirically I focus on educational materials that have been designed for REDD+ projects in cooperation with one of the world's largest REDD+ funds, Norway's International Climate and Forest Initiative. I identify several strategies that aim at aligning diverse actors, seek to de- or re-politicize REDD+ concepts, authorize knowledge, and, most significantly, address local actors as responsible ecological stewards, who contribute to stabilizing REDD+ regimes on the ground. In total, these strategies promote programmatic subjectivities among indigenous 'stakeholders' and contribute to a new, 'glocal' understanding of nature-society relations.
Keywords: global environmental governance, REDD+, governmentality, environmentality, capacity-building
... These include: markets that price and trade emissions rights (Callon, 2009;Knox-Hayes, 2016;McKenzie, 2009;Lovell, 2015) and ecosystem services (e.g. Asiyanbi, 2016;Corbera, 2012;Fletcher et al., 2016;Gupta et al., 2012); forms of investment in natural capital designed to generate value through conservation and carbon sequestration (Dempsey, 2015;Fairhead et al., 2012;Kay, 2018;Sullivan, 2018); and raising capital expressly for low-carbon investment in enterprises, projects and initiatives (Bracking, 2015;Christophers, , 2018Karpf and Mandel, 2018), especially to provide for the greening of urban infrastructures (Castree and Christophers, 2015;Knuth, 2018a) and the renewable and 'clean tech' energy sectors (Hall et al., 2017;Knuth, 2018b;McCarthy, 2015). ...
... Rather than being a commodity in the strictest sense of being a good that can be bought or sold, the trading of carbon is more like the buying and selling of serviceswhere the service is the calculated and qualified ability to contribute to reducing atmospheric carbon. The development of markets around the potential of forests and land cover to sequester carbon from the atmosphere has attracted sustained critical attention, particularly the rapid development of so-called Reduced Emissions from Degradation & Deforestation schemes (REDD, or REDDþ where additional sustainability benefits are involved) (Asiyanbi, 2016;Corbera, 2012;Fletcher et al., 2016;Gupta et al., 2012). As one of a number of processes that have expanded through the development of the concept of ecosystem services and its circulation in global environmental governance, REDD schemes may well be an example of 'accumulation by conservation' (Büscher and Fletcher, 2015). ...
Growing emphasis on finance as key to decarbonization requires social science research that critically attends to the emergent and diverse forms taken by carbon finance. First, we pluralize research into carbon finance, building on existing work to identify four main forms: carbon markets; ecosystem services; natural capital investment; and, capital allocated to low-carbon enterprises and projects. Second, we propose that research should problematize the processes through which carbon is variously translated into financial value. Illustrated with reference to low-carbon investment in electricity generation, our agenda thereby extends from the difficulties of producing carbon-as-commodity to the uncertainties of constituting carbon-as-asset.
... Vulnerability to climate change (and thus the receipt of funds for its mitigation) can, for example, be performatively conjured up by a cast of community stakeholders, politicians, and adaptation or finance technocrats (Webber, 2013). Schemes to incentivize sequestration through reforestation performatively create their emission offset credits by calculations of measurement, reporting and verification (Gupta et al., 2012). Efforts to encourage more ambitious mitigation have followed suit, with activists organizing their actions around estimations of the warming implications of business-as-usual scenarios, using emissions calculations to performatively bring about social change (Beuret, 2017). ...
The metrics used in environmental management are performative. That is, the tools deployed to classify and measure the natural world interact with the things they were designed to observe. The idea of performativity also captures the way these interactions shape or distort the governance activities that metrics are used to inform. The performativity of metrics reveals how mundane practices of measurement and auditing are inscribed with substantial power. This has proven particularly true for the global warming metrics, like GWP100, that are central to the management of anthropogenic climate change. Greenhouse gases are materially heterogenous, and the metrics used to commensurate their various warming impacts influence the distribution of both culpability and capital in climate policy and markets. The publication of a new warming metric, GWP* (or GWP Star), has generated a modest scientific controversy, as a diverse cast of stakeholders recognize this performativity seek to influence the metrological regime under which they live. We analyse this controversy, particularly as it unfolded in the fractious discourse around sustainable food and farming, to develop the concept of reflexive performativity: where actors are anticipatory and strategic in their engagement with the metrics that are used to govern their lives. We situate this idea in relation to, and in tentative evidential support of, the concept of reflexive modernization.
... Carbon lock-in and carbon verification: Carbon verification has been recognised as a pivotal governance instrument for some time (Gupta et al., 2012). However, interestingly, while 15 years ago there were hundreds of carbon verification actors competing for the same space, now it seems that three or four dominate. ...
Global greenhouse gas emissions are the main contributor to anthropocentrically-induced climate change and have risen 41% since 1990. We are still yet to reach peak emissions. A large share of those emissions result from private sector activity. At the same time, the private sector possesses major resources which should be harnessed to scale up funding and emissions reduction technologies to benefit the 3 climate. Since the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, there has been an upsurge in private sector activity on climate change, especially in the corporate sector. Researchers have suggested that this groundswell of private sector activity especially in reduction of carbon emissions holds out the promise of plugging conspicuous public governance gaps. But while this surge in private action since the Paris Climate Agreement is to be encouraged, and indeed has been formally welcomed by global public climate governance actors under the UNFCCC, the measurable success of private, public-private and “hybrid” climate governance arrangements on reducing emissions remains unclear. Through an in depth empirical investigation of the actors and initiatives that play a key role in this emerging domain of bottom-up climate change governance, this study finds that, despite a groundswell in private activity, zones of fragmentation among a multiplicity of private actors, initiatives and standards is stymying progress: while key actors are increasingly networked, key metrics remain severely fragmented; while substantial resources have been dedicated to governing carbon emissions, greenhouse gas emissions keep rising. These observations are demonstrated through an empirical analysis of the “carbon-based” governance regime, which we define as the governance of climate change through a unitary focus on carbon measurement, disclosure, and verification. So far, the ultimate goal of carbon-based governance to reduce emissions is far from being realized. Whether this regime can be repurposed to fulfil this crucial function remains an open question.
... Feb. 2022). Central to the REDD+ framework is the forest carbon accounting, which requires a monitoring, reporting and verifying (MRV) system that tracks changes in forest carbon stocks (Gupta et al., 2012). Therefore, establishing functional MRV systems is one of the major goals of the so called 'REDD Readiness' (Fry, 2011). ...
Net Ecosystem Production (NEP) of forests is the net carbon dioxide (CO2) fluxes between land and the atmosphere due to forests' biogeochemical processes. NEP varies with natural drivers such as precipitation, air temperature, solar radiation, plant functional type (PFT), and soil texture, which affect the gross primary production and ecosystem respiration, and thus the net C sequestration. It is also known that deposition of sulphur and nitrogen influences NEP in forest ecosystems. These drivers' respective, unique effects on NEP, however, are often difficult to be individually identified by conventional bivariate analysis. Here we show that by analyzing 22 forest sites with 231 site-year data acquired from FLUXNET database across Europe for the years 2000–2014, the individual, unique effects of these drivers on annual forest CO2 fluxes can be disentangled using Generalized Additive Models (GAM) for nonlinear regression analysis. We show that S and N deposition have substantial impacts on NEP, where S deposition above 5 kg S ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹ can significantly reduce NEP, and N deposition around 22 kg N ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹ has the highest positive effect on NEP. Our results suggest that air quality management of S and N is crucial for maintaining healthy biogeochemical functions of forests to mitigate climate change. Furthermore, the empirical models we developed for estimating NEP of forests can serve as a forest management tool in the context of climate change mitigation. Potential applications include the assessment of forest carbon fluxes in the REDD+ framework of the UNFCCC.
... Criticism that REDD+ is used a convenient offset option for developed countries to compensate their own poor climate mitigation performance (Gupta et al., 2012;Lohmann, 2005;McAfee, 2012;Nielsen, 2014). Social ...
Forests generate a range of ecosystem services at global, local and regional scales but deforestation and forest degradation is increasing in many regions of the world, with primary forests under particular threat. At the same time, the communities that own and live in and around these forests are seeking incomes for development in an increasingly globalised world. The failure to comprehensively recognise, demonstrate and capture the value of the ecosystem services of forests, means that forests are seen primarily as a source of timber, or forest land as simply an opportunity for agriculture and mining. Forest communities, that have often harnessed the forest for centuries, are often faced with a false choice between conservation and development. A number of mechanisms exist to create incomes from the forest through more sustainable activities that recognise and seek to capture forest ecosystem service benefits beyond timber. This paper examines the literature on four key mechanisms – (i) forest certification, (ii) non-timber forest products, ecotourism and eco-labelling, (iii) payments for ecosystems services and (iv) forest carbon mitigation schemes (reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation) to determine how they recognise, demonstrate and capture ecosystem services and to identify their strengths, weaknesses opportunities and threats. It is argued that while the mechanisms recognise multiple ecosystem services, they struggle to demonstrate their value, and thus ineffectively capture them in forest management and income-generation for forest stewards. The paper uses the analysis to propose the essential requirements of a ‘Basket of Benefits Approach’ that provides guidance for more comprehensive valuation of forest ecosystem services, inclusive of ecosystem integrity, that enables just benefit sharing. This Approach considers all the benefits and the beneficiaries to be within the ‘basket’, and therefore that agreement on values and equitable sharing of the benefits, through participatory planning and governance, is essential
... Now is the time for more attention to the systemic (or indirect) drivers of deforestation that we identified in this research as embedded in all economic sectors. Similar to how the simplification and reduction of the value of the forests to carbon capturing sinks under REDD+ and other mechanisms received significant criticism [135][136][137], reducing the deforestation issue to the role of certain commodities is simplifying the issue too far, making zero deforestation commitments continue to struggle to make large-scale impact. The focus on a handful of commodities is limiting an international response, act as "fixes that fail" on symptoms of the problem, by creating the misleading assumption that private supply chain or production sector sustainability solutions are able to bring transformational change on their own [38][39][40]43,[136][137][138][139][140][141][142]. ...
Tropical deforestation and forest degradation driven by agricultural commodity production remains one of the important sustainability challenges of our times. The responses to tropical deforestation so far have not managed to reverse global trends of forest loss, reigniting the discussion about more robust and systemic measures. The concept of deforestation risk is highly relevant for current debates about policy and trade, and likely to increase in importance in the context of the proposed EU Regulation on Deforestation-free Products and EU-Mercosur Trade Agreement. We argue that deforestation is a systemic risk that permeates through different economic sectors, including production, manufacturing, service and control sectors. International trade, investment and economic policies thus act as a systemic trap that cause the production sector to continue with nature’s destruction. This article seeks to more clearly define deforestation risk and uses the case of bovine leather from Brazil to illustrate how pressures for deforestation accumulate across economic sectors towards production, while deforestation risk is dispersed in an opposite trajectory. The article draws on multiple datasets and an extensive literature review. Included are quantitative data sources on annual slaughter, bovine hide/leather registry and annual deforestation, slaughterhouse and tannery locations. We argue that the EU banning unsustainable products from entry and putting incentives for more sustainable agricultural production in the tropics addresses deforestation risks that are currently visible and relatively easy to identify. These response mechanisms are conditioned upon traceability of deforestation risk across supply chains, which is prone to falsifications, leakage and laundry. Although proven to be essential, the proposed EU responses still miss out deeper leverage points to address the systemic drivers of deforestation coming from the manufacturing, service and control sectors that make production through deforestation profitable in the first place.
... To understand the relations between the government and society, we draw from Science and Technology studies which are concerned with the mutual relationship between social contexts and knowledge (Gupta et al., 2012;Jasanoff, 2004). The concept of civic epistemology, in particular, captures the institutionalized relations between the government and non-state actors in the production, dissemination, and use of knowledge (Jasanoff, 2005). ...
The Paris Agreement encourages countries to monitor and regularly report on progress in responding to the impacts of climate change. So far, discussions on adaptation tracking have focused on the technocratic reasons for limited progress on adaptation tracking, for example, financial, methodological, and technical capacity gaps. Substantial variation exists in the institutional context within which adaptation takes place and is being tracked. Yet, recent discussions overlook the importance of the extent to which new systems of adaptation tracking fit within the prevailing rules and practices of knowledge production and use. Although such fit-for-context has been considered important in other fields, no adequate frameworks exist to operationalize it within adaptation tracking. We develop a six-dimensional framework for analyzing institutional structure as the first step towards alignment in the design and use of adaptation tracking: 1) stakeholder participation, 2) transparency, 3) bureaucratic accountability, 4) engagement with experts, 5) politico-administrative relations, and 6) coordination within the administration. For each dimension, we synthesize academic literature, provide variables for operationalization, and provide examples drawn from various regions. The resulting framework allows the description of the institutional structures of knowledge production and use and supports the context-specific design of new programs, tools, and practices for tracking adaptation progress.
... Extending rotation age could increase landscape C storage, but to offset a loss in economic returns to a landowner, then payment for C sequestration may be needed [78]. These C payments should be sensitive to verification of in situ storage [79], and so we note that the stand metrics used in our regression models can all be detected with remote sensing techniques that measure pine heights for site index, stand density, and the time since the last harvest c.f. [80]. ...
Tree plantations represent an important component of the global carbon (C) cycle and are expected to increase in prevalence during the 21st century. We examined how silvicultural approaches that optimize economic returns in loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.) plantations affected the accumulation of C in pools of vegetation, detritus, and mineral soil up to 100 cm across the loblolly pine’s natural range in the southeastern United States. Comparisons of silvicultural treatments included competing vegetation or ‘weed’ control, fertilization, thinning, and varying intensities of silvicultural treatment for 106 experimental plantations and 322 plots. The average age of the sampled plantations was 17 years, and the C stored in vegetation (pine and understory) averaged 82.1 ± 3.0 (±std. error) Mg C ha−1, and 14.3 ± 0.6 Mg C ha−1 in detrital pools (soil organic layers, coarse-woody debris, and soil detritus). Mineral soil C (0–100 cm) averaged 79.8 ± 4.6 Mg C ha−1 across sites. For management effects, thinning reduced vegetation by 35.5 ± 1.2 Mg C ha−1 for all treatment combinations. Weed control and fertilization increased vegetation between 2.3 and 5.7 Mg C ha−1 across treatment combinations, with high intensity silvicultural applications producing greater vegetation C than low intensity (increase of 21.4 ± 1.7 Mg C ha−1). Detrital C pools were negatively affected by thinning where either fertilization or weed control were also applied, and were increased with management intensity. Mineral soil C did not respond to any silvicultural treatments. From these data, we constructed regression models that summarized the C accumulation in detritus and detritus + vegetation in response to independent variables commonly monitored by plantation managers (site index (SI), trees per hectare (TPH) and plantation age (AGE)). The C stored in detritus and vegetation increased on average with AGE and both models included SI and TPH. The detritus model explained less variance (adj. R2 = 0.29) than the detritus + vegetation model (adj. R2 = 0.87). A general recommendation for managers looking to maximize C storage would be to maintain a high TPH and increase SI, with SI manipulation having a greater relative effect. From the model, we predict that a plantation managed to achieve the average upper third SI (26.8) within our observations, and planted at 1500 TPH, could accumulate ~85 Mg C ha−1 by 12 years of age in detritus and vegetation, an amount greater than the region’s average mineral soil C pool. Notably, SI can be increased using both genetic and silviculture technologies.
... Depuis quelques années, elles ont produit une littérature abondante sur les savoirs et les techniques qui visent à connaître et gouverner la nature ou lřenvironnement, notamment en lien avec le changement climatique, la biodiversité et son érosion, les océans, etc. Peu dřétudes ont porté sur les forêts. Celles qui existent traitent presque exclusivement des forêts tropicales, et notamment les forêts amazoniennes, dévoilant les difficultés à les gouverner et les conserver dans un contexte international marqué par le changement climatique, en se focalisant sur des dispositifs technico-politiques comme les dispositifs de compensation carbone Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation Ŕ REDD puis REDD+ Ŕ (Gupta et al., 2012 ;Flechter et al., 2016 ;Foyer et al., 2017 ;Turhnout et al., 2017 ;Asiyanbi and Lund, 2020). La quantification du stockage du carbone par les forêts a également fait lřobjet dřétudes, toujours centrées sur les forêts tropicales Ŕ Amérique du Sud, Afrique ou Asie (Viard-Créat, 2014). ...
Les changements globaux ont mis sur le devant de la scène politique et scientifique les forêts, appréhendées comme des dispositifs de lutte contre le changement climatique, et comme des écosystèmes menacés par les climats futurs. Chercheurs, ingénieurs et gestionnaires forestiers déploient des stratégies pour anticiper leurs dynamiques futures afin de les préparer aux enjeux écologiques, socio-économiques et politiques de demain. Ces préoccupations pour l’avenir des forêts ne sont pourtant pas nouvelles, elles sont au cœur des sciences et de la gestion des forêts depuis la fin du XVIIIème siècle, comme le grand récit de la « mort des forêts » (das Waldsterben) ou celui des « puits de carbone » pour atténuer le changement climatique. Cette thèse étudie d’un point de vue historique et sociologique comment sont façonnés les futurs des forêts françaises. S’inscrivant dans le courant des Science and Technology Studies (STS), ce travail s’appuie sur le concept d’infrastructures de recherche forestière pour décrire et analyser comment les forêts sont transformées en chiffres et en données, comment elles sont quantifiées, modélisées et simulées informatiquement pour être gérées et gouvernées. Les infrastructures de recherche forestières renvoient alors aux assemblages sociotechniques, organisationnels et scientifiques qui visent à surveiller les forêts, et rendre leurs futurs anticipables et gouvernables. L’enquête au cœur de ces infrastructures a été menée dans plusieurs laboratoires français de recherche forestière et s’appuie sur des entretiens réalisés avec des chercheurs, ingénieurs et gestionnaires, ainsi qu’une analyse documentaire de leurs productions. L’étude des pratiques de quantification, de modélisation et de simulation des forêts, et des acteurs, collectifs et institutions qui les portent, dévoile alors les dimensions sociotechniques de la production des futurs des forêts. Ces futurs ont une histoire et une matérialité : ils suivent les trajectoires prises par les infrastructures de recherche forestière. Ces futurs sont pluriels : les acteurs portent des visions concurrentes sur les rôles joués par les forêts dans les climats futurs, et sur les savoirs, technologies et pratiques à mettre en œuvre pour les adapter aux changements globaux.
... This discourse is the most influential , being drawn on primarily by representatives of international organizations like UN-REDD+ and national policymakers. Through this discourse, REDD+ is discussed primarily as a tool for managing and conserving forests and the initiative recast as a technical innovation in forest management (Gupta et al. 2012). The technical discourse in both countries is operationalized by representatives of intergovernmental organizations, government officials and consultants. ...
This paper demonstrates what the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) initiative would have to do to satisfy the expectations of its diverse, local stakeholders. It connects the unmet expectations of REDD+ with a deepening reliance on extractive activity in the Guiana Shield. In it, I argue that extractive activity, which has always been the most significant driver of deforestation in the ecoregion, is further overtaking REDD+’s capacity for meeting expectations and development aspirations due to the combined failure of REDD+ to deliver vast amounts of promised funding to alter unsustainable development paths and the subsequent announcements of major oil discoveries in the territorial waters of the Guiana Shield. These arguments are based on data collected in the early phases of REDD+ readiness through a multi-sited ethnography, analyzed through a combination of Foucauldian discourse analysis and governmentality. I use critical discourse analysis to represent REDD+’s regional interpretations and governmentality to tease out the expectations embedded in these discourses. This combination supports my identification of what REDD+ would have to accomplish to be deemed successful in Guyana and Suriname, the only two REDD+ participating countries entirely within the Guiana Shield. In turn, this identification improves understandings of the relationship between failed or failing conservation and development initiatives and the subsequent intensification of extractive activity.
... The evidence-based outcomes on household welfare improvement are not equally different from the outcomes on forest conditions and forest cover. Gupta et al. (2012) found an increase in household incomes in a case study in India. Ali et al. (2007) conducted a study in Pakistan and found no difference in the number of income sources available to participatory forest management (PFM) and non-PFM households and only a small difference in primary sources of income (with a marginal increase in income from forest sources and small business activities, but less income from agriculture in PFM sites). ...
Increasing the supply of forest ecosystem services in the tropics is on the agenda of most developing countries’ forest policies and most importantly in Kenya which is a low forest cover country. Evidence from past empirical impact assessments show numerous limitations in these assessments such as complexities within local forest communities and challenges in accessing relevant ecosystem services and household income data for impact assessments. This paper attempts to address some of these limitations by estimating joint ecosystem services and household livelihood outcomes at the same time. A survey protocol was designed, pre-tested and implemented with 370 households in two (2) out of the ten (10) forest ecological conservancies in Kenya and with secondary data on selected ecosystem services outcomes. Propensity score matching estimates of the treatment effects of the treated from participation in conservation association show a significant income loss (−57600.11) for households participating in a conservation association with a positive effect on erosion control (3.49) and biodiversity conservation outcomes (0.071) in the Nzoia catchment area. The paper concludes recommending the introduction of a payment scheme with CBCAs household members in reforestation and afforestation programs in the Basin.
... Measuring, reporting and verification (MRV) systems used to support global forest governance initiatives, while making visible forest loss and regeneration, identify forests as 'pixels' or units of carbon, risks further decontextualising the historic processes of deforestation that were-and are-based on a colonial extractivist mindset that persists in national plans and forest policies (Gupta et al. 2012). Galudra and Sirait (2009) argue that scientific discourse was used by the Dutch colonial administration to justify control of 120 million hectares of land as forest reserves, legitimised by the view that customary systems of land tenure and use were 'inappropriate' and 'destructive'. ...
The UN Sustainable Development Goals include ambitious targets for tackling deforestation and emphasise the roles of diverse actors and partnerships for transformative change. Initiatives for governing tropical forests take multiple forms, including ‘zero deforestation’ supply chain initiatives, carbon forestry, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+), legislative frameworks that intend to cut off markets for illegally harvested timber, and emerging landscape and jurisdictional approaches. Drawing on insights from political ecology and sustainability transitions research, this chapter discusses the barriers to transitioning to ‘zero deforestation’ through consideration of: (1) the contested framing of the problem of deforestation, (2) how sustainable forest governance is translated and enacted across scales, and (3) who is represented in ‘the transition’. This reveals opportunities for sustainable and just transitions for forests. We argue that careful attention must be paid to the influences of power and politics surrounding forest governance and its social and ecological outcomes, and the need to challenge orthodoxies around economic growth that currently underpin policy responses.
... It should be calculated as with PES, measured according to the forest area or deforestation" (NA #4). This issue is well documented in the literature on discourses around MRV (Gupta et al. 2012;Jagger et al. 2014). ...
... Carbon lock-in and carbon verification: Carbon verification has been recognised as a pivotal governance instrument for some time (Gupta et al., 2012). However, interestingly, while 15 years ago there were hundreds of carbon verification actors competing for the same space, now it seems that three or four dominate. ...
The “carbon-based” governance regime, defined as the governance of climate change through a unitary focus on carbon measurement, disclosure, focuses on the measurable success of private, public-private, and “hybrid” approaches to climate governance. Our research finds that, despite a groundswell in private activity, zones of fragmentation among a multiplicity of private actors, initiatives, and standards is stymying progress. Key actors are increasingly networked, yet key metrics remain severely fragmented; Moreover, while substantial resources have been dedicated to governing carbon emissions, greenhouse gas emissions keep rising. So far, the ultimate goal of carbon-based governance, to reduce emissions, is far from being realized. Whether this regime can be repurposed to fulfill this crucial function remains an open question.
... The incipient representation of mangroves as a blue carbon sink is expected to increase replantation and conservation efforts. It will also likely bring about other material effects associated with the internationally driven foci on carbon stock accounting and valuation of ecosystem services (Gupta et al., 2012;Van Lavieren et al., 2012;Howard et al., 2014). While the apparent positive outcomes of blue carbon promotion have begun to be documented and lessons propagated (e.g., Locatelli et al., 2014;Wylie et al., 2016), and discussion emerging on best practices for implementation in local contexts (see Ingram et al., 2016;Thompson et al., 2017), the possibility of other impactsin particular, any adverse consequences on people who rely on mangroves has rarely been considered. ...
The current focus on mangroves as key ecosystems in mitigating the impacts of climate change has largely neglected the livelihoods of coastal dwellers interacting with mangroves. This article provides a review of scholarly and policy attention paid to these social groups and their means of struggle. It argues that the latest dominant governance discourse tying mangroves to blue carbon signifies a departure from catering to coastal people's interests and rights in mangroves. We describe the evolving discourses that have shaped mangrove use and conservation in the Philippines since the 1970s. While the mid-century preoccupation with mangrove conversion to fish farms gradually gave way to the pursuit of community-based mangrove conservation in the late 1980s and 1990s, recent experiences suggest a comparably weakened focus towards recognizing local access and use patterns. We contend that the present blue carbon framing of mangroves, which harbours technocratic and financialized ideals of sustainability, poses a fundamental disadvantage to local users of mangroves. We conclude by reflecting on ways to redress this trend via a new framing of mangroves.
... This can result in tensions that can limit the authority of the platform. If, in the future, carbon-offset funding will support jurisdictional REDD+ programmes, it becomes even more important that the GCF does not forgo downward accountability to local stakeholders for upward accountability to globalized carbon markets (Bäckstrand, 2008;Gupta et al., 2012). ...
Transnational climate change initiatives have increased in number and relevance within the global climate change regime. Despite being largely welcomed, there are concerns about their ability to deliver ambitious climate action and about their democratic legitimacy. This paper disentangles the nature of both authority and legitimacy of a specific form of transnational networks, transgovernmental networks of subnational governments. It then investigates how a major transgovernmental initiative focusing on tropical forests, the Governors’ Climate and Forests Task Force, attempts to command authority and to build and maintain its legitimacy. The paper illustrates the particular challenges faced by initiatives formed primarily by jurisdictions from the Global South. Three major trade-offs related to authority and legitimacy dimensions are identified: first, the difficulty of balancing the need for increased representation with performance on ambitious climate goals; second, the need to deliver effectiveness while ensuring transparency of governance processes; and third, the limited ability to leverage formal authority of members to deliver climate action in local jurisdictions, while depending on external funds from the Global North.
... d exploitation constitute blocks on global solidarity and cooperative climate governance (S. Beck, Forsyth, Kohler, Lahsen, & Mahony, 2016). Such dominant renderings of climate change and its impacts make certain worldviews and mitigation strategies seem rational or even natural, while silencing other perspectives and policy options (Gifford, 2020;A. Gupta, Lövbrand, Turnhout, & Vijge, 2012;Lövbrand & Stripple, 2011). They have repercussions not just for how we define the problem but also what weight is given to different drivers and solutions (Castree et al., 2014;Turnhout, Dewulf, & Hulme, 2016). These processes are epitomized most directly in the case of market-based policies, which have often accompanied carbon removal ...
Recent IPCC assessments highlight a key role for large‐scale carbon removal in meeting the objectives of the Paris Agreement. This focus on removal, also referred to as negative emissions, is suggestive of novel opportunities, risks, and challenges in addressing climate change, but tends to build on the narrow techno‐economic framings that characterize integrated assessment modeling. While the discussion on negative emissions bears important parallels to a wider and older literature on carbon sequestration and carbon sinks, this earlier scholarship—particularly from the critical social sciences—is seldom engaged with by the negative emissions research community. In this article, we survey this “long history” of carbon removal and seek to draw out lessons for ongoing research and the emerging public debate on negative emissions. We argue that research and policy on negative emissions should proceed not just from projections of the future, but also from an acknowledgement of past controversies, successes and failures. In particular, our review calls attention to the irreducibly political character of carbon removal imaginaries and accounting practices and urges acknowledgement of past experiences with the implementation of (small‐scale) carbon sequestration projects. Our review in this way highlights the importance of seeing continuity in the carbon removal discussion and calls for more engagement with existing social science scholarship on the subject. Acknowledging continuity and embracing an interdisciplinary research agenda on carbon removal are important aspects in making climate change mitigation research more responsible, and a precondition to avoid repeating past mistakes and failures.
This article is categorized under:
• The Carbon Economy and Climate Mitigation > Benefits of Mitigation
... Moderate criticism often addresses the question of whether and how REDD+ can achieve its own mitigation objectives, and how the implementation of REDD+ affects environmental and equity goals (Ece et al. 2018;Milne et al. 2019;McDermott 2014;Saeed et al. 2018). For instance, some scholars point to leakage, lack of additionality, and technical problems related to monitoring, reporting, and verification as factors that may undermine the effectiveness of REDD+ (Gupta et al. 2012;Ingalls et al. 2018;Mertz et al. 2018). Following the argument of Ferguson and Lohmann (1994), some claim that REDD+ projects may end up depoliticizing climate change mitigation, in that these projects cannot address politically sensitive drivers of deforestation, such as large-scale international land concessions, thereby undermining effectiveness (Myers et al. 2018;Nathan and Pasgaard 2017). ...
This article examines the (re)production of discourses and storylines in the process of policy translation of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) in Laos. Applying the concepts of policy discourses and policy translation, we first identify the prominent storylines at the various governance levels in Laos. Second, we compare and contrast these storylines with the global REDD+ discourses. Further, we discuss how different actors' capacities and political agendas shape REDD+ storylines at different levels of governance. We find that national and sub-national storylines portray REDD+ mainly as a tool for supporting Laos' forestry strategy and sustainable forest management; for capacity-building and donor funding; and for village forest management and education of villagers. At the village level, many see REDD+ as a project for various political elites and external actors to control forests and cheat villagers. We conclude that, while globally there is increasing attention to civic-environmentalism in REDD+, neoliberalist and techno-managerial discourses still dominate. At the village level, however, civic-environmentalist ideas, such as social safeguards, benefit sharing, and equity largely disappear and two opposing discourses emerge representing anti-civic ideas and REDD+ resentment. Furthermore, while techno-managerial ideas permeate all levels in Laos, neoliberalist ideas in terms of carbon trading are almost absent. During policy translation, REDD+ thus transforms into "just another" top-down development project. This serves the interest of Laos's techno-managerial elite well, but has little positive prospect for local people and forests. In this perspective, the lack of alternative discourse-coalitions promoting non-carbon benefits, social safeguards, and equity is striking.
Key Words: REDD+, Laos, policy translation, environmental discourses, neoliberalism, civic environmentalism
... Finally, we would point out that de-politicization and rendering technical are also visible in the heavy focus in REDD+ on technical measures, including calculations of carbon storage, baseline values, and additionality. Though not analyzed in the present study, these procedures are intended to monitor and verify the effectiveness of REDD+ interventions, but tend create the impression that the objectives of REDD+ are uncontested and that performance in achieving them can be unproblematically assessed using technical methodologies (Gupta, Lövbrand, Turnhout, & Vijge, 2012). ...
While mainstream academic literature over the past ten years has tended to identify commercial and industrialized agriculture as the primary driver of deforestation, national plans for REDD+ (as exemplified by proposals to the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility for funding) focus strongly on ‘communities’ and local actors. This is partly to ensure that communities are not harmed by the program, and may benefit from it; but the documents show that in most cases they are in fact envisaged as the primary actors in the REDD+ implementation. In concordance with this, most of the national proposals identify small scale local actors as the agents behind deforestation much more often than large scale outside actors. Moreover, most assign more weight to REDD+ activities directed to small scale actors than even their own analysis of drivers would imply, quite apart from global understanding about who is responsible for forest loss. We suggest that this seeming policy inconsistency can be explained through an understanding of problem framing. We show that the ‘communities’ narrative may implicitly rest on earlier, now largely discredited explanations of the causes of deforestation (shifting cultivation and other traditional practices). However this narrative is attractive today from a variety of other positions, and we suggest that it represents a policy case of a solution looking for a problem.
... Most of these countries have produced technical reports, but most usually with external funding and technical assistance from Western experts. To meet the requirements, recipient countries engaged in the REDD+ process must have a thorough knowledge of their forest carbon stocks and the ability to monitor these carbon stocks in space and time at the national level (Gupta et al., 2012). Methods, skills and funding needed for such carbon measurements have been provided by Western aid donor agencies if targeted forests and recipient actors were located in 'weak' or 'fragile' tropical countries (Karsenty and Ongolo, 2012). ...
Since the end of 2000s, many forest-rich countries have engaged into results-based deforestation reduction monitoring under REDD+ mechanisms. A set of methods and tools designed at international level is expected to be transferred to the domestic level in many developing countries, in order to generate information on how these countries contribute to global emissions reduction through local forest landscapes. Using the monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) device as an example, this paper sets out to analyze this knowledge transfer by identifying bottlenecks. It proposes an original analysis that will help to better understand how such knowledge transfers could be improved at the domestic level. Based on empirical case studies related to REDD+ projects in Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, it assesses knowledge transfer and the role of stakeholders involved at multiple levels (global, regional, national and local). For this purpose, we used the Research Integration and Utilization (RIU) model, which is an analytical framework allowing analyses showing how scientific results can be owned, integrated and disseminated to meet specific needs. Results show that there is a weakness in MRV knowledge transfer from global to local levels and back. The MRV knowledge has a strong research background, a weak MRV knowledge integration and a mitigated direct utilization. The RIU model allows us to identify significant weaknesses in the transfer of MRV knowledge, including institutional dysfunction, weak institutional coordination, a lack of integration and reduced utilization of the scientific knowledge produced, despite the creation of coordinating institutions. These weaknesses are due partly to the absence of a common platform between exogenous and endogenous knowledge. To overcome these obstacles, synergies between scientists and indigenous actors should be explored and developed.
... However, the effects of increasingly digital forms of observation and measurement (as they also scale up to "smart" development projects) in relation to forest environments have yet to be extensively studied. On REDDþ, see for example Gupta et al. (2012) and Paladino and Fiske (2017). 3. ...
Environments are increasingly becoming technologized sites of data production. From smart cities to smart forests, digital networks are analyzing and joining up environmental processes. This commentary focuses on one such understudied smart environment, smart forests, as emerging digital infrastructures that are materializing to manage and mitigate environmental change. How does the digitalization of forests not only change understandings of these environments but also generate different practices and ontologies for addressing environmental change? I first analyze smart forests within the expanding area of smart environments, and then discuss five digital practices that characterize smart forests. Based on this analysis, I suggest that forests are not only becoming highly digital environments but also that forests are transforming into technologies for managing environmental change. Smart forest interventions therefore expand the scope of what could count as a technology, especially in the context of data-oriented planetary governance.
... Most of these countries have produced technical reports, but most usually with external funding and technical assistance from Western experts. To meet the requirements, recipient countries engaged in the REDD+ process must have a thorough knowledge of their forest carbon stocks and the ability to monitor these carbon stocks in space and time at the national level (Gupta et al., 2012). Methods, skills and funding needed for such carbon measurements have been provided by Western aid donor agencies if targeted forests and recipient actors were located in 'weak' or 'fragile' tropical countries (Karsenty and Ongolo, 2012). ...
Since the end of 2000s, many forest-rich countries have engaged into results-based deforestation reduction monitoring under REDD+ mechanisms. A set of methods and tools designed at international level is expected to be transferred to the domestic level in many developing countries, in order to generate information on how these countries contribute to global emissions reduction through local forest landscapes. Using the monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) device as an example, this paper sets out to analyze this knowledge transfer by identifying bottlenecks. It proposes an original analysis that will help to better understand how such knowledge transfers could be improved at the domestic level. Based on empirical case studies related to REDD+ projects in Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, it assesses knowledge transfer and the role of stakeholders involved at multiple levels (global, regional, national and local). For this purpose, we used the Research Integration and Utilization (RIU) model, which is an analytical framework allowing analyses showing
how scientific results can be owned, integrated and disseminated to meet specific needs. Results show that there is a weakness in MRV knowledge transfer from global to local levels and back. The MRV knowledge has a strong research background, a weak MRV knowledge integration and a mitigated direct utilization. The RIU model allows us to identify significant weaknesses in the transfer of MRV knowledge, including institutional dysfunction, weak institutional coordination, a lack of integration and reduced utilization of the scientific knowledge produced, despite the creation of coordinating institutions. These weaknesses are due partly to the absence of a common platform between exogenous and endogenous knowledge. To overcome these obstacles, synergies between scientists and indigenous actors should be explored and developed.
... In the case of carbon projects the potential for the integration of local knowledge is advocated mainly in relation to monitoring (Gupta, Lövbrand, Turnhout, & Vijge, 2012;Larrazábal, McCall, Mwampamba, & Skutsch, 2012). In contrast, suggestions of incorporation of local knowledge in carbon communication are sparse. ...
The formation of local carbon knowledge is central to the meaningful participation of communities in the land-based carbon projects which have become widespread in pursuit of global emissions reductions. Through a qualitative analysis of interviews with community sensitization practitioners, this paper considers how concepts of carbon are communicated to project communities. We find that fieldworkers use people's own experiences to make intangible carbon visible, but rely on scientific concepts to explain the transfer of carbon between states. However, interviews suggest that project communities’ knowledge and understanding of carbon is partial. This highlights the challenges of meeting the safeguarding principles of respect for local knowledge and informed consent in carbon projects. We conclude that greater attention needs to be given by planners to the role of communication in carbon projects, including the potential to draw on indigenous knowledges to advance local understanding.
... Several qualitative studies are focused on the governance and implementation of REDD+ programs (Bolin, Mustalahti, Boyd, & Paavola, 2012;Hajek, Ventresca, Scriven, & Castro, 2011;Marcovitch & Pinsky, 2014;Peskett, Schreckenberg, & Brown, 2011). Others focus on the political dimensions of REDD+ in light of forest tenure and carbon rights (Larson et al., 2013;Lyster, 2011;Sandbrook, Nelson, Adam, & Agrawal, 2010;Schroeder, 2010), social safeguards (McDermott, Coad, Helfgott, & Schroeder, 2012), major drivers of deforestation (Hansen, Lund, & Treue, 2009), and the implementation of MRV systems (Gupta, Lövbrand, Turnhout, & Vijge, 2012;Herold & Skutsch, 2011). ...
Climate change is a daunting problem that results in actions-interactions from a number of actors in complex global systems, which require multi-level governance and a myriad of international and national policies. Deforestation is the second largest source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Success in this area can have a large impact on mitigation. We focus on the governance of ‘Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation’ (REDD+), a large scale experiment in climate finance and a promising cost-effective mitigation mechanism to motivate developing countries to implement policy approaches to reduce forest-related GHG emissions. REDD+, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, is considered a breakthrough mechanism in international cooperation under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) regime, as it was designed to be performance-based. In this paper we analyze a state of the art review on governing REDD+ based on a systematic analysis of peer-reviewed articles in the field. Ours results present a historical perspective of REDD+, literature review, and indicate the most relevant works and scholars in the field.
... For emissions related to the forestry sector, countries need, for example, to be able to have a thorough knowledge of the stock of carbon in their national territory and the ability to monitor it in time and in space. Then the dynamics of carbon accounting, whether global, national or project-based, can provide important insights into the design, functioning and implications of REDD+ MRV systems and practices (Gupta, Lövbrand, Turnhout, & Vijge, 2012). The measurement in logged forest in the same zone are difficult but necessary to obtain statistics and carbon stock damage (Sufo Kankeu, Richard, Jean Sonwa, Eba'a, & Noelle Marlène, 2016). ...
Quantification of forest biomass is a challenge for developing countries
due to insufficient data and lack of expertise. Involving villagers
in this work, especially in the case of local forests could improve the
speed and efficiency of this quantification process. This article
describes the participatory approach implemented to assess carbon
stocks in two community forests located in south-eastern Cameroon.
This was put into practice for forest inventory work and the estimation
of biomass and carbon stocks. The aim was to use classic
scientific approaches of inventory and cartography, but involving
local populations in the different stages of the process. The involvement
of local populations, through the mobilization of their indigenous
knowledge, significantly increases data quality and considerably
reduces the costs and duration of the evaluation process. Ultimately,
only 2% of the trees inventoried were “unknown” by local botanists,
92.3% of the species identified by them had accurate scientific correspondences.
Help of local actors contributed to halving the time
required to set up the plots and reduced the cost of operations by
twenty times compared with using experts. REDD +, at least its local
level monitoring dimension, could be successful if implemented in
a dialectic involving expert scientists and local populations
Opening up regional ontologies for climate action is a necessary and underexplored dimension of climate change policymaking. This commentary explores how a regional lens might be integrated into the complex mosaic of climate governance, particularly in the context of resilient regions. I argue regional ontologies for climate policymaking could have greater analytical power if integrated into a theoretical framing of action that goes beyond the nation‐state, beyond formal policy processes and beyond a strict binary between science and policy. Applying this lens to resilient regions, I argue there are particular opportunities at the regional scale for highlighting diverse perspectives or adaptation issues obscured through a national ontology, using existing transnational data infrastructure and community‐led data systems to support the regional ontology and reframing the scale of collective future visions for a climate‐adapted world.
The question of who participates in making forest environments usually refers to human stakeholders. Yet forests are constituted through the participation of many other entities. At the same time, digital technologies are increasingly used in participatory projects to measure and monitor forest environments globally. However, such participatory initiatives are often limited to human involvement and overlook how more-than-human entities and relations shape digital and forest processes. To disrupt conventional anthropocentric understandings of participation, this text travels through three different processes of “unsettling” to show how more-than-human entities and relations disrupt, rework, and transform digital participation in and with forests. First, forest organisms as bioindicators signal environmental changes and contribute to the formation and operation of digital sensing technologies. Second, speculative blockchain infrastructures and decision-making algorithms raise questions about whether and how forests can own themselves. Third, Amerindian cosmologies redistribute subjectivities to change how digital technologies identify and monitor forests within Indigenous territories. Each of these examples shows how more-than-human participation can rework participatory processes and digital practices in forests. In a time when forests are rapidly disappearing, an unsettled and transformed understanding of participation that involves the world-making practices of more-than-human entities and relations can offer more pluralistic and expansive forest inhabitations and futures.
This article examines the political and performative function of the deforestation ‘reference level’ within Guyana’s Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) agreement with Norway. It argues that the establishment of, and continual negotiations around, the reference level rate illustrate how the Guyana-Norway REDD+ agreement was always more about ensuring the programme’s ‘success’ than materially reducing deforestation in Guyana. By setting the ‘reference level’ at 0.275% per year in 2010, far above Guyana’s historical rate of 0.02%, Guyana’s successful performance in terms of ‘avoiding deforestation’ against this inflated level was all but guaranteed – even as ‘business as usual’ forest use continued on the ground. The fact that the reference level was high moreover allowed Norway to claim that it had ‘contributed’ (through its REDD+ payments) to higher ‘avoided emissions’, even though there was never a clear relationship between its payments and Guyana’s deforestation rate throughout the programme. The ‘performative’ nature of the programme was meanwhile confirmed in 2019, when Norway disbursed the entire remaining balance from the US$250 million originally pledged to Guyana, despite the fact that Guyana had infringed the adjusted reference level ‘floor’ of 0.056% in several years of the programme. The article concludes that if meaningful solutions for ‘avoiding deforestation’ are to be developed, especially in the context of a new centrality for offsetting within the global ‘net zero’ agenda, ‘success’ must mean more than achieving results on paper and resources must be committed that are commensurate with the scale of the stated policy challenge.
In contrast to its Assessment Reports, less is known about the social science processes through which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces methodologies for greenhouse gas emissions reporting. This limited attention is problematic, as these greenhouse gas inventories are critical components for identifying, justifying, and adjudicating national-level mitigation commitments. We begin to fill this gap by descriptively assessing, drawing on data triangulation that incorporates ecological and political analysis, the historical process for developing emissions guidelines. Our systematic descriptive efforts highlight processes and structures through which inventories might become disconnected from the latest peer-reviewed environmental science. To illustrate this disconnect, we describe the IPCC guideline process, outlining themes that may contribute to discrepancies, such as diverging logics and timeframes, discursive power, procedural lock-in, resource constraints, organizational interests, and complexity. The themes reflect challenges to greenhouse gas inventories themselves, as well as broader challenges to integrating climate change science and policy.
• Highlights
• This article provides an illustrative analysis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s greenhouse gas inventory guideline process
• There is evidence for substantive discrepancies between empirical literature and these guidelines
• Particularly for forest soil organic carbon reporting, inventory guidelines are influenced by a multitude of political and scientific actors
• Explanations for these discrepancies merit further inquiry, and include institutional lock-in, political influence, discursive power, resource constraints, and world views
This investigation focuses on the design and formulation of the Brazilian Amazon Fund—perhaps the boldest REDD+ oriented initiative to date. Study draws its hypothesis from the understanding that the Amazon Fund operated until recently based on a nuanced integration of two current trends in environmental governance: (i) institutionalization of ecological modernization theories and (ii) establishment of multilevel, multi-stakeholder governance. To visualize such integration, this work deploys discourse analysis and text-mining techniques to the Amazon Fund's policy documents. Overall findings suggest the ecological modernization agenda is predominant within the Amazon Fund. The following discussion articulates with environmental studies' critical scholarship to debate the dominance of ecological modernism as it is claimed to inherently narrow the scope of perspectives, knowledge, and values integrated into sustainability policies. Whereas the opposite should occur, considering multi-stakeholder environmental governance mechanisms propose to incorporate a plurality of legitimate perspectives and knowledge basis. In these terms, innovative approaches that envision “win-win” solutions for environmental policy may eventually rest in endorsing alternative framings about nature and society that move away from the constrained paradigms of efficiency within ecological modernization theories and discourse. The relevance of this work lays in the debate that acknowledges the importance of driving environmental governance mechanisms in tropical developing countries to new viable alternatives. In broader terms, the importance of this debate emerges in the proposal of changes that move government, business, and civil society away from usual policies (and interests) underpinning policies for land use and the forest sector.
This article attempts to re-ground analyses of carbon markets by examining the material relations of production of a REDD + project in Cambodia. It focuses on how surplus value is extracted from labour at various points in the production chain of Verified Carbon Units (VCUs). Using extensive field work conducted over three years on a REDD + project in northern Cambodia I argue that VCUs are neither actual avoided units of deforestation and emissions, nor mere imagined or socially constructed commodities. Rather VCUs are packages of technical and affective claims attached to particular REDD + projects which are created through material labour processes. Only by examining the use-values that are created through these labour processes can demand for VCUs be properly understood. This article will start by giving a background to the Oddar Meanchey REDD + project (OMREDD + project). It will then examine the writing of the project document and examine the verification process and consider how these formed critical parts of the commodity production process. After that it will examine how the project collapsed on the ground and yet VCUs were still sold in the market. Finally the article will consider how the claims of the OMREDD + project were challenged by critical work and how future interventions against REDD + projects can successfully undermine the claims of REDD + projects and the extraction of surplus value.
Within environmental governance regimes such as the United Nations’ Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+), uncertainty surrounding forest carbon offset commensurability is often regarded as a technical failing that can be resolved through additional data collection or new scientific methods. Though efforts to reduce uncertainty through extensive carbon accounting has generated immense datasets, uncertainty surrounding the commensurability of forest carbon offsets remains, emerging from the neoliberal political economic context as much as from scientific data gaps. Drawing on an analysis of a REDD+ project in Indonesia’s peatlands, this article shows that incompatibilities between scientific uncertainty and financial uncertainty emerged through this forest carbon offset project and, more broadly, that incompatible uncertainty acts as a knowledge regime in the context of hegemonic discourses that connect Indonesia’s degraded peatlands to climate change. This article thus argues that in neoliberal land use-based climate change mitigation projects, it is not the inevitable, enduring presence of scientific or market-based uncertainty that stymies project implementation but the incompatibility of these two forms of uncertainty. By exploring how the drive for more data leads to more uncertainty, in turn spurring the pursuit of more data in lieu of other forms of project action, this article contributes to scholarship on the politics of knowing and un-knowing in environmental governance.
REDD+ is a forest conservation and carbon trading scheme seeking to incentivise a reduction in emissions through payments. This article draws on Foucault’s governmentality concept and Dean’s analytics of government framework to analyse the REDD+ negotiations under the UNFCCC. It argues that negotiators perceived forest inhabitants as malleable subjects whose conduct can and should be “improved” through disciplinary techniques instantiated in forest monitoring practices. Forest inhabitants are not powerless or passive recipients of discipline, but these techniques foster a conduct that only values carbon at the expense of other ecological and cultural values and, further, encourage conservation purely based on cost-benefit reasoning. The article also interrogates the negotiations of safeguards meant to ensure that REDD+ does no social or ecological harm. It argues that the safeguards appear to allow forest inhabitants to decide on REDD+ implementation and governance, and protect their existing forest governance practices should they elect to do so. However, the safeguards are formulated in a voluntary manner, casting doubts on their ability to offer suitable protection. The article concludes by reflecting on the current demand for carbon credits from REDD+ projects and the implications this has for the disciplinary techniques and the conduct they foster.
Oaxaca is the most biologically-and culturally-diverse state of Mexico, and considered by many to be a source of best practices for the role of Indigenous peoples in forest governance. Utilizing an original data set containing census and remote sensing information, I construct a set of empirical tests to assess the impact of indigenous peoples and decentralized local institutions on forest loss in Mexico. Recognizing the great biological and cultural diversity of Mexico, I employ an ecoregion sampling technique to understand trends in different vegetation regimes and to understand better how local institutions influenced forest loss between 2000-2015 by looking within shared watersheds crossing the Oaxacan border. The results indicate that, contrary to strategies based on targeting simply the presence of Indigenous peoples, Indigenous households weakly correlate with forest loss, while Oaxacan autonomous Indigenous municipalities, which retain meaningful influence on local institutions, consistently have lower forest loss across national, regional, and ecoregional samples.
Securing accountability of states for their climate actions is a continuing challenge within multilateral climate politics. This article analyses how novel, face-to-face, account-giving processes for developing countries, referred to as ‘Facilitative Sharing of Views’, are functioning within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and what these processes help to shed light on. We analyse the nature and scope of the ‘answerability’ being generated within these novel processes, including what state-to-state questioning and responses focus on, and what ‘performing’ accountability in this manner delivers within multilateral climate politics. We find that a limited number of countries actively question each other within the FSV process, with a primary focus on sharing information about the technical and institutional challenges of establishing domestic ‘measuring, reporting and verification’ systems and, to lesser extent, mitigation actions. Less attention is given to reporting on support. A key aim is to facilitate learning, both from the process and from each other. Much effort is expended on legitimizing the FSV process in anticipation of its continuation in adapted form under the 2015 Paris Agreement. We conclude by considering implications of our analysis.
Key policy insights
• We analyse developing country engagement in novel face-to-face account-giving processes under the UNFCCC
• Analysis of four sessions of the ‘Facilitative Sharing of Views’ reveals a focus on horizontal peer-to-peer learning
• States question each other more on GHG emission inventories and domestic MRV systems and less on mitigation and support
• We find that limited time and capacity to engage, one-off questioning rather than a dialogue, and lack of recommended follow-up actions risks generating ‘ritualistic’ answerability
• Such account-giving also intentionally sidesteps contentious issues such as responsibility for ambitious and fair climate action but may still help to build trust
• Much effort is expended on ‘naming and praising’ participant countries and legitimizing the process
Drawing on recent multiple governmentality literature, this article analyses the REDD+ negotiations to interrogate who the scheme is likely to govern and how. Two arguments are advanced. First, REDD+ is likely to target local forest users at the expense of both corporate and international drivers of deforestation. This will reduce the effectiveness of the scheme and invite leakage issues. In elucidating the ultimately rejected strategies for addressing international drivers now hidden in neat negotiation outcomes, this article opens a space for considering how the scheme could move beyond a predominant focus on local forest users. Second, targeted forest users are likely to be governed by a combination of neoliberal and disciplinary technologies. REDD+ will seek to ‘improve’ their conduct through a three-staged process involving education, self-reflection and rewards for carbon sequestration. An alternative governmentality associated with local forest users’ claims to decide on REDD+ implementation and governance, on the other hand, met with resistance and ultimately received no protection in the adopted REDD+ safeguards. Moreover, the formulation of the safeguards could undermine legitimacy and forest stewardship in REDD+ projects. By linking the possibility of such issues to the negotiation outcomes, this article demonstrates necessary changes to the scheme.
Across developing countries substantial effort and resources have been dedicated to setting up systems for the measurement, recording and verification of greenhouse gas emissions in the forestry and land-use sectors – a key initiative of the global climate programme Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. This paper approaches these systems through the lens of conservation biopolitics, identifying the calculative processes and spatial logics that attempt to regulate the life and death of the forest. It uses an example of the Indonesian National Carbon Accounting System to explore how a biopolitical apparatus of constant data accumulation and presentation integrates an infinitely complex set of ecological processes across highly differentiated spatial landscapes, and organises these into governable carbon domains. The Indonesian National Carbon Accounting System provides a visual and numeric representation of the various policy and socio-economic processes that drive and limit carbon emissions, and identifies where this occurs in the landscape. By understanding these forest–carbon–human dynamics, programmes can be designed that change how populations access, use and potentially restore the life of the forest. For state and non-state interests alike, the System was viewed as a critical tool for both developing and evaluating the performance of multiple forest carbon initiatives. It also offers a surveillance apparatus to regulate the carbon market and to discipline the actions of various agents that utilise forests and land. Critically, the biopolitical utility of these systems have been undermined by waning commitment within Indonesia to overhaul forest governance towards carbon outcomes.
Forests are a central figure in contemporary environmental thinking. In this context, they have the status of a global icon (Smouts 2001) which illustrates many of the salient features of anthropocenical debates. The simplification of their representation in the public space is matched only by their immense variability on a global scale, and the importance accorded to them by scientists concerned about their role in climate change is often summed up in a few key words. They are thus emblematic of the discrepancy between the individual and sensitive perception of global changes and that of scientific measurements, mediated by various instruments and relating to areas distant from the observer. This discrepancy is often at the heart of anthropocenic controversies. On the other hand, since forests have become a standard ideal of global environmental problems and their potential solutions, they have long overshadowed other biophysical objects that are essential for thinking about the future of the planet.
This article follows the journey of Guyana’s Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) programme, from its promising emergence in 2009 as an ambitious, Norway-funded scheme worth US$250m to its near-abandonment by all actors ten years later. It is based on primary fieldwork conducted in Guyana in 2016 and 2017 and a deep review of the theoretical and empirical literature on REDD+ policy processes and the Norway–Guyana agreement. The article shows how, contrary to the mainstream understanding of environmental policy as a disinterested search for a rational, scientific solution, decisions governing REDD+ policy in Guyana were rather shaped throughout by the political objectives and calculations of a small number of opportunistic elite actors. It further shows how even the modest incarnation of REDD+ in Guyana (which ended up resembling more of a results-based aid programme than a Payment for Ecosystem Services scheme) was continually affected by political factors beyond the control of policy managers. These included fluctuations in the world gold price that led to an increase in mining activity and deforestation, the departure of a key international investor which caused the collapse of the flagship REDD+-funded Amaila Falls hydropower project, and legislative gridlock in Guyana generated by a hung Parliament. While not suggesting that REDD+ (or similar Payment for Ecosystem Services schemes) can never work, the article nonetheless illustrates the ways in which political objectives and unforeseen events can overwhelm substantive policy efforts towards fighting climate change. The findings also illustrate the dangers of prioritizing short-term ‘success stories’ over longer-term and more consultative environmental policy processes.
There are phenomena from an experiment on a target “population” that are deterministic, in the sense that when we observe them, we are absolutely sure about their outcomes. However, there are other phenomena that are nondeterministic. More often than not, the quantitative or categorical outcomes of interest induced from the phenomena will not be predictable. Probability and statistics are the branches of knowledge dealing with such stochastic phenomena and uncertainties.
Highlights
► Reducing GHG emissions from forest degradation requires concerted policies and institutions. ► Understanding forest degradation drivers is needed to design efficient REDD+ programs. ► Likewise learning from past interventions will promote effective REDD+ design. ► Relevant social actors must engage in deliberative processes to design REDD+ programs. ► Adaptive theories of change should be designed for each kind of conservation intervention. ► Synergies among programs should be enhanced to address barriers and achieve shared goals. ►.
We provide a synthesis of recent scholarship on social safeguards and co-benefits in REDD+ with a focus on debates on: first, tenure security, and second, effective participation of local communities. Scholars have explored both proximate and long-term co-benefits of REDD+ interventions, with an emerging trend that links safeguards to improved social co-benefits. Proximate co-benefits include improved rural livelihoods and lower costs of implementation. Long-term co-benefits include greater adaptive capacity of local communities and increasing transparency and accountability in forest governance. Our review suggests that greater tenure security and effective participation of local communities in management will not only prevent adverse social outcomes, but will also enable better forest outcomes and improved capacity for forest governance.
In light of arguments that citizen science has the potential to make environmental knowledge and policy more robust and democratic, this article inquires into the factors that shape the ability of citizen science to actually influence scientists and decision makers. Using the case of community-based air toxics monitoring with "buckets," it argues that citizen science's effectiveness is significantly influenced by standards and standardized practices. It demonstrates that, on one hand, standards serve a boundary-bridging function that affords bucket monitoring data a crucial measure of legitimacy among experts. On the other hand, standards simultaneously serve a boundary-policing function, allowing experts to dismiss bucket data as irrelevant to the central project of air quality assessment. The article thus calls attention to standard setting as an important site of intervention for citizen science-based efforts to democratize science and policy.
To provides an overall framework for thinking about the construction of carbon markets, we adopt James Der Derian's ‘virtuous war’ theory to develop an argument about carbon as a virtuous commodity. This refers to the close affinity between virtuality and virtue – the technological and the ethical – in the construction of carbon markets. The figure of virtuous carbon draws attention to both the fictitious character of carbon units (as imagined things, complex abstractions that exist only by way of agreement) and their virtue (how those units are only provisionally stabilised, and where their ethical contestation is part of their construction). We explore virtuality and virtue at five moments in the commodification of carbon (invention, proliferation, verification, and differentiation into two forms). Virtuous carbon thereby captures the emergence of a distinct sort of governmentality, which aims to neutralise resistance by imbuing the commodities of carbon markets with a self-evident moral quality.
Deforestation and forest degradation remain high worldwide, and one of the dominant underlying causes for this forest loss is illegal logging. Numerous international policies have been developed aimed at addressing these issues. This article studies two of these regimes, the European Union's Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) action plan and its Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) with Ghana, and the climate mitigation policy of reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+). The interactions between these two international policies at the national level, namely in Ghana, are analyzed. The research shows numerous current and anticipated interactions between the two regimes. Most of these interactions potentially have a positive influence, but much depends on the future implementation of both regimes. The article makes recommendations on how to manage the interactions in order to improve the synergies and enhance effectiveness, including institutionalizing information sharing and learning, jurisdictional delimitation, and improving collaboration.
In this article, we draw on the contributions to this issue to address the question 'Will REDD+ work?'. We do so by differentiating between how, where and when REDD+ might work. The article shows how issues of scope, scale and pace of REDD+ are related, and how interdisciplinary research can help to distill the lessons learned from REDD+ efforts currently underway. Important research areas include the drivers of deforestation and forest degradation, monitoring, reporting and verification, co-benefits, governance capacity, linkages with related policies, and the environmental and social impacts of REDD+. In concluding, we highlight the role of interdisciplinary research in supporting the different actors involved in REDD+ to cope with the inherent heterogeneity and complexity of REDD+.
Countries are encouraged to identify drivers of deforestation and forest degradation in the development of national strategies and action plans for REDD+. In this letter we provide an assessment of proximate drivers of deforestation and forest degradation by synthesizing empirical data reported by countries as part of their REDD+ readiness activities, CIFOR country profiles, UNFCCC national communications and scientific literature. Based on deforestation rate and remaining forest cover 100 (sub) tropical non-Annex I countries were grouped into four forest transition phases. Driver data of 46 countries were summarized for each phase and by continent, and were used as a proxy to estimate drivers for the countries with missing data. The deforestation drivers are similar in Africa and Asia, while degradation drivers are more similar in Latin America and Asia. Commercial agriculture is the most important driver of deforestation, followed by subsistence agriculture. Timber extraction and logging drives most of the degradation, followed by fuelwood collection and charcoal production, uncontrolled fire and livestock grazing. The results reflect the most up to date and comprehensive overview of current national-level data availability on drivers, which is expected to improve over time within the frame of the UNFCCC REDD+ process.
This is the third book in a series of highly recognised REDD+ volumes from CIFOR. It provides an analysis of actual REDD+ design and early implementation, based on a large research project – the Global Comparative Study on REDD+ (GCS), undertaken by CIFOR and partners. It takes stock of national, subnational and local REDD+ experiences, and identifies the political and practical challenges to designing and implementing effective, efficient and equitable REDD+ policies and projects.
Key conclusions are:
As an idea, REDD+ is a success story: It is a fresh approach generating hope of significant result-based funding to address an urgent need for climate change mitigation. The idea has been sufficiently broad to serve as a canopy, under which a wide range of actors can grow their own trees.
REDD+ faces huge challenges: Powerful political and economic interests favour continued deforestation and degradation. Implementation must be coordinated across various government levels and agencies; benefits must be distributed and need to balance effectiveness and equity; tenure insecurity and safeguards must be genuinely addressed; and transparent institutions, reliable carbon monitoring and realistic reference levels are all required to support result-based systems.
REDD+ requires – and can catalyse – transformational change: New economic incentives, new information and discourses, new actors and new policy coalitions have the potential to move domestic policies away from the business as usual trajectory.
REDD+ projects are hybrids in high deforestation areas: Project proponents are pursuing strategies that mix the enforcement of regulations and support to alternative livelihoods (ICDP) with result-based incentives (PES). Projects tend to be located in high deforestation and high forest carbon areas, yielding high additionality if they succeed.
‘No regret’ policy options exist: Despite uncertainty about the future of REDD+, stakeholders need to build political support and coalitions for change, invest in adequate information systems, and implement policies that can reduce deforestation and forest degradation, but are desirable regardless of climate objectives.
Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) in developing countries has been at the centre of negotiations on a renewed international climate regime. Developing countries have made it clear that their ability to engage in REDD activities would depend on obtaining sufficient and stable funding. Two alternative REDD financing options are examined to find possible ways forward: financing through a future compliance market and financing through a non-offset fund. First, global demand for hypothetical REDD credits is estimated. The demand for REDD credits would be highest with a base year of 1990, using gross-net accounting. The key factors determining demand in this scenario are the emission reduction targets and the allowable cap. A proportion of emission reduction targets available for offsets lower than 15% would fail to generate a sufficient demand for REDD. Also examined is the option of financing REDD through a fund. Indirectly linking the replenishment of a REDD fund to the market is a promising mechanism, but its feasibility depends on political will. The example of overseas development assistance for global health indicates the conditions for possible REDD financing. The best financial approach for REDD would be a flexible REDD mechanism with two tracks: a market track serving as a mitigation option for developed countries, and a fund track serving as a mitigation option for developing countries.
In this article we unpack the ‘black box’ of carbon offsetting through a critical examination of the technologies and techniques that create carbon credits. Drawing on empirical research of compliance (Clean Development Mechanism) and voluntary carbon offset markets, we highlight the diversity of technologies, techniques and devices involved in carbon offsetting, ranging from refrigerant plants to systems of calculation and audit. We suggest that polarised debates for and against offsetting do not adequately reflect the considerable variations between types of offset project and governance practices in the compliance and voluntary offset markets. Using conceptual insights from governmentality theory and science and technology studies we assess the tensions in making standard, fungible carbon credits. In conclusion, we suggest attention to the technologies and materiality of carbon offsetting allows a fresh perspective on somewhat entrenched debates about the advantages and disadvantages of offsetting.
One of the most contentious issues at the 2009 UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen, and one which has persisted in the successive rounds of negotiation since then, is, in diplomatic lingo, ‘MRV’ (monitoring, reporting and verification). Expanding the MRV regime to include mitigation actions is an opportunity to support, rather than burden, developing countries in their efforts to improve their climate performance over time, consistent with sustainable development—if done in a sensible way. The article reviews the essence of this debate and suggests one pragmatic approach to ensure that national actions are indeed measurable, reportable and verifiable, namely adopting a certification scheme for national climate management systems (NCMS, which would require countries to establish a climate policy, set national goals and timetables, secure resources to implement related national actions and track their progress over time). Based on the high level of agreement among Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on the need for comprehensive frameworks to facilitate forestry and energy sector mitigation by developing countries, supported by financial resources, technology and capacity building, an NCMS certification scheme is well suited to add value to the existing MRV regime both for developed and developing countries.
The UNFCCC mechanism for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation in developing coun-tries (REDD+) represents an unprecedented opportunity for the conservation of forest biodiversity. Nev-ertheless, there are widespread concerns surrounding the possibility of negative environmental outcomes if biodiversity is not given adequate consideration throughout the REDD+ process. We propose a general framework for incorporating biodiversity concerns into national REDD+ programmes based on well-established ecological principles and experiences. First, we identify how biodiversity distribution and threat data, together with data on biodiversity responses to forest change and management, can be readily incorporated into the strategic planning process for REDD+ in order to identify priority areas and activities for investment that will deliver returns for both carbon and biodiversity. Second, we pro-pose that assessments of changes in biodiversity following REDD+ implementation could be greatly facil-itated by paralleling, where possible, the existing IPCC architecture for assessing carbon emissions. A three-tiered approach is proposed for biodiversity assessment, where lower tiers can provide a realistic starting point for countries with fewer data and lower technical capacities. Planning and assessment of biodiversity safeguards for REDD+ need not overburden an already encumbered UNFCCC process. Imme-diate progress is already possible for a large number of developing countries, and a gradual, phased approach to implementation would minimise risks and facilitate the protection of additional biodiversity benefits from REDD+ activities. Greater levels of coordination between the UNFCCC and CBD, as well as other agencies and stakeholder groups interested in forest conservation are needed if biodiversity safe-guards are to be fully adopted and implemented.
The international community has developed hundreds of intergovernmental agreements to address global sustainability issues, and market and civil society actors have supported this effort by taking numerous initiatives themselves. As a consequence, different public and private institutions interact and influence each other, creating a complex governance system working towards sustainable development, and the call for synergies among the various initiatives is increasingly being heard. An example is the issue of reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, REDD+, in which different international institutions are active, including the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) and Forest Investment Program (FIP), and the United Nations UN-REDD Programme. This chapter introduces a ‘practice turn’ to the scientific debates on institutional interactions and their management, with the aim of elucidating how the institutional interactions on REDD+ are being managed in practice, and why they are being managed the way they are. The analysis shows that interaction management practices are especially influenced by the partner countries and NGOs involved in REDD+ institutions, and that different ‘logics of practice’ have developed over time, including strategic interaction management, which we have labelled ‘meta interaction management’. Interaction management on more contentious issues, such as stakeholder engagement, is shown to be rather difficult, and thus less far-reaching.
Despite current disagreements over the future climate policy architecture, carbon markets represent a central feature in most proposals to move society towards a low carbon economy. The worldwide creation of carbon markets is emblematic of the marketization trend in climate governance that accelerated after Russia's ratification of the Kyoto Protocol in November 2004 - the crucial moment making the treaty legally binding. With the entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol, the inception of the EU emissions trading scheme in 2005 and the more recent emergence of regional carbon markets in North America, Australia and New Zealand, global transactions in emission reductions have become more than mere social imagining. As estimated by the World Bank (Capoor and Ambrosi 2008: 1), as much as 2983 million tonnes of carbon dioxide were traded by public and private actors in 2007 to a total value of USD 64 035 million. In this chapter, we illustrate the agency beyond the state in contemporary carbon markets. However, in contrast to global governance studies (Rosenau 1999; Biersteker and Hall 2002), we do not conceptualize carbon market governance along the public-private continuum. Instead of asking which entities (for example public or private authorities) govern the carbon economy, we draw attention to the procedures by which carbon markets are made thinkable and operational as administrative domains in the first place. Hence, we analyse the complex body of knowledge, techniques and practices that have turned tradable carbon offsets into a governable reality. In particular, this chapter focuses on the multilateral verification, validation and certification practices of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) that have enabled the making of the 'certified emission reduction', and the private rules and standard-setting underpinning 'voluntary' or 'verified emission reductions'.
This paper reviews research which has investigated community skills for carbon (and other natural resource) monitoring. The assessment focuses on the reliability of the data, the cost of community monitoring (CM) versus expert surveys, and the broader benefits and challenges of involving communities in the process. We identify the tasks considered necessary for carbon monitoring inventories. The review finds that CM is useful and cost-effective for REDD+ carbon monitoring. In particular, forest inventories communities can provide forest enhancement data unobtainable by other means at the scale required. CM is particularly helpful in assessing rates of forest degradation, and would density a national forest inventory in community management areas. We conclude that communities can assess above ground biomass, monitor social and environmental variables, and store and transmit the data.
Fundamental trade-offs exist between different land uses for carbon, livelihoods, economic development, biodiversity, agriculture and energy (especially biofuels). This article analyses the scientific debates on REDD+ trade-offs, co-benefits and safeguards, and shows how the development and expanded scope of REDD+ mechanisms have shaped these debates over time. We find substantial evidence that the non-carbon values of biodiversity conservation, equity and sustainable livelihoods are critical to both the legitimacy and effectiveness of REDD+, and argue that they therefore are better viewed as prerequisites than as values to be safeguarded. Scientists can contribute to the development of a more integrative REDD+ through interdisciplinary research and through a 'learning architecture' that supports the REDD+ policy development process with research dedicated to finding durable solutions.
Highlights
► Forest inventories data can be used to quantify forest ecosystem carbon budgets. ► Carbon in forest soils requires additional sampling because of soil heterogeneity. ► Carbon in forest products should be accounted for when analysis carbon dynamics in forest ecosystems, taking into account product life span and substitution effects. ► Remote sensing techniques combined with ground based sampling provide a means for upscaling over larger regions. ► Effects of climate change may lead to increased disturbance and decrease of carbon storage in forest ecosystems.
Highlights
► The availability of sufficient, predictable and long-term finance is essential for the eventual success of REDD+. ► Fast-start finance for REDD+ is slow in being disbursed, while long-term strategies for REDD+ remain missing. ► With stable demand and strong safeguards, carbon markets could facilitate investment into REDD+. ► Given the insecurities in REDD+ financing developing countries will have to develop financing strategies that rely on a mix of public and private funding sources.
Increasing emphasis on social and environmental safeguards for REDD+ in the UNFCCC and work under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) have prompted growing interest in biodiversity monitoring for REDD+, but most discussions of REDD+ monitoring have so far centred on greenhouse gas emissions and removals at national level. Challenges in monitoring biodiversity for REDD+ include choosing which aspects of biodiversity to monitor, the difficulty of attributing particular changes to REDD+ and the likely scarcity of resources for biodiversity monitoring. Three responses can help address these challenges. First, already-agreed policy targets can help to identify what should be monitored. Second, making links to existing biodiversity monitoring and to monitoring to estimate GHG emissions and removals (both remote sensing and ground based inventories) can provide some solutions. Finally, developing clear theories of change can assist in determining which changes in biodiversity can be attributed to REDD+.
The design and implementation of REDD+ projects requires understanding the local ecological, economic and social context. This paper analyzes how REDD+ influences the context of ecosystem management, from both a conceptual and an ecosystem-scale perspective. We analyze how REDD+ changes the economic interests in ecosystem management for different stakeholders, and present a case study demonstrating the economic benefits of sustainable forest use versus oil palm plantation in Indonesia. We also analyze the economic costs of carbon emissions from land use conversion, and show that in Kalimantan, Indonesia, net revenues from REDD+ need to be US$ 3/ton CO2 to allow sustainable forest use to compete with oil palm on peat, and US$ 7/ton CO2 for mineral soil. Subsequently we present four insights from our ecosystem analysis relevant for REDD+.
This paper discusses the operational issues associated with the expanding scope of reduced emissions from deforestation (RED) as forest degradation, conservation and enhancement of forest carbon stocks (REDD+) and other sectors and activities are added. The review looks to the ideas of countries, observers, and experts, as well as to the experience of those moving toward implementation through country REDD+ plans and voluntary offset markets. While not all countries may be ready to implement programs or policies across all REDD+ activities, expanding RED to REDD+ can bring significant benefits for strategic planning, coordination across sectors and activities, and increasing mitigation opportunities.
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) is a global mechanism being debated by the international community, aimed at mitigating dangerous climate change. It is a complex multilevel and multistakeholder process that tends to fulfill multiple goals beyond emission reduction. The lessons we are beginning to learn through a Global Comparative Study show that a cross-sectoral transformation is needed to change the course of sectoral drivers of deforestation and forest degradation. Sufficient capacity of government at all levels is crucial to guide the policy processes, benefit sharing, and technical support. Uncertainties around tenure issues and property rights may generate new problems that undermine the interests of society at large. The first generation of REDD+ activities also exhibited varying levels of capacity for monitoring REDD+ in non-Annex I countries. Large capacity gaps are found for developing reference levels and establishing measurement, reporting and verification systems.
The net emissions of carbon from deforestation and degradation in the tropics, including the draining and burning of peat swamps in SE Asia, averaged similar to 1.4 (+/- 0.5) PgC yr(-1) over the period 1990-2010. Most (60-90%) of the emissions were from deforestation; degradation (or reductions of biomass density within forests) is more difficult to document but results from harvest of wood and the re-clearing of fallow forests within the shifting cultivation cycle. The main driver of deforestation is agriculture, whether permanent or shifting, and whether for food crops or pasture. The relative contribution of deforestation and degradation to anthropogenic carbon emissions has been declining, but reducing emissions from land, along with reduced emissions from fossil fuels, could help stabilize the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere.
This article explores how climate governance is accomplished in practical terms. To that end we develop an ‘analytics of carbon accounting’ that draws attention to the calculative practices that turn stocks and flows of carbon into objects of governance. Carbon accounting as a rationality of government is primarily concerned with the ways in which carbon can be measured, quantified, demarcated and statistically aggregated; but the concept also alludes to questions about (political) accountability in relation to emissions of greenhouse gases. The paper outlines three different regimes of carbon accounting – ‘the national carbon sink’, ‘the carbon credit’ and ‘the personal carbon budget’ – to illustrate how stocks and flows of carbon are constructed as administrative domains amenable to certain forms of political and economic rationality, such as government regulation, market exchanges and self-governance by responsible individual subjects.
This paper discusses the discourses on climate change adaptation and mitigation that are currently at the forefront in the Congo Basin. On mitigation, the forests have enormous opportunities to contribute to the reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) mechanism. But the forest itself and its multiple dependent societies and sectors need to adapt to potential climate risks. Hence, actors are debating the design of climate change policy in the forest sector. Theoretically, we combine the agency-focus of frame analysis and discourse theory to analyze how different agents hold frames on climate change adaptation and mitigation policies in the region. This paper draws upon interviews with 103 different actors from government, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, research institutions and private sector in three countries: Cameroon, Central African Republic (CAR) and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Three discourses were found on policy response to climate change in the forest sector: mitigation policy only, separated policy on adaptation and mitigation, and an integrated policy on adaptation and mitigation. The various frames articulated around each discourse by the coalitions include elements of: costs and benefits, scale of operation, effectiveness, financial resources and implementation mechanisms. Overall, the mitigation discourse, through its mix of actors, resources and interests seems to be stronger than the adaptation discourse. The paper finally outlines a number of implications of the discourses for policy design.
This article analyzes evolving institutions and practices of anticipatory risk governance in India, through the lens of two recent and highly controversial developments in governing genetically modified crops in Indian agriculture. These developments include, first, conflicts over approving (or not) the very first genetically modified food crop in India and a related experiment in participatory decision-making; and second, proposals to revamp the existing biosafety regulatory system (with its checks and balances across diverse sources of authority) with one that elevates scientists and scientific expertise to the pinnacle of decision-making power. The article analyzes the distinct means by which legitimacy is sought to be conferred upon the means and ends of anticipatory risk governance, as reflected in these two examples. I contrast claims to legitimacy deriving from innovative experiments in participatory democracy with legitimacy claims based upon “objective” science, showing that despite acknowledged need for the former, the latter is still being prioritized. The article concludes by identifying the contours of an evolving science-society contract in India, as revealed by these cases.
Attempts to alter the range of expertise represented on some US advisory committees have raised questions of accountability in the selection and deployment of expert advice. Governments seem sometimes to adopt the relativist position that all expertise is biased, and that political considerations may therefore determine the official selection of experts; at other times, they endorse the elitist view of expertise as superior knowledge. This paper argues instead that experts exercise a form of delegated authority and should thus be held to norms of transparency and deliberative adequacy that are central to democratic governance. This theoretical perspective should inform the practices of expert deliberation. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.
This article argues that climate change produces discordances in established ways of understanding the human place in nature, and so offers unique challenges and opportunities for the interpretive social sciences. Scientific assessments such as those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change helped establish climate change as a global phenomenon, but in the process they detached knowledge from meaning. Climate facts arise from impersonal observation whereas meanings emerge from embedded experience. Climate science thus cuts against the grain of common sense and undermines existing social institutions and ethical commitments at four levels: communal, political, spatial and temporal. The article explores the tensions that arise when the impersonal, apolitical and universal imaginary of climate change projected by science comes into conflict with the subjective, situated and normative imaginations of human actors engaging with nature. It points to current environmental debates in which a reintegration of scientific representations of the climate with social responses to those representations is taking place. It suggests how the interpretive social sciences can foster a more complex understanding of humanity’s climate predicament. An important aim of this analysis is to offer a framework in which to think about the human and the social in a climate that seems to render obsolete important prior categories of solidarity and experience.