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Virtual nature, violent accumulation: The ‘spectacular failure’ of carbon offsetting at a Ugandan National Park
Abstract
In East Africa, financially strained governments increasingly experiment with voluntary, market-based carbon offset schemes for enhancing the public management of protected areas. Often, conservationists and governments portray these as ‘triple-win’ solutions for climate change mitigation, biodiversity preservation, and local socioeconomic development. Examining such rhetoric, this paper analyses the rise and decline of an integrated carbon offset and conservation initiative at Mount Elgon National Park in eastern Uganda, involving a partnership between the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) and a Dutch NGO, Face the Future. In doing so, the paper reveals the ways in which the uncompensated dispossession of local residents was a necessary precondition for the project’s implementation. Although external auditors expected the project to sequester 3.73 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) between 1994 and 2034, conflicts forced the scheme to cease reforestation in 2003. Noting this rapid decline, we problematize the ways in which Face the Future and other carbon market intermediaries represented their activities via project documents and websites, obscuring the violence that was necessary for the project’s implementation. In so doing, we argue that the maintenance of a ‘triple win’ spectacle is itself integral to the management of carbon sequestration projects, as it provides consumers with a form of ‘ethical’ use value, and greatly enhances the capacity of carbon market brokers to accumulate exchange value by attracting ‘green’ investors. Consequently, what we term a ‘spectacular failure’ manifests in at least two ways: first, in the unravelling of the heavily mediatized spectacle of harmonious, profitable conservation, and, second, in the deleterious nature of the consequences that accrue to local communities and ecosystems alike.
... Third, it revisits discursive power theories and their environmentality framing (Agrawal, 2005;Fletcher, 2010). They use Michael Foucault's understanding of discourses, governmentality, and biopolitics (Cavanagh, 2014). Then, I provide a detailed case from Tanzania that has uniquely attracted the attention of different scholars with diverse power approaches in illustrating differentiated social and ecological consequences. ...
... Luke's "one-dimension view" intervenes in the behaviour reinforcing decisionmaking in explicit contestations, while the "two-dimension view" also involves thriving behaviour to contain political agenda. This analytical lens demonstrates how different forms of capital (economic, political, cultural, or social), discursive power resource (p.353), and symbolic power affect actors with differentiation in the social hierarchy of decision-making in environmental governance (Benjaminsen, 2014). However, there is a limitation in the Weberian approach because it inclines much on eclectic idealism that reproduces western 'rationality' as the core analytical benchmark while paying less attention on the materiality and dialectical nature and uneven knowledge production in shaping human subjectivities (Greco, 2022). ...
... Concerning climate change discourse, Cavanagh (2014) documents the growth of the biopower framework that focuses on Foucault's theoretical shifts towards viewing biopower as the tool to "make life or die." Biopolitical reveals that this shift intends to improve lives by investing in different dimensions, including health and other developmental aspects. ...
This paper examines power as a conceptual lens for understanding Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation plus (REDD+) scholarship in the Global South. It focuses on the underlying argument that conservation problematization, practices, and execution are complex and variegated in shaping asymmetric power relations. This demonstrates that REDD + power framing is not unilinear but has theoretical commonalities and differences that need systematic documentation, yet scanty and discrete. Thus, it reexamines recent debates and theoretical trends on REDD+ through power approaches. It has shown that analysing the complexity of power relations reveals uneven power structures shaping REDD+ with associated inequitable relations. Also, the paper highlights specific ideas, strategies and initiatives by those powerful actors have produced in extending coloniality for controlling forest-landdependent communities and their actions to resist it. It showcases how current critical theories and policy debates are crucial for realizing a just and equitable conservation model in the Global South.
... The ethical issues related to ecological compensation have been discussed in some literature. Carbon offset seemed to provide consumers with a form of "ethical" use value (Cavanagh and Benjaminsen, 2014). On the one hand, it is possible to use carbon offset "green value capability" to attract the entities to actively participate in carbon offset projects (Cavanagh and Benjaminsen, 2014). ...
... Carbon offset seemed to provide consumers with a form of "ethical" use value (Cavanagh and Benjaminsen, 2014). On the one hand, it is possible to use carbon offset "green value capability" to attract the entities to actively participate in carbon offset projects (Cavanagh and Benjaminsen, 2014). On the other hand, this choice might support the impression that climate issues are acceptable and can be resolved through carbon offset alone (Yirdaw et al., 2023). ...
... Contemporary conservation contestations between post-independence African states and local communities are rooted in historical colonial disenfranchisements that created protected areas (Kamau and Sluyter 2018;Kiwango and Mabele 2022). Scholars have critically examined the nature, type, and methods of peasant acts of resistance against the hegemony of conservation and colonial continuities (Neumann 1998;Holmes 2007;Cavanagh and Benjaminsen 2014). Yet, such analyses rarely consider how people interact with the past and mobilise a politics of memory to legitimate their claims in conservation-related conflicts (Moore 1993). ...
... To achieve 'wilderness', people were removed from their ancestral lands and separated from their subsistencebased means of production-conservation through primitive accumulation (Cavanagh and Himmelfarb 2015;Asiyanbi and Lund 2020). Conservation through primitive accumulation, or green grabbing, generally entails the violent/militaristic removal of people and unfair compensation for their land (Cavanagh and Benjaminsen 2014;Büscher and Fletcher 2015). People dispossessed or displaced by colonial and post-colonial conservation have enacted much resistance. ...
Political ecologists have linked conservation conflicts in post-independence Africa to the continuities and legacies
of colonial policies that displaced and dispossessed people to create ‘wild places’. This paper introduces a
political ecology of vernacular memory to discuss the Basongora people’s vernacular memories of their historical
dispossession to create the Queen Elizabeth National Park (QENP) in Uganda. It explores how these events spurred
multidirectional memories of resilience, heroism, victimhood, and resistance that the Basongora pastoralists deploy
to reclaim social-political autonomy and agency. Using archival data and historical ethnography, I examine how the
Basongora mobilise vernacular memory in contemporary contestations with the state and conservation authorities
in QENP. Vernacular memory provides a moral authority that helps subordinated groups contest the hegemonic
dominance of conservation authorities. A political ecology approach to vernacular memory reveals how people
use memory politics to legitimise their claims in contested environments—an essential fact of contemporary
conservation conflicts. This paper is the first to conceptualise how vernacular memories can legitimise the
decolonisation of conservation narratives and community resistance against conservation.
... unten) -betrieben, indem klimabezogene Gesetze und Regulierungen bewusst ausgehöhlt oder abgeschwächt werden (Der GLOBAL 2000Banken-Check, 2021. 3 Unter anderem werden im Green-Finance-Diskurs aus Marktperspektive oft Substitutionsmöglichkeiten und Carbon Offsetting 4 (Klimakompensation) als zulässige Instrumente angenommen, welche jedoch in der Literatur vor allem aus Gesellschaft-Naturund Bereitstellungsperspektive kontrovers diskutiert werden (Cavanagh & Benjaminsen, 2014;Hyams & Fawcett, 2013). ...
... Insbesondere bedeutet eine Monetarisierung der Natur eine gesteigerte Regulierung und potenzielle Ausbeutung der Natur durch gesellschaftliche Machverhältnisse, Strukturen und Hierarchien, die ihrerseits das Geld-und Finanzsystem regulieren. Solange diese inhärenten Instabilitäten, Ungleichheiten und daraus resultierenden Spannungsverhältnisse im Finanzkapitalismus nicht gesellschaftlich gesteuert werden, liegt es nahe, dass der Versuch unternommen wird, diesen Spannungsverhältnissen durch vergrößerte Ausbeutung (Nutzbarmachung, Kommodifizierung und Monetarisierung) der Natur und des Menschen als Teil davon -also menschlicher Arbeitskraft, vergrößerten Ressourcenverbrauch, Abfallproduktion und natürlich mehr Emissionen -zu begegnen (Bracking, 2020;Cavanagh & Benjaminsen, 2014;Eisenstein, 2011Eisenstein, , 2021J. R. Lent, 2021;Rosa, 2005Rosa, , 2016. ...
Zusammenfassung
Dieses Kapitel bewertet anhand eines breiten Überblicks an Literatur aus Marktperspektive, Innovationsperspektive, Bereitstellungsperspektive und Gesellschaftsperspektive, inwiefern Anreizstrukturen des Geld- und Finanzsystems die Transformation zu einer klimafreundlichen und nachhaltigen Lebensweise in Österreich begünstigen oder behindern. Zudem trifft es eine literaturbasierte Einschätzung darüber, in welche größeren wirtschaftlichen und gesellschaftlichen Strukturen das Geld- und Finanzsystem in Österreich eingebettet ist. Bereits eingeleitete und potenzielle zukünftige Reformen des Finanzsystems und Änderungen des bestehenden Geldsystems werden dahingehend überprüft, inwiefern sie Kapitalströme mobilisieren können, die für die Finanzierung der Strukturen für eine klimafreundliche Lebensweise notwendig sein werden.
... Especially carbon-offset projects in the Global South have been controversially debated since the 1990s (Lohmann, 2011;Bumpus and Liverman, 2008). They have often been violently contested by local communities (Cavanagh and Benjaminsen, 2014;Dunlap, 2018) and criticized as "carbon colonialism" (Agarwal and Narain, 1991;Bachram, 2004). While the effectiveness of these instruments in reducing emissions is questioned (Cames et al., 2016), their implementation can have far-reaching effects for both the socioeconomic structures of the places where they "touch ground" and the relations between human actors and their non-human environments. ...
... Studies have shown that REDD+ projects can lead to the eviction of forest communities (Nel and Hill, 2014) and increased militarization (Asiyanbi, 2016) and that they can support shifts in power structures, such as a recentralization of forest governance (Agrawal et al., 2010). Many studies have asked who bears the costs of the projects and who gains or loses access to forest resources (Beymer-Farris and Bassett, 2012), and they have often focussed on conflicts and the resistance of local communities to REDD+ projects, like the "spectacular failure" of a reforestation programme aimed at offsetting travel emissions in Uganda because of growing political tensions after the eviction of local users (Cavanagh and Benjaminsen, 2014). ...
This paper discusses the opportunities and challenges of integrating science and technology studies (STS), especially the variant based on actor–network theory (ANT), into fields of human geography with a critical research tradition. Drawing on the experiences of political ecology and empirical research on carbon markets, it uses the example of reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) to show how the turn towards such STS impacts has changed the “framing” of REDD+: from analysing REDD+ as an example of the “neoliberalization of nature” and a focus on the impacts on human forest users to detailed accounts of infrastructures and practices of making markets. Discussing the consequences of these observations and different proposals brought forward to combine ANT with political ecology, the paper argues for a conscious and reflective use of ANT-inspired STS approaches to benefit from the additional insights this approach allows while keeping the critical potential of geography alive.
... unten) -betrieben, indem klimabezogene Gesetze und Regulierungen bewusst ausgehöhlt oder abgeschwächt werden (Der GLOBAL 2000Banken-Check, 2021. 4 Unter anderem werden im Green-Finance-Diskurs aus Marktperspektive oft Substitutionsmöglichkeiten und Carbon Offsetting 5 (Klimakompensation) als zulässige Instrumente angenommen, welche jedoch in der Literatur vor allem aus Gesellschafts-und Bereitstellungsperspektive kontrovers diskutiert werden (Cavanagh & Benjaminsen, 2014;Hyams & Fawcett, 2013). ...
... Insbesondere bedeutet eine Monetarisierung der Natur eine gesteigerte Regulierung und potenzielle Ausbeutung der Natur durch gesellschaftliche Machverhältnisse, Strukturen und Hierarchien, die ihrerseits das Geld-und Finanzsystem regulieren. Solange diese inhärenten Instabilitäten, Ungleichheiten und daraus resultierenden Spannungsverhältnisse im Finanzkapitalismus nicht gesellschaftlich gesteuert werden, liegt es nahe, dass der Versuch unternommen wird, diesen Spannungsverhältnissen durch vergrößerte Ausbeutung (Nutzbarmachung, Kommodifizierung und Monetarisierung) der Natur und des Menschen als Teil davon -also menschlicher Arbeitskraft, vergrößerten Ressourcenverbrauch, Abfallproduktion und natürlich mehr Emissionen -zu begegnen (Bracking, 2020;Cavanagh & Benjaminsen, 2014;Eisenstein, 2011Eisenstein, , 2021J. R. Lent, 2021;Rosa, 2005Rosa, , 2016C. ...
Dieses Kapitel bewertet, inwiefern Anreizstrukturen des Geld- und Finanzsystems die Transfor-mation zu einer klimafreundlichen und nachhaltigen Lebensweise in Österreich begünstigen oder behindern. Zudem trifft es eine literaturbasierte Einschätzung darüber, in welche größeren wirt-schaftlichen und gesellschaftlichen Strukturen das Geld- und Finanzsystem in Österreich einge-bettet ist. Bereits eingeleitete und potenzielle zukünftige Reformen des Finanzsystems und Än-derungen des bestehenden Geldsystems werden dahingehend überprüft, inwiefern sie Kapital-ströme mobilisieren können, die für die Finanzierung der Strukturen für eine klimafreundliche Lebensweise notwendig sein werden.
... Particularly when related interventions incentivize, or depend upon, the displacement of rural land users, such initiatives raise well-documented concerns about multifaceted social and environmental injustices. Amongst others, these risks include the 'moral hazard' that offsetting or cross-sectoral mitigation schemes may result in emissions reduction deterrence (Anderson and Peters 2016;Carton 2019), as well as human rights concerns regarding displacement, dispossession, or restricted access to lands and resources (see, inter alia, Beymer-Farris and Bassett 2012; Cavanagh and Benjaminsen 2014;Fisher et al. 2018;Cavanagh et al. 2021). Indeed, both political ecologists and critical agrarian studies scholars have repeatedly highlighted important trade-offs and associated environmental (in)justice risks associated with the implementation of climate mitigation policies across different regions, scales, and sectors (Akram-Lodhi et al. 2021;Newell 2022). ...
... As critical scholars know all too well, in 'reality' the drivers of land use or cover change are anything but straightforward. Indeed, attempts to reconfigure the ownership of lands and resources via transnational investment often fail, as the case study literature illustrates in particular (Cavanagh and Benjaminsen 2014;Borras et al. 2022b; see also Li 2014). Considering the gravity of these and related assumptions embedded within the 'black box' of specific IAM methodologies, critical scholars might thus be tempted to dismiss these scenario archetypes altogether as being simply 'unrealistic' or irreparably blind to certain political-economic realities. ...
Advancing future-oriented perspectives in political ecology and critical agrarian studies, this paper examines projected land use and land cover change (LULCC) dynamics in four ‘archetypal’ scenarios foregrounded by the IPCC for limiting global warming to 1.5°C by 2100. Focusing on the Global South, we explore how these archetypes project a radical reversal of historical LULCC and rural population trends, potentially implying a considerable rescaling of contemporary land rush dynamics. Taken together, land-based climate mitigation futures highlight risks related to the (re)production of relative surplus populations through processes of rural enclosure and accumulation by dispossession in the Global South.
... According to Jones et al. (2018), about one-third of legally protected areas are undergoing various levels of degradation due to intense human pressure related to high population growth, increasing consumption, agriculture and infrastructural development. Consequently, several conservation studies have refuted the claim that only legally protected areas are capable of conserving forests (Cavanagh & Benjaminsen, 2014;Palacín & Alonso, 2018). One of the reasons for this is the failure of the protected area-based approach to nature conservation to engage with community needs and cultures and align with local priorities (Duan & Wen, 2017). ...
The need to recognise plural values and integrate these into policy design has long been of interest in nature conservation. However, we also need to understand whether and how different values are prioritised among diverse stakeholders. This is particularly important when indigenous and traditional cultures play a role in how land is managed and protected.
Working in the sacred forests of Nigeria, we applied the principles of biocultural conservation and sociocultural valuation to understand the values that underpin people's relationship with nature and with other users of nature. We operationalised this by employing participatory workshop methods to identify multiple values of sacred forests, and conjoint analysis to elicit local people's value priorities and preferences for conserving sacred forests.
We identified multiple values attributed to sacred forests, but the strongest preferences were for improved provision of medicinal values. However, preference heterogeneity analysis showed that sacred forests are valued differently among clusters of people with distinct sociodemographic profiles.
Our findings also showed that the current management strategy for the conservation of sacred forests is inadequate to galvanise shared and collective responsibility from diverse stakeholders. Using a value-based approach, more robust management strategies that will yield high utility to the public were determined and recommended for implementation.
Policy implications. Overall, our study demonstrates that sacred forests are valued in multiple ways above and beyond their role in a cultural belief system. New strategies are therefore needed to effectively manage and conserve them. We recommend a plural approach to the conservation of sacred forests that will incorporate multiple values. This can be achieved by integrating biocultural conservation and sociocultural valuation.
... In other words, Toroto is trying to convince buyers that they are purchasing something 'real' and enhancing the transparency of their environmental commodity. After all, the existence of offsets depends on technologies and accounting methodologies that provide buyers with confidence that physical tons of carbon dioxide are actually being captured somewhere (Cavanagh & Benjaminsen 2014;Sullivan, 2017;Dunlap, 2023;Broekhoff et al. 2019). Now, blockchain technologies will also offer proof that real jaguars exist in the carbon-absorbing forest. ...
This article explores the seemingly unlikely intersection of jaguar conservation and green extractivism in the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico. The 'green' or environmental aspect of jaguar conservation, we argue, is largely manufactured, employing the qualities of ecosystems to market and advance forms of 'place-based' extraction. Analyzing jaguar conservation programs through green extractivism not only shows problems related to market-based conservation schemes, but how these conservation projects advance spatial legibility of resources and political control over territories for public and private actors, aiding capitalist and extractive trajectories. Drawing on fieldwork in Laguna Om, an ejido––rural community––in the south of the Peninsula, the article reveals how an entanglement of market-based instruments (MBIs), voluntary carbon markets, NGOs, corporate financing, environmental policy, and technological developments continue to consume ecosystems into circuits of capitalist control and accumulation. Finally, the article demonstrates, jaguar conservation serves to greenwash traditional extractive and infrastructural development projects, such as Tren Maya. Digitalized and market-based forms of conservation, moreover, reduce ecosystems to units of accounting that are fit for trade in international markets, advancing the capture and accumulation of value through conservation, enacting a process of green extractivism.
... Given the ability of forests to absorb carbon, many national parks have also been targets of international carbon markets. One example is Mount Elgon National Park in eastern Uganda, which was targeted in a partnership between the Uganda Wildlife Authority and a Dutch NGO [46]. While the carbon offset scheme was expected to sequester up to 3.73 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) between 1994 and 2034, this did not happen as conflicts forced the scheme to be terminated in 2003. ...
Globally, national parks contribute to tourism and conservation. Several iconic national parks in Africa attract millions of tourists. These include Table Mountain, Kruger, the Serengeti, Chobe, Hwange, and Gorongosa National Park. Tourism contributes substantially to global warming and climate change through carbon emissions from tourism activities. Regardless of this understanding, minimal effort has been put into understanding and documenting the national park's carbon risk. The current debate on sustainability transitions calls for a relook of various economic sector strategies to reduce their carbon footprint. This aligns with SDG 13 on climate change action and the sector's calls for carbon neutrality. To that effect, this study examines how South African National Parks (SANParks) seeks to transition to net zero in its park operations to ensure responsiveness to the climate change agenda. This study included 150 interviews with national park and hospitality professionals in 19 national parks to address the research objective. In addition, the study draws upon extensive field observation, document analysis, and 871 tourist questionnaire surveys. Data analysis from the survey was conducted using QuestionPro Analytics, while interview data were analysed through systematic content and thematic analysis. The study found that South Africa's national parks have primarily carbon-intensive tourism facilities from an energy perspective. South African national parks, however, have taken steps to respond to the four essential pillars of NetZero emissions by 2050. These pillars are outlined in the Glasgow Declaration on climate change and the revised Nationally Determined Contributions. Within SANParks estates, these pillars include planning, measuring, reporting, and advocating for accelerated climate change action. NetZero initiatives should be funded in a variety of ways, including by tourists, the private sector, and other stakeholders.
... Bringing unpriced and neglected units of nature into the market gaze will generate action to reverse ecological crises by sending appropriate cost signals to market actors. If individuals and firms can 'see' the actual monetary costs of, for example, CO 2 emissions, deforestation and industrial pollution, economic actors will be able to make better decisions, eliminating governance and market failures to which crises are attributed, and achieving a more sustainable growth trajectory (Cavanagh and Benjaminsen, 2014;Hardt and Negri, 2018;Robertson, 2006;Sullivan, 2013b). ...
Accumulation by Restoration (AbR) represents a shift from a conservationist 'mode of production' emphasizing sustainability and preservation to a 'growth economy of repair' in which nature becomes valued not just for its use but also for its potential for repair or restoration. The 'repair mode' mobilizes the assumption, imagery and mythology of degradation juxtaposed with the promise of economic and ecological redemption. Through rationalization, restoration, recreation and/or re-cultivation, it aims to generate new, better-disciplined, more legible, 'substitutable' natures to multiple accumulative ends. Bridging political ecology, critical agrarian studies and science and technology studies, contributions to this themed issue explore transformations associated with AbR at across scales and involving variegated alliances, discourses, technologies and institutional dynamics giving rise to ecologies of repair. We demonstrate how the dynamics and contradictions of the repair mode are mediated and enacted through the performative, spectacular and metrological rendering of 'mitigation', 'equivalence', 'neutrality' and 'repair' as instruments and object, simultaneous means and ends. These dynamics have given rise to new materialities and technologies of governance and new intensities and spatialities of resource control and accumulation , as what were consequences of growth have become strategic goals and the foundation of a new growth economy.
... These trends are alarming because vulnerable communities are often divested of their liberties and livelihoods under the guise of unsubstantiated 'win-win' promises and financial profits (Bachram, 2004;Blundo-Canto et al., 2018;Osborne, 2015). In cases like Uganda's carbon-offsetting projects with the Dutch NGO Face the Future, Indigenous communities have been violently removed to allow the local elites to profit from reforestation carbon credits (Cavanagh & Benjaminsen, 2014). Other ESV studies in Costa Rica have also found that benefits from market-based conservation programs are syphoned by local elites (Miranda, Porras, & Moreno, 2003;Zbinden & Lee, 2005). ...
The growing datafication of the world continues to be a pressing concern for critical geographers. Indigenous scholars are also challenging western research paradigms for under-representing the social effects that datafication imposes on Indigenous communities. This paper adds to these conversations by closely examining the problematic of carbon datafication in Indigenous places using the author's positionality as an Indigenous-Naga geographer. The author simulated carbon maps of Nagaland (northeastern India) to demonstrate the datafication of Indigenous places into carbon commodities, and then used the maps and his emic perspectives to interview Naga tribesmen and tribeswomen about carbon datafication. Selected interviews are highlighted in this paper to contextualize the social effects of carbon datafication on Naga epistemologies of forests, material reorganization of space, and carbon enclosures for global marketization. The paper also examines the limitations of alternative non-digital mapping, as well as the opportunities for locally repurposing GIS applications to involve and benefit Indigenous communities. Elements of local agency and the speculative effects of carbon markets are also discussed in the inter-tribal sociopolitical context of Nagaland.
... This risk could only be prevented if the contract compliance is binding over a longer period, even if ownership changes. Moreover, various authors stress associated risks when PES target private land, for example, that the private enclosure of land could bring benefits for the middle class and rich people or for large private companies at the expense of poor people , McAfee and Shapiro 2010, McElwee 2012, Bremer et al. 2014b, which, in the worst case, can lead to the displacement of local people by people with enough money and power to acquire land titles (Cavanagh andBenjaminsen 2014, Scales 2015). Again, it is important to investigate more in-depth when and to which extent these negative consequences appear. ...
Payments for ecosystem services (PES) gained an increasing importance in science and politics within the last decades. Although the enthusiasm about PES is particularly high in Environmental Economics, opponents criticize the market-based character of PES and the associated commodification as well as privatization trends. By means of a systematic literature review we aim at shedding light on the complex and controversial debate about how to define commodification and related privatization processes and how they are linked to PES outcomes. We do so by setting a particular focus on the potentials and challenges of community-based and collective PES (C-PES), also in contrast to PES targeting land under private land tenure (P-PES). Our results reveal that C-PES show promising results when targeting local communities with a high level of social capital. However, there is a lack of studies that systematically assess the relations between different degrees of commodification and the ecological and social outcome of PES programs. For this reason, we provide a new conceptual framework of commodification by highlighting two interrelated spheres, where PES-related commodification processes take place: The first sphere relates to the commodification of ES-providing land, which greatly depends on the land tenure regime in place. The second sphere addresses the commodification of ecosystem services (ES). Our review indicates that C-PES show rather low degrees of commodification in the first sphere because the ES-providing land is often less embedded into private land markets. This is due to often missing alienation rights, more complex decision-making processes, and a potentially lower profit-orientation of the landowners. Empirical long-term studies are needed to investigate changes in both spheres of commodification over time, their potential interactions, and how they affect the outcome of C-PES and P-PES programs.
... Conversely, overt resistance to protected area establishment or expansion may nonetheless precipitate manifold complications for the achievement of conservation objectives. Such complications can arise, for instance, via the deliberate slaughter of protected wildlife (Mariki, Svarstad, and Benjaminsen 2015), the reversal of restoration-associated forms of land cover change as a form of political protest (Grove 1997;Cavanagh and Benjaminsen 2014), or the recruitment of local people into poaching or illegal resource extraction networks (Hübschle 2017). ...
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... Pushing back against a narrow conceptualization of agriculture as a sector, source, and sink in relation to the generation of greenhouse gases, Reisman and Fairbairn (2021, 688) observe that agriculture is 'not a set of impacts to be avoided but rather a site of political and economic processes to be accounted for and reimagined.' By enabling analytical purchase on political economic processes underpinning climate change and responses to it, critical agrarian studies has, to date, engaged with climate mitigation from a range of perspectives, including green grabbing (Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones 2012), Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation or REDD+ (McElwee 2016), climate smart agriculture (Newell and Taylor 2018;Clapp, Newell, and Brent 2018) and carbon offsetting (Cavanagh and Benjaminsen 2014). These studies pose a direct challenge to the way that climate science and policy decouple the problem of climate change from the political, economic, and bio-historical circumstances in which it emerged (see Chakrabarty 2009;Mitchell 2011). ...
This article seeks to stimulate analysis of how accounting knowledge, techniques, and practices work to incorporate agriculture and land use into climate mitigation. Accounting plays a significant role in the ways that capitalism inserts itself into, reworks, or reorganises agrarian webs of life. To study these processes, we train our critical gaze on accounting itself – its epistemic foundations, instruments, and narratives, and their implications for agrarian livelihoods and relations. Through the notion of “agrarian counter-accounts,” we conclude by considering the potential of alternative methodologies and understandings of account-giving, taking, and holding in struggles for agrarian climate justice.
... Leading climate scenarios based on BECCS absorb new land of an area up to three times the size of India (Cavanagh, 2021;Hickel, 2021), with unavoidable impacts on local resource access and land use. Numerous examples of violent resistance to the marginalization or outright eviction of populations from afforestation and green conservation programs may be an antecedent of things to come if these projects progress to the scale projected for deep decarbonization pathways without commensurate considerations of social and environmental safeguards and acknowledgement of the inherent rights of Indigenous Peoples (Alusiola et al., 2021;Bergius et al., 2020;Beymer-Farris and Bassett, 2012;Cavanagh and Benjaminsen, 2014;Duffy, 2016;Schmid, 2022;Sovacool, 2018). Policies designed to curb fossil fuel use, such as cuts in consumer subsidies for cooking and fuel taxes, have also been met with collective and occasionally violent resistance in locales as diverse as France (Stephens, 2019), Nigeria (Houeland, 2020), and Ecuador (Díaz Pabón and Palacio Ludeña, 2021). ...
Anthropogenic climate change is commonly characterized as a threat to human security. However, the extent to which and under what conditions climate impacts and responses may produce severe risks to peace have seen less systematically assessment to date. This essay provides a conceptual discussion of what risks to peace entail and how such risks might be considered severe, acknowledging that perceptions, values, and social scale must be grappled with in the identification of severity. Informed by available empirical research, the essay then explores the conditions under which climate-related risks could become severe during this century. Three illustrative scenarios based on different assumptions about climate-driven risks and risks related to social responses to climate change serve to illustrate how alternative warming and adaptation trajectories will have distinct implications for the prospect of future peace. The essay ends by reflecting on some implications for future research needs.
... Some organizations are effective, while others simply maintain the aura of success (MacAskill, 2015). Political ecologists have discovered evidence of how conservation non-profits can negatively impact local populations in the developing world (Cavanagh & Benjaminsen, 2014;Peluso, 1993). Effective altruism holds that donating blindly to charities is unproductive (MacAskill, 2015). ...
A geographic Anthropocene ethic merges human-environment thinking, descriptions of places and regions, and spatial thinking with professional ethics. Teachers will benefit from reflecting upon what sustainability and the Anthropocene might mean for their career trajectories and overall impact on students. A pragmatic sense of place can assist educators in contextualizing global change, while at the same time illuminating complex environmental ideas for greater student learning. Derek Alderman's acronym REAL (Responsive, Engaged, Advocating, and Life-Improving) is presented as a vehicle to help teachers think about and share ethical ideas in their community. Ethics in geography differentiate between what is and what ought to be, allowing prospects for imagining future scenarios and self-correction within and among places. The format for a professional development workshop is provided to address the implications of the Anthropocene for advancing professional ethics.
... There are many challenges with ensuring the atmospheric integrity of carbon creditsthat is, whether they actually deliver a climate benefit to the atmosphere-which are documented in offsetting guides (Broekhoff et al. 2019), case studies (Cavanagh and Benjaminsen 2014), and systematic reviews (Galik and Jackson 2009;Haya et al. 2020;Cames et al. 2016). Key concerns affecting integrity include quantification (How much CO 2 is actually avoided or removed?), constraining the risk of non-additionality (Might mitigation have taken place in the absence of demand for the credits generated by the carbon project?), indirect carbon leakage (Has deforestation in one location simply been displaced to another?), and the risk of physical reversal, sometimes referred to as durability or permanence (Will a forest remain intact in perpetuity in the face of pests, fire, logging, agricultural development, and global warming itself? ...
Interest in carbon offsetting is resurging among companies and institutions, but the vast majority of existing offerings fail to enable a credible transition to a durable net zero emission state. A clear definition of what makes an offsetting product “net zero compliant” is needed. We introduce the “proset”, a new form of composite carbon credit in which the fraction of carbon allocated to geological-timescale storage options increases progressively, reaching 100% by the target net zero date, generating predictable demand for effectively permanent CO2 storage while making the most of the near-term opportunities provided by nature-based climate solutions, all at an affordable cost to the purchaser.
... One prominent conceptualization of this is Nature 2.0, which demonstrates how web and digital media technologies present spaces where humans may "(re)imagine and understand (the rest of) nature" (Büscher et al., 2017:111). Using this concept, scholars demonstrate how the digital may conceal the commodification of nature or the naturalization of capitalist accumulation in conservation contexts (Büscher and Igoe, 2013;Cavanagh and Benjaminsen, 2014). This often occurs through spectacle, celebrity, and popular media-based content encouraged in many digital spaces (Hawkins and Silver, under review;McCubbin, 2020). ...
This commentary proposes a research agenda for the concept of feminist digital natures (FDN). To demonstrate how we see FDN connecting existing research efforts, we review both the well-established and much-needed work in three overlapping areas of scholarship where we see the potential for productive discussions, new questions, and empirical analysis: feminist digital geographies (FDG), digital natures (DN), and feminist political ecology (FPE). We offer specific and grounded examples of topics and questions that scholars might pursue through an FDN approach. We encourage sustained, collaborative, and critical attention to the uneven consequences and political terrain of understanding natures as increasingly digitally monitored, managed, manipulated, and represented. We can and should think with digital relations, and we might benefit from new creative conversations across our areas of inquiry and action.
... For example, evidence suggests that even where farmers have not themselves lost land but fear the risk of expropriation, they are less likely to invest in on-farm management (Aha and Ayitey 2017). There are also significant cases of local dispossession driven by smallholders themselves (Osborne 2011;Chen 2013;Cavanagh and Benjaminsen 2014;Bleyer et al. 2015;Olwig et al. 2015;Scheidel and Work 2018). Overall, the literature suggests that concentrated ownership of tree plantations has been more associated with dispossession (Kröger 2014;Malkamäki et al. 2018) (an outcome likely to be relevant for BECCS), while smallholder models have been more broadly positive in terms of food security and biodiversity (Jindal, Swallow, and Kerr 2008;Eijck et al. 2014) (more likely for afforestation NETs). ...
Negative emissions technologies (NETs) for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) are increasingly important responses to achieve global climate change targets, but to date, there has been insufficient attention to land-based NETs (including afforestation, biochar, and other measures) as an agrarian challenge for the global South. This paper explores the implications of different NETs for land, labor, capital, and politics in rural spaces and contributes to articulating agrarian climate justice by demonstrating the potentially unjust implications of many NETs. The paper concludes with how these measures might be designed to be less negative for rural peoples in future implementation.
... The German foresters co-opted African Jumbe and Akidawho were intermediate brokers/informers -as salaried forest wardens and police for easy self-policing, surveillance, and disciplining fellow Africans (Dove, 2010;Harris, 2011). The German postulates normalized exclusions while profiteering from colonial forestry economic ventures alongside dispossession through land alienation and forced labor (Cavanagh and Benjaminsen, 2014). The co-option of Jumbe and Akida signifies the practices of acting at a distance/soft power (Rose and Miller, 2010) to govern indigenous/ethnic tribes. ...
There is an emerging scholarly concern for reconstructing and engaging with diverse approaches that theorize the question of power. Scholars focusing on the Global South critically explore how power dynamics shaping forestry governances hold western colonial assumptions that erase complexities of nature-society relations. Yet, many studies have not systematically (re)conceptualized issues of knowledge-power nexus as an instrument of control and power through Foucauldian and coloniality lens in Tanzania. The review critically discusses politics and power by plotting it within environmentality and coloniality literature. It argues that postcolonial forestry governance is devoid of its colonial residue that seems to be visible in the current forestry governance regimes. It proposes an alternative critical constructivist approach that considers the role of knowledge production through which forest discourses as assemblages of power mechanisms are crucial in producing uneven social and ecological implications.
... 56 In Uganda, projects promoting reforestation for carbon offsetting resulted in the uncompensated loss of land, property, and livelihoods of communities and smallholder farmers. 57 ...
The protection, restoration, management, and sustainable use of natural and modified ecosystems to address climate change mitigation have received much global attention in recent years. Those types of actions are, however, often not designed to also address other global challenges, and so they miss an opportunity to provide important non-mitigation benefits and compromise their mitigation potential. Here, we highlight the importance of planning Nature-based Solutions for mitigation while considering the suite of global challenges that societies face, and we propose a set of considerations to ensure that those types of solutions also provide climate adaptation, biodiversity, and/or human well-being benefits. Planning Nature-based Solutions for climate mitigation that can also address other global challenges is very timely because every nature-based effort should grasp the opportunity to address a variety of pressing issues in order to allow for the continued delivery of mitigation and other benefits in this critical decade.
... Although there is scope for significant private finance in these types of schemes, private companies will be seeking assurances on good governance and guarantees that the ES they are paying for are being delivered. At the same time, there is considerable risk that offsets will not be ecologically equivalent and provide few or no social benefits (Cavanagh and Benjaminsen, 2014;Maron et al., 2015). ...
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
... Since its inception, REDD+ has been widely studied. Issues identified in the literature are diverse, ranging from land dispossession (Cavanagh and Benjaminsen 2014;Furtado 2017), local political instability and social-economic disruptions (Asiyanbi et al. 2019;Corbera and Schroeder 2017) to food insecurity (Bayrak and Marafa 2016) that all too often impact Indigenous peoples and other traditional forest-dependent communities. Of particular concern is how REDD+ projects have been associated with forced evictions (Lyons and Westoby 2014;Milne et al. 2019) land conflicts (Dunlap and Fairhead 2014;Hunsberger 2015), contentions between and within communities (Bayrak and Marafa 2016;Osborne 2015), centralization of forest governance (Bayrak and Marafa 2016;Hunsberger 2015), and failure in providing socioeconomic benefits to locals (Osborne 2015;Schroeder and McDermott 2014). ...
This article contributes to political ecologies of forest-based climate change mitigation strategies by assessing Brazil's first subnational jurisdictional REDD+ program. Proponents of jurisdictional REDD+ argue that the approach brings more social and environmental benefits than small-scale REDD+ projects and addresses negative socio-economic impacts of deforestation pressures on forest-dependent communities. Our analysis tell a different story. We assess Acre's sub-national jurisdictional (SNJ) program to show that reworking the scale of REDD+ is not only key to its persistence and stabilization but also how implementation politics often further environmental injustice. We draw qualitative field research in the state of Acre into conversation with a critical analysis of SISA and the ISA Carbono program implementation. Our findings illustrate two interwoven points vital to political ecologies of REDD+. First, the socio-environmental ambitions of Acre's SNJ REDD+ program were strongly influenced by the political ecologies of popular movements and a history of state-led environmental governance initiatives. Second, Acre's SNJ REDD+ has not met several of its social-environmental goals like bolstering forest-dependent peoples' rights or equitably distributing program benefits across sectors despite most extensively operating on the lands of forest-dependent communities. Consequently, we argue that Acre's SNJ REDD+ track record has reinforced rather than alleviated injustice against Indigenous peoples and traditional forest extractivist communities.
... With the growing sustainability discourse that emerged in the 1990 s, mining companies have found it necessary to showcase their sustainability considerations through media and public discussions to maintain the legitimacy of their operations and a continued access to land and flow of profits (Seagle, 2012). Coinciding with the emerging neoliberal conservation efforts, mining companies have entered into negotiations and deals with conservation actors, producing win-win-win spectacles and ostensibly solving ecological, social and economic issues simultaneously through CSR, while supporting market-based environmental initiatives and biodiversity offsetting (Cavanagh & Benjaminsen, 2014;Dunlap & Jakobsen, 2020). ...
Biodiversity conservation and mining activities are increasingly overlapping throughout the world. While conservation has conventionally been seen as a strategy to oppose the negative environmental impacts of extractivism, the experiences of local communities especially in the Global South reveal similar dynamics in the ways in which mining and conservation actors seek to gain control over land and resources, often resulting in land grabbing. Furthermore, literature on neoliberal conservation has portrayed conservation as an increasingly prevalent strategy of capital accumulation. This study looks at the commodity frontiers of neoliberal conservation and mining – at the spectrum ranging from artisanal and small-scale mining to large-scale corporate mining – and focuses on the competing territorialisations at these heterogeneous ‘double’ frontiers. Analysed by means of an integrative literature review and illustrated with cases from across the Global South, this study asks just what institutional settings enable the mining and conservation frontiers to co-exist and what kinds of interactions can be expected at their intersections. The study finds three different types of double frontier interactions, competing, synergistic and co-ignorant, resulting alternatively from deepened cooperation between international mining and conservation actors, a fragmented state structure or legal pluralism at the local level. These findings provide a first attempt to create a theoretical framework for analysing the intersections of the expanding mining and conservation frontiers. They highlight the need for further empirical research to focus on double frontier contexts and particularly on the roles played by local actors between the frontiers in order to address, understand and manage the increasing competition between mining and conservation across the rural landscapes of the Global South.
... One increasingly prominent route through which international-level formalization is taking place is charcoal's incorporation into REDD+ initiatives and flows of finance, as global authority is exerted over African landscapes and people [177], often in collaboration with states. Caution is warranted here as well, since research has shown the social and environmental harms that REDD+ and carbon forestry initiatives can cause, as local people may pay a steep price for global emissions mitigation through loss of land, forest access, livelihoods, or autonomy [122,[177][178][179][180][181]. This takes on added relevance given the call for REDD+ initiatives in Africa to focus further on degradation instead of deforestation [61], which could lead to even more invasive systems of surveillance and discipline required to measure and curb degradation [182,183]. ...
Is charcoal a sustainable energy source in Africa? This is a crucial question, given charcoal's key importance to urban energy. In today's dominant policy narrative – the charcoal-crisis narrative – charcoal is deemed incompatible with sustainable and modern energy, blamed for looming ecological catastrophe, and demanding replacement. However, an emerging sustainability-through-formalization narrative posits that charcoal can be made sustainable – specifically, through formalization of production, trade, markets, and consumption technologies. This represents an important opportunity to go beyond the crisis narrative and to engage productively with charcoal. However, this ascendent narrative also risks misrepresenting the reality of charcoal on the continent and leading to inappropriate policies. The narrative's designation of the African charcoal sector as unsustainable at present obscures charcoal production's diverse and uncertain impacts across the continent; moreover, the association of informality with unsustainability obscures a similarly complex and diverse social reality as well as the ways that social processes and relations of power and inequality determine charcoal's sustainability. We argue that charcoal needs to be considered within its historical, social, and environmental contexts to better understand its present and the emergent pathways to sustainable energy futures. We draw upon research that is raising questions about both the charcoal-crisis and the sustainability-through-formalization narratives to argue for a new narrative of charcoal in context. This approaches charcoal as a politically, ecologically, and historically embedded resource, entailing significant socio-ecological complexity across diverse historical and geographical conjunctures, and calling for new agendas of interdisciplinary research with an orientation towards sustainability and justice.
... The fact that the behaviour of transnational companies is not necessarily aggressive, but often follows legal procedure and adapts to political conditions, can in some instances provide conservationists with an effective means to prevent its occurrence inside protected areas. Also interesting is the fact that large-scale mining has managed to establish itself when it is has offered conservationist packages, such as in the form of integrated mining and biodiversity offsetting projects (Cavanagh and Benjaminsen 2014;Brock 2020;Enns, Bersaglio, and Sneyd 2019), in an act of adaptation and reconfiguration of its practices. ...
This article contributes to the literature on commodity frontiers by providing evidence
from locales where two different frontiers overlap. We focus on intersecting commodity frontiers
produced through biodiversity conservation and mineral extraction that increasingly compete for
control over land and resources. We frame commodity frontiers as organised through the territorialisation of rural landscapes via different types of protected areas (strict, flexible) and various
scales of mining activity (artisanal, semi-industrial, industrial). With reference to case studies from
eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and northern Madagascar, we disaggregate the processes of
territorialisation both at and between conservation and mining frontiers. It is argued that flexible
approaches to protected area management and artisanal and semi-industrial modes of mining can
be viewed as territorial adaptations to enable frontiers to co-exist where strict conservation and
large-scale mining would otherwise exclude one-another. We conclude that contexts where state
power is limited, and the boundaries between legal and illegal become blurred, are likely to be
especially conducive to the emergence of double frontiers.
... This has resulted in an even greater turnover of conservation fads, with each failure explained by simplistic factors, such as lack of implementation capacity or interference of non-market factors in market mechanisms, as opposed to deeper questioning of the solutions themselves and their win-win discourses (Li, 2016;Lund et al., 2017;Redford et al., 2013). Numerous studies have demonstrated the ease and frequency with which organizations manage to 'sell success' despite substantial conservation failures and social harms on the ground (Büscher, 2014;Cavanagh & Benjaminsen, 2014;Mosse, 2004;Moyo, Ijumba, & Lund, 2016;Singh, Liebrand, & Joshi, 2014;Svarstad & Benjaminsen, 2017;To & Dressler, 2019;Warner & van Buuren, 2011). ...
A growing body of critical research interrogates the tendency within international conservation circles to present interventions as successful, even when evidence points to substantial negative impacts. The flip side of this 'selling' success is a growing emphasis on the importance of embracing and even celebrating failure. Yet this important trend in international conservation policymaking has yet to be examined in depth. We address this research gap by first tracing the origins of the embracing failure narrative, linking it to the historical handling of failure in conservation and in fields such as business management and international development. We then explore the implications of this framing of failure for international conservation policy and practice by examining relevant policy literature and illustrative case studies in Tanzania and Peru. Based on this analysis, we demonstrate how a 'right to fail' can justify both continuing and discontinuing conservation interventions in highly problematic ways. We show how the framing of failure as a positive outcome for global learning can reduce accountability for significant and long-lasting negative consequences of failed interventions. Furthermore, the emphasis on approaches to learning that employ narrow technical frames can depoliticize issues and limit possibilities to fundamentally question and transform dominant conservation models with histories of persistent failure. Consequently, we argue that by affording interventions the 'right to fail', conservation actors with a stake in dominant models have taken control of failure discourse in ways that reinforce instead of undermine their ability to 'sell' success amidst negative (or limited) local outcomes. While it is of course important to acknowledge failure in order not to repeat it, we caution against embracing failure in ways that may further exacerbate conservation injustices and hinder transformative societal change. We advocate instead for an explicitly political approach to addressing failure in conservation.
... Informed by these conceptualizations, studies by Political Ecologists have criticized the structural violence behind an economic functionality of tourism to conservation areas as exemplifying the profit-maximizing logic of the capitalist system feeding into exploitative practices in form of natural and cultural commodification with detrimental effects on local populations (Brockington et al. 2010;Büscher and Fletcher 2017). Specifically engaging with the conservation contexts in the DRC, Rwanda and Uganda, other Political Ecologists applied these definitions of violence to call out the direct acts of violence such as beating, rape, imprisonment as well as eviction and dispossession executed by conservation actors against local communities (Cavanagh and Benjaminsen 2014;Clay 2019;Marijnen 2018;Verweijen 2020). ...
There is an urgent need to globally advance human wellbeing and ecosystem restoration is required to achieve international targets. However, the relationship between ecosystem services and wellbeing is frequently assumed to be simple and positive, but this is not the case. This paper argues that a poor understanding of how and when ecosystem restoration can improve wellbeing causes a disconnect between the practice and the benefits it promises to provide. Problematic issues with carbon credits are discussed and a case is made against promoting ecosystem restoration initiatives based on carbon storage. Opportunities for ecosystem restoration to optimize gains in wellbeing are proposed, including the identification of sites where restoration has the greatest impact and the transition from carbon credit systems into ecosystem service credit systems. Future research directions are recommended, as are the production of international standards for ecosystem restoration in natural hazard recovery and risk mitigation.
This chapter analyses four strategies that follow the direct intent of serving power through weakening the opposition and actively supporting the projects realisation. First, it introduces the concept of enclosure that captures the tactic of limiting the imagination for what is possible. Second, it discusses the building of anticipation through overstating benefits and understating risks. Third, with the identification of alphas it analyses the singling out of social leaders and outspoken critiques to convert them in their position or to silence them. And forth, with corporate control it critically reflects on the exclusive EIA ownership and responsibility that corporations generally enjoy. Finally, the Chapter returns to the question of what these four strategies of serving power mean for the EIA as a key tool for environmental auditing and accountability.
Cet article vise à comprendre la persistance et la radicalisation de la critique écologique dans l’espace public malgré les tentatives de récupération des questions environnementales par le capitalisme via l’introduction dans les discours managériaux des « concepts verts » (développement durable, RSE, etc.). Nous développons les raisons pour lesquelles la critique écologique semble résister à sa récupération et mobilisons le concept marxien de « fétichisme de la marchandise » pour saisir la critique écologique comme remise en cause des fondements de notre organisation économique. Cette analyse permet de comprendre l’échec des concepts verts et d’éclairer l’évolution des relations entre le capitalisme et sa critique. Classification JEL : A13, B51, P10, Q50, Z1.
Scientists, economists, and politicians increasingly recognize that Indigenous peoples possess invaluable knowledge and practices that have the potential to drive innovation to solve critical global challenges. Indeed, thousands of important drugs—including lifesaving cancer treatments—have their origins in centuries old Indigenous knowledge and practices. Similarly, Indigenous practices have fueled the fast‐growing regenerative agriculture industry that is able to yield windfall profits while sequestering carbon and enhancing biodiversity. Referred to in policy circles as biocultural innovation —a form of innovation that occurs at the intersection of the biosphere and ethnosphere—hundreds of diverse examples from a wide array of industries have been documented outside of the innovation literature. However, innovation scholars have yet to recognize or embrace biocultural innovation. We argue that this major oversight hinders practice and leaves untapped potential for solving issues such as slow or unsustainable economic growth, ecological decline, and inequality. To address this gap, we provide a clear definition of biocultural innovation, differentiate it from other innovation domains, and establish its conceptual foundations. Informed by economic theorizing that views the ethnosphere and biosphere as assets, we propose that these assets share four traits: functionality , potentiality , vulnerability , and inseparability (“ FPVI shared traits ”). Due to their immense biocultural diversity, we assert that these assets carry an “option value” representing enormous innovation potential that can be converted , conserved , or constructed to solve global challenges (the “ 3Cs ”). We conclude by identifying promising avenues for future research on biocultural innovation and a call for action on how to unlock economic and social value while supporting biocultural assets and Indigenous rights.
From Big Tech to Oil Majors, companies are increasingly resorting to the voluntary purchase of carbon credits to offset their greenhouse gas emissions and make claims about their carbon neutrality. Yet, the credibility of offsetting as a solution to climate change remains contested. From the outset, that is, since the mid-2000s, the voluntary carbon markets have been criticised, as we discuss in this commentary, which stems from our long-standing interest in the social study of carbon markets. Drawing on interviews conducted with offset suppliers and buyers, we examine some of the ways in which the issue of quality (or the lack of) has come to be a central concern in the voluntary offsetting markets.
Despite the manifold loopholes of carbon markets, the demand for climate offsets has never been higher than in recent years. Besides the questionable efficacy of such climate compensating measures, growing critique has also been voiced concerning their role in perpetuating global power dynamics and neocolonial patterns. The history of nature conservancy and its implementation in the Global South under the veil of sustainable development, prepared the ground for the deployment of carbon markets, which have also evolved, responding to criticism, presumably seeking ethical improvements. While many studies have addressed evident forms of physical land grabs as a consequence of environmental and climate action, this chapter highlights the subtler expressions of “carbon colonialism” found in recent research, showcasing them through different case studies. As climate finance diversifies to meet the needs of a growing awareness among both the mediatized Western society and the hosting communities, new challenges beyond land-use conflicts appear, that need to be addressed, too. As opposed to land grabs, they take place in unseen dimensions of instrumentalization, where “contradictory knowledge translations” are used to ensure legitimacy. Exposing such hidden dynamics is essential to respond appropriately and seek solutions to decolonize climate finance.
In this article, we bring together understandings of the spectacle of nature and spectacle 2.0 to show how people are invited to participate in the spectacular production of nature. Recent work has expanded on the Debordian notion of spectacle, interrogating the ways people do not just consume images, but help to produce and enact spectacle: spectacle 2.0. Building on this, we argue that in conservation, consumers increasingly interact with the spectacle through digital and real-life means, thereby reinforcing and reproducing the nature that is being transformed. We term this process the spectacle of nature 2.0. We present the case of Valle Chacabuco in southern Chile, which has been transformed into Patagonia National Park. This process has been welcomed by the international conservation community, but has incited tension and conflict with local residents who have their own very different sense of Valle Chacabuco. Through the production of spectacle, park discourses highlight the heroic role of Northern conservationists, obscuring the underlying capitalist logics of the project and the social tensions it has created. We argue that it was possible to unmake/remake Valle Chacabuco from once a place of livelihoods, ranching, and production to a place of unspoiled nature through the recruitment of digital and material interaction. In the process, environmental politics and activism are channeled back into the dominant underlying capitalist ideology. Patagonia National Park is now a place that the park promoters claim belongs to the world, its nature and culture to be consumed and reproduced by environmentalists and tourists.
Although many governments, financial institutions, and corporations are embracing nature-based solutions as part of their sustainability and net-zero carbon strategies, some nations, Indigenous peoples, local community groups, and grassroots organizations have rejected this term. This pushback is fueled by (i) critical uncertainties about when, where, how, and for whom nature-based solutions are effective and (ii) controversies surrounding their misuse in greenwashing, violations of human rights, and threats to biodiversity. To clarify how the scientific community can help address these issues, I provide an overview of recent research on the benefits and limits of nature-based solutions, including how they compare with technological approaches, and highlight critical areas for future research.
Contributions in political ecology draw heavily on case study research. This has triggered questions regarding the wider theoretical relevance to such studies. This article argues that one of the main shortcomings of political ecology case studies is not their wider applicability, but that scholars often miss reflection on their chosen cases and case methodology. The purpose of the article is to examine the continued relevance of case study research, especially within more recent advances of political ecology, and to develop ten recommendations for how a political ecology case study could overcome identified weaknesses.
This chapter charts the postcolonial transitions and recent political history while outlining the different development histories that have taken place in the region: from African socialism (Tanzania) to capitalism (Kenya). The charismatic leaders that took East Africa out of the colonial era (Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyere, and Idi Amin) with such hope, expectation, and the ensuing missed opportunity will be presented along with their defining policies. The chapter explores the past 50 years by focusing on events such as the mass eviction of Asian communities during the 1970s in Uganda and more contemporary issues such as the post-election violence of Kenya in 2009, the ensuing new constitution in Kenya, and the increasing rise of power at the local level for local issues. In addition, the chapter will consider the socio-economic changes within East Africa such as the emergence of large cities, and the implications of transitioning from a large rural population to a growing urban population. Alongside these demographic transitions the changing international relationships; growth of devolved conservation initiatives and current development trajectories will be presented.
In the north-eastern hills of Meghalaya, the Khasi Hills project, self-advertised as ‘one of the first Redd+ initiatives in Asia to be developed and managed by indigenous governments on communal lands’, is often presented as one of the rare success stories of India’s recent experimentation with market instruments as part of its forest governance. This article uses this example to extend existing discussions on the neoliberalization of forest governance, and its intersections with the cultural politics of resource control. Unlike mainstream forestry projects criticized for being too concentrated in the hands of the Forest Department, this project explicitly taps into the particularities of a region located on the margin of the Indian nation-state, where, crucially, ownership and control of the land lie formally with the people rather than with the state. The article explores the politics of this curious marriage of (formal) indigenous sovereignty with market environmentalism, showing, first, the centrality of these assumed cultural and ecological specificities within the regime of justification of such market project; second, how the aspirations of project proponents for community engagement unravelled in practice; and, third, the limits of their endeavours due to larger structural social inequalities and the requirements of such market projects. I conclude with the idea that far from being anecdotal, this case brings interesting perspectives in the context of the struggle for the recognition of forest rights in the rest of India.
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.
Poor people in rural areas depend directly on functioning agroecosystems. Environmental rehabilitation, culminating in the reestablishment of tree cover, is seen as improving ecological functioning and in so doing, reducing the vulnerability of the poor who rely on these agroecosystems. This is what we refer to as the win-win vision for afforestation, reforestation, and revegetation (ARR) programs – increases in ecological resiliency will lead to increases in social resiliency. This highly appealing vision cannot be realized unless one takes seriously the two basic premises. First, to reduce the vulnerability of a rural population, even in rural areas of the Sahel, one must develop strategies to improve the conditions of the most vulnerable. Second, technical success in terms of ecological rehabilitation will not automatically reduce the vulnerability of the most vulnerable and may in fact directly or indirectly exacerbate their vulnerability. Thus, for ARR programs to approach their win-win goals, one must be attentive not only to their technical success, but also to their social consequences for the rural poor. The Great Green Wall program is the most ambitious ARR program in sub-Saharan Africa. It seeks to rehabilitate degraded lands and reduce the vulnerability of the rural poor in dryland West Africa. We reviewed project documents from twelve country programs of the World Bank’s Sahel and West Africa Program (SAWAP) initiative that falls under the visionary umbrella of the Great Green Wall. Our approach was to treat these project documents as “research sites,” allowing us to not only consider how these projects conceptualize the relationships between vulnerability environmental rehabilitation but also to identify the activities and outcomes that projects attend to and measure their success by. In general, attention was narrowly focused on achieving the technical goals of ARR with outcomes primarily measured by numbers of trees planted, hectares restored, and people trained. We looked for evidence in these documents of efforts and strategies used to identify and target benefits to the most vulnerable. We found little evidence in project design and evaluation of attention to the differential vulnerabilities of particular livelihood and demographic groups nor to the potential for these projects to serve as mechanisms of enclosure to benefit powerful local interests. Rapid rural appraisal at nine ARR sites in Niger revealed little attention to the needs of the most vulnerable with some of the most vulnerable either excluded (women with absent husbands) or ignored (pastoralists). Moreover, ARR activities often led to the direct and indirect enclosure of reclaimed sites benefiting powerful individuals. Options to improve these programs are discussed.
Markets in carbon offsetting have, since their inception, been defended by their proponents as ‘experiments’ when it comes to the scale and the scope of their purpose of governing climate mitigation. Yet, different counter-narratives or ‘tales of defiance’ have been mounted as critiques of offsetting. This article focuses in particular on a tale of defiance, which continually has dismissed offsetting as a form of indulgence payment. While acknowledging that there are clear similarities between offsets and indulgence payments, the article argues that the indulgence payment metaphor glosses over the complexity of both types of transactions. The historical development of indulgence payments in the past demonstrates the difficulty of using them as simple models for understanding the problems inherent to offsetting, even if both types of transactions have been controversial. The debates over carbon offsetting continue to evolve, however, and recent developments seem to suggest a third tale, where the funding of emission-reducing projects are seen as donations of development aid, instead of being assumed to compensate for the donor’s emissions.
In this chapter, I would like to take stock of the situation in broad terms upon the historical link that unites geography and philosophy. This review will identify therefore some stages of a common historical framework, from antiquity to the present day. Of course, these two knowledges did not always dialogue, indeed. However, today geographers are now able to converse on equal terms with philosophers, and work on critically and theoretically wide-ranging theories, issues, and topics. Currently, in the Anthropocene era, marked by the awareness of the common destiny of humanity and Earth, geography and philosophy form a rich field of discussion. It is impossible to predict where this debate will lead to; however, there is hope that both geographers and philosophers will be able to take advantage from it in their investigations.
Offsetting is widely embraced as a market-based solution to global warming. Governments, universities, and businesses of all sorts have pledged to achieve “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions partly or entirely through offsetting projects, many of which rely on so-called nature-based solutions (NBSs). Offsets are meant to compensate for damage caused by emissions from one place by absorbing or preventing the release of an equivalent amount somewhere else. At best, offsetting results in no change in total emissions, but as theory predicts and experience shows, that best result is rarely attainable. Meanwhile, both land-based and industrial offsets legitimize continued emissions. There is active debate in Paris-pact talks and in climate politics more broadly over how much fossil-fuel industries and industrial countries will be allowed to delay real climate action by representing offsets as if they were emissions reductions. The American Association of Geographers should not contribute to this illusion by endorsing offsetting. Instead we should take steps to reduce our own emissions and speak out clearly when our work has bearing on policy decisions and public perceptions about the climate crisis.
Can “market forces” solve the world’s environmental problems? The stakes are undeniably high. With wildlife populations and biodiversity riches threatened across the globe, it is obvious that new and innovative methods of addressing the crisis are vital to the future of the planet. But is “the market” the answer? As public funding for conservation efforts grows ever scarcer and the private sector is brimming with ideas about how its role-along with its profits— can grow, market forces have found their way into environmental management to a degree unimaginable only a few years ago. Ecotourism, payment for environmental services (PES), and new conservation finance instruments such as species banking, carbon trading, and biodiversity derivatives are only some of the market mechanisms that have sprung into being. This is “Nature™ Inc.”: a fast-growing frontier of networks, activities, knowledge, and regulations that are rapidly changing the relations between people and nature on both global and local scales. Nature™ Inc. brings together cutting-edge research by respected scholars from around the world to analyze how “neoliberal conservation” is reshaping human-nature relations that have been fashioned over two centuries of capitalist development. Contributors synthesize and add to a growing body of academic literature that cuts across the disciplinary boundaries of geography, sociology, anthropology, political science, and development studies to critically interrogate the increasing emphasis on neoliberal market-based mechanisms in environmental conservation. They all grapple with one overriding question: can capitalist market mechanisms resolve the environmental problems they have helped create?
Over the past two decades, the incorporation of market logics into environment and conservation policy has led to a reconceptualization of “nature.” Resulting constructs like ecosystem services and biodiversity derivatives, as well as finance mechanisms like Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, species banking, and carbon trading, offer new avenues for accumulation and set the context for new enclosures. As these practices have become more apparent, geographers have been at the forefront of interdisciplinary research that has highlighted the effects of “green grabs”—in which “green credentials” are used to justify expropriation of land and resources—in specific locales. While case studies have begun to reveal the social and ecological marginalization associated with green grabs and the implementation of market mechanisms in particular sites, less attention has been paid to the systemic dimensions and “logics” mobilizing these projects. Yet, the emergence of these constructs reflects a larger transformation in international environmental governance—one in which the discourse of global ecology has accommodated an ontology of natural capital, culminating in the production of what is taking shape as “The Green Economy.” The Green Economy is not a natural or coincidental development, but is contingent upon, and coordinated by, actors drawn together around familiar and emergent institutions of environmental governance. Indeed, the terrain for green grabbing is increasingly cultivated through relationships among international environmental policy institutions, organizations, activists, academics, and transnational capitalist and managerial classes.
Global green grabs are facilitated by a logic in which environmental damage of economic growth is putatively mitigated by environmental repair elsewhere (Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones 2012:242). A remarkably similar logic informs green consumption, whereby "the very consumerist act buys your redemption from being a consumer" (Žižek 2009).1 Indeed, experiences of consumer redemption are visually linked to environmental repair at a distance. While direct causation between these experiences and grabbing green are practically impossible to discern, their parallels and interactions reflect larger shifts in the political ecology of capitalism. I situate these parallels and interactions in my introduction, before turning in detail to visually mediated relationships between consumers and conservation, based on promises of redemption and repair.I conclude with the relationships of green consumption to realignments of conservation and capitalism, and their implications for environmental awareness and collective political action.
This essay offers an engagement with Daniel Brockington’s (2009) recent book Celebrity and the environment. I highlight the book’s contribution to debate regarding processes of human displacement arising through biodiversity
conservation under conditions of neoliberal capitalism. I fi rst situate the book in relation to contemporary
perspectives on displacement, justice, and human rights, using examples to illustrate complex and dynamic patterns
of conservation inclusions and exclusions globally. This is followed by a summary of Brockington’s typology of
conservation celebrities, and of the ways in which celebrities assist with the amassing of conservation finance. I proceed to consider the roles of a celebrity-saturated mass media (and mediated) ‘spectacle of conservation’ in structuring social and consumptive engagements with the ‘non-human’ world globally. I draw attention to how diverse peoples in conservation landscapes might become part of the spectacle of conservation by reconfiguring themselves as cultural objects of touristic consumerism in a script not necessarily of their choosing. By way of acknowledging the significance of social networks and alliances in infl uencing conservation perspectives and
practice, I close with a disclaimer regarding my own long-term collaborations with the author of Celebrity and
the environment.
We analyze institutional challenges for a joint transboundary protected area regime. Employing the case of Mt Elgon in Uganda and Kenya, we use the concepts of fit and interplay to guide our examination in the challenges of the establishment of a transboundary protected area management (TBPAM) regime. Although transboundary regimes are thought to provide better fit for the resources, fitness is a contested phenomenon. The findings are critical to the perceived benefits of the TBPAM strategy in the form of one, fully integrated regional regime. We reveal how such a regime will be seriously constrained by the interplay of complex institutional factors. We moreover find evidence that TBPAM entails a reintroduction of the old top-down conservation paradigms, counteracting the community conservation attempts. Therefore, policy makers are encouraged to approach critically the daunting exercise of a continuum of TBPAM governance toward fully integrated management within a joint TBPAM regime. Instead, the focus should be on identifying the issues that are truly transboundary in nature and construct governance structures that directly address these. In this paper we suggest that policy makers carry out a clear institutional analysis: disaggregate the real transboundary objects, identify common interests, and look for appropriate content and levels of cooperation. It is no panacea to establish an integrated transboundary regime, even if two protected areas happen to be adjoining.
This U4 Brief extracts lessons from recent Ugandan experiences with conservation areas and corruption. A case involving the World Bank/Global Environment Facility (GEF), the Ugandan Ministry of Trade, Tourism, and Industry (MoTTI), and the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA), illuminates how corrupt processes can unfold across multiple governance levels in the Ugandan context. Based on qualitative fieldwork, it offers monitoring and evaluation considerations for donors seeking to support both schemes for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) and other conservation efforts in East Africa. Climate change, biodiversity decline, and deforestation present donors with an implementation paradox. In order to mitigate these processes, development agencies fund governments and civil society groups to manage significant portions of Sub-Saharan Africa's forest resources. Simultaneously, donors are aware both of the management challenges faced by many of these same actors and of experiences with corruption in the region's natural resource sectors. East African countries that score highest on biodiversity, wildlife, and forest indices – Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda – have also been ranked as corrupt and poorly governed states.
Carbon forestry represents a degree of continuity and discontinuity with traditional conservation practices, rescripting forestry management/governance and land access through projects on the ground in variegated, context-dependent ways. Utilising the comparative lens of two distinct projects operating on state-led protected areas in the east of Uganda, and focusing on their contested boundaries, this paper reflects on these dynamics and tries to make sense of the implications for the rural communities within the project vicinities. The projects and their framings reassert the claims to territory of the state in different ways which are contingent upon and emergent from the local institutional and historical context, or ‘legacies of the land’, which can be seen in context to be disputed and contested. Whilst it must be said that there can be selectively progressive elements within carbon forestry initiatives, it can be observed that techno-centric interventions, which depoliticise their local contexts and selectively transnationalise access to land and forestry resources, can further marginalise local communities in the process.
In this paper I emphasise the financialisation of environmental conservation as 1. the turning of financiers to conservation parameters as a new frontier for investment,
and 2. the rewriting of conservation practice and nonhuman worlds in terms of banking and financial categories. I introduce financialisation as a broadly controlling impetus
with relevance for environmental conservation. I then note ways in which a spectacular investment frontier in conservation is being opened. I highlight the draw of assertions of lucrative gains, combined with notions of geographical substitutability, in creating tradable indicators of environmental health and harm. I disaggregate financialisation strategies into four categories — nature finance, nature work, nature banking and nature
derivatives — and assess their implications. The concluding section embraces Marx and Foucault as complementary thinkers in understanding the transforming intensifications of late capitalism in environmental conservation, and diagnosing their associated effects and costs.
Transboundary protected area governance is on the rise in Africa. There is still a scarcity of well-documented success stories on how to design and deliver institutionally consistent transboundary outcomes concerning biodiversity and sustainable livelihoods. This article focuses on institutional challenges of such governance at the local stakeholder level on Mt. Elgon in Uganda and Kenya. A stakeholder analysis was conducted in border communities to analyze institutional frameworks of different protected area regimes coordinating local people's forest resources access, focusing on rights, returns, relationships, and responsibilities at the local stakeholder level. On the basis of the analyses we find that institutional complexities constrain an ideal of joint transboundary protected area management regime with a joint approach to local livelihood improvements. If institutional complexities lead to a lower priority on other concerns than biodiversity conservation in transboundary protected area programs in Africa, there may be an erosion of future support for such programs.
Demands for economic growth are often visibly at odds with public concerns about what this growth portends for the future of our planet. In this context the production and dissemination of images not only shape people’s perceptions of the world, but mediate social and human—environmental relationships. Debord saw such mediation as a central feature of late capitalism, in which images become commodities alienated from the relationships that produced them and consumed in ignorance of the same. As biodiversity conservation and capitalism become increasingly intertwined, human— environmental relationships are being spectacularized in a proliferating smorgasbord of images and media. This article presents a theoretical framework for thinking about these transformations as they pertain to biodiversity conservation, consumerism and the environmental contradictions of global neoliberalism. I then use fieldwork from Tanzania to demonstrate the value of this approach. I conclude by discussing the larger social and theoretical implications of this material.
This paper traces the institutionalization of Environmentalism as a precondition for the production of 'The Green Economy,' particularly the containment of the oppositional possibilities of an environmentalist politics within the institutional and organizational terrain of a transnational managerial and capitalist class. This is a context in which many environmental organizations – once the site of planning, mobilizing and implementing opposition and resistance to the environmentally destructive practices of corporate industrialism – have become part of a new project of accumulation grounded in enclosure, access and the production and exchange of new environmental commodities. This transformation reflects what Sloterdijk (1988) has termed cynical reason – an enlightened false consciousness; and my concern in the paper is to think through 'The Green Economy' and its coin-cident instrumental ethics as an iteration of cynical reason and an expression of institutionalized power. Specifically, I focus on the development of 'global environmental governance' as a statist project that concentrates sanctioning authority and resource allocation in centers of accumulation (e.g., the Convention on Biological Diversity and its funding mechanism the Global Environment Facility) and facilitates the containment of Environmentalism as an oppositional politics through demands that it assume conventional forms of organization, projectification and professionalisation and through facilitating a redefinition and redeployment that shifts environmentalism from a space of hope to an instrumentalist mechanism in rationalist projects of accumulation.
The unfolding of a juridico-cadastral system in present-day Cambodia is at odds with local understandings of landholding, which are entrenched in notions of community consensus and existing occupation. The discrepancy between such orally recognized antecedents and the written word of law have been at the heart of the recent wave of dispossessions that has swept across the country. Contra the standard critique that corruption has set the tone, this paper argues that evictions in Cambodia are often literally underwritten by the articles of law. Whereas 'possession' is a well-understood and accepted concept in Cambodia, a cultural basis rooted in what James C. Scott refers to as 'orality', coupled with a long history of subsistence agriculture, semi-nomadic lifestyles, barter economies and – until recently – widespread land availability have all ensured that notions of 'property' are vague among the country's majority rural poor. In drawing a firm distinction between possessions and property, where the former is premised upon actual use and the latter is embedded in exploitation, this paper examines how proprietorship is inextricably bound to the violence of law.
This article shows how wildlife and marine conservation in Tanzania lead to forms of ‘green’ or ‘blue grabbing’. Dispossession of local people's land and resources has been gradual and piecemeal in some cases, while it involved violence in other cases. It does not primarily take the usual form of privatization of land. The spaces involved are still formally state or village land. It is rather the benefits from the land and natural resources that contribute to capital accumulation by more powerful actors (rent-seeking state officials, transnational conservation organizations, tourism companies, and the State Treasury). In both cases, restrictions on local resource use are justified by degradation narratives, while financial benefits from tourism are drained from local communities within a system lacking in transparent information sharing. Contrary to other forms of primitive accumulation, this dispossession is not primarily for wage labour or linked to creation of a labour reserve. It is the wide-open spaces without its users that are valued by conservation organizations and the tourism industry. The introduction of ‘community-based conservation’ worked as a key mechanism for accumulation by dispossession allowing conservation a foothold in village lands. This foothold produced the conditions under which subsequent dispossessions could take place.
‘Green grabs,’ or the expropriation of land or resources for environmental purposes, constitute an important component of the current global land grab explosion. We argue that international environmental institutions are increasingly cultivating the terrain for green grabbing. As sites that circulate and sanction forms of knowledge, establish regulatory devices and programmatic targets, and align and articulate actors with these mechanisms, they structure emergent green market opportunities and practices. Drawing on the idea of primitive accumulation as a continual process, we examine the 10th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity as one such institution.
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.
In agrarian societies land is not only the main means for generating a livelihood, it is also a means to accumulate wealth and transfer it between generations. In Uganda, it is a basic source of food, employment, a key agricultural input and a major determinant of a farmer's access to other productive resources. The nature of land tenure, therefore, has profound implications for the development process of nations. As the historical experience of Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa indicates, land tenure can either impede or facilitate positive socio-economic change in a given economy. The Land Act (1998), which aims at reforming land tenure relations in Uganda, is therefore one of the most far-reaching legislation enacted by the National Resistance Movement (NRM) government. The new tenure system aims at supporting agricultural development through the functioning of a land market, establishing security of tenure and ensuring sustainable utilisation of land in order to bring about development. This paper discusses three major issues. First, the extent to which the new Land Act (1998) ensures security of tenure to the peasant majority in the country. Second, the issue of its capacity to resolve the long-run contestation between the mailo landowners and tenants (bibanja) holders. And third, the ambiguities and difficulties facing the Act in the process of its implementation must be confronted. The article is based on the textual analysis of the various land laws in Uganda historically. The literature brings out several constraints and ambiguities regarding the land reform process in Uganda. Africa Development Vol. 31(1) 2006: 1-26
ABSTRACT Nature™ Inc. describes the increasingly dominant way of thinking about environmental policy and biodiversity conservation in the early twenty‐first century. Nature is, and of course has long been, ‘big business’, especially through the dynamics of extracting from, polluting and conserving it. As each of these dynamics seems to have become more intense and urgent, the capitalist mainstream is seeking ways to off‐set extraction and pollution and find (better) methods of conservation, while increasing opportunities for the accumulation of capital and profits. This has taken Nature™ Inc. to new levels, in turn triggering renewed attention from critical scholarship. The contributions to this Debate section all come from a critical perspective and have something important to say about the construction, workings and future of Nature™ Inc. By discussing the incorporation of trademarked nature and connecting what insights the contributions bring to the debate, we find that there might be what we call an intensifying dialectic between change and limits influencing the relations between capitalism and nature. Our conclusion briefly points to some of the issues and questions that this dialectic might lead to in future research on neoliberal conservation and market‐based environmental policy.
Protected areas (PAs) are a country's key strategy to conserve and manage forest resources. In sub-Saharan Africa, the effectiveness and efficiency of PA institutions in delivering sustainable outcomes is debated, however, and deforestation has not been avoided within such formal regimes. This paper analyzes the processes that led to deforestation within the PAs on the transboundary Mt. Elgon, Uganda–Kenya, employing institutional theory. Landsat satellite imagery helped identify and quantify forest loss over time. The study showed how, since 1973, about a third of all forests within the PAs on Elgon have been cleared in successive processes. Within formal protected area regimes, complex political and institutional factors drive forest loss. We argue, therefore, that policies to counter deforestation using a PA model have to be considered and understood against the broader background of these factors, originating both inside and outside the PA regimes.
Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) is being proclaimed as “a new direction in forest conservation” (Anglesen, 2009: 125). This financial incentives-based climate change mitigation strategy proposed by the UNEP, World Bank, GEF and environmental NGOs seeks to integrate forests into carbon sequestration schemes. Its proponents view REDD+ as part of an adaptive strategy to counter the effects of global climate change. This paper combines the theoretical approaches of market environmentalism and environmental narratives to examine the politics of environmental knowledge that are redefining socio-nature relations in the Rufiji Delta, Tanzania to make mangrove forests amenable to markets. Through a case study of a “REDD-readiness” climate change mitigation and adaptation project, we demonstrate how a shift in resource control and management from local to global actors builds upon narratives of environmental change (forest loss) that have little factual basis in environmental histories. We argue that the proponents of REDD+ (Tanzanian state, aid donors, environmental NGOs) underestimate the agency of forest-reliant communities who have played a major role in the making of the delta landscape and who will certainly resist the injustices they are facing as a result of this shift from community-based resource management to fortress conservation.
Despite a decade of rhetoric on community conservation, current trends
in Tanzania reflect a disturbing process of reconsolidation of state control
over wildlife resources and increased rent-seeking behaviour, combined with
dispossession of communities. Whereas the 1998 Wildlife Policy promoted
community participation and local benefits, the subsequent policy of 2007
and theWildlife Conservation Act of 2009 returned control over wildlife and
over income from sport hunting and safari tourism to central government.
These trends, which sometimes include the use of state violence and often
take place in the name of ‘community-based’ conservation, are not, however,
occurring without resistance from communities. This article draws on indepth
studies of wildlife management practices at three locations in northern
Tanzania to illustrate these trends. The authors argue that this outcome is
more than just the result of the neoliberalization of conservation. It reflects
old patterns of state patrimony and rent seeking, combined with colonial
narratives of conservation, all enhanced through neoliberal reforms of the
past two decades. At the same time, much of the rhetoric of neoliberal
reforms is being pushed back by the state in order to capture rent and interact
with villagers in new and oppressive ways.
Land questions have invigorated agrarian studies and economic history, with particular emphases on its control, since Marx. Words such as ‘exclusion’, ‘alienation’, ‘expropriation’, ‘dispossession’, and ‘violence’ describe processes that animate land histories and those of resources, property rights, and territories created, extracted, produced, or protected on land. Primitive and on-going forms of accumulation, frontiers, enclosures, territories, grabs, and racializations have all been associated with mechanisms for land control. Agrarian environments have been transformed by processes of de-agrarianization, protected area establishment, urbanization, migration, land reform, resettlement, and re-peasantization. Even the classic agrarian question of how agriculture is influenced by capitalism has been reformulated multiple times at transformative conjunctures in the historical trajectories of these processes, reviving and producing new debates around the importance of land control.The authors in this collection focus primarily on new frontiers of land control and their active creation. These frontiers are sites where authorities, sovereignties, rights, and hegemonies of the recent past have been challenged by new enclosures, property regimes, and territorializations, producing new ‘urban-agrarian-natured’ environments, comprised of new labor and production processes; new actors, subjects, and networks connecting them; and new legal and violent means of challenging previous land controls. Some cases augment analytic tools that had seemed to have timeless applicability with new frameworks, concepts, and theoretical tools.What difference does land control make? These contributions to the debates demonstrate that the answers have been shaped by conflicts, contexts, histories, and agency, as land has been struggled over for livelihoods, revenue production, and power.
Protected forests are sometimes encroached by surrounding communities. But patterns of cover change can vary even within one given setting – understanding these complexities can offer insights into the effective maintenance of forest cover. Using satellite image analyses together with historical information, population census data and interviews with local informants, we analysed the drivers of forest cover change in three periods between 1973 and 2009 on Mt Elgon, Uganda. More than 25% of the forest cover of the Mt Elgon Forest Reserve/National Park was lost in 35 years. In periods when law enforcement was weaker, forest clearing was greatest in areas combining a dense population and people who had become relatively wealthy from coffee production. Once stronger law enforcement was re-established forest recovered in most places. Collaborative management agreements between communities and the park authorities were associated with better forest recovery, but deforestation continued in other areas with persistent conflicts about park boundaries. These conflicts were associated with profitability of annual crops and political interference. The interplay of factors originating at larger scales (government policy, market demand, political agendas and community engagement) resulted in a “back-and-forth” of clearing and regrowth. Our study reveals that the context (e.g. law enforcement, collaborative management, political interference) under which drivers such as population, wealth, market access and commodity prices operate, rather than the drivers per se, determines impacts on forest cover. Conservation and development interventions need to recognize and address local factors within the context and conditionalities generated by larger scale external influences.
In this essay contemporary Marxist writings on the commodification of nature in capitalist societies are reviewed systematically. Recent research on commodities in human geography, cultural studies and related fields have been largely post or non-Marxist in tenor and have paid relatively little attention to the ‘natural’ dimensions of commodities. By contrast, recent Marxist writings about capitalism-nature relations have tried to highlight both the specificity of capitalist commodification and its effects on ecologies and bodies. This fact notwithstanding, it is argued that the explanatory and normative dimensions of this Marxist work are, respectively, at risk of being misunderstood and remain largely implicit. On the explanatory side, confusion arises because the words ‘commodification’ and ‘nature’ are used by different Marxists to refer to different things that deserve to be disentangled. On the normative side, the Marxian criticisms of nature's commodification are rarely explicit and often assumed to be self-evident. The essay offers a typology of commodification processes relating to specific natures with specific effects to which a variety of criticisms can be applied. Though essentially exegetical rather than reconstructive, the essay tries to pave the way for a more precise sense of how the commodification of nature in capitalist societies works and why it might be deemed to be problematic.
Emissions trading is rife with controversy and the potential for exacerbating environmental and social injustice. The changes necessary to avert climate catastrophe are simple enough, namely, a switch away from fossil fuels and to renewable energy like solar and wind, along with a reduction in energy use generally. Instead, world leaders have taken ten years to agree to inadequate targets and the deeply flawed mechanism of emissions trading. Although emissions trading is represented as part of the solution, it is actually a part of the problem itself. Despite the scope and gravity of the dangers posed by greenhouse gases, and the major role of emissions trading in compounding them, this arrangement has not been seriously challenged in any international forum. The continuing acquiescence toward emissions trading is not an accident or bureaucratic oversight. The smooth sailing of this arrangement is attributable to the arm-twisting tactics of the richer nations and their constituencies of corporate polluters whenever global treaties are hammered out. The failure of the Kyoto Protocol to deal adequately and effectively with climate change is also representative of wider issues of democratic decision-making and symptomatic of the injustices that permeate international relationships between peoples.
A wheel turns because of its encounter with the surface of the road; spinning in the air it goes nowhere. Rubbing two sticks together produces heat and light; one stick alone is just a stick. In both cases, it is friction that produces movement, action, effect. Challenging the widespread view that globalization invariably signifies a "clash" of cultures, anthropologist Anna Tsing here develops friction in its place as a metaphor for the diverse and conflicting social interactions that make up our contemporary world. She focuses on one particular "zone of awkward engagement"--the rainforests of Indonesia--where in the 1980s and the 1990s capitalist interests increasingly reshaped the landscape not so much through corporate design as through awkward chains of legal and illegal entrepreneurs that wrested the land from previous claimants, creating resources for distant markets. In response, environmental movements arose to defend the rainforests and the communities of people who live in them. Not confined to a village, a province, or a nation, the social drama of the Indonesian rainforest includes local and national environmentalists, international science, North American investors, advocates for Brazilian rubber tappers, UN funding agencies, mountaineers, village elders, and urban students, among others--all combining in unpredictable, messy misunderstandings, but misunderstandings that sometimes work out.
1. Neoliberalism and the environmentNeoliberalism is the most powerful ideological andpolitical project in global governance to arise in thewake of Keynesianism, a status conveyed by trium-phalist phrases such as ‘‘the Washington consensus’’ andthe ‘‘end of history’’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Jessop,1994; Harvey, 2000; Peck, 2001). Yet the neoliberalproject is not hegemonic: it has been roundly criticizedand attacked, and it has faltered in a number of respects.In fact, the most nakedly extreme forms of neoliberalstate rollbacks and market triumphalism may well bepast, beaten back in places by virulent resistance (asurprise to those who believed history was at an end);undermined by the spectacular failures of neoliberalreforms judged even by the standards of neoliberalchampions (as in Argentina, for example); and replacedby ‘‘kinder, gentler,’’ Third Way variants (Peck andTickell, 2002).Neoliberalism’s adventures and misadventures areincreasingly well-chronicled,
This article expounds the traditional Marxist theory of the contradiction between forces and relations of production, over production of capital and economic crisis, and the process of crisis-induced restructuring of productive forces and production relations into more transparently social, hence potentially socialist, forms. This exposition provides a point of departure for an “ecological Marxist” theory of the contradiction between capitalist production relations and forces and the conditions of production, underproduction of capital and economic crisis, and the process of crisis-induced restructuring of production conditions and the social relations thereof also into more transparently social, hence potentially socialist, forms. In short, there may be not one but two paths to socialism in late capitalist society. While the two processes of capital overproduction and underproduction are by no means mutually exclusive, they may offset or compensate for one another in ways which create the appearance of relatively stable processes of capitalist development. Study of the combination of the two processes in the contemporary world may throw light on the decline of traditional labor and socialist movements and the rise of “new social movements” as agencies of social transformation. In similar ways that traditional Marxism illuminates the practises of traditional labor movements, it may be that “ecological Marxism” throws light on the practices of new social movements. Although ecology and nature; the politics of the body, feminism, and the family; and urban movements and related topics are usually discussed in post-Marxist terms, the rhetoric deployed in this article is self-consciously Marxist and designed to appeal to Marxist theorists and fellow travelers whose work remains within a “scientific” discourse hence those who are least likely to be convinced by post-Marxist discussions of the problem of capital’s use and abuse of nature (including human nature) in the modem world. However, the emphasis in this article on a political economic “scientific” discourse is tactical, not strategic. In reality, more or less autonomous social relationships, often non-capitalist or anti-capitalist, constitute “civil society,” which needs to be addressed on its own practical and theoretical terms. In other words, social and collective action is not meant to be construed merely as derivative of systemic forces, as the last section of the article hopefully will make clear.