Redeeming REDD+? A critical review of Michael Brown’s book

Since 2005, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has worked to establish a cooperation agenda where the Convention’s Annex I parties can incentivize the reduction of land-use related emissions in sub-tropical and tropical countries. Many viewed the original vision to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD), and the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks (REDD+) as a market-based policy framework through which developing countries would be paid for measurable and verified land-use emission reductions, thus up-scaling former project-based approaches that prevailed under the Clean Development Mechanism.

However, the design of the international, national and sub-national institutions that could guarantee the feasibility and political buy-in of such an approach have proved challenging and, as a result, the finally agreed framework has resulted in a hybrid mechanism that encourages Parties to pursue REDD+ activities using both market and non-market based approaches. A number of political decisions made over this period provide guidance on how countries should develop land-use emissions reference levels, quantify and monitor progress in emission reductions, involve communities and Indigenous Peoples in the implementation of land-use policies, and find meaningful and politically acceptable means to finance such activities and policies (the UNFCCC provides a useful series of documents in this regard; see: http://unfccc.int/land_use_and_climate_change/lulucf/items/6917.php).

Michael Brown’s Redeeming REDD. Policies, incentives and social feasibility for avoided deforestation is a broad, encompassing book that provides valuable history, insights, and analysis for those interested in the role that REDD+ may play in re-framing land-use governance in the global South. In the book’s first three chapters, including the Introduction, Brown presents his argument, covers the early years of negotiation and reviews the distinct arguments that were mobilized by different parties – including NGOs, governments, and indigenous peoples – to either support or confront REDD+. While Brown considers REDD+ a good idea in general, he is explicit in his belief that ‘the strategies employed are inappropriate and unfeasible’ and that ‘the front line communities who will make or break sustainable forest use that REDD is predicated upon, remain marginalized players in setting policy, identifying practical approaches, and receiving commensurate benefits given the risk they bear’ (p. 9). In a nutshell, the book’s core argument or narrative is that the rural poor can potentially use REDD+ to help save forests if they are recognized as key stewards, allowed to participate fully in policy design and implementation, and provided with the necessary political, technical and financial capacities to do so. But for this to happen, according to Brown, REDD+ would require ‘a new social contract’ (p. 6).

Chapters 4-10 are developed to make the case for his argument, although chapters like the science and policy (5) or finance (9) could well be read as stand-alone contextual information. In chapter 4, Brown draws on some of his early work experience with the Pygmies in Africa in order to illustrate the challenges that REDD+ will face in realizing informed consent and providing the necessary capacities to local people so that they can equitably negotiate their terms of participation. He argues that REDD+, as it stands, pays little attention to how national countries will deal with these issues, and how such efforts should be mainstreamed and funded. I could not agree more. Chapter 5 is dedicated to relating REDD+ to other development or mitigation initiatives, such as the MDGs and joint implementation, and to problematizing the foundations upon which some early REDD+ initiatives were built (i.e. the theory of change), the safeguards and the transaction costs issue. Brown maintains that the theories of change that can be used in ongoing and future REDD+ projects run the risk of simplifying the environmental, economic and social complexities of a given territory. He also suggests that transaction costs calculations disregard the costs of building local capacities, while safeguards do not guarantee the right of many communities who might prefer other development and conservation options than REDD+.

In chapter 6, Brown develops the perspectives of most REDD+ stakeholders, including large and national NGOs, project standard setters, peasant organizations, rural communities and Indigenous Peoples. Brown uses key documents and reports to present these views, without developing an exhaustive analysis covering specific organizations or countries, or examining the views of commercial actors such as timber industries, agribusiness, infrastructure developers and the like. Nevertheless, the chapter still serves its central purpose which is to demonstrate that the interests in REDD+ vary within and across groups. Among Indigenous Peoples, for example, Brown notes that there have been groups that consider REDD+ ‘a possible solution’ to ameliorate climate impacts while others have manifestly opposed its development at national or local levels (p. 182), in line with his view that if REDD+ is transparently developed and provides the necessary capacities to local people, it would not be surprising if ‘a good number of IPs [indigenous peoples] at the end of the day may actually opt for REDD as a best option for the present and future’ (p. 185).

In chapters 7 and 8, dedicated to social feasibility and capacity building in REDD+, Brown begins to distil the foundations of his suggested ‘social contract’. The first pillar of this contract, he argues, should be the recognition that REDD+ design and implementation must treat rural communities and Indigenous Peoples as equals, which means that ‘planners must get past the simplistic logic of needs assessments and treat communities with the same respect they would demand for their own community’s present and future’ (p. 187). In chapter 7, Brown draws a concrete proposal for how this desirable objective should and can be pursued, comparing what he labels a ‘social feasibility’ approach with the REDD+ social safeguards. Here, he stresses the importance of involving communities in developing their own assessments of capacities, equitable benefit-sharing, monitoring abilities and so on, before any consent to REDD+ development is even considered (pp. 189-192). He uses an example from Cambodia to illustrate the risks involved in pursuing a project informed only by social safeguards, and contrasts such an experience with a social feasibility approach developed in the context of a biodiversity conservation initiative in Cameroon and the DRC (pp. 201-202). A second pillar of the new ‘social contract’, according to Brown, is the need to mainstream capacity building efforts. Drawing mostly on his professional experience, Brown explains why building capacity among government, NGOs and local communities is necessary to guarantee the future effectiveness and social success of any REDD+ actions, whatever the scale of implementation. In his view, many development and conservation projects have failed in the past because the capacities for project implementation among involved stakeholders were not been properly assessed and addressed prior to implementation.

Chapter 9 provides an overview of all the possible options that REDD+ might have available in terms of funding, from the yet inexistent markets following the Clean Development Mechanism approach to one based on climate aid or national systems of payments for ecosystem services. In this regard, Brown argues that a hybrid financing platform, made up of ODA-type funding and carbon markets, is ‘inevitable’ (p. 222) and events since the book was written has not proven him wrong, as subsequent relevant REDD+ decisions at the UNFCCC level acknowledge that parties should be able to access finance from markets, governments or other mechanisms based on their results (i.e. the amount of carbon emissions avoided or reduced through REDD+ actions), as well as being able to receive financial support from the same or other sources to support the development of joint mitigation and adaptation approaches for the integral and sustainable management of forests, regardless of the level of emissions reduced. In chapter 10, Brown provides a very balanced synthesis of all the risks involved in REDD+, including the potential perils of: misconduct in carbon accounting and monitoring; simplifying deforestation and forest degradation narratives; and developing poorly designed policy and project approaches that would ultimately impact local livelihoods and the political, economic and social rights of rural communities. At the same time, he also warns against ill-founded critiques of REDD+ on behalf of web-based NGOs or the strategic politicizing and simplification of Indigenous Peoples perspectives.

In chapter 11, Brown concludes the book and returns to his vision of a new ‘social contract’ in REDD+. For REDD+ to be redeemed, rather than discarded on the grounds of its top-down and technocratic character, he argues that first and foremost it needs to develop new mechanisms for recognition and participation across governance levels, from international to local scales, which effectively and equally involve rural communities and Indigenous Peoples in decision-making. In the design phase, this means deploying sufficient resources to build capacities across all parties, and during implementation internalizing the high costs of effective land-use emission reductions, which will necessarily involve compensation for local people. REDD+ should account for the costs of developing grounded social feasibility assessments so that, for example, it does not become a means to encroach upon peoples’ land and other rights. Finally, REDD+ initiatives need to avoid oversimplifying local contexts and mobilizing excessive resources to clarify tenure regimes, and should instead recognize social-ecological complexity, the existence of legal pluralism and messy tenure arrangements, which in turn translates to a range of plausible implementation outcomes (both positive and negative).

Overall, Brown’s book is a very useful guide to the early years of REDD+ formation and implementation, the social and environmental risks it entails, and ideas about how it can work better in the future. There are, however, a few weaknesses in the book that concerned me. First, I think that Brown often mistakenly refers to a REDD+ framework that has barely existed until very recently – i.e. a REDD+ based on tradable carbon offsets – when in reality most of the pilots in place at the time the book was written were conservation and development projects that, at best, were trying to generate carbon credits for the voluntary market. Second, while I agree that REDD+ has been excessively technocratic and top-down, it is also true that many have warned against its blueprint character and host countries have often been quite supportive of bottom-up or sub-national REDD+ activities that have tried to accommodate local realities, though success in doing so has been highly variable. Third, I would argue that the book fails to maintain its argument consistently throughout. This might be because it employs too many sections that can easily distract the reader, including (as indicated before) the chapters that could have been considered contextual information, as well as the extensive discussion in the central and final parts to develop the new ‘social contract’. Finally, and most problematically, I found scant evidence about the role that large-scale and commercial actors driving deforestation and forest degradation have played in REDD+ developments or, more critically, how to account for them in such proposed ‘social contract’. These actors are the missing piece in the REDD+ puzzle, and I would argue that it is impossible to fully redeem REDD+ until this piece is found and placed as a central part of the overall picture. Communities and indigenous peoples, whether they are involved or not in REDD+, cannot alone save the remaining tropical forests: in order to do this, they would also need a firm international and national commitment against the expansion of large-scale agriculture and timber operations, as well as profound changes in the global political economy of natural resource extraction and consumption.

An edited and published version of this text can be found here:

Corbera, E., (2017) Redeeming REDD. Policies, incentives and social feasibility for avoided deforestation, by M.I. Brown. Book review, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 44:2, 502-506. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2017.1287671

A moral economy of water: charity wells in Egypt’s Nile Delta

I’m very proud to use the blog to disseminate an article that was successfully led by former ICTA MSc student Hagar El Didi, now based at IFPRI-Cairo. Through a case study in Egypt’s Nile Delta, we investigated the role that charity wells play in irrigation and drinking water access relations, placing emphasis on the ways in which these wells interact with other local and national institutions. We demonstrate that charity wells alter property rights relations, extending entitlements to water, but their effectiveness is also limited by existing property rights regimes and anti-cooperative actions of specific individuals which together contribute to maintain an inequitable access system.

Recognition in Biodiversity Conservation

I paste below the presentation I gave today at the British Ecological Society. You can find the accompanying slides here.

The text below includes many (sometimes altered) passages of the article cited below. All the authors of this article deserve credit for the argument and ideas developed here.

Martin, A., Dawson, N., Coolsaet, B., Corbera, E., Fraser, J., Lehmann, I., Rodríguez, I. (2016) Justice and conservation: the need to incorporate recognition. Biological Conservation, 197: 254–261. http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2016.03.021

Slide 1

Good morning and thanks for being here. I would like to start by acknowledging the financial support of the ESPA program, as well as of the Conservation Ecology group of the British Ecological Society. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Caroline Howe and Dan Brockington from the University of Sheffield for organizing this exciting panel.

The title of my talk today is ‘Incorporating recognition in biodiversity conservation’, which differs slightly from the program’s title. I originally envisioned incorporating the argument and ideas of two recently published articles but when I attempted to do so I realized it was far too much information that did not fit in 15 minutes. Therefore, my talk draws only on the article you see on the screen and therefore all authors deserve credit for what I’m going to say next. From now on, you can choose to ‘switch off’, to read the slides, to ignore the slides and follow my words, or combine the last two as you see fit.

Slide 2

Our argument departs from the premise that making conservation socially just is ethically desirable and it’s conducive to the legitimacy and environmental effectiveness of conservation approaches in the long-term. This premise is grounded on growing evidence that conservation that leads to fair outcomes or involves people in design and implementation results in more sound environmental outcomes. It is also grounded on a shared belief that conservation policy and practice has often placed much more emphasis on distributional and participation concerns, than it has on recognition.

Recognition and conservation are inextricably linked. By recognition, we generally mean the respect to plural social identities and cultural difference, and the extent to which different actors, ideas and cultures are respected and valued in social encounters and public discourse.

Bearing this in mind, the link between recognition and conservation appears evident, for at least three reasons. First, protected areas in their variegated forms are often spatially associated with cultural diversity and with people whose knowledge and environmental governance institutions are vulnerable to being marginalized.

Second, mainstream conservation management strategies are influenced by culturally specific and often disputed ideas about what works and about what counts as evidence of what works.

Third, dominant blueprints about how conservation should be done become a basis for the misrepresentation and misrecognition of indigenous and local people. For example, the ‘Yosemite model’ of conservation, in which nature is conceived as wilderness, has led to the representation of local and indigenous lifestyles as harmful to nature conservation.

We sustain, however, that biodiversity conservation can work constructively with local communities, especially if it embraces the concept of recognition. Where innovative, non-exclusionary models are developed, indigenous and local people can support protected areas as a way to positively promote both their territories and traditions. And, fortunately, there is of course evidence in this regard too.

Slide 3

The language of equity and rights has been present in global conservation discourse since at least the early 1970s. In the 1980s, ideas of inter- and intra-generational equity were foundational to popular narratives of sustainable development. And article 1 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) highlights as one of its three main objectives ‘…the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilisation of genetic resources’. The Nagoya Protocol in 2010 has aimed to develop further this objective and it has also emphasized ‘the important role of traditional knowledge’.

However, these efforts have led to controversies over recognition. One charge is that the CBD and the Nagoya Protocol are culturally dominating, requiring prospective beneficiaries to assimilate imposed ideas of what is fair and equitable as a condition of benefiting. Additionally, it has also been argued that despite the CBD has acknowledged cultural diversity and the identity of indigenous peoples as both conducive to and key relevant issues to protect in the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, the Convention has also endorsed approaches that conflict with traditional ethics of stewardship of nature, notably with regard to the so-called valuation and “marketisation” of nature.

Slide 4

We are not naïve, however. The application of recognition in conservation remains difficult, not least because of contested meanings and approaches. And for this reason, the remaining of this talk focuses on how four schools of thought on recognition have understood the concept and, in doing so, we hope to reveal common concerns that can serve as a basis for progress in conservation policy and practice. To distinguish analytically these schools of thought we employ a simple conceptual framework that decomposes them into four dimensions: subjects, harms, mechanisms and responses.

Subjects refer to the stakeholders or users who are entitled to moral consideration, in other words, those who hold rights and deserve recognition.

Harms are the kinds of injustices suffered by moral subjects that can vary according to the dimension of environmental justice. Distributive injustice is more likely to result in objective material harm such as impoverishment whilst misrecognition tends to be linked with harms to subjective wellbeing, such as reduced self-esteem.

Mechanisms, in turn, refer to the institutional and structural explanations for such harms. This involves asking the question: “how can we explain how similar injustices appear repeatedly, in different places and times?” In this regard, recognition theories argue that misrecognition arises from the realms of ideas and culture, or from economic structures of society, or from a combination of both.

Finally, it is inevitable that schools of thought that identify different harms and mechanisms will also propose different solution frameworks. For some, responses can start with individual efforts at self-development, such as recognizing one’s connectedness to the rest of nature. For others, a more political project is required, such as extending participatory democracy, or redefining national constitutions to allow plural notions of citizenship, among others.

Let me turn now to provide a bit more detail on each of these four schools of thought and to lay out the implications of taking into account their ideas and arguments for conservation.

Slide 5

Georg Hegel is considered the founder of the continental European ethics of recognition. He conceived the struggle against injustice in terms of an essential need to be recognized and respected by others. Recognition is essential because it is the basis of individual freedom. In turn, human freedom cannot be achieved unilaterally but only through social relationships of a psychological nature. Such relationships can be described as ‘inter-subjective’ interactions that inevitably occur between persons who are more and less powerful.

In such interactions, a person can only really value their own life if they see that others value such a life. It is not possible to have high self-esteem if you perceive that others treat you with contempt. For Hegel the mechanism of subjugation was thus psychological and the required response was to move relations towards more reciprocal recognition.

The implications of adopting this reasoning in conservation are twofold. First, it is clearly a call for understanding individuals’ sentiments in conservation contexts, a need to make sure that their feelings and values are listened to and embraced. Second, it is a call for conservationists to be aware of the historical legacy and imprint of certain conservation approaches on local and indigenous peoples’ histories and cultures, which in turn implies being sensitive to the latter’s needs related to resource use, livelihoods, and development more generally.

Slide 6

A critical theory approach to recognition does not differ from a Hegelian account of recognition in terms of the subjects of justice, but differs in terms of the nature of harms, the mechanisms by which these are produced, and the suggested solution frameworks. Nancy Fraser, one of the most important and contemporary critical theorists, argues that societies develop hierarchies of cultural values that degrade the status of some groups of people, thereby culturally subordinating them and denying equality of social interaction. Such injustices are reproduced through formal institutions, such as property laws that discriminate against indigenous forms of tenure, or against women, but also through informal institutions including cultural norms and prejudices. Injustices also arise out of a combination of economic exploitation and cultural subordination, neither of which can be analytically subsumed under the other. Gender inequality for example has connected roots in both culture and economic arrangements, such as local rules of resource access.

Responses to these harms need to be multi-dimensional. As with Hegelian thinking, there is a need for affirmative efforts to tackle cultural misrecognition. However, to achieve parity of participation, there is also a need to transform the institutions that define distribution and political representation.

Such combined focus on recognition and distribution appears fruitful for thinking about conservation. First, economic inequalities are often considered to be drivers of biodiversity loss, both through mechanisms of impoverishment of some groups that undermine sustainable practices, and through the corresponding enrichment of others who fuel profligate consumption. Second, however, this is only part of the story because conservationists need to be aware that their material practices are entwined with status inequalities and political marginalization that should be acknowledged and reworked if necessary.

Slide 7

Decolonial thinking has roots in both Hegelianism and critical theory, emphasising forms of social, cultural and political subordination that deny freedom and opportunity to some groups. However, it is distinct for its focus on the global South and for identifying mechanisms of subordination in Eurocentric scientific and political worldviews. This dominating European culture is institutionalized through education, the media, state-sanctioned languages and behavioural norms. Thus, coloniality is a mechanism of recognition injustice that creates structural oppression over marginalised sectors of society whose alternative worldviews become devalued and stigmatised. This school of thought is inspired by indigenous peoples’ movements and their struggles against modernity and it therefore has links with indigenous cosmogonies, leading to conceptions of justice subjects that emphasise community over individuals and includes moral responsibilities towards mother nature and intangible beings such as spirits.

The most important implication of such thinking for what brings us here today is acknowledging that conservation practice and its associated knowledge forms part of a dominant form of knowledge production (western science), institutionalised within bodies such as the CBD, which has at times marginalized local forms of knowledge. Therefore, responding to conservation injustices must include democratizing science itself by creating opportunities for inter-cultural dialogues as part of the knowledge production process.

Slide 8

Finally, the capabilities ‘school’ does not by itself develop a theory of ‘recognition’, but offers a comprehensive view of the conditions needed for a good life that incorporates aspects of recognition, participation and distribution. Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, two of its most prominent representatives, argue that what is relevant for justice is whether individual persons have the freedom to realize the objectives they have in life. In other words, the ‘good’ to which justice aspires is defined in terms of a person’s opportunities or ‘capabilities’ rather than their actual achievements. Such capabilities are clearly dependent on a range of conditions, including economic distribution and cultural recognition.

Generally speaking, a person who has fewer capabilities or opportunities to accomplish what they reasonably value for whichever reasons would be regarded as less well-off than others. In that sense, injustice is the denial of choice and, particularly, the denial of some things that are universally essential for a dignified life, such as food and water, or key resources four sustaining or pursuing the desired living. Overall, critical theorists agree that injustice arises from forms of governance and political organisation that lead to a reduction in the available options that one’s has to pursue her own needs and interests.

Such thinking is an everyday confrontation for the conservation sector because maintaining biodiversity and ecological processes is entwined with, and can often conflict with, valued ways of life. Such awareness should, in turn, lead towards a very careful understanding and negotiation of individuals and communities’ needs and aspirations, in order to avoid precluding their access to basic needs and hampering their capabilities.

Slide 9

To conclude, where do all these reflections take us? Why did I think it was important to bring them forward in a setting like this?

On the one hand, to share with you the breadth of knowledge that political philosophers can offer to conservation scholars and practitioners. This knowledge can help us thinking more critically about our own research and implementation agendas, and how we contribute to reduce or enhance recognition injustices. On the other hand, these four schools of thought indirectly put the responsibility of realizing a more ‘just conservation’ on our shoulders, since we undoubtedly belong to those who hold a position of power in social encounters of conservation.

Finally, the four schools of thought taken together offer at least four practical ways of incorporating recognition in biodiversity conservation. First, we need to move beyond a distributive model of thinking about the social benefits and costs of conservation. This model is important, but the theories of recognition presented also reveal the limitations of a distributive model and, in doing so, invite us to identify social categories of concern that require additional coverage in conservation research and practice, including non-right holders, women, trans-gender, caste, migrants, and so on.

Second, recognition theories allow us to reflect on the fact that the social impacts of conservation are in large part relational, whether this is taken in a Hegelian sense that inequitable relationships constitute the harm itself, or more in line with feminist, critical and decolonial scholars, that this is part of a broader structuring of social relations that produces low status for some groups.

Third, as we develop practices that attend to these relational concerns, we can be guided by the concerns over the status of peasant cultures and knowledge worldwide. Whilst the CBD is committed to recognising different knowledge, it is clear that ways of working across alternative ways of perceiving and valuing nature are still not widely effective in many parts and sites of the world. Improving recognition should thus be about acknowledging that conservation can produce these kinds of harms as well as providing opportunities for their alleviation. We should also change power relations and move towards relationships of more equal influence.

This brings us to the fourth possible action, namely to become aware that equitable influence over decision-making will rarely be served by use of pre-defined blueprints for biodiversity conservation, whether it be models for protected areas or market-based instruments. Such blueprints, such as the ‘ecosystem services’ model that we might be discussing here today, are themselves institutionalisations of particular western ways of knowing and valuing nature, which can act as barriers that prevent consideration of alternative knowledge and values.

I realize that acknowledging this might represent real challenges for field level conservation, in terms of resource constraints, methods and training, and in some cases political constraints. But if we are serious about the commitment for conservation to be socially just, then engaging with issues of recognition is a necessary step to take.

Thank you for your attention.

Six thoughts on ‘the carbon fix’

The following paragraphs present my reflections after reading four chapters of the book ‘The Carbon Fix’ (2016), edited by Stephanie Paladino and Shirley Fiske, and which I had the honor to preface. I acted as a discussant of these contributions in the recently held Annual Meeting of the American Association of Anthropologists, Minneapolis, 19th November 2016.

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I would like to start thanking the Panel conveners and Book Editors, Shirley and Fiske, for inviting me to be here and to write the book’s Foreword. I’m not going to read the argument put together in the Foreword, which revolved around the importance of thinking about ‘The Carbon Fix’ through the lens of justice, but to sketch instead six thoughts I had when reading four of the articles led by James, Michael, Laura and Pam, who are here today.

First thought: Critique versus accommodation

The four papers reflect all together the tension between the rejection of ‘the carbon economy’ grounded on critical enquiry –regardless of the critique’s angle: anthropology, geography, political economy or ecological economics- and the acceptance of such economy, which comes with suggestions for improvement, such as making carbon projects or REDD+ activities more sensitive and attune with social-ecological contexts, as well as more sensitive to participation and distribution, at least at the national and local scales.

This tension is of course not new and it’s a recurrent one in debates about environmental offsetting, since its emergence in the 1970s in the United States, or in debates for other social policy domains, such as conditional cash transfers. Walden Bello, for example, has argued that conditional cash transfers are ‘about poverty containment rather than poverty reduction’, and that they are promoted by institutions that support forms of macro-economic growth that engender the conditions of poverty that such cash transfers are supposed to alleviate. Does it ring a bell?

Second thought: Long life to critique!

The second thought I had when reading the four articles is that critical scholars should be proud of themselves: I think we have contributed a lot to deflate the balloon of this new carbon economy or, while writing, we have made it look bigger than it has ever actually been. For example, offset markets are relatively small or they are working very poorly when compared to other commodity markets. Many airlines stopped offering offsets in 2011 onwards because nobody would pay for them. Three of the four articles show quite neatly that REDD+ has become more an aid-based mechanism, than it has been a market-based one with strong conditionalities attached. It has been more ‘aid/donor as usual’ by governments, NGOs and consultants, than a revolutionary mechanism leading to dispossessing farmers from forests –with unquestionable exceptions, of course. Many communities involved in REDD+ pilots worldwide are waiting for payments to materialize after participating in policy and project-based design processes.

I’m not suggesting that there are no markets at all, and that we have invented the balloon all together. But I’m suggesting that our critique might have been more effective than we could have imagined, resulting in less appetite for these new sort of ‘invisible’ nature commodities than we originally envisaged when we saw the balloon inflating. In Mexico, except for a few organisations now pushing for emission reduction initiatives under World Bank support, nobody associates REDD+ with carbon trading. NGOs want to think, rightly or wrongly –and we can discuss this later-, that REDD+ will mostly be about receiving money from the international community to develop sustainable rural development plans. Should this be seen as a conquest from the critics and from those who resist ‘the carbon fix’?

Third thought: Cashing in

Yes, we have probably contributed to deflate or explode the balloon altogether. However, while we were busy deconstructing nature and burying rather than sequestering carbon, a few cashed in and no tangible or relevant benefits reached forest communities. Three of the four papers argue that most of the money invested in preparing carbon forestry markets or REDD+ governance has gone to state governments, consultants, NGOs, and the like. Efforts to clarify tenure relations, particularly in favor of forest communities, have been weak. Activities geared at sustainable and profitable timber extraction that can uplift livelihoods have been limited to a few projects and have been insufficiently sustained over time. Time and money invested in social processes, such as participation and consent, or at building the social contract Michael advocates for, have been scarce.

Fourth thought: the never-ending story

This last point takes me to my fourth thought, which goes one step further: when is there ‘enough participation’ in ‘the carbon fix’? And what kind of participation should be pursued? Insights from the three empirical articles suggest that farmers, forest dwellers, and communities in general are poorly informed and misunderstand what’s behind a carbon or REDD+ project, i.e. the ultimate purpose, trading carbon, their additional objectives, supporting livelihoods, and how these should be achieved in practice. As a result, there are calls for more and better participation. But how? And funded by whom?

I just arrived from Mexico, where the government finalised a public consultation of the REDD+ strategy targeting thousands of villages throughout the country and developing dozens of focus group discussions in capitals and other towns of REDD+ priority regions. The process was apparently rushed, and somewhat flawed, but despite this tremendous effort, critiques from civil society organisations abound, on the grounds that more efforts are needed to reach everybody who might be potentially affected by future land management activities under REDD+. I could not agree more, but who would fund such continuous effort? When should we call participatory processes to a close? Which lending agencies and private donors are willing to support bottom-up participatory processes forever?

Another difficulty is to identify who should participate in these participatory processes and to develop those in a way that are both inclusive and respectful . Understanding tenure dynamics, understood as the set of social relations and property rights that glue the socio-ecological fabric that forests represent, is always a good starting point to deal with the whom and the how. As the Vietnam and Brazil papers implicitly suggest, this is by no means a straightforward task because legality and legitimacy in land tenure mean different things to different people. If we were to extend the participatory processes in the Brazilian carbon projects, why should not we also involve the migrants who threaten indigenous peoples’ territories? Which advantages or disadvantages would that have? And in Vietnam, should projects targeting state-owned forests involve the inhabiting but untitled communities? And those projects targeting land titled to ethnic groups… should they involve in participatory processes the government which feels entitled to carbon ownership and carbon rights?

Fifth thought: More ‘superfluous’ research

We, the academics in the room, have also benefited from the new carbon economy through the pursuit of research grants. Therefore, outlining a few areas of additional enquiry might sound superfluous, even hypocritical. Our panelists have shown that, in each project, or in the REDD+ preparedness phase, there is an important number of intermediaries about which we know little about: it is known who they are, but why they operate the way they do, in which countries, under which operational assumptions, and if they got involved in the carbon economy as a mode of institutional reproduction or as a life source has not been well researched and systematised.

The scholarship of the ‘new carbon economy’ has probably not been sufficiently in contact with anthropologists like those present in this conference and in this Panel. Articles about carbon projects and REDD+ have not sufficiently problematized very contested social entities like ‘the community’, or ‘the indigenous’. We have been more interested on unearthing the challenges of realising justice at the intersection of project proponents and communities, and of communities and the global community (including donors, prospective carbon buyers and citizens), or at the level of international negotiations, than we have been on explaining how carbon projects and offsets create new elites at local level, and how they might be helping some to gain power against others. We have also not paid sufficient attention to how these projects and REDD+ preparedness might have politically favored some social identities over others, and why.

Another under explored question relates to the existence of contradictory policy incentives that will compromise any promised emission reductions and the lack of interest in REDD+ activities by agribusiness, mining and timber companies.  In this regard, and during my stay in Mexico last week, an officer of the national forestry commission complained about how little interest the agricultural ministry had so far had in the REDD+ readiness phase and how difficult it had been for the forestry commission to receive attention from agribusinesses and timber management organisations. This is again a commonly found weakness of REDD+ preparedness throughout the world, which in turn suggest that those who aim to ‘trade nature to save it’ or ‘to destroy nature all together’ are, albeit some exceptions, two separate social networks. I think that we wrongly believe they go together because a few NGOs from the former group get funding from a few large multinationals from the latter.

Six thought: ‘Doing good, feeling bad’

Finally, I would not like to conclude without a final reflection that came to mind after reading Jim’s article. In my view, the mere existence of the conservationist movement, and the more recent ‘selling nature to trade it’ one, seems to connect with some kind of logic of ‘doing good’, rooted in a sense of guilt that we want to confront. This sense of guilt is related to our consumerist behavior, which has inextricable and complex links to a series of environmental impacts across the world. Knowing this springs in us a desire to find ways of alleviating these impacts and ease our consciousness. But the sense of guilt is also related to the fact that we have increasingly become urban beings, detached from everyday natural resource management, and who feel the need to support those who still live somewhat like our ancestors. So, the question becomes then, how can we approach or relate to nature under such individual and collective conditions of doing good, feeling bad and urban living? Should we simply discard whatever mode of environmental conservation action, dismantle related NGOs and focus our efforts on developing a non-capitalist and less urban global society? And, if so, where do we start?

Our life as Rarámuri’s in the forests

The photo voice exhibition “Our life as Rarámuri’s in the forests”, i.e. Nuestra Vida Rarámuri en el Bosque (in Spanish), has now been opened to the general public at the National Museum of Cultures, in central Mexico City. The exhibition is an effort led by members of the Rarámuri community of Kwechi, located in the Western Sierra Madre, in the state of Chihuahua, who took pictures and wrote up their stories during a one-year period. The community was supported by Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the United Kingdom, in the context of an international research project focused on understanding conflict and cooperation in the development of REDD+ policies in Mexico, Nepal and Vietnam (which I have the honour to coordinate).

The opening counted with the participation of some of the Rarámuri involved in the development of the photo voice exhibition project, who travelled for two days to attend the event, as well as of Dr. Horacio Almanza from INAH who had trained the community in picture-taking. The pictures and the associated text illustrate the community’s livelihood activities and the role that forests play in their lives.

The exhibition will remain in the Museum until the end of January 2017 and it will then move to another location in Chihuahua, and to the school of Kwechi. Subsequently, there are plans to take it (alongside the other photo voice projects conducted in Nepal and Vietnam) to one or more international policy events related to biodiversity conservation and climate change policy.

We will soon be able to post and share an electronic file containing the dozens of pictures that make up the photo voice project but, meanwhile, I just leave a few examples below (open them in a new tab to enlarge them).

Photo Voice exhibition flyer

Photo Exhibit 1

Photo Exhibit 2

Photo Exhibit 3

Photo Exhibit 3

Photo Exhibit 4

Photo Exhibit 5

Photo Exhibit 6

Photo Exhibit 7

Photo Exhibit 8