Editorial

REDD-plus, forest people's rights and nested climate governance

Local values, institutions and knowledge have enabled people to understand the happenings and changes in their environment. Local perceptions and knowledge provide a crucial foundation for community-based climate change adaptation measures and natural resource conservation. This paper is specifically focused on the assessment of the opportunities and challenges of traditional knowledge and institutions for community's sustainable climate change adaptation in Ethiopia. We used knowledge products form journal articles, policy documents, working papers, policy briefs, and other gray literature. In addition, two case studies were conducted in central and eastern Ethiopia by interviewing 251 randomly selected households. This helped to determine the state-of-the art for knowledge co-products for community's sustainable climate change adaptation and natural resource management. Regardless of the challenges from global change, cultural erosion and transformation, traditional knowledge still serve as the bases for weather forecasting, agricultural and natural resource management thereby sustain community's livelihoods and landscape resilience against the impacts of climate change and variability. Traditional knowledge and institutions in Ethiopia have maintained landscapes for millennia: Konso cultural landscapes and Gedeo Agroforestry systems are some to mention. The knowledge systems have also contributed for the large diversity of crops and livestock breeds in Ethiopia which play roles in community's climate change adaptation. From this assessment, it can be concluded that both scientific and traditional knowledge have their own gaps and what will be better is the integration of the two to give an additive impact that can foster sustainable development and build livelihood and landscape resilience in times of climate change.

Valuation can be used for a wide range of purposes, including informing environmental decision-making, designing and evaluating policies, and acknowledging and raising awareness of the importance of the environment. A promising development in the field of environmental valuation that is receiving increasing attention is the hybridization of stated preference methods and deliberative approaches. Proponents claim that deliberative monetary valuation (DMV) can successfully address many of the limitations ascribed to more conventional monetary valuation approaches. However, DMV has scarcely been tested in contexts of the Global South thus far, where arguably, the benefits it offers may be most relevant. In this paper we study the applicability DMV on preference elicitation in a rural Indigenous community in Colombia. We find that DMV is superior to conventional stated preference approaches in terms of its capacity to elicit more considered, informed, and diverse values. Our results suggest that DMV offers learning opportunities for participants, the benefits of which are greater for those for whom conventional valuation exercises may seem too cognitively complex. We find that by the end of the deliberative workshop, participants were considering a wider range of preferences. We control for one of the main risks of DMV, which is the possibility of participants with a higher social status exercising a dominant role during the deliberative process, and do not find evidence of this being the case. Our results suggest that one of the main advantages of DMV is its capacity to capture a much broader set of values than conventional valuation approaches, including instrumental, relational and intrinsic values.

This research analyses the interactions and impacts of forest carbon projects on existing governance mechanisms viz. policies, institutions and implementation structures. It critically evaluates the assumption that forest carbon projects always result in improved governance of resources. Empirical evidence from a World Bank funded project in the state of Himachal Pradesh in India suggests that these projects might conflict with existing policies and complicate property relations on the ground. These projects might be used by powerful stakeholders as a tool to scuttle the progressive policy reforms. In the case of Himachal Pradesh, state bureaucracy and local elites have used forest carbon project to thwart the progressive policy provisions of HP common land vesting and utilisation (Amendment) Act 2001 and Forest Rights Act 2006, which were enacted to recognise individual and community rights on the community and forest lands respectively. Similarly, existing institutional issues related to lack of inclusiveness, participation and transparency have been exacerbated by the availability of increased resources from the project. Project activities such as fencing and changing land use of community pastures through plantations can adversely impact local livelihoods. Hence, it is imperative to undertake a comprehensive assessment of potential risks and conflicts before implementation of such projects.

Indonesia was expected to enter the implementing phase of REDD+ in 2015. Some technical and regulatory documents have been prepared within the framework of national REDD+ elemen. However, the development of REDD+ was constrained leading to the delay of the full implementation of REDD+. This study investigates the factors that may support or impede the effectiveness of REDD+ policies. It analyses policy structures and the behaviour of actors within and outside the forestry sector affecting the preparation of REDD+ implementation. The study was conducted in the three provinces of Papua, Central Kalimantan and Riau. The results show that most of the existing policy structures support REDD+ implementation. However, there are some regulations negatively impacting the implementation. Government actors at the central level have fragmented power, need for an actor that can manage coordination among the relevant actors. In addition, REDD+ documents and regulations are considered less legitimate and cannot fully support the implementation of REDD+ in Indonesia. Indonesia is not fully ready to implement national REDD+ since some current policies need to be improved to enhance the effectiveness of REDD+ policies.

The green economy now dominates global environmental governance, but its potentially insidious inner-workings and effects remain poorly understood. To probe this problem, it is necessary to explore how value is created and distributed in the green economy, and how the production processes of new green commodities like carbon credits shape the social and material realities from which they emerge. In this article, we examine how voluntary carbon credits are produced and acquire value through the implementation of REDD+ in voluntary markets, which essentially entails the demonstration of project compliance with a set of techno-bureaucratic standards or rules, known as validation and verification. Through participant observation of these processes at a REDD+ project site in Cambodia, we reveal how the REDD+ standards give rise to bureaucratic performance and disciplined adherence to an “audit culture” that is both apolitical and indifferent to local realities. The local realities observed in Cambodia entailed profound environmental and social injustices, especially for indigenous communities facing illegal logging and land alienation. While the REDD+ initiative initially engaged these communities in Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) and indigenous communal land titling, the techno-bureaucratic exigencies of the REDD+ standards ultimately curtailed such formal possibilities for local rights and agency. We call this phenomenon bureaucratic violence, as it involves the implementation of mundane technical rules that hide local contestation, sideline criticism and deny justice. Furthermore, we argue that bureaucratic violence is fundamental to the generation of value in the green economy, as a process that works alongside commodification, spectacle, and other forms of structural and material violence.

Schemes to promote sustainable forest management have increasingly focused on addressing widespread informalities in timber production, based on the presumed links between formalisation, the maintenance of forest cover and local welfare. This trend is typified by the EU Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) initiative and associated Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPA) aimed at eradicating the trade of illegal wood between partner countries and the EU. Yet there is concern that such initiatives might have detrimental impacts on the largely informal rights of local resource users. In order to inform the formalisation agenda, more detailed analysis of the operation of local rights, and how they might be affected by particular schemes is required.

This paper focuses on Ghana as a country with a largely informal wood sector that has signed a VPA with the EU for the express purpose of rapid formalisation. Our analysis is guided by a framework for assessing which types of rights might be transformed by particular approaches to formalisation and the subsequent effect this might have on forests and people in particular local contexts. We then apply this framework to an in-depth local case study of on-farm timber governance within a cocoa-forest landscape in Ghana’s Central Region to examine how the operation of formal and informal and substantive and procedural rights shape who controls, and benefits from, on-farm timber production. We then analyse the content of the VPA in light of these local realities and assess its potential impacts.

Our findings highlight how the substantive rights the state grants to companies are presumed to be balanced with the granting of procedural rights to farmers via the mechanisms of right of refusal to harvest on-farm timber, compensation for damage to cocoa crops and the negotiation of community-level Social Responsibility Agreements with private companies. Yet a comparison of these formal rights with farmers’ existing informal rights reveals that farmers’ control and access to benefits from trees on their farms are notably higher in the ‘illegal’ chainsaw dominated informal sector than in the ‘legal’ state-based system. Farmers choose to maintain trees on farms both to shade cocoa and in anticipation of benefits from their informal sale. The VPA, however, aims to eradicate all informal on-farm timber production and thus threatens existing local rights and benefit capture while diminishing incentives to maintain trees on farm. Rather than further criminalising local systems of timber governance, the maintenance of tree cover and local benefit-sharing would be better served by 1) phasing out timber concessions on farmland, 2) abandoning the distinction between planted and native trees on farms and, 3) understanding, recognizing and respecting the existing informal rights of farmers, traditional authorities and chainsaw loggers to negotiate among themselves patterns of access and control of on-farm trees and timber. In general, the case study challenges the assertion that formalisation is requisite for sustainable forest management and mandates a more nuanced and contextually informed assessment of the assumed costs and benefits associated with particular forms of legal and policy reform.