1 Result-Based Actions

The primary effect of the ‘Warsaw Framework for REDD+’Footnote ⁵⁷ is to establish an accounting framework for the monitoring, reporting and verifying (MRV) ‘result-based actions’, one that allows the additional carbon sequestered due to policy approaches to reduce deforestation and forest degradation to become legible in terms of 1tCO₂e. To be eligible to receive international (‘results-based’) finance, host nation-states are required to establish strategies, plans, reference levels and systems for monitoring, reporting and verifying the effects of forest mitigation activities. That is, countries are required to show results of, not merely steps towards, forest protection, and these results need to be measured in terms of saved emissions (as opposed to hectares of forests protected, for example). The Warsaw Framework is therefore primarily orientated towards establishing an internationally verifiable regime of accounting for carbon ‘saved’ from avoided deforestation, which renders divergent activities in different places legible as and accounted for as fully certified emission reductions measured in terms of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e), that could be fungible, transferable and exchangeable within carbon compliance markets.Footnote ⁵⁸ Such legibility is the essential precondition for the inclusion of forests in international carbon markets, and thus the current accounting rules create the regulatory conditions that could enable REDD+ credits to be used as offsets by purchasing countries or entities in the future.Footnote ⁵⁹

The Warsaw Framework did not set up an institutional arrangement for REDD+, but it calls for the ‘effective and transparent coordination of support’ for forest sector mitigation activitiesFootnote ⁶⁰ and the transnational sharing of information and ‘best practices’.Footnote ⁶¹ Institutional arrangements were the subject of ‘much debate and disagreement during the negotiations’;Footnote ⁶² however, no real decision was reached: rather, international co-ordination is to be organised through an ‘information hub’ on the UNFCCC Web Platform.Footnote ⁶³ Countries are ‘invited’ to designate a ‘national entity or focal point’ to liaise with the Secretariat and other Convention bodies,Footnote ⁶⁴ and ‘encouraged’ to meet with other Parties, financing entities and civil society representatives and other stakeholders annually on a voluntary basis.Footnote ⁶⁵

The Warsaw Framework establishes a decentralised model where responsibility for developing key aspects of the regulatory infrastructure for REDD+ is devolved to host nation-states but is subject to international review and verification. The elements of the framework were initially articulated in the Cancun Agreements that called on developing country Parties to develop:

• a national strategy or action plan;Footnote ⁶⁶

• a national forest emission reference level and/or forest reference level;Footnote ⁶⁷

• a ‘robust and transparent’ national forest monitoring system for monitoring and reporting;Footnote ⁶⁸ and

• a system on providing information on how safeguards are being ‘addressed and respected’.Footnote ⁶⁹

Host nation-states therefore formally establish their regulatory frameworks ‘in accordance with national circumstances and respective capabilities’, but must in practice do so with reference to internationally determined expectations and requirements. These processes therefore become ‘internationalised’: subsequent COP agreements have confirmed that many of these elements are subject to international technical verification. Whilst these processes are therefore formally decentralised, verification ensures some standardisation, not necessarily of content, but of in the methodologies, practices and modes of expertise relied upon. In the following section, I will briefly outline these aspects of the REDD+ regulatory framework in greater detail.

2 Alternative Policy Approaches

Since Bolivia proposed a further REDD+ agenda item on ‘alternative policy approaches’ in 2011, such non-result-based approaches have also been endorsed by COP decisions, but no real mechanisms have been established to support or incentivise such alternative approaches. The 2011 Durban decision on REDD+ noted that ‘joint mitigation and adaptation approaches for the integral and sustainable management of forests as a non-market alternative’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ and the 2012 Doha decision requested further methodological guidance on how ‘non-market-based approaches, such as joint mitigation and adaptation approaches for the sustainable management of forests … could be developed to support the implementation’ of REDD activities.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The 2013 Warsaw framework for REDD+ likewise encouraged financing entities ‘to continue to provide financial resources to alternative policy approaches, such as joint mitigation and adaptation approaches for the integral and sustainable management of forests’.Footnote ¹⁰² A 2015 COP decision at Paris explicitly concluded the consideration of alternative policy approaches including joint mitigation and adaptation approaches for the integral and sustainable management of forests.Footnote ¹⁰³ It identified such ‘alternative policy approaches’ as ‘one of the alternatives to result-based payments’, noting that such policy approaches may ‘contribute to the long-term sustainability of the implementation of [REDD+] activities’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ It also clarified that such approaches were subject to the previous methodological guidance and to the guidance on systems and safeguards.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This decision encouraged developing country Parties interested in such approaches to prepare national strategies or action plans, to identify their support needs, develop proposals about the potential contribution of such approaches and consider outcomes and areas of improvement.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The decision also noted that financing entities are encouraged to provide financial resources for alternative policy approaches.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Nevertheless, although the decision encouraged financial support for such activities it did not establish any mechanisms to incentivise such approaches to provide international support for their enactment.

The UNFCCC negotiations on REDD+ have therefore developed a regulatory framework that makes it possible for activities to avoid deforestation be made legible as ‘result-based actions’ measured in terms of one 1tCO₂e, through an internationally verified process. This framework could therefore enable forest carbon to be incorporated in international carbon markets. Although there was also a separate agenda on ‘alternative policy’ approaches, the conclusions of this workstream are simply permissive and do not put in place measures to facilitative or mandate that such activities be undertaken or that support for them be provided. Despite extensive debate and deliberation, a number of key issues relating to environmental integrity remain unaddressed by the REDD+ framework. The problem of ensuring permanence of carbon sequestration and preventing reversals of carbon sequestration savings has not been properly resolved. As stated in a recent UNFCCC report, it is ‘widely accepted that there are risks of reversals associated with … mitigation actions relating to forests’Footnote ¹⁰⁸ that are inadequately addressed by current safeguards.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Although various risk-mitigation techniques to protect against such reversals have been proposed – including REDD+ unit reserves (or buffers) or the creation of an insurance system that requires compensation (financial or of credits) for reversalsFootnote ¹¹⁰ – these are not required as a part of the Warsaw Framework. The problem of additionality – that is, ensuring that any carbon ‘savings’ attributed to REDD+ are ‘additional’ to what would otherwise have happened without the REDD+ project – also has not been satisfactorily resolved. Although reference levels are subject to international verification, the establishment of any counterfactual projection remains inherently indeterminate. There are also no real mechanisms in place to prevent leakage – the displacement of deforestation from the REDD+ jurisdiction to other jurisdictions sub-nationally or internationally. Although a safeguard calls for ‘actions to reduce displacement of emissions’,Footnote ¹¹¹ the lack of universal participation as well as the mix of national and sub-national baselines means that leakage remains a real risk. Finally, although the Warsaw Framework talks about the need to address ‘drivers of deforestation’, REDD+ remains a mechanism that addresses ‘supply-side’ factors rather than any ‘demand’ leading to deforestation. REDD+’s narrow focus that locates the problem of deforestation in developing countries means that more structural drivers and internationalised demands for agricultural expansion, pulp, timber and palm oil remain unaddressed.Footnote ¹¹² Therefore, despite the development of a complex accounting system, the inherent uncertainties in any attempt to posit what would have otherwise have happened in the future, to measure ‘saved’ emissions against that baseline, and then ensure that such ‘savings’ are permanent, means forest carbon remains an inherently indeterminate commodity.

1 Demonstration Activities

Demonstration activities represent a space of international/local REDD+ experimental ‘learning-by-doing’ that operate to generate specific knowledges, technologies and practices for REDD+ as well as producing new norms from on-the-ground facts. The REDD+ literature envisions that demonstration activities play a central role in ‘build[ing] confidence and ensur[ing] that mechanisms and institutions are fit for purpose’,Footnote ¹¹⁵ as well as testing approaches to MRV, benefit-sharing and credit transfer amongst others. By September 2016, the International Database on REDD+ Projects identified 454 projects, 344 of which were active, 67 completed prior to 2016 and 43 pending, located across 56 different countries.Footnote ¹¹⁶

At the 2007 Bali COP, a methodological decision invited Parties to ‘further strengthen and support ongoing efforts to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation on a voluntary basis,’Footnote ¹¹⁷ thereby encouraging action to prepare for the actualisation and implementation of REDD+ in parallel with the ongoing negotiations. The decision encouraged developed country Parties to support capacity-building and provide technical assistance and technology transfer (especially relating to data collection, estimating emissions and monitoring and reporting) and to address the institutional needs of developing countries to support the implementation of REDD+.Footnote ¹¹⁸ It also encouraged Parties to ‘explore a range of actions, identify options and undertake efforts, including demonstration activities’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Such ‘demonstration projects’ have become sites of experimental ‘learning-by-doing’, which not only seek to actualise the legal norms but actively influence their development. For example, the objectives of the Kalimantan Forest Carbon Partnership, an Australian-sponsored ‘demonstration project’ located in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, included trialling an ‘innovative market-orientated approach to financing and implementing measures for REDD+’ in order to provide ‘useful and practical lessons to support international efforts to establish a REDD+ mechanism’ and ‘inform a future climate change agreement’.Footnote ¹²⁰ These practices and processes that are endorsed and encouraged, but are formally outside the official UNFCCC framework, therefore need to be understood as sites of norm construction. These are sites that produce and determine methodologies, processes and visions through which REDD+ is actualised, even as these methodologies may be subject to intense contestation and controversy within the deliberative and consensus-driven formal negotiating spaces.

Critically, however, this process of learning-by-doing is not merely preparatory for REDD+ but is a key aspect of how REDD+ is envisioned. In this way REDD+ reflects several principles of ‘experimentalist governance’ frameworks, especially the concept of continuing iterative development and the need for continuous feedback, flexibility and adaptability.Footnote ¹²¹ In a different vein, scholars of science and technology studies have described carbon markets as ‘on-going collective experiments’.Footnote ¹²² These scholars understand economics as performative, in that it is not simply ‘a form of knowledge that depicts an already existing state of affairs but … a set of instruments and practices that contribute to the construction of economic settings, actors, and institutions’.Footnote ¹²³ Timothy Mitchell has analysed the ways economic theory, as a method for testing its arguments, is required to conduct experiments in the world constituted as a laboratory.Footnote ¹²⁴ He draws on Michel Callon’s insight that economics is best understood ‘not as a form of knowledge that pictures the world’ but an activity that ‘participates in the pre-formation of the worlds to which it belongs, by helping set up socio-technical agencies/arrangements’ that are themselves part of a wider process of continuous experimentation.Footnote ¹²⁵ Callon has described the process of establishing carbon markets as itself an economic experiment, writing that ‘what is designed, tested and evaluated is a socio-technical agencement that combines material, textual and procedural elements’.Footnote ¹²⁶

When the construction of carbon markets is understood as a ‘governance experiment’ that operates not as a ‘rational device to identify the best solution, but a social process in which a new reality is constructed’, a much more complicated relation between vision and implementation in REDD+ becomes evident.Footnote ¹²⁷ Rather than a straightforward relation between constructing a problem and proposing a solution, economic experiments are more ambitious attempts to ‘reconfigure the world so that problem and solution works in it’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Voß and Schroth define ‘experimentation’ as the ‘deliberate production of experiences for finding out what works’.Footnote ¹²⁹ They note how, in some understandings, experiments are not simply a process of ‘adapting to reality’ but rather a process of ‘making reality’.Footnote ¹³⁰ They thus highlight how experimentation is a ‘way of deliberately changing the world’ that ‘enables learning, not about a pre-existing reality, but about the possibilities of knowing and doing reality differently’.Footnote ¹³¹ This means that experimentation is never a neutral process,Footnote ¹³² especially given that it is always ‘deeply embedded in institutional, cultural and material settings and asymmetric power relations’.Footnote ¹³³ Given how power shapes experimental practices ‘leaving institutional development up to decentralized trials … may not produce the best solutions, but in fact help already powerful actors to assert their vision of collective order against other[s]’.Footnote ¹³⁴

Demonstration projects, as sites of experimentation within the broader carbon market experiment, can therefore be understood not just as directed towards the demonstration of specific outcomes but an investment in the process of creating the conditions necessary for the realisation of carbon markets. ‘Demonstration projects’ should thus be understood as a ‘laboratory’ existing in a space of ‘non-legality’Footnote ¹³⁵ in that they are promoted by the UNFCCC framework, yet not subject to it. The constant reiteration that such projects are ‘experimental’ in nature moreover limits the perchance of critiques about their failures or problems, given that all failings can be rationalised as part of a process of ‘learning-by-doing’. However, the practices promoted within this space nonetheless create specific realities: they enable the formation of particular expectations in and of different actors and stakeholders; they encourage particular forms of behaviours and interactions; and they require the establishment of particular organisational and institutional structures. These ‘produced facts’ are then taken as given within the spaces where institutionalised regulatory decisions are being made, where they retrospectively become ‘inscribed into a law already prepared to accept it as a practice’.Footnote ¹³⁶

2 REDD+-Readiness

The process of ‘REDD+-readiness’ refers to ‘[a]ctions aimed at developing technical and institutional capacity in developing countries’.Footnote ¹³⁷ It is broadly recognised that ‘the legal framework will be the vehicle through which many of the international requirements for REDD+ will be translated by forest countries into tangible and specific national requirements, according to their unique circumstances’.Footnote ¹³⁸ The Cancun Agreements followed The Eliasch Review recommendations in adopting a three-staged approach to REDD+ implementation. While The Eliasch Review’s explicit long-term goal is ‘the full inclusion [of forests] in a global carbon market’, it stresses the need for public interventions and public funds to enable and facilitate such a transition, given that a ‘smooth transition path is also important for building confidence in the system’.Footnote ¹³⁹ After reviewing three transition options The Eliasch Review recommends a hybrid model in which REDD+ countries would be ‘accessing finance under incentive-based schemes from a combination of carbon markets (regional and national emissions trading schemes) and other sources while carbon markets grow smoothly over time’. This hybrid approach was specifically recommended over the alternative possibilities of either immediately moving to a market-based cap-and-trade system or remaining solely with funding from non-market sources.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

The process of REDD+-readiness involves preparing the following at the national level:

• REDD+ strategies and action plans;

• national or subnational reference levels;

• a robust and transparent system to measure, report and verify forest change;

• a system to provide information on how safeguards are being addressed and respected;

• a system for the receipt, management and disbursal of REDD+ finance.Footnote ¹⁴¹

The process of REDD+-readiness therefore sits between easy delimitations of the global and the local. It is, as William Boyd describes, the process by which

Similarly, the process of REDD+-readiness, unsettles distinctions between the public and private. It relies on public financing, but especially in the work of the FCPF, is arguably directed towards establishing the institutional conditions that can enable the expansion of private markets. Therefore, this discussion suggests REDD+-readiness should be understood as part of a process of ‘market construction’, where public funds are deployed to support the development of regulatory conditions that can enable private contracting and accumulation.

A number of multilateral processes have been established to support REDD+-readiness, including prominently the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF), the UN-REDD Programme (a collaboration between the FAO, UNDP and UNEP) and the Forest Investment Programme, which is part of the World Bank’s Climate Investment Funds. In addition, the Green Climate Fund – the financial mechanism under both the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement – is providing support and funding for REDD+-readiness. These initiatives are discussed below.

1 REDD+ As a Vision of Economic Valuation of Forests

The premise of REDD+ as a concept or idea is this: that making legible in economic terms the ‘value’ of forests’ carbon sequestration potential will provide economic incentives for forest protection by enabling the ‘value’ of standing forests to be better factored into decision-making; this will thereby shift decision-making practices in ways that lead to better forest protection outcomes. The UN-REDD Programme describes how ‘REDD+ … creates a financial value for the carbon stored in forests by offering incentives for developing countries to reduce emissions from forested lands and invest in low-carbon paths to sustainable development’.Footnote ²¹⁴ This idea that nature should be valued in economic terms underpins influential policy prescriptions to include forests in global carbon markets such as are found in the English Stern ReviewFootnote ²¹⁵ and The Eliasch Review.Footnote ²¹⁶ Eliasch writes that ‘as long as forest carbon or other ecosystem services are not reflected in the price of commodities produced from converted forest land, forests will – in financial terms – generally be worth more to landowners cut rather than standing’.Footnote ²¹⁷ He therefore argues that the costs of ecosystem services, including carbon storage and sequestration, need to be valued differently in order to change the current conditions in which it is ‘more lucrative to deforest and sell the resulting timber and agricultural produce than to leave forests standing … because the costs of the deforestation are not reflected in the price of the timber or agricultural produce’.Footnote ²¹⁸ In this sense, The Eliasch Review conceptualises the costs of deforestation as ‘externalities’ whose exclusion from the market creates a market failure whereby the ‘market will supply more timber and agricultural produce from deforested land than is efficient’.Footnote ²¹⁹ The underlying rationale of this policy prescription is that ‘if the costs of deforestation were factored into the price of products, their production would tend to shift to other land where they could be grown without deforestation’.Footnote ²²⁰ This conceptualisation, however, leaves unaddressed the concrete and material ways in which the demand for forest products drives processes of deforestation. Moreover, it is based on the assumption that there is a supply of available ‘other’ land, which ignores how such land may already be used for alternative purposes such as subsistence agriculture, which are critically important even if they bring low market returns. The rationality underpinning pricing mechanisms is that decisions about alternative land uses should be determined by relations of supply and demand rather than other – perhaps more deliberative – processes.

This focus on promoting the valuation of nature, including forests, in economic terms, has a longer history. In 1989, the Blueprint for Green Economy report commissioned by the UK government argued for the need to economically ‘value’ the environment and sought to outline mechanisms for that purpose.Footnote ²²¹ The development of improved valuation, pricing and incentive mechanisms has been a principle of ecological sustainable development since the early 1990s, based on the assumption that the real costs of polluting activities – and the real value of natural resources – are reflected in the prices paid by industry and consumers.Footnote ²²² This focus was adopted by the World Bank as the theme of their First Annual International Conference on Environmentally Sustainable Development in 1993.Footnote ²²³ Within the field of forest policy, a key message of the 1999 Our Forests, Our Future report produced by the World Commission on Forests and Sustainable Development was the need to value the ‘natural capital’ of forests.Footnote ²²⁴ These ideas were transferred into the forest regime through close collaborations between the epistemic community of environmental economic practitioners and those working on forest policy development. As documented by David Humphreys, some materials prepared for the Intergovernmental Panel on Forests (1995–97) for its work on ‘methodologies for the proper valuation of the multiple benefits of forests’ were in effect directly plagiarised from a report prepared by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) for the UK Overseas Development Administration.Footnote ²²⁵ Subsequently the World Bank was made the lead agency for the Intergovernmental Forum on Forests (1997–2000) work program on the ‘valuation of forest goods and services’.Footnote ²²⁶ In this role the Bank prepared background papers suggesting five areas where new markets could be established in forest goods and services to provide conservation incentives (including carbon sequestration, biodiversity and hydrological services as well as non-timber products and ecotourism).Footnote ²²⁷ Again Humphreys notes that ‘in several cases, language from the documents was used as a basis for negotiating Intergovernmental Forum on Forests proposals for action … [where in fact] in many cases the wording proposed by the World Bank survived the negotiations intact’.Footnote ²²⁸ These incidents, Humphreys argues, ‘reveal the limits of genuine intellectual debate on environmental valuation’ and the strong influence of certain actors that are part of ‘a knowledge-based network that shares agreement on the methodologies for environmental valuation in general, and forest valuation in particular’’.Footnote ²²⁹

Approaches focused on economic valuation have remained hegemonic in environmental policy-making, although for many proponents, economic valuation of nature is seen as only the first step in a much broader agenda. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment highlighted that ‘[t]he mere act of quantifying the value of ecosystem services cannot by itself change the incentives affecting their use or misuse’ and that changes to current practices are required to ‘take better account of these values’.Footnote ²³⁰ The UNEP-sponsored The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) initiative is perhaps the most prominent expression of this project of valuing nature in order to better factor ecosystem services within policy and decision-making.Footnote ²³¹ These practices of ‘valuing nature’ – and accounting for this value within decision-making and cost benefit analysis – has become a central theme of the ‘green economy’.Footnote ²³² A critical observer of this trend, geographer Sian Sullivan, describes the development of a growing industry of ‘accounting of socio-environmental relations’.Footnote ²³³ She highlights the reductive and repressive effects of an illusion of fixing the ‘value of nature’ in tradable and substitutable economic terms. Sullivan argues that when the ‘messy materiality of life’ is rendered ‘legible as discrete entities, individualised and abstracted from complex social and ecological entanglements’Footnote ²³⁴ and standardised, it has the effect of dismissing other logics of evaluation.Footnote ²³⁵ She further expresses concern ‘that diversities are lost in the world-making mission to fashion and fabricate the entire planet as an abstracted plane of (ac)countable, monetizable and potentially substitutable natural capital’.Footnote ²³⁶

Thus, in understanding REDD+ as a vision of the economic valuation of forests it is critical to recognise that the underlying economic assumptions, theories and models are not simply a description of how forest conservation does work but a prescription of how forest conservation should work. Moreover, these models have embedded in them numerous presuppositions about human nature and human motivations. Actualising these prescriptions, or making them real, thus necessarily also entails a micro-politics addressed to altering human behaviour, responses, drives and motivations.

2 REDD+ As a Vision of an ‘Offset’ in Transnational Carbon Markets

For many proponents REDD+ is imagined, not just as a mechanism to ‘value’ forest carbon, but as a mechanism to incorporate forest carbon as an ‘offset’ into international carbon markets. The Stern Review noted that carbon markets could ‘play an important role’ in providing incentives for curbing deforestation.Footnote ²³⁷ Further, The Eliasch Review assumes that in order to tackle forest emissions it is necessary to have a ‘well-designed mechanism for linking forest abatement to carbon markets’, in order to access public and private finance.Footnote ²³⁸ Charlotte Streck writes that REDD+ was ‘originally … conceived of as a market-based system’Footnote ²³⁹ and others confirm it was ‘originally conceived as a PES [payment for environmental services] system’ where it ‘was anticipated that the majority of funding would come from carbon markets’.Footnote ²⁴⁰

If REDD+ were to be confirmed as an offset mechanism – whereby purchased ‘emission reductions’ from countries of the Global South were able to contribute towards the compliance obligations of countries of the Global North – such a mechanism would be structured around the assumption that ‘emission reductions’ through reducing deforestation and forest degradation are equivalent to GHGs emitted elsewhere. Scholars have critically described and elaborated the work – representational, accounting and regulatory – that goes into enabling diverse actions to be presented as equivalent and substitutable,Footnote ²⁴¹ while simultaneously questioning these purported equivalences, especially the claimed equivalence between forest carbon and fossil carbon.Footnote ²⁴² However, the present analysis is not primarily concerned with whether such purported equivalences are real or an illusion but is focused on interrogating the productive effects of such claims to equivalence: that is, the effects of designating the outcomes of these very different practices and processes as equivalent.

This claim of equivalence between carbon emitted in the Global North and additional carbon sequestered in forests in the Global South establishes a strategic relation between the practices of resource extraction on one hand and the practices of conservation, preservation, sustainable engagement of forests and management of carbon stocks that make up REDD+ on the other. As such, the offset relation holds together two different ways of governing nature – one directed towards the appropriation of nature and the other towards stewardship of nature – that have historically been viewed as being in tension with one another: that is, the offset relation holds together an ‘extractive’ power over nature alongside a ‘productive’ power over nature. Resource extraction operates through the form and modality of anthropocentric power over the natural world, in which an absolute human mastery and domination of nature is justified by a divine biblical right.Footnote ²⁴³ Thus, as a modality of power it exhibits a parallel with a sovereign ‘power of life and death’ or to ‘take life or let live’, in which power is exercised primarily through deduction or subtraction and through a claim to a right of appropriation and seizure.Footnote ²⁴⁴ This biblical injunction to subdue the earth was, as Yoriko Otomo and Stephen Humphreys note, ‘relied upon by the Dominicans in the pre-Reformation era and, most pointedly, the Puritans afterwards’,Footnote ²⁴⁵ and it is a key organising principle of many legal theories.

Practices of conservation, preservation and scientific management display a different modality of anthropocentric power over the natural world to that of resource exploitation – namely stewardship or a form of pastoral power, whose motif is the shepherd rather than the king. In contrast to a despotic power based on its own absolute claim to sovereignty, stewardship manages its domain ‘on the basis of its claim to be operating under the auspices of a higher ethical power that, properly understood, guides the rulers’ concern for the well-being of those ruled’.Footnote ²⁴⁶ This is a ‘beneficent power’ whose purpose of doing ‘good’ manifests itself through a ‘power of care’Footnote ²⁴⁷ or a ‘duty’ to undertake its tasks of keeping watch in order to achieve its objective of collective salvation, or salvation as subsistence.Footnote ²⁴⁸ Such a ‘proper’ management of individuals, goods and wealth derives from conceptions of the art of governing a family and the paternal control exercised by a (male) household head over his wife, children and servants. The Greek word oïkos, meaning ‘home’ or household, is the etymological root of both economy and ecology.Footnote ²⁴⁹ The strategic relation that REDD+ instigates between these two different modalities of power therefore requires us not to bracket or downplay either one, but to think of them together, and ‘to account for and critically engage the integral co-implication and coevalness of “repressive” and “productive” formations’ by which life is governed.Footnote ²⁵⁰ Moreover, through the offset relation these practices are co-articulated and jointly encompassed in a broader framework directed towards maximising the aggregate productivity of nature. The strategic relation produced by the offset generates a rationality of aggregate global resource maximisation that is made concrete through the concept of ‘value’. The danger of such an approach, focused on maximising the aggregate 'value' of nature, is that an economic understanding of ‘value’ increasingly operates as a substitute for, or it displaces, the contestation over competing values. What is thereby lost are the ‘irreducible contestations over the values underlying and informing ecological science and environmental law’.Footnote ²⁵¹

1 Conservation

Practices of forest conservation or preservation have historically been counterpoised to processes of extraction, appropriation and translation of nature into a ‘resource’. Nonetheless, like practices of extraction, practices of conservation and the romanticised wilderness ideology that underpins them are structured by colonialist assumptions, that historically operated to make invisible the practices and histories of peoples living in places imagined as ‘wild’.Footnote ²⁷¹ National Parks or ‘wilderness areas’, whilst not autonomous jurisdictions,Footnote ²⁷² nonetheless remain a troubling figure of exclusion/inclusion in the law.Footnote ²⁷³ The ‘nature resource’, as Mick Smith argues, exists in a paradoxical legal position whereby it ‘is exempted from being a resource, freed from human domination, only by being already and always included within the remit of human domination’.Footnote ²⁷⁴ These practices were underpinned by the concept of ‘wilderness’ as a central theme of Romantic political and artistic movements. This concept, Humphreys and Otomo argue, has ‘implanted lasting notions of the beauty of “unspoilt” wilderness, imbued with a profound moral significance, that have endured to the present and provide the ideational backdrop specific to this body of international law’.Footnote ²⁷⁵ This fantasy of wilderness as a primitive Eden arose in a specific context, namely that of the nineteenth century colonising and industrialising bourgeoisie;Footnote ²⁷⁶ it did so to enable the Romantic bourgeois dreams of ‘authentic’ self-realisation; and it had dangerous effects, because this idea as ‘ideal’ sustains itself only through the erasure of people, law and livelihoods from these spaces.Footnote ²⁷⁷ As Robert Fletcher shows, the illusion that a wilderness free of human manipulation could engage with Indigenous peoples in only one of two ways: either through their deliberate erasure and making invisible the record of inhabitation and transversion of these spaces by, interventions in and transformation of ‘wilderness’ spaces by humans for millennia; or by recognising their presence, but ‘pronouncing indigenous people sub-human, and therefore incapable of diluting wilderness in the same manner as ‘civilized man’.Footnote ²⁷⁸

The establishment of ‘protected areas’ has been the main vehicle for in-situ conservation for ‘the protection of ecosystems, natural habitats and the maintenance of viable populations of species in natural surroundings’,Footnote ²⁷⁹ and it is ‘deeply embedded in the forest regime and other areas of global environmental governance’.Footnote ²⁸⁰ In the contemporary era, the conflicts between nature conservation and local livelihoods remain acute. Anthropologist Nancy Peluso has shown that a Romantic gaze continues to underpin ‘coercive conservation’ practices,Footnote ²⁸¹ and Mark Dowie has documented how such practices have produced ‘conservation refugees’.Footnote ²⁸² In the last two decades there has been a strong focus on ‘rights-based conservation’,Footnote ²⁸³ since the Durban Accord passed at the fifth International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Parks Congress announced a ‘new paradigm’ for protected areas that foregrounded the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities.Footnote ²⁸⁴ To facilitate ‘rights-based approaches’ to conservation various ‘soft law’ mechanisms have been developed and adopted such as codes of practice, principles and internal policies; nonetheless, the challenges of implementing such ‘rights-based approaches’ in practice have been considerable.Footnote ²⁸⁵ Since 2010 the issue of ‘green grabbing’, where large conservation projects have led to forced evictions, resettlement or decreased livelihood or subsistence access for local communities, has again come into sharp focus.Footnote ²⁸⁶ The UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, highlighted in 2016, how the ‘impact that conservation initiatives have on indigenous peoples has been a constant and recurring theme’.Footnote ²⁸⁷ She noted that conservation measures have resulted in a number of human rights violations, including the expropriation of land, forced displacement, denial of self-governance, lack of access to livelihoods and loss of culture and spiritual sites, non-recognition of Indigenous peoples’ own authority over land and resources, and denial of access to justice and reparation, including restitution and compensation.Footnote ²⁸⁸ She has noted specific concerns that ‘[w]hile the conservation community is in the process of adopting conservation measures that respect the human rights of indigenous peoples, considerable implementation gaps remain and new threats to human rights-based conservation are emerging’.Footnote ²⁸⁹ It is therefore unsurprising that the provision of further incentives for such activities through the carbon economy has raised concerns about the potential impact on peoples living in and around forested areas, something which will be discussed in greater detail in the next section.

2 Sustainable Management of Forests

The concept of ‘sustainable forest management’ (SFM) has been notoriously difficult to define. The ‘deliberately vague’ term was included in the 1992 Non-legally Binding Authoritative Statement of Principles for a Global Consensus on the Management, Conservation and Sustainable Development of All Types of Forests (the ‘Forest Principles’), which was agreed to at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.Footnote ²⁹⁰ Several regional processes have since attempted to define this term and develop indicators and criteria.Footnote ²⁹¹ As David Humphreys argues, the formulation of the concept of ‘sustainable development’ had a strong impact on the emergence of ‘sustainable forest management’ as a legal idea.Footnote ²⁹² This concept is central to the International Tropical Timber Agreement (1983, 1994 and 2006),Footnote ²⁹³ the first commodity agreement to also include conservation provisions. Subsequent to the articulation of the Forest Principles, the 1995 protocol to the Lomé IV Convention was the first international legal agreement between governments from the North and South on SFM.Footnote ²⁹⁴ The concept of SFM is central to the four global objectives that organise the 2007 Non-Legally Binding Instrument on All Types of Forests, especially the first objective – to ‘reverse the loss of forest cover worldwide through sustainable forest management, including protection, restoration, afforestation and reforestation, and increase efforts to prevent forest degradation’.Footnote ²⁹⁵ This instrument also recognises that SFM, as a ‘dynamic and evolving concept, aims to maintain and enhance the economic, social and environmental values of all types of forests, for the benefit of present and future generations’.Footnote ²⁹⁶

However, the concept of SFM has been critiqued for its environmental and social limitations. Global Witness writes that ‘SFM is a poorly defined term that in practice has included highly destructive activities such as industrial-scale logging in intact natural (primary) forests’.Footnote ²⁹⁷ Similar to how ‘sustainable development’ has been critiqued as a paradigm that facilitates the sustaining of capitalism rather than promotion of ecological values, SFM has been described as a ‘nasty little euphemism’, that in practice allows the continuation of destructive logging practices.Footnote ²⁹⁸ As Global Witness alleges:

The development of forestry science can be traced to seventeenth century European attempts to understand the detrimental consequences of over-utilisation of resources alongside the need to safeguard them for future generations. Eighteenth century German scientific forestry formulated the concept of ‘Nachhaltigkeitsprinzip’ (sustainability principle) and developed quantitative methods to estimate growing stock and develop a yield-based system directed towards the maximisation of ‘sustained yield’.Footnote ³⁰⁰ In these practices, nature is still fundamentally legible as a resource, extractable for human use, but where the impetus of resource utilisation needs to be tempered with the capacity of the resource to reproduce and regenerate. This ideology of scientific conservation was given impetus through colonial exploitation.Footnote ³⁰¹ When the practices were deployed in the colonies, their ‘actual experience’ and ‘professed aims’ often conflicted.Footnote ³⁰² .

Governance of forests has tended to assume a highly centralised form, one that depends on development of standardised measures and ‘ways of seeing’. These practices have had the effect of strengthening the centralisation of political authority and strengthening state control over forested lands.Footnote ³⁰³ In anthropologist James Scott’s influential account, practices of scientific forest management are emblematic of a specific modernist governance paradigm. He documents the emergence of a specific way of seeing the world that has sought to make phenomena legible in quantifiable terms from a top-down perspective.Footnote ³⁰⁴ This model of colonial forestry produced conflict given the reality that areas now delineated as ‘forest reserves’ were owned, inhabited, managed and used by peoples in those areas: ‘curtailing the rights of these peoples inevitably sparked resistance, which either had to be suppressed through forced removals, fines, exactions or worse punishments or accommodated by permitting certain forest-based activities to continue as “privileges” subject to strict controls.’Footnote ³⁰⁵ Practices of forest management continue to generate social conflict, as well as excluding and impoverishing local communities. For example, a 2000 World Bank evaluation report describing the impact of ‘large-scale commercial interests’ in Indonesia found as follows:

In the mid twentieth century, the concept of ‘sustained yield’ was progressively broadened from a singular focus on timber, to encompass the multiple uses of forests, and consider social, as well as economic factors. The Collaborative Partnership on Forests, founded in 2000 and made up of 14 intergovernmental organisationsFootnote ³⁰⁷ in 2008, promoted SFM as ‘an effective framework for forest-based climate change mitigation and adaptation’.Footnote ³⁰⁸ In recent years there has been increasing attention to the ‘multiple benefits’ or ‘multiple functions’ of forests.Footnote ³⁰⁹ For example, a report of the United Nation Forum on Forests (UNFF) meeting states:

This focus on multiple uses suggests that ‘the different forest interests were reconcilable and that no intrinsic value conflicts existed between different ideas of future use’, and therefore such ‘win-win’ rhetoric can be ‘efficient as a way of holding different agendas together’.Footnote ³¹¹ However, in practice, this conception of the multiple uses of forests and the optimal yield of a range of different benefits is often quickly narrowed to a focus on the most economically productive uses. In the case of REDD+ such a rhetoric of ‘multiple benefits’ is arguably in tension with the focus in REDD+ on ‘the conservation of forest carbon stocks’ and the ‘enhancement of forest carbon stocks’.Footnote ³¹² Thus, in many ways, although its focus is carbon rather than timber, REDD+ arguably replicates many of problematic dynamics of SFM. Finally, the recognition that the activities of conservation and sustainable forest management each have conflicted histories highlights the need to be attentive to the social impact of REDD+ programs and how they risk perpetuating dangerous dynamics that consolidate power and inequalities. It is therefore unsurprising that the potential social impacts of REDD+ have been a key concern, as the next section discusses.

1 Debates in the UNFCCC and by NGOs

It is important to recognise the background conditions under which the push for REDD+ safeguards has gained particular traction, namely the intensification of processes that restructure land relations and promote human dispossession in the Global South. A key characteristic of the present era is the ‘explosion’ of (trans)national commercial land transactions and speculation (‘land grabbing’) driven by large-scale, export-orientated agricultural production (including biofuels), as well as extractive industries and conservation practices.Footnote ³¹⁷ The LandMatrix database documented over 1000 large-scale land concluded deals (over 200 hectares) affecting almost 40 million hectares of land, an area over 4,300 times the size of Manhattan, between 2000 and 2015.Footnote ³¹⁸ These new forms of ‘accumulation by dispossession’Footnote ³¹⁹ have produced, as Saskia Sassen documents, a new global logic of expulsion.Footnote ³²⁰ The expulsion of life deemed ‘superfluous’Footnote ³²¹ or ‘disposable’,Footnote ³²² she argues, is not accidental. Rather, such expulsions are produced by a ‘systemic logic at work’ in ‘predatory formations’ that are part of ‘larger assemblage of elements, conditions and mutually reinforcing dynamics’.Footnote ³²³ This global context has made concerns that REDD+ could represent a form of ‘green grabbing’ particularly acute.Footnote ³²⁴

The first major report to address the potential social impacts of REDD+ was Seeing ‘RED’? Forests, Climate Change Mitigation and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’, written by Tom Griffiths for the Forest Peoples’ Program and launched to coincide with COP13 (Bali, 2007).Footnote ³²⁵ It highlighted that implementing such projects without proper regard for rights and social and livelihood issues could give rise to the following risks:

• renewed and even increased state and ‘expert’ control over forests;

• overzealous government support for anti-people and exclusionary models of forest conservation (evictions, expropriation) to protect lucrative forest carbon ‘reservoirs’;

• unjust targeting of indigenous and marginal peoples as the ‘drivers’ of deforestation;

• violations of customary land and territorial rights;

• state and NGO zoning of forest lands without the informed participation of forest dwellers;

• unequal imposition of the costs of forest protection on indigenous peoples and local communities;

• unequal and abusive community contracts;

• land speculation, land grabbing and land conflicts (competing claims on [avoided deforestation] compensation);

• corruption and embezzlement of international funds by national elites;

• increasing inequality and potential conflict between recipients and non-recipients of [avoided deforestation] funds;

• potential conflict among indigenous communities (over acceptance or rejection of [avoided deforestation] schemes)[.]Footnote ³²⁶

The report argued that any effective policy ‘on forests and climate change mitigation must be based on the recognition of rights, respect for the principle of free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) and requirements for progressive forests sector tenure and governance reforms’, otherwise it would perpetuate injustices.Footnote ³²⁷ These concerns were quickly taken up by human rights advocates and civil society actors. At the launch of the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility at the Bali COP in 2007 the (then) Chair of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples (UNPFII), Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, strongly condemned the World Bank’s failure to consult properly with Indigenous peoples prior to the Facility’s launch.Footnote ³²⁸

By 2008, questions concerning the social impacts of REDD+ had permeated into UNFCCC processes. The report from a June 2008 SBSTA workshop on methodological issues associated with REDD+ noted:

Simultaneously, social mobilisation around the potential social implications of REDD+ continued. The ‘Accra Briefing’ (August 2008) by NGOs stressed the need for the ‘recognition and enforcement of customary and territorial land rights’ and reference to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in any REDD+ policy.Footnote ³³⁰ More critically, Director of the Global Forest Coalition Simone Lovera described REDD+ as ‘another disaster in the making’ and a ‘fairy-tale about a simple solution to climate change’.Footnote ³³¹ In November 2008 the Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) report REDD Myths concluded that if REDD+ were to significantly increase the value of forests ‘it is likely [would have] extremely detrimental impacts on some of the poorest people in the world’.Footnote ³³² It argued that REDD+ implementation could potentially displace millions, and that there were no guarantees that Indigenous peoples would benefit from its implementation unless secure land rights were ensured.Footnote ³³³ The report also cited additional risks of REDD+ such as ‘conflict between and within communities (especially where land rights are unclear), changes to local power structures and shifts in social and traditional values and behaviours’.Footnote ³³⁴ Survival International’s The Most Inconvenient Truth of All: Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples (2009) likewise suggested REDD+ could make recognition of land rights more difficult and undermine existing recognition as well as potentially restrict traditional land use activities.Footnote ³³⁵

Alongside this focus on the risks REDD+ could present to forest peoples, a distinct but related discourse emerged that emphasised potential benefits REDD+ could provide to peoples living in and around forest areas. A 2008 report by Overseas Development Initiative (ODI) canvassed design and policy options for how REDD+ could be made to ‘work for the poor’.Footnote ³³⁶ It identified that there were pragmatic as well as moral reasons for a ‘pro-poor’ approach to REDD+, including improved long-term project sustainability, reduced risks for investors and buyers, the potential for increased returns or ‘niche’ market opportunities as well as donor contractual and legal obligations.Footnote ³³⁷ These discussions highlighted REDD+ as a potential opportunity to promote co-benefits and stressed that the viability of REDD+ depended upon it being perceived as not causing harm and in fact as having positive impacts. A report by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) highlighted that REDD+ ‘deriv(es) much of its legitimacy and potential effectiveness from its ability to improve the welfare of the forest-dependent poor and foster development in some of the poorest regions of the world’.Footnote ³³⁸ Similar conclusions were reached by the influential Eliasch Review that recognised the potential risks REDD+ could pose to those living in and around forest areas. For Eliasch, participation was key to mitigating these risks: ‘the full participation of forest communities will make reforms more likely to succeed and benefit the poor.’Footnote ³³⁹

This emphasis on ‘rights-based’ or ‘pro-poor’ REDD+ has become central to the mandate of the UN-REDD Programme, whose Framework Document articulates the Programme’s guiding principles as a ‘human-rights-based approach’, ‘gender equity’, ‘environmental sustainability’, ‘results-based management’ and ‘capacity development’.Footnote ³⁴⁰ At the Programme’s launch in September 2008, participation and benefit-sharing were emphasised, with UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner stating, ‘REDD must benefit local communities and indigenous peoples as much as it benefits national economies and the global environment. If that is done the prospects are exciting and potentially far reaching.’Footnote ³⁴¹

The importance of participation was reiterated in Global Witness’ report Honest Engagement: Transparency and Civil Society Participation in REDD (February 2009) that stressed ‘enhancing transparency and understanding of the process, and ensuring broad engagement of civil society organizations and indigenous groups, must move to the top of the agenda if REDD is to avoid failure.’Footnote ³⁴² Other civil society reports, such as FERN’s An Overview of Selected REDD+ Proposals (November 2008), similarly focused on the centrality of rights as ‘crucial to forest conservation’ and the imperatives of tenure reform, warning that without clearly defined property rights REDD+ would fail.Footnote ³⁴³ Released in May 2009, the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) report Tenure in REDD: Start-point or Afterthought? foregrounded the issues of tenure and forest governance, and emphasised that questions of land and resource tenure needed to be given greater attention in REDD+ implementation to ensure both the equity and effectiveness of REDD+.Footnote ³⁴⁴ A subsequent consensus quickly developed that tenure clarification was a precondition for, and potentially co-benefit arising from, REDD+ activities.

A 2009 report by CIFOR and IUCN lists potential benefits that REDD+ for people living in and around forest areas, including:

• encouraging government action to secure and formalize land tenure for forest dwellers;

• generating revenue that governments could direct to social services in rural areas (health care centres, schools, water systems, etc.);

• creating new income streams for forest-dwellers;

• maintaining forests’ regulating ecosystem services … which may enhance adaptive capacity in a changing climate; and

• maintaining forests’ provisioning ecosystem services … which may also help buffer communities from the shocks of [climate related] reduced agricultural yields.Footnote ³⁴⁵

A further IUCN briefing document noted that REDD+ projects may improve livelihoods and provide opportunities to strengthen capacity of Indigenous peoples’ organisations and communities, whilst an increased awareness of Indigenous peoples’ role in forest management may contribute to further recognition to Indigenous peoples’ traditional knowledge systems.Footnote ³⁴⁶ It concluded that if rights are recognised REDD+ is more likely to achieve mitigation and sustainable development objectives.Footnote ³⁴⁷

The discussions on the social impacts of REDD+ increasingly came to be structured in accordance with two dominant frames: firstly, one focused on the risks REDD+ projects might present to people living in and around forested areas that emphasises the need to manage these risks; and secondly, one focused on benefits REDD+ projects might present to people living in and around forested areas that emphasised the need to put in place measures to ensure that such benefits were realised. Both these discourses, around risks and around benefits, focused on how REDD+ could be carried out, rather than whether it should be. That is, the two dominant positions taken in debates over social impacts both seemed to accept the existence or rolling out of REDD+ as a given, and primarily focused on ways in which REDD+ could be implemented in order to either minimise risks or materialise potential benefits for forest people. Thus, the dominant framing of social debates increasingly foreclosed critiques of REDD+ as a project and instead directed attention to its mode of implementation.Footnote ³⁴⁸

2 Debates within the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues

This section turns to consider how a similar grammar of argumentation, as that analysed in civil society debates above, was adopted in discussions about REDD+ at the UNPFII between 2008 and 2013. It shows how within the UNPFII debates, individuals and organisations that were critical of the idea of REDD+ were increasingly sidelined, and the institutional focus shifted to addressing how REDD+ should be implemented in order to best manage risks and realise potential benefits for people living in forested areas.

‘We want to speak’ was the collective call from a caucus in the back of the room on 2 May 2008, the concluding day of the Seventh Session of the UNPFII. Initially, the Chair of the session, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, attempted to continue through the agenda, but she was prevented from doing so as the clapping and chanting from the back of the room intensified in speed and volume. Delegates in the two back rows were on their feet calling out: ‘We want to make a statement!’, ‘You have to listen to us — we want that you hear us.’, ‘Indigenous peoples want to make a statement!’ ‘Madame Chair — we want to speak.’ The Chair offered to give the interjectors the floor once ‘business’ had been finished, but the protests continued and security personnel were called into the session. It was only when the situation risked spiralling out of control, after Indigenous delegates were almost forcefully evicted from the United Nations space that claimed to represent and facilitate their voices, that the Chair requested security staff to leave and reorganised proceedings to allow time to listen to a statement prepared by the Caucus Indigenas de Abya Yala.Footnote ³⁴⁹

The commotion was sparked by recommendations that had been presented to the UNPFII on carbon market ‘offset’ mechanisms under the CDM and REDD+.Footnote ³⁵⁰ One of the recommendations described the CDM as a ‘good example of the kind of partnership that will become increasingly important’,Footnote ³⁵¹ and called for greater engagement with Indigenous peoples in the process of designing and implementing such programs. Another recommendation called on World Bank carbon funds to centrally involve Indigenous peoples in their project design, implementation and evaluation.Footnote ³⁵² These recommendations calling for more Indigenous participation and voice in REDD+ projects ran counter to the opposition to REDD+ articulated by some Indigenous groups and their representatives in the UNPFII, who saw the commodification of nature as fundamentally incompatible with their worldview and cosmology. Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environment Network, recalls that throughout the Seventh Session ‘intervention after intervention of our Indigenous brothers and sisters from the Global South said, “This is wrong, we do not support REDD, we do not support these offset initiatives.”’Footnote ³⁵³ He recounts that ‘despite this overwhelming opposition [to carbon trading] we got [a report] from the permanent forum members promoting … these World Bank initiatives’.Footnote ³⁵⁴

After the commotion subsided, a petition addressed to the UNPFII expressing opposition to REDD+ was read out, which asserted that ‘[t]he vast majority of indigenous peoples feel that the REDD will not benefit Indigenous Peoples, but in fact will result in [further] violations of Indigenous Peoples’ rights’.Footnote ³⁵⁵ In response, some amendments were made to the recommendations, and the Permanent Forum recommended that REDD+ and the ‘renewed political focus on forests’ should be ‘used towards securing the rights of indigenous peoples living in forests’.Footnote ³⁵⁶ The Permanent Forum also noted that

Since this incident several reports by Special Rapporteurs appointed by the UNPFII have addressed the impacts of carbon-offset mechanisms on Indigenous peoples.Footnote ³⁵⁸ The 2013 report, by Paul Kanyinke Sena, Myrna Cunningham and Bertie Xavier, briefly reviews the experiences and positions of Indigenous organisations and communities around the world in relation to REDD+. It acknowledges the

This passage speaks to critical ‘on the ground’ realities about how REDD+ is being implemented and the abuses of power evident in some REDD+ schemes – echoing similar documentation of abuses in REDD+ implementation that have been confirmed in other NGO reports.Footnote ³⁶⁰ However, the UNPFII report positions these examples as at one end of a ‘wide spectrum’, and also highlights opposite cases, ‘where the initiative for a project springs from a community decision, perhaps as a way of funding its own previously determined territorial management and community development aspirations.’Footnote ³⁶¹ The report thereby implies that the problems associated with REDD+ are not inherent to the scheme but are instead produced by a lack of good governance, information or understanding, or are the product of corruption or bad faith. The report further positions properly implemented REDD+ schemes as an opportunity for Indigenous peoples to consolidate their rights.Footnote ³⁶² It therefore reflects the growing convergence between rights discourses and REDD+ imperatives evident both at a rhetorical level but also in a proliferation of reports on rights in REDD+ and ‘best practice’ guidelines.

The report acknowledged that there are at least two divergent positions adopted by Indigenous groups in relation to REDD+, but it failed to acknowledge the deeper ontological and normative reasons why some groups might have rejected REDD+. It described ‘two different scenarios’, namely:

1. (a) Organizations radically oppose REDD-plus owing mainly to insecurity as to the rights of indigenous peoples, the weakness of existing national legal frameworks to protect those rights and the uncertainties of the Framework Convention negotiations on REDD-plus. Those organizations are strongly opposed to the carbon market.

2. (b) Organizations consider the REDD-plus model as [offering] opportunities for indigenous peoples. Although they share reservations about the risks that this model offers if indigenous peoples’ rights are not fully recognized and strong safeguards are not in place, some organizations are open to the voluntary carbon market.Footnote ³⁶³

Despite acknowledging many reports of communities signing ‘highly disadvantageous agreements’,Footnote ³⁶⁴ the report engages only minimally with the former position, and concludes that ‘REDD-plus offers opportunities for indigenous peoples to consolidate their rights, including tenure of their territories and the implementation of community-led livelihood strategies.’Footnote ³⁶⁵ It thus focuses on ‘the nature of potential benefits to indigenous peoples and how those benefits could be secured through the various safeguard mechanisms being developed’.Footnote ³⁶⁶ As in the discussions of safeguards described above, this focus eludes the normative question of whether REDD+ should be implemented. Instead, the attention is directed to questions of REDD+’s implementation: how to manage the potential risks of REDD+ and how to promote benefits through REDD+.

3 The Gradual Elaboration of Safeguards

As discussions about the social impacts on REDD+ progressed, a consensus developed that the implementation of social safeguards is a key means to minimise risks and promote benefits to forest peoples. The road towards the elaboration of safeguards in the UNFCCC was, however, far from smooth. At Poznań (COP14, 2008), Parties and observers were invited ‘to submit … their views on issues relating to indigenous people and local communities for the development and application of methodologies’.Footnote ³⁶⁷ This wording was the subject of intense dispute: initial draft wording had also included ‘noting the rights and importance of engaging indigenous peoples and other local communities’. However, this reference to ‘rights’ was removed after lobbying by the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia,Footnote ³⁶⁸ sparking civil society protestsFootnote ³⁶⁹ that demanded ‘an unequivocal reference to rights and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous peoples be reinserted into the draft COP14 Decision text on REDD.’Footnote ³⁷⁰ The language used by SBSTA also ignored the earlier address to the session by UNPFII Chair Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, who had called for the UNDRIP to ‘be used as an overarching framework for the design, methodologies, implementation and monitoring and evolution of REDD+’ and had stated that no projects should occur on Indigenous lands without free, prior and informed consent.Footnote ³⁷¹ At the final SBSTA session, a representative from the International Indigenous Peoples’ Forum on Climate Change sought to speak to express profound disappointment over the removal of ‘rights’ language and the use of the singular rather than the collective term ‘indigenous peoples’.Footnote ³⁷² The Chair prevented her from speaking by saying:

Although the UNFCCC COP process allows for more civil society participation and inclusion of Indigenous voices than many other international legal institutions,Footnote ³⁷⁴ this incident highlights how there are still broader institutional failings to provide space and meaningful participation for diverse and oppositional voices. Moreover, this incident reveals the limitations of calls for participation and the broader issue of to what extent these institutional spaces are able to hear and take on board such voices, even if they are allowed to speak.

Subsequent to the Poznań COP14 multiple submissions from Parties and observer groups were received by SBSTA.Footnote ³⁷⁵ Many submissions stressed the need to fully involve local communities in monitoring and implementation and the necessity for safeguards and tenure clarification; many submissions also stressed the necessity of a rights-based approach, including provisions for consultation towards free, prior and informed consent and other rights articulated in the UNDRIP. At Copenhagen a methodological decision on REDD+ recognised the ‘need for full and effective engagement of indigenous peoples and local communities in, and the potential contribution of their knowledge to, monitoring and reporting of activities’,Footnote ³⁷⁶ although a separate draft text on safeguards could not be agreed upon.Footnote ³⁷⁷

As discussed previously, the 2010 Cancun Agreements listed seven safeguards that should be ‘promoted and supported’, and also requested that countries, ‘when preparing national REDD+ strategies or plans … ensur[e] the full and effective participation of relevant stakeholders, inter alia indigenous peoples and local communities’.Footnote ³⁷⁸ Debates about the processes by which the implementation of safeguards is verified in order to ensure environmental integrity and to prevent negative social impacts has been one of the most fraught areas of REDD+ policy and there has been significant criticism of the fact that the extent to which safeguards are realised is not subject to international review.Footnote ³⁷⁹ While the safeguards, as expressed in UNFCCC agreements on REDD+, lack clear legal enforcement, they nonetheless have had a significant a normative impact. Several guides have been prepared on how to actualise safeguards within national REDD+ projects,Footnote ³⁸⁰ and it is assumed ‘host’ governments of REDD+ projects should develop capacity to implement and enforce safeguards as part of REDD+-readiness programs.Footnote ³⁸¹ Further, the language, style and approach of the UNFCCC safeguards is reflected in social and environmental safeguard provisions that have been adopted by other agencies involved in REDD+-readiness or the regulation of carbon markets in more tangible ways. As Margaret Young argues, there is an entire ‘plethora of informal or soft-law processes which have developed outside of the UNFCCC negotiations but which influence and draw upon these negotiations’, predominately arising out of bilateral and multilateral processes engaged in supporting REDD+-readiness activities.Footnote ³⁸² Safeguards have also been promoted through an emerging transnational governance network that includes the internal guidelines and procedures governing donors’ activities (such as international development agencies of countries, including Australia, Norway and Germany, and multilateral development banks) and policies or voluntary Codes of Conduct of implementing agencies (transnational conservation or aid bodies such as The Nature Conservancy, Flora and Fauna International, World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Wetlands International or CARE) alongside market-based certification schemes.Footnote ³⁸³

UN-REDD and the FCPF have developed harmonised Guidelines on Stakeholder Engagement in REDD+ Readiness with a Focus on the Participation of Indigenous Peoples and Other Forest-Dependent Communities, defining stakeholders broadly as ‘those groups that have a stake/interest/right in the forest and those that will be affected either negatively or positively by REDD+ activities’, but focusing primarily on ‘indigenous peoples and other forest-dependent communities’.Footnote ³⁸⁴ It refers to further applicable standards, which for the FCPF includes the FCPF Charter and the World Bank Operational Policies, and for the UN-REDD Programme includes international instruments on human rights and Indigenous peoples’ rights. The UN-REDD Programme has additionally prepared its own UN-REDD Programme Guidelines on Free, Prior and Informed Consent (January 2013) and its complementing legal companion.Footnote ³⁸⁵ In August 2016, the World Bank adopted a new Environmental and Social Framework (ESF)Footnote ³⁸⁶ made up of ten standards, including Environmental and Social Standard 7 (ESS7) on Indigenous Peoples/Sub-Saharan African Historically Underserved Traditional Local Communities (IP/SSAHUTLCs).Footnote ³⁸⁷ The adoption of these standards was preceded by a major consultation with civil society and contentious debates,Footnote ³⁸⁸ given that these standards are ‘likely to give rise to new norms and/or trigger reinterpretation of existing rules in international law more generally’.Footnote ³⁸⁹ Although the ESF ‘symbolically’ invokes international human rights norms in its vision, as María Victoria Cabrera Ormaza and Franz Christian Ebert have shown, the World Bank’s operationalisation of it entails ‘a form of discourse-content-decoupling’.Footnote ³⁹⁰ That is, although the World Bank ‘symbolically’ refers to human rights concepts in order to suggest coherence and build legitimacy, its discourse on human rights does not ‘fully correspond to the actual content of the ESF’.Footnote ³⁹¹ Although ESS7 aims to ‘foster full respect for the human rights’ of Indigenous Peoples and Sub-Saharan African Historically Underserved Traditional Local Communities, it does not refer to the UNDRIP or ILO 169, the major international instruments concerned with such rights.Footnote ³⁹² Further, although ESS7 requires ‘meaningful consultation’ in ways that are ‘culturally appropriate’,Footnote ³⁹³ it also ‘appears to distance itself from relevant human rights standards in different ways’.Footnote ³⁹⁴ However, a positive development is that it departs from the World Bank’s earlier Operational Directive 4.20 (1991) and Operational Policy 4.10 (2005), which only provided for free, prior and informed consultation. ESS7 now requires consent in three situations: where a project will ‘have adverse impacts on land and natural resources subject to traditional ownership or under customary use or occupation’; where a project will cause ‘relocation’; and where a project will have ‘significant impacts’ on ‘cultural heritage that is material to their identity and/or cultural, ceremonial, or spiritual aspects’.Footnote ³⁹⁵ Although this inclusion was widely welcomed, a detailed analysis of how the World Bank has defined and articulated FPIC suggests that ‘[t]he scope of application of FPIC under the ESF appears to be narrower than under the UNDRIP’.Footnote ³⁹⁶ Ormaza and Ebert therefore warn that consultation and FPIC might ‘turn out to be legitimation tools to validate Bank-sponsored projects and not primarily consensus-building devices and safeguards for indigenous peoples’.Footnote ³⁹⁷

When evaluating safeguards it is critical to examine not just their limitations but also their productive effects. Safeguard mechanisms are key sites through which REDD+ implementation interacts with and engages other legal regimes as well as broader development objectives.Footnote ³⁹⁸ As Feja Lesniewska argues, ‘Since Cancun, safeguards have been seen as the opportunity through which the interactions between these different law making processes could be more formally co-ordinated.’Footnote ³⁹⁹ Safeguards thereby operate as a ‘missing link’ that connects REDD+ with other fields of law; they ‘provide formal justification [for] the increasing cross-fertilization and collaboration between forest law and governance processes beyond the UNFCCC’.Footnote ⁴⁰⁰ In this way they facilitate the integration of REDD+ with broader development objectives, including those relating to improved forest governance, tenure reform and livelihood interventions. Such agendas are not politically neutral in either their conceptualisation or implementation and have long and often contentious histories.Footnote ⁴⁰¹ The promotion of social safeguards has therefore also operated to expand the sphere of authorised intervention by international financial institutions and other bilateral and multilateral bodies into the lives of peoples living in and around forested areas as part of REDD+-readiness and REDD+ implementation processes. The effects of key mechanisms promoted to address social concerns – especially tenure reform and benefit sharing – go beyond merely minimising risks or promoting benefits to people living in and around forested areas: they represent an active transformation of lives and livelihoods.Footnote ⁴⁰²