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Glocal forest and REDD+ governance: win–win or lose–lose?
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Glocal forest and REDD+ governance: win–win or lose–lose? Joyeeta Gupta1,2 Global forest governance is moving incrementally forward. REDD+ is the latest forest instrument being promoted globally as a cost-effective mechanism. This paper addresses the question: Does a glocal (global to local to global) analysis of forest policies lead to the conclusion that REDD+ can deliver a win–win situation as proponents claim? Using a literature review and focusing on four countries, this paper argues that REDD+ can potentially address deforestation and climate change by mobilizing financial and human resources, and help developed countries through cost-effective measures and developing countries by channeling resources to them. However, there is a risk that REDD+ may become a ‘lose–lose’ instrument leading to irreversible commodification and tradeability of forests, exacerbating North–South conflicts, and marginalizing local communities. Addresses 1 Institute for Environmental Studies, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands 2 UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, Delft, The Netherlands Corresponding author: Gupta, Joyeeta ([email protected])
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policies lead to the conclusion that REDD+ may deliver a win–win situation as proponents claim? Since any new forest instrument should build on the lessons learnt from past forest governance efforts, further develop existing forest institutions, and address the drivers of deforestation and forest degradation, this paper will review key issues in forest governance from the global to local to global levels (referred to here as ‘glocal’ forest governance challenges).
Key issues in forest governance With four billion hectares, forests cover a little less than one third of the global land surface. However, primary forests constitute only about one third of total forests and have declined by 40 million ha since 2000 [6]. Forests are important in themselves. They are also important in terms of the ecosystem services they provide; namely the provisioning services, or the service of providing products for human use, such as timber, food, and fuel and a habitat for forest biodiversity; regulating services, such as the contribution to watershed management; supporting services, including the role in nutrient cycles and crop pollination; and cultural services, such as providing a home for indigenous peoples and meeting the various spiritual and recreational needs of humans in general [7].
This review comes from a themed issue on Climate systems Edited by Ingrid J Visseren-Hamakers, Aarti Gupta, Martin Herold, Marielos Pen˜a-Claros and Marjanneke J Vijge For a complete overview see the Issue and the Editorial Received 1 May 2012; Accepted 24 September 2012 Available online 12nd October 2012 1877-3435/$ – see front matter, # 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2012.09.014
Introduction Forests have been on the global agenda for at least half a century. Forest governance in the past decades has had limited effectiveness [1,2]. The current climate change discussions have infused the forest arena with new enthusiasm through developing the instrument of reducing emissions from deforestation and Forest degradation and conservation, sustainable use and enhancement of forest carbon stocks (collectively known as REDD+) [3,4]. REDD+ aims to finance verifiable and additional forest protection either through global funds, or through a mechanism that offsets carbon emissions in the North for emissions sequestered in the South. Many authors consider REDD+ a possible win–win situation [5]. Against this background, this paper addresses the question: does a glocal (global to local to global) analysis of forest Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2012, 4:620–627
While forest products and services can generate revenues, the land on which forests grow can also generate revenues if put to other uses. Since only a few of the products and services are actually traded in markets (e.g. wood and non-timber forest products), alternative land-uses for agriculture, biofuels, industry, roads and expanding cities appear to be more profitable to societies in the short-term. This brings us to the driving forces of deforestation and forest degradation. These include proximate drivers which are mostly local in nature and include agriculture (cash crops, shifting subsistence agriculture and animal husbandry), infrastructure (road building, settlements, dams and mines, wood extraction for commercial, fuelwood and pole wood uses), and local customs. Underlying drivers can be local through to global in nature and range from local poverty to the national drive for economic growth; population growth, distribution, density and migration; the demand for wood, non-timber forest products or land; problems in the policy making process; international debt; and the possible impact of climate change on forests. Other drivers include soil quality or civil war [8]. The precise nature of these drivers differs from place to place [9]. The nature of drivers of deforestation and forest degradation also differs over time. This has been depicted in the forest transition curve, a U-shaped curve which shows www.sciencedirect.com
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that past forest transitions reflected a move through four stages – from virgin forests via deforestation of the forest frontier and a move towards agro-forest mosaics to the realization of the need to protect forests and to stabilize forest regions [10,11,12]. Current societies deviate from such pathways as there are a variety of new global influences that impact countries, local contexts differ, as do national policy contexts. To ensure that developing tropical forest countries do not follow in the ‘transition’ footsteps of the North – which involve first deforesting primary forests before investing in secondary forests – there is need for a leap-frog strategy. This is where forest governance plays a key role. Good forest governance can, in theory, identify the drivers of deforestation and deal with each driver at multiple levels of governance. This paper provides an overview of the challenges in global forest governance and REDD+ implementation in developing countries before drawing some conclusions about the win–win nature of forest governance at the glocal level.
Global forest governance Based on the literature [13,14] I argue that throughout human history, global forest governance has undergone nine phases. Most societies began with the customary use of forests; following settled agriculture there was the initial deforestation of land, and with industrialization, shipbuilding and colonization, forests were regarded as a resource to be exploited [15]. This trend continued after independence in the developing countries, while the developed countries mostly stabilized their forests. The trade regimes promote trade in wood products. The subsequent recognition of species, habitat and heritage loss, and the recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples triggered a series of measures to deal with forests indirectly; followed by measures on direct forest protection. The concept of sustainable forest management gradually became more important [16] and with liberalization, forests and other lands are being opened up to private ownership. These phases often imply overlapping systems of governance, for example liberalization co-exists with nationalization and customary ownership in different parts of the world. This is most evident in discussions on land and forest ownership. Although many local people have customary rights to forest lands, the governments and other actors do not always recognize such ownership and may lease these lands to investors or nationalize them – leading to ownership disputes [17,18]. Current global forest governance includes intergovernmental actors (e.g. the Food and Agricultural Organization and the World Bank) and agreements (e.g. the Tropical Forestry Action Plan), and private governance institutions (e.g. the Forest Stewardship Council) [19]. These actors and agreements focus either directly or indirectly on www.sciencedirect.com
forests. For example, the Convention on Biological Diversity promotes the protection of biodiversity in all ecosystems including forests while agreements and declarations on the rights of indigenous peoples aim at protecting the rights of these communities in their habitats, which may include forests. At the global level there are more than two dozens such actors and agreements [20]. These large numbers of actors imply that current global forest governance is fragmented. The different actors and agreements have different goals, mandates, and memberships, and they attempt to influence forest governance [21]. Each agency/regime tries to deal with very specific elements of forest governance [22,20]. This fragmentation implies that each regime pushes its own goals and interests and there is more competition than complementarity between the different actors for influence on the domestic regime. To illustrate, the International Tropical Timber Organization may have promoted more deforestation than afforestation [23]. Within this fragmented regime, the last relevant legally binding agreement on forests was signed in 1997 – since then, a series of policies and measures have been taken in different fora. This move away from legally binding agreements may reflect a new general trend in international law. It indicates a shift towards a system of administrative law – a system in which neither the legislative nor the judiciary participate in law making, but instead the bureaucracy becomes more involved [24]. This trend may imply a gradual implicit effort at moving the policy process further and bypassing formal state consent for treaties; or reflect a dominant neo-liberal tendency to increase engagement of market actors and reduce regulation from above. As governance issues become more complex and interlinked, the definition of simplistic targets and measures may have simply become more and more difficult to agree upon. This means that it is difficult to gauge precisely the moment at which decisions are taken, as they are no longer made in binding legal treaties but in continuing meetings of Conferences of the Parties and the subsidiary bodies, and the influence of these decisions depends on the willingness of actors to implement them. Decisions on REDD+ are primarily being taken in this arena. Furthermore, linking this fragmented regime to the ecosystem services discussed above leads to the conclusion that no regime addresses forests for its own sake; most address the provisioning services of forests, and wood products, while some address the cultural services. Of the regulating services, only the carbon sequestration function is really dealt with at the global level, although others are touched upon [20]. Only 8% of the forests protect soil and water services [6], while 30% provide wood and nonwood forest products contributing to 2% of world trade; excluding oil palm [25,26] and biofuel plantations. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2012, 4:620–627
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Another conclusion that can be derived is that global forest governance also does not adequately deal with the major global underlying drivers of deforestation described above [27]. In other words, existing forest governance regimes promote the adoption of concepts (e.g. sustainable forest management) or rules (e.g. trade in sustainably produced wood) but scarcely deal with the global or national demand for forest and non-forest products including land (land grabbing has become a serious challenge in recent years), food, biofuels, and other non-timber forest products. Furthermore, the impacts of climate change on forests are not being addressed, especially since the climate change regime appears to be in a negotiation deadlock [28]. Some global drivers are dealt with in a limited manner: international debt through past debt-for-nature swaps [29]; and consumer demand through certification schemes [30]. Most national drivers and some local drivers are only partially dealt with. However, it is legitimate to ask whether the suasive effect of global forest governance has led to declining deforestation. The answer is not clear. FAO uses country reporting to argue that 1.6 million hectares of forest are now under sustainable management [6] and that the rate of deforestation is declining. However, these data are disputed [31]. What is clear is that some countries are reforesting (e.g. China), some are arresting deforestation processes and plan to rejuvenate their forest lands (e.g. Brazil), and some have stabilized their forests (e.g. Vietnam 9) [11]. However, many countries are also increasingly importing wood products (e.g. Vietnam and China) which may lead to deforestation elsewhere [11].
REDD+ governance Clearly global forest governance is difficult. However, it is still necessary and some innovative mechanisms such as certification are making progress. The Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol encouraged forest projects, but there have been few projects [32] because of the many forest-related implementation challenges [33]. The latest effort in forest governance is REDD+ promoted since 2005 in the context of the climate change negotiations [34,35]. In the past, Dimitrov has argued that the continuing focus on forest governance is a ‘decoy’ to distract attention from other issues [1]. One can frame the renewed focus on forests more positively as ‘enlarging the negotiating pie’, as a way to help the stalling climate negotiations [36] while providing new impetus to the forest agenda. Forests and climate change influence and are influenced by each other. Managing forests sustainably contributes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions while at the same time a reduced threat of climate change implies fewer risks to forests. Hence, dealing with forests under the heading of climate change poses a win–win situation for both forest and climate change challenges. Much of the literature Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2012, 4:620–627
supporting REDD+ focuses on the win–win nature of this instrument [5] and the ability to achieve cost-effective reductions for developed countries and additional resources to protect forests in developing countries [34,35]. The climate change regime has dealt with forests in four phases. Initially, in the pre-1990 phase, discussions were held on the need for afforestation targets [37]. Post-1990, the focus shifted to the industrial emissions of greenhouse gases. Since 1997, interest in forests was rekindled and afforestation and reforestation were included in the Clean Development Mechanism. Since 2005, discussions are ongoing about including REDD+. The goal of REDD+ is to create financial incentives to help countries reduce their deforestation rates [38,39]. Countries will be paid for their efforts if their results are additional and can be measured and verified. There are two ways to finance REDD+; through a fund – preferred by countries with national voluntary targets – or an offset mechanism – which raises resources by offsetting carbon emissions in developed countries. The literature discusses a series of challenges related to REDD+: the issue of baselines, the perverse incentive for countries not to create forest policies, the scale of REDD+ and the challenges of monitoring, reporting and verification [38,39,40]. My own focus here is more broadly on the potential of REDD+ to achieve win–win results.
Implementation in developing countries Having provided a brief overview of the global level, I now turn to examining the literature on forest governance challenges in some developing countries, in order to explain the REDD+ implementation challenges and opportunities [41]. The countries include: Vietnam [42,43], Indonesia [44], Cameroon [45] and Peru [46] – four countries with high forest area, diversity of location and per capita income, different political systems and different policies with respect to forests and are at different stages of the forest transition curve. Deforestation rates differ among the four countries – although Vietnam experiences net afforestation [47], Indonesia has lost about 20% of its forests over the past 20 years [48], Cameroon has lost 0.90% per year [49] and Peru 0.15% annually [50]. All four countries are deforesting to make space for agriculture and cash crops supported by government policy. Shifting cultivation is more prevalent in Peru (for reasons of poor soils and migration) and Cameroon (local culture). Commercial logging is a key reason in Indonesia, while illegal logging and overharvesting are important drivers in all four countries. Dams are a challenge in Vietnam, Cameroon and possibly in Peru. Forest roads are a key threat to the forests in all three countries. Mining is a cause of deforestation in Indonesia and Peru and probably also in Cameroon. Although all four countries have forest policies, their overall national policies promote rapid economic growth www.sciencedirect.com
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and job creation. This includes the doi moi economic policy and the resulting agricultural targets in Vietnam which affect the forest sector; the overall economic growth policy in Indonesia which allows for extensive logging concessions; national foreign debt-related strategies in Cameroon; and economic growth strategies that justify agricultural credits in Peru. Forest fires, accidental and deliberate, are common to all four countries. Common underlying drivers are high population growth leading to overall demand for consumption, economic growth strategies and low global timber prices. The drivers reinforce each other. Forest roads increase access and encroachment especially in buffer zones. In Cameroon, implementation of forest management policies has forced domestic industrial loggers and small scale artisanal logging into the informal market – leading to even greater deforestation. The question which follows logically is: does the existing national forest governance strategy, influenced by global through to domestic politics, target these drivers? Trade restrictions from bilateral (EU-FLEGT) and unilateral (US Lacey Act) programs have influenced wood export policies. All four countries are in different stages of decentralization, which has led to decentralizing forest policies as well. They have all been influenced by international policies to adopt the concept of sustainable forest management and this is being implemented in national policies. Spatial planning is a key instrument for managing forests in all four countries. Yet, every country has taken a different approach to forest governance. Key challenges include incomplete or even manipulative decentralization processes [51,52]. While decentralization in theory creates opportunities for bottom-up policies that can potentially empower local people, it can also have the effect of ironically enhancing control over local areas as in Vietnam [50]; leading to poorly implemented policy as local authorities have fewer resources and capacity; or resulting in local governments seeing the devolution as equivalent to complete local autonomy, which may translate into forest land use change without permission. Decentralization is also not always able to deal with the challenge of elite capture of resources [53,54]. Furthermore, there is unclear implementation of the concept of sustainable forest management, overlapping authority to classify land use, as in Vietnam between the Ministry of Environment and the Ministry of Agriculture [55], incomplete classifications, as in Cameroon, and the likelihood of changing classifications from forests to agriculture when forest land is deemed capable of agricultural production, as in Peru. All four countries have been unable as yet to verify spatial plans with in situ examinations and policies are weak [56,42,43,44,45]. Another challenging key issue is who actually owns forest lands. Forest land ownership is generally seen as bundles www.sciencedirect.com
of rights including usufructuary rights, commercial rights, and the right to rent, sell and/or manage forests [57]. Historically, local communities and indigenous groups had customary rights to forests. Conquests, colonization and post-independence politics have led to national policies to nationalize these rights in all four countries. Only recently has there been an effort to return land to local communities and indigenous groups in all four countries. However, complications include allocation of land parcels to multiple owners in Indonesia (where ownership of indigenous people is recognized but not spelt out in terms of specific land rights) and contested land rights in Vietnam, Peru, Indonesia and Cameroon (where only limited ancestral rights are recognized) [58,59,42,43,44,45]. Forest concessions are common to all four countries, but may have impacts on the customary rights of forest dwellers. Cameroon has an interesting forest tax strategy, while Vietnam subsidizes reforestation. Vietnam and Peru are experimenting with Payment for Ecosystem Services. Forest Stewardship Council Certification is currently occurring in all four countries. REDD+ can build on these instruments in order to reduce deforestation. At the same time, lessons from past experiences show that consensual bilateral and global policies are seen in a more positive light than unilateral trade restrictions. Although land titling is expected to empower local communities, the commodification of carbon and the potential for accessing new financial resources for forest management may intensify the struggle between the state, logging and carbon companies, elites and local communities. This may in turn lead to major risks for the poor and disempowered. Land titling schemes are as yet incomplete, contested and inadequately supported by national policies and the state may retain control by leasing land to commercial interests – which may be accelerated by the process of REDD+, as it has in the past by ‘protected areas’ [60]. Many of the economic instruments are unable to provide real benefits for local people, and national parks are unable to deal with ‘illegal’ encroachment in peripheral areas, not least because in many cases customary rights have been relabeled as illegal [61].
Implications for REDD+ governance Extrapolating from experiences from four countries is risky. After all, if Brazil is able to address its own deforestation building on the incentives provided by REDD+, this will have a major impact on total global forest protection and climate change. Nevertheless, there are lessons to be learnt from the literature on forest governance challenges in the other developing countries. The literature shows that the focus countries in this paper are actively engaged in REDD+ preparation, and are engaged in various pilot projects [cf. 62–64]. REDD+ implementation can benefit from existing experiments Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2012, 4:620–627
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that have worked in these countries. For example, REDD+ payments in Vietnam can build on the infrastructure created and lessons learnt in paying subsidies for reforestation. REDD+ reallocation could draw on the lessons from the Annual Area Fee sharing mechanism used in Cameroon. A key lesson from Vietnam’s experience with CDM is that local people need to understand the mechanisms well if they are to benefit from it. Free prior informed consent is critical to get local communities and indigenous people on board. REDD+ is more likely to be effective when it is linked with existing national and international schemes. REDD+ resources, if indeed paid to local communities, may help to deal with some of the proximate drivers of deforestation. However, it is unlikely to deal with the underlying drivers of deforestation such as demographic reasons, national economic policy and global demand for timber and forest products [42]. Furthermore, REDD+ resources may be most useful where the opportunity costs of deforesting are the lowest, and least likely to be effective where the opportunity costs of deforestation are higher, as with oil palm plantations in Indonesia.
Implications for glocal forest governance: win–win or lose–lose Let us now turn to the big question – what does the literature indicate about the prospects for success of REDD+. There are four clusters of arguments in favor of REDD+ leading to a win–win situation. First, the win–win framing focuses primarily on how reducing emissions from deforestation can be cost-effective [34,35,65] in reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. Second, it can win time in addressing climate change [34,35,64]. Third, REDD+ can help to compensate those who look after forests and can thus mitigate local poverty. Fourth, it can help channel resources to developing countries while still addressing global problems: this is especially so if REDD+ can build on the REDD+ readiness activities in countries that are deforesting. At issue is whether it can, on the one hand, generate the resources needed and, on the other hand, build on existing success stories and institutional frameworks to effectively promote forest protection while ensuring that social safeguards are in place. Then those who have high mitigation costs gain by the lower mitigation costs through forests; and the problems of deforestation, climate change and poverty can be addressed simultaneously. Thus, glocal forest governance can result in a win–win situation if all actors at the multiple levels of governance gain from the process of participation in the forest regime. This would necessarily imply that proximate, underlying and other drivers are effectively dealt with. It would imply that policies can be designed by public and private actors, individually or jointly, to ensure that countries do not follow the patterns predicted by the forest transition curve but that they can leap-frog to a Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2012, 4:620–627
sustainable future in which the forests are protected, a variety of co-benefits are generated and the rights of all, especially the vulnerable, are safeguarded. However, there is also a risk of lose–lose results: First, the REDD+ framing commodifies [66,67] forests even further – from timber to carbon. Commodification puts a price on goods and services and makes them tradable, allowing for the change of ownership of these goods and services. Once products become commodified, they may be sold to the highest bidder. This framing intensifies local struggles for control over land. It may or may not lead to forest conservation. Second, REDD+ diverts attention from the current reluctance of the US, Canada and Russia to meaningfully participate in the climate change regime by reducing their industrial emissions. Furthermore, to the extent that they do adopt modest targets, REDD+ can be used to offset these emission reductions of the North; thus allowing Northern countries not to compromise on their own living standards while constraining the South’s right to develop – the classic offset argument. Although the dynamics of North–South issues are changing [68,69], it shows that history is repeating itself yet again: the same arguments that were made with respect to joint implementation and the Clean Development Mechanism [70] become relevant once more! Furthermore, if the monitoring, reporting and verification element of REDD+ requires extensive internal scrutiny, this may make many developing countries see this instrument as a neo-colonial instrument. Third, applying the access (protection of the rights of the poorest and most vulnerable) and allocation (allocation of resources between social actors) framework [71] of the Earth System Governance project, one can argue that despite efforts to protect the rights of indigenous peoples, the rights of these groups, local farmers and local communities are increasingly being compromised in the struggle over who owns forest land and how the bundle of rights is to be allocated between different social groups. This intensifies the struggle for control over forests manifested through the instruments of spatial planning, land tenure and concession rules, and may intensify current land grabbing efforts world-wide [72,73]. Furthermore, if the REDD+ instrument is successful in dealing with local drivers it will have to pay in accordance with the opportunity costs of different actors. This may imply differential payments – where the rich commercial exploiters are rewarded more than the poor local users – thus exacerbating the existing inequities in society. It may also make customary practices ‘illegal’ [60], thus further marginalizing, if not displacing the poor [59]. Fourth, although there have been very high expectations regarding the availability of resources for funding REDD+, the political window for seeing forests as important within the context of climate change is reducing. Emissions from land-use change constitute a declining fraction of global emissions [74], the lack of post-Kyoto targets implies that fewer offset resources www.sciencedirect.com
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(if any) are available for forest management until (perhaps) 2020 when new targets may become effective, funds for REDD+ are diverting the declining ODA resources from other ODA goals, and the REDD+ instrument may have grossly underestimated the actual costs of equitable implementation. This may imply that REDD+ has a limited future and that the massive investments made in REDD+ readiness are partly in vain, especially if these investments have been made in states with poor systems of governance that cannot build further on these investments on their own [75]. Thus, although REDD+ has considerable potential if designed and implemented appropriately, and although much attention has gone into ensuring that safeguards are in place, if the financial resources for implementation are not forthcoming due to a combination of reduced priority for climate change (including weaker targets for the developed countries) and the global recession; it may instead have intensified a national struggle between different actors over the control of resources, in which the poor and marginalized gain a little but may lose a lot more. While some scholars argue that there are different schools of thought on REDD+ framing [76], I would argue that the dominant win–win framing is based on the expectations that the developed countries will have targets to deal with climate change and are genuinely willing to support forest protection; but if these targets are not forthcoming, and political will in the developed countries diminishes, the possibility that resources for REDD+ will be available diminishes rapidly. The efforts to ensure cobenefits and safeguards may become mired in a lose–lose situation for local people, forests and climate change, and thereby the global community. In the meanwhile, the most important legacy of REDD+ to date is the way it has raised global awareness and created a community of people who are willing to look at ways in which deforestation and forest degradation can be addressed.
Acknowledgements Joyeeta Gupta is professor at the Institute for Environmental Studies, VU University Amsterdam and at the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, Delft, and adjunct professor at the School of Commerce, Division of Business, University of South Australia. The author has worked on this project as part of the EU FP7 Project on REDD Alert (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation through Alternative Landuses in Rainforests of the Tropics (contract number 226310).
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10. Mather AS: The forest transition. Area 1992, 24:367-379. 11. Meyfroidt P, Lambin EF: Global forest transition: prospects for an end to deforestation. Ann Rev Environ Resour 2011, 36:343-371. 12. Rudel TK, Coomes OT, Moran E, Achard F, Angelsen A, Xu J, Lambin E: Forest transitions: towards a global understanding of land use change. Global Environ Change 2005, 15:23-31. This paper contributes to an understanding of how land use change occurs in countries and the kinds of forest transition countries go through. 13. Humphreys D: Forest Politics: The Evolution of International Cooperation. London: Earthscan Publications; 1996. 14. Tarasofsky RG: The International Forests Regime: Legal and Policy Issues. Gland: IUCN and WWF; 1995. 15. Beinart W: African history and environmental history. Afr Aff 2000, 99:269-302. 16. Assembe Mvondo S: A review of States practice of sustainable forests management with regard to some international conventions. Miskolc J Int Law 2008, 5:109-131. 17. Alston LJ, Libecap GD, Mu¨ller B: Land reform policies, the sources of violent conflict, and implications for deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. J Environ Econ Manage 2000, 39:162-188. 18. Nguiffo S, Kenfack PE, Mballa N: The influence of historical and contemporary land laws on indigenous peoples’ land rights in Cameroon, land rights and the forest peoples of Africa. Forests Peoples Programme 2009. 19. Cashore B, Auld G, Newsom D: Governing Through Markets: Forest Certification and the Emergence of Non-state Authority. New Haven: Yale University Press; 2004. 20. Haug C, Gupta J: Global forest governance. In Climate Change, Forests and REDD: Lessons for Institutional Design. Edited by Gupta J, van der Grijp N, Kuik O. Routledge; in press. 21. Gulbrandsen L: Overlapping public and private governance: can forest certification fill the gaps in the global forest regime? Global Environ Polit 2004, 4:75-99. 22. Humphreys D: Logjam. Deforestation and The Crisis of Global Governance. London: Earthscan Publications; 2006. This book provides a thorough assessment of the global governance challenges with respect to deforestation. 23. Nagtzaam GJ: The International Tropical Timber Organization and Conservationist Forestry Norms: A Bridge Too Far? Monash University; 2008. Available at: http://work.bepress.com/ gerry_Nagtzaam/. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2012, 4:620–627
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24. Kingsbury B, Krisch N, Stewart RB: The emergence of global administrative law. Law Contemp Probl 2005, 68:15-62. 25. Sandker M, Suwarno A, Campbell BM: Will forests remain in the face of oil palm expansion? Simulating change in Malinau, Indonesia. Ecol Soc 2007, 12:37-54. 26. Koh LP, Miettinen J, Liew SC, Ghazoul J: Remotely sensed evidence of tropical peatland conversion to oil palm. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2011, 108:5127-5132. 27. Gupta J, Shin HY, Matthews R, Meyfroidt P, Kuik O: The forest transition, the drivers of deforestation and governance approaches. In Climate Change, Forests and REDD: Lessons for Institutional Design. Edited by Gupta J, van der Grijp N, Kuik O. London: Routledge; in press. 28. Grubb M: Durban: the darkest hour? Climate Policy 2011, 11:1269-1271. 29. Thapa B: Debt-for-nature swaps: an overview. Int J Sustainable Dev World Ecol 1998, 5:249-262. 30. Auld G, Gulbrandsen LH, McDermott CL: Certification schemes and the impacts on forests and forestry. Ann Rev Environ Resour 2008, 33:187-211. 31. Grainger A: Difficulties in tracking the long-term global trend in tropical forest area. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2008, 105:818-823. 32. UNEP Risoe: CDM/JI Pipeline Analysis and Database; 2010. http:// cdmpipeline.org/. 33. Thomas S, Dargusch P, Harrison S, Herbohn J: Why are there so few afforestation and reforestation clean development mechanisms projects? Land Use Policy 2010, 27:880-887. 34. Stern N: The economics of climate change. The stern review. HM Treasury 2006. 35. Eliasch J: Climate change: financing global forests. The Eliasch Review. Crown Copyright UK: Office of Climate Change; 2008. 36. Gupta J: Negotiating challenges and climate change. Climate Policy 2012, 12:630-644. 37. The Noordwijk Declaration on Climate Change: Conference Report of Noordwijk Conference on Climate Change; 1989. 38. Corbera E, Schroeder H: Governing and implementing REDD+. Environ Sci Policy 2011, 14:89-99. 39. Karsenty A: The architecture of proposed REDD schemes after Bali: facing critical choices. Int Forestry Rev 2008, 10:443-457. 40. Gupta A, Lovbrand E, Turnhout E, Vijge M: Pursuit of carbon accountability: the politics of REDD+ measuring, reporting and verification systems. Curr Opin Environ Sustainability 2012, 4:726-731. 41. Cerbu GA, Swallow BM, Thompson DY: Locating REDD: a global survey and analysis of REDD readiness and demonstration activities. Environ Sci Policy 2011, 14:168-180. 42. Long V, Phuong VT: Review of Forest Policies in Vietnam. Hanoi: Research Centre for Forest Ecology and Environment (RCFEE); 2011. 43. Bigot L, van der Grijp N, Gupta J, Phong VT, Case study: Vietnam. In Climate Change, Forests and REDD: Lessons for Institutional Design. Edited by Gupta J, van der Grijp N, Kuik O. London: Routledge; in press. 44. Lima MB, Gupta J, van der Grijp N, Agus F, Case study: Indonesia. In Climate Change, Forests and REDD: Lessons for Institutional Design. Edited by Gupta J, van der Grijp N, Kuik O. London: Routledge; in press. 45. Kuijper JYB, van der Grijp N, Gupta J, Betgen, C, Case study: Cameroon. In Climate Change, Forests and REDD: Lessons for Institutional Design. Edited by Gupta J, van der Grijp N, Kuik O. London: Routledge; in press. 46. Blu¨cher F von, van der Grijp N, Gupta J, Maria, PS, Case study: Peru. In Climate Change, Forests and REDD: Lessons for Institutional Design. Edited by Gupta J, van der Grijp N, Kuik O. London: Routledge; in press. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2012, 4:620–627
47. Mongabay: Vietnam Forest Information and Data (based on FAO data). http://rainforests.mongabay.com/deforestation/2000/ Vietnam.htm. 48. Mongabay: Indonesia Forest Information and Data (based on FAO data). http://rainforests.mongabay.com/deforestation/2000/ Indonesia.htm. 49. Mongabay: Cameroon Forest Information and Data (based on FAO data). http://rainforests.mongabay.com/deforestation/2000/ Cameroon.htm. 50. Mongabay: Peru Forest Information and Data (based on FAO data). http://rainforests.mongabay.com/deforestation/2000/Peru.htm. 51. Fritzen SA: Probing system limits: decentralisation and local political accountability in Vietnam. Asia Pac J Public Adm 2006, 28:1-23. 52. Barr C, Resosudarmo IAP, Dermawan A, McCarthy J: Decentralization of Forest Administration in Indonesia: Implications for Forest Sustainability, Economic Development and Community Livelihoods. Bogor: CIFOR (Center for International Forestry Research); 2006. 53. Dkamela GP: The Context of REDD+ in Cameroon: Drivers, Agents, Institutions. Bogor: Center for International Forestry Research; 2011. 54. Cerutti PO, Nasi R, Tacconi L: Sustainable forest management in Cameroon needs more than approved forest management plans. Ecol Soc 2008, 13:36-48. 55. Hoang MH, Hoan DT, van Noordwijk M, Thuy PT, Palm M, Phuc TX, Diem D, Xuan NT, Anh HTV: An Assessment of Opportunities for Reducing Emissions from All Land Uses – Vietnam Preparing for REDD. Final National Report. Partnership for the Tropical Forest Margins; 2010. http://www.asb.cgiar.org/PDFwebdocs/REALUFinal%20Report%20-%20Vietnam.pdf. 56. Assembe Mvondo S: State failure and governance in vulnerable states: an assessment of forest law compliance and enforcement in Cameroon. Afr Today 2009, 55:85-102. 57. Barry D, Meinzen-Dick R: The invisible map: community tenure rights. In Proceedings of the 12th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of Commons.2008. 58. Peluso NL, Vandergeest P: Genealogies of the political forest and customary rights in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. J Asian Stud 2001, 60:761-812. 59. Freudenthal E, Nnah S, Kenrick J: Redd and Rights in Cameroon: A Review of the Treatment of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities in Policies and Projects. Moreham-in-Marsh: Forest Peoples Programme; 2011. 60. Curran BE: Are Central Africa’s protected areas displacing hundreds of thousands of rural poor? Conservation Soc 2009, 7:30-45. 61. McElwee P: You say illegal, I say legal: the relationship between ‘‘illegal’’ logging and land tenure, poverty, and forest use rights in Vietnam. J Sustainable Forestry 2004, 19:97-135. This paper is interesting because it discusses the contested nature of the legality or illegality of logging. 62. Akiefnawati R, Villamor GB, Zulfikar F, Budisetiawan I, Mulyoutami E, Ayat A, van Noordwijk M: Stewardship agreement to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD): Case Study from Lubuk Beringin’s Hutan Desa, Jambi Province, Sumatra, Indonesia. Int Forestry Rev 2010, 12:349-360. 63. Somorin OA, Peach Brown HC, Visseren-Hamakers IJ, Sonwa DJ, Arts B, Nkem J: The Congo Basin forests in a changing climate: policy discourses on adaptation and mitigation (REDD+). Global Environ Change 2012, 22:288-298. 64. Hajek F, Ventresca MJ, Scriven J, Castro A: Regime-building for REDD+: evidence from a cluster of local initiatives in SouthEastern Peru. Environ Sci Policy 2011, 14:201-215. 65. McKinsey and Company: Pathways to a Low-Carbon Economy: Version 2 of the Global Greenhouse Gas Abatement Cost Curve. McKinsey & Company; 2009. www.sciencedirect.com
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66. McDermott CL, Levin K, Cashore B: Building the forest-climate bandwagon: REDD+ and the logic of problem amelioration. Global Environ Polit 2011, 11:85-103.
72. Sikor T, Nguyen TQ: Why may forest devolution not benefit rural poor? Forest entitlements in Vietnam’s central highlands. World Dev 2007, 35:2010-2025.
67. Clements T: Reduced expectations: the political and institutional challenges of REDD+. Oryx 2010, 44:309-310.
73. Cotula L, Dyer N, Vermeulen S: Fuelling Exclusion? The Biofuels Boom and Poor People’s Access to Land. London: FAO and IIED; 2008.
68. Gupta J: Changing North–South challenges in global environmental politics. In Handbook of Global Environmental Politics. Edited by Dauvergne P. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar; 2012: 97-112.
74. Le Que´re´ C, Raupach MR, Canadell JG, Marland G: Trends in the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide. Nat Geosci 2009, 2:831-836.
69. Cadman T, Maraseni T: The governance of REDD+: an institutional analysis in the Asia Pacific region and beyond. J Environ Plan Manage 2012 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/ 09640568.2011.619851.
75. Karsenty A, Ongolo S: Can ‘‘fragile states’’ decide to reduce their deforestation? The inappropriate use of the theory of incentives with respect to the REDD mechanism. Forest Policy Econ 2012, 18:38-45.
70. van Asselt H, Gupta J: Stretching too far? Developing countries and the Role of Flexibility Mechanisms beyond Kyoto. Stan Envtl L J 2009, 28:311-378. 71. Gupta J, Lebel L: Access and allocation in global earth system governance: water and climate change compared. INEA 2010, 10:377-395.
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76. Ba¨ckstrand K, Lo¨vbrand E: Planting trees to mitigate climate change: contested discourses of ecological modernization, green governmentality and civic environmentalism. Global Environ Polit 2006, 6:50-75. This paper provides a very clear overview of the competing discourses that underlie approaches to, and the framing of, forest governance.
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Glocal forest and REDD+ governance: win–win or lose–lose? Joyeeta Gupta1,2 Global forest governance is moving incrementally forward. REDD+ is the latest forest instrument being promoted globally as a cost-effective mechanism. This paper addresses the question: Does a glocal (global to local to global) analysis of forest policies lead to the conclusion that REDD+ can deliver a win–win situation as proponents claim? Using a literature review and focusing on four countries, this paper argues that REDD+ can potentially address deforestation and climate change by mobilizing financial and human resources, and help developed countries through cost-effective measures and developing countries by channeling resources to them. However, there is a risk that REDD+ may become a ‘lose–lose’ instrument leading to irreversible commodification and tradeability of forests, exacerbating North–South conflicts, and marginalizing local communities. Addresses 1 Institute for Environmental Studies, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands 2 UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, Delft, The Netherlands Corresponding author: Gupta, Joyeeta ([email protected])
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policies lead to the conclusion that REDD+ may deliver a win–win situation as proponents claim? Since any new forest instrument should build on the lessons learnt from past forest governance efforts, further develop existing forest institutions, and address the drivers of deforestation and forest degradation, this paper will review key issues in forest governance from the global to local to global levels (referred to here as ‘glocal’ forest governance challenges).
Key issues in forest governance With four billion hectares, forests cover a little less than one third of the global land surface. However, primary forests constitute only about one third of total forests and have declined by 40 million ha since 2000 [6]. Forests are important in themselves. They are also important in terms of the ecosystem services they provide; namely the provisioning services, or the service of providing products for human use, such as timber, food, and fuel and a habitat for forest biodiversity; regulating services, such as the contribution to watershed management; supporting services, including the role in nutrient cycles and crop pollination; and cultural services, such as providing a home for indigenous peoples and meeting the various spiritual and recreational needs of humans in general [7].
This review comes from a themed issue on Climate systems Edited by Ingrid J Visseren-Hamakers, Aarti Gupta, Martin Herold, Marielos Pen˜a-Claros and Marjanneke J Vijge For a complete overview see the Issue and the Editorial Received 1 May 2012; Accepted 24 September 2012 Available online 12nd October 2012 1877-3435/$ – see front matter, # 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2012.09.014
Introduction Forests have been on the global agenda for at least half a century. Forest governance in the past decades has had limited effectiveness [1,2]. The current climate change discussions have infused the forest arena with new enthusiasm through developing the instrument of reducing emissions from deforestation and Forest degradation and conservation, sustainable use and enhancement of forest carbon stocks (collectively known as REDD+) [3,4]. REDD+ aims to finance verifiable and additional forest protection either through global funds, or through a mechanism that offsets carbon emissions in the North for emissions sequestered in the South. Many authors consider REDD+ a possible win–win situation [5]. Against this background, this paper addresses the question: does a glocal (global to local to global) analysis of forest Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2012, 4:620–627
While forest products and services can generate revenues, the land on which forests grow can also generate revenues if put to other uses. Since only a few of the products and services are actually traded in markets (e.g. wood and non-timber forest products), alternative land-uses for agriculture, biofuels, industry, roads and expanding cities appear to be more profitable to societies in the short-term. This brings us to the driving forces of deforestation and forest degradation. These include proximate drivers which are mostly local in nature and include agriculture (cash crops, shifting subsistence agriculture and animal husbandry), infrastructure (road building, settlements, dams and mines, wood extraction for commercial, fuelwood and pole wood uses), and local customs. Underlying drivers can be local through to global in nature and range from local poverty to the national drive for economic growth; population growth, distribution, density and migration; the demand for wood, non-timber forest products or land; problems in the policy making process; international debt; and the possible impact of climate change on forests. Other drivers include soil quality or civil war [8]. The precise nature of these drivers differs from place to place [9]. The nature of drivers of deforestation and forest degradation also differs over time. This has been depicted in the forest transition curve, a U-shaped curve which shows www.sciencedirect.com
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that past forest transitions reflected a move through four stages – from virgin forests via deforestation of the forest frontier and a move towards agro-forest mosaics to the realization of the need to protect forests and to stabilize forest regions [10,11,12]. Current societies deviate from such pathways as there are a variety of new global influences that impact countries, local contexts differ, as do national policy contexts. To ensure that developing tropical forest countries do not follow in the ‘transition’ footsteps of the North – which involve first deforesting primary forests before investing in secondary forests – there is need for a leap-frog strategy. This is where forest governance plays a key role. Good forest governance can, in theory, identify the drivers of deforestation and deal with each driver at multiple levels of governance. This paper provides an overview of the challenges in global forest governance and REDD+ implementation in developing countries before drawing some conclusions about the win–win nature of forest governance at the glocal level.
Global forest governance Based on the literature [13,14] I argue that throughout human history, global forest governance has undergone nine phases. Most societies began with the customary use of forests; following settled agriculture there was the initial deforestation of land, and with industrialization, shipbuilding and colonization, forests were regarded as a resource to be exploited [15]. This trend continued after independence in the developing countries, while the developed countries mostly stabilized their forests. The trade regimes promote trade in wood products. The subsequent recognition of species, habitat and heritage loss, and the recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples triggered a series of measures to deal with forests indirectly; followed by measures on direct forest protection. The concept of sustainable forest management gradually became more important [16] and with liberalization, forests and other lands are being opened up to private ownership. These phases often imply overlapping systems of governance, for example liberalization co-exists with nationalization and customary ownership in different parts of the world. This is most evident in discussions on land and forest ownership. Although many local people have customary rights to forest lands, the governments and other actors do not always recognize such ownership and may lease these lands to investors or nationalize them – leading to ownership disputes [17,18]. Current global forest governance includes intergovernmental actors (e.g. the Food and Agricultural Organization and the World Bank) and agreements (e.g. the Tropical Forestry Action Plan), and private governance institutions (e.g. the Forest Stewardship Council) [19]. These actors and agreements focus either directly or indirectly on www.sciencedirect.com
forests. For example, the Convention on Biological Diversity promotes the protection of biodiversity in all ecosystems including forests while agreements and declarations on the rights of indigenous peoples aim at protecting the rights of these communities in their habitats, which may include forests. At the global level there are more than two dozens such actors and agreements [20]. These large numbers of actors imply that current global forest governance is fragmented. The different actors and agreements have different goals, mandates, and memberships, and they attempt to influence forest governance [21]. Each agency/regime tries to deal with very specific elements of forest governance [22,20]. This fragmentation implies that each regime pushes its own goals and interests and there is more competition than complementarity between the different actors for influence on the domestic regime. To illustrate, the International Tropical Timber Organization may have promoted more deforestation than afforestation [23]. Within this fragmented regime, the last relevant legally binding agreement on forests was signed in 1997 – since then, a series of policies and measures have been taken in different fora. This move away from legally binding agreements may reflect a new general trend in international law. It indicates a shift towards a system of administrative law – a system in which neither the legislative nor the judiciary participate in law making, but instead the bureaucracy becomes more involved [24]. This trend may imply a gradual implicit effort at moving the policy process further and bypassing formal state consent for treaties; or reflect a dominant neo-liberal tendency to increase engagement of market actors and reduce regulation from above. As governance issues become more complex and interlinked, the definition of simplistic targets and measures may have simply become more and more difficult to agree upon. This means that it is difficult to gauge precisely the moment at which decisions are taken, as they are no longer made in binding legal treaties but in continuing meetings of Conferences of the Parties and the subsidiary bodies, and the influence of these decisions depends on the willingness of actors to implement them. Decisions on REDD+ are primarily being taken in this arena. Furthermore, linking this fragmented regime to the ecosystem services discussed above leads to the conclusion that no regime addresses forests for its own sake; most address the provisioning services of forests, and wood products, while some address the cultural services. Of the regulating services, only the carbon sequestration function is really dealt with at the global level, although others are touched upon [20]. Only 8% of the forests protect soil and water services [6], while 30% provide wood and nonwood forest products contributing to 2% of world trade; excluding oil palm [25,26] and biofuel plantations. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2012, 4:620–627
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Another conclusion that can be derived is that global forest governance also does not adequately deal with the major global underlying drivers of deforestation described above [27]. In other words, existing forest governance regimes promote the adoption of concepts (e.g. sustainable forest management) or rules (e.g. trade in sustainably produced wood) but scarcely deal with the global or national demand for forest and non-forest products including land (land grabbing has become a serious challenge in recent years), food, biofuels, and other non-timber forest products. Furthermore, the impacts of climate change on forests are not being addressed, especially since the climate change regime appears to be in a negotiation deadlock [28]. Some global drivers are dealt with in a limited manner: international debt through past debt-for-nature swaps [29]; and consumer demand through certification schemes [30]. Most national drivers and some local drivers are only partially dealt with. However, it is legitimate to ask whether the suasive effect of global forest governance has led to declining deforestation. The answer is not clear. FAO uses country reporting to argue that 1.6 million hectares of forest are now under sustainable management [6] and that the rate of deforestation is declining. However, these data are disputed [31]. What is clear is that some countries are reforesting (e.g. China), some are arresting deforestation processes and plan to rejuvenate their forest lands (e.g. Brazil), and some have stabilized their forests (e.g. Vietnam 9) [11]. However, many countries are also increasingly importing wood products (e.g. Vietnam and China) which may lead to deforestation elsewhere [11].
REDD+ governance Clearly global forest governance is difficult. However, it is still necessary and some innovative mechanisms such as certification are making progress. The Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol encouraged forest projects, but there have been few projects [32] because of the many forest-related implementation challenges [33]. The latest effort in forest governance is REDD+ promoted since 2005 in the context of the climate change negotiations [34,35]. In the past, Dimitrov has argued that the continuing focus on forest governance is a ‘decoy’ to distract attention from other issues [1]. One can frame the renewed focus on forests more positively as ‘enlarging the negotiating pie’, as a way to help the stalling climate negotiations [36] while providing new impetus to the forest agenda. Forests and climate change influence and are influenced by each other. Managing forests sustainably contributes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions while at the same time a reduced threat of climate change implies fewer risks to forests. Hence, dealing with forests under the heading of climate change poses a win–win situation for both forest and climate change challenges. Much of the literature Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2012, 4:620–627
supporting REDD+ focuses on the win–win nature of this instrument [5] and the ability to achieve cost-effective reductions for developed countries and additional resources to protect forests in developing countries [34,35]. The climate change regime has dealt with forests in four phases. Initially, in the pre-1990 phase, discussions were held on the need for afforestation targets [37]. Post-1990, the focus shifted to the industrial emissions of greenhouse gases. Since 1997, interest in forests was rekindled and afforestation and reforestation were included in the Clean Development Mechanism. Since 2005, discussions are ongoing about including REDD+. The goal of REDD+ is to create financial incentives to help countries reduce their deforestation rates [38,39]. Countries will be paid for their efforts if their results are additional and can be measured and verified. There are two ways to finance REDD+; through a fund – preferred by countries with national voluntary targets – or an offset mechanism – which raises resources by offsetting carbon emissions in developed countries. The literature discusses a series of challenges related to REDD+: the issue of baselines, the perverse incentive for countries not to create forest policies, the scale of REDD+ and the challenges of monitoring, reporting and verification [38,39,40]. My own focus here is more broadly on the potential of REDD+ to achieve win–win results.
Implementation in developing countries Having provided a brief overview of the global level, I now turn to examining the literature on forest governance challenges in some developing countries, in order to explain the REDD+ implementation challenges and opportunities [41]. The countries include: Vietnam [42,43], Indonesia [44], Cameroon [45] and Peru [46] – four countries with high forest area, diversity of location and per capita income, different political systems and different policies with respect to forests and are at different stages of the forest transition curve. Deforestation rates differ among the four countries – although Vietnam experiences net afforestation [47], Indonesia has lost about 20% of its forests over the past 20 years [48], Cameroon has lost 0.90% per year [49] and Peru 0.15% annually [50]. All four countries are deforesting to make space for agriculture and cash crops supported by government policy. Shifting cultivation is more prevalent in Peru (for reasons of poor soils and migration) and Cameroon (local culture). Commercial logging is a key reason in Indonesia, while illegal logging and overharvesting are important drivers in all four countries. Dams are a challenge in Vietnam, Cameroon and possibly in Peru. Forest roads are a key threat to the forests in all three countries. Mining is a cause of deforestation in Indonesia and Peru and probably also in Cameroon. Although all four countries have forest policies, their overall national policies promote rapid economic growth www.sciencedirect.com
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and job creation. This includes the doi moi economic policy and the resulting agricultural targets in Vietnam which affect the forest sector; the overall economic growth policy in Indonesia which allows for extensive logging concessions; national foreign debt-related strategies in Cameroon; and economic growth strategies that justify agricultural credits in Peru. Forest fires, accidental and deliberate, are common to all four countries. Common underlying drivers are high population growth leading to overall demand for consumption, economic growth strategies and low global timber prices. The drivers reinforce each other. Forest roads increase access and encroachment especially in buffer zones. In Cameroon, implementation of forest management policies has forced domestic industrial loggers and small scale artisanal logging into the informal market – leading to even greater deforestation. The question which follows logically is: does the existing national forest governance strategy, influenced by global through to domestic politics, target these drivers? Trade restrictions from bilateral (EU-FLEGT) and unilateral (US Lacey Act) programs have influenced wood export policies. All four countries are in different stages of decentralization, which has led to decentralizing forest policies as well. They have all been influenced by international policies to adopt the concept of sustainable forest management and this is being implemented in national policies. Spatial planning is a key instrument for managing forests in all four countries. Yet, every country has taken a different approach to forest governance. Key challenges include incomplete or even manipulative decentralization processes [51,52]. While decentralization in theory creates opportunities for bottom-up policies that can potentially empower local people, it can also have the effect of ironically enhancing control over local areas as in Vietnam [50]; leading to poorly implemented policy as local authorities have fewer resources and capacity; or resulting in local governments seeing the devolution as equivalent to complete local autonomy, which may translate into forest land use change without permission. Decentralization is also not always able to deal with the challenge of elite capture of resources [53,54]. Furthermore, there is unclear implementation of the concept of sustainable forest management, overlapping authority to classify land use, as in Vietnam between the Ministry of Environment and the Ministry of Agriculture [55], incomplete classifications, as in Cameroon, and the likelihood of changing classifications from forests to agriculture when forest land is deemed capable of agricultural production, as in Peru. All four countries have been unable as yet to verify spatial plans with in situ examinations and policies are weak [56,42,43,44,45]. Another challenging key issue is who actually owns forest lands. Forest land ownership is generally seen as bundles www.sciencedirect.com
of rights including usufructuary rights, commercial rights, and the right to rent, sell and/or manage forests [57]. Historically, local communities and indigenous groups had customary rights to forests. Conquests, colonization and post-independence politics have led to national policies to nationalize these rights in all four countries. Only recently has there been an effort to return land to local communities and indigenous groups in all four countries. However, complications include allocation of land parcels to multiple owners in Indonesia (where ownership of indigenous people is recognized but not spelt out in terms of specific land rights) and contested land rights in Vietnam, Peru, Indonesia and Cameroon (where only limited ancestral rights are recognized) [58,59,42,43,44,45]. Forest concessions are common to all four countries, but may have impacts on the customary rights of forest dwellers. Cameroon has an interesting forest tax strategy, while Vietnam subsidizes reforestation. Vietnam and Peru are experimenting with Payment for Ecosystem Services. Forest Stewardship Council Certification is currently occurring in all four countries. REDD+ can build on these instruments in order to reduce deforestation. At the same time, lessons from past experiences show that consensual bilateral and global policies are seen in a more positive light than unilateral trade restrictions. Although land titling is expected to empower local communities, the commodification of carbon and the potential for accessing new financial resources for forest management may intensify the struggle between the state, logging and carbon companies, elites and local communities. This may in turn lead to major risks for the poor and disempowered. Land titling schemes are as yet incomplete, contested and inadequately supported by national policies and the state may retain control by leasing land to commercial interests – which may be accelerated by the process of REDD+, as it has in the past by ‘protected areas’ [60]. Many of the economic instruments are unable to provide real benefits for local people, and national parks are unable to deal with ‘illegal’ encroachment in peripheral areas, not least because in many cases customary rights have been relabeled as illegal [61].
Implications for REDD+ governance Extrapolating from experiences from four countries is risky. After all, if Brazil is able to address its own deforestation building on the incentives provided by REDD+, this will have a major impact on total global forest protection and climate change. Nevertheless, there are lessons to be learnt from the literature on forest governance challenges in the other developing countries. The literature shows that the focus countries in this paper are actively engaged in REDD+ preparation, and are engaged in various pilot projects [cf. 62–64]. REDD+ implementation can benefit from existing experiments Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2012, 4:620–627
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that have worked in these countries. For example, REDD+ payments in Vietnam can build on the infrastructure created and lessons learnt in paying subsidies for reforestation. REDD+ reallocation could draw on the lessons from the Annual Area Fee sharing mechanism used in Cameroon. A key lesson from Vietnam’s experience with CDM is that local people need to understand the mechanisms well if they are to benefit from it. Free prior informed consent is critical to get local communities and indigenous people on board. REDD+ is more likely to be effective when it is linked with existing national and international schemes. REDD+ resources, if indeed paid to local communities, may help to deal with some of the proximate drivers of deforestation. However, it is unlikely to deal with the underlying drivers of deforestation such as demographic reasons, national economic policy and global demand for timber and forest products [42]. Furthermore, REDD+ resources may be most useful where the opportunity costs of deforesting are the lowest, and least likely to be effective where the opportunity costs of deforestation are higher, as with oil palm plantations in Indonesia.
Implications for glocal forest governance: win–win or lose–lose Let us now turn to the big question – what does the literature indicate about the prospects for success of REDD+. There are four clusters of arguments in favor of REDD+ leading to a win–win situation. First, the win–win framing focuses primarily on how reducing emissions from deforestation can be cost-effective [34,35,65] in reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. Second, it can win time in addressing climate change [34,35,64]. Third, REDD+ can help to compensate those who look after forests and can thus mitigate local poverty. Fourth, it can help channel resources to developing countries while still addressing global problems: this is especially so if REDD+ can build on the REDD+ readiness activities in countries that are deforesting. At issue is whether it can, on the one hand, generate the resources needed and, on the other hand, build on existing success stories and institutional frameworks to effectively promote forest protection while ensuring that social safeguards are in place. Then those who have high mitigation costs gain by the lower mitigation costs through forests; and the problems of deforestation, climate change and poverty can be addressed simultaneously. Thus, glocal forest governance can result in a win–win situation if all actors at the multiple levels of governance gain from the process of participation in the forest regime. This would necessarily imply that proximate, underlying and other drivers are effectively dealt with. It would imply that policies can be designed by public and private actors, individually or jointly, to ensure that countries do not follow the patterns predicted by the forest transition curve but that they can leap-frog to a Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2012, 4:620–627
sustainable future in which the forests are protected, a variety of co-benefits are generated and the rights of all, especially the vulnerable, are safeguarded. However, there is also a risk of lose–lose results: First, the REDD+ framing commodifies [66,67] forests even further – from timber to carbon. Commodification puts a price on goods and services and makes them tradable, allowing for the change of ownership of these goods and services. Once products become commodified, they may be sold to the highest bidder. This framing intensifies local struggles for control over land. It may or may not lead to forest conservation. Second, REDD+ diverts attention from the current reluctance of the US, Canada and Russia to meaningfully participate in the climate change regime by reducing their industrial emissions. Furthermore, to the extent that they do adopt modest targets, REDD+ can be used to offset these emission reductions of the North; thus allowing Northern countries not to compromise on their own living standards while constraining the South’s right to develop – the classic offset argument. Although the dynamics of North–South issues are changing [68,69], it shows that history is repeating itself yet again: the same arguments that were made with respect to joint implementation and the Clean Development Mechanism [70] become relevant once more! Furthermore, if the monitoring, reporting and verification element of REDD+ requires extensive internal scrutiny, this may make many developing countries see this instrument as a neo-colonial instrument. Third, applying the access (protection of the rights of the poorest and most vulnerable) and allocation (allocation of resources between social actors) framework [71] of the Earth System Governance project, one can argue that despite efforts to protect the rights of indigenous peoples, the rights of these groups, local farmers and local communities are increasingly being compromised in the struggle over who owns forest land and how the bundle of rights is to be allocated between different social groups. This intensifies the struggle for control over forests manifested through the instruments of spatial planning, land tenure and concession rules, and may intensify current land grabbing efforts world-wide [72,73]. Furthermore, if the REDD+ instrument is successful in dealing with local drivers it will have to pay in accordance with the opportunity costs of different actors. This may imply differential payments – where the rich commercial exploiters are rewarded more than the poor local users – thus exacerbating the existing inequities in society. It may also make customary practices ‘illegal’ [60], thus further marginalizing, if not displacing the poor [59]. Fourth, although there have been very high expectations regarding the availability of resources for funding REDD+, the political window for seeing forests as important within the context of climate change is reducing. Emissions from land-use change constitute a declining fraction of global emissions [74], the lack of post-Kyoto targets implies that fewer offset resources www.sciencedirect.com
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(if any) are available for forest management until (perhaps) 2020 when new targets may become effective, funds for REDD+ are diverting the declining ODA resources from other ODA goals, and the REDD+ instrument may have grossly underestimated the actual costs of equitable implementation. This may imply that REDD+ has a limited future and that the massive investments made in REDD+ readiness are partly in vain, especially if these investments have been made in states with poor systems of governance that cannot build further on these investments on their own [75]. Thus, although REDD+ has considerable potential if designed and implemented appropriately, and although much attention has gone into ensuring that safeguards are in place, if the financial resources for implementation are not forthcoming due to a combination of reduced priority for climate change (including weaker targets for the developed countries) and the global recession; it may instead have intensified a national struggle between different actors over the control of resources, in which the poor and marginalized gain a little but may lose a lot more. While some scholars argue that there are different schools of thought on REDD+ framing [76], I would argue that the dominant win–win framing is based on the expectations that the developed countries will have targets to deal with climate change and are genuinely willing to support forest protection; but if these targets are not forthcoming, and political will in the developed countries diminishes, the possibility that resources for REDD+ will be available diminishes rapidly. The efforts to ensure cobenefits and safeguards may become mired in a lose–lose situation for local people, forests and climate change, and thereby the global community. In the meanwhile, the most important legacy of REDD+ to date is the way it has raised global awareness and created a community of people who are willing to look at ways in which deforestation and forest degradation can be addressed.
Acknowledgements Joyeeta Gupta is professor at the Institute for Environmental Studies, VU University Amsterdam and at the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, Delft, and adjunct professor at the School of Commerce, Division of Business, University of South Australia. The author has worked on this project as part of the EU FP7 Project on REDD Alert (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation through Alternative Landuses in Rainforests of the Tropics (contract number 226310).
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