The Green Economy in the Global South by Stefano Ponte & Daniel Brockington

Author:Stefano Ponte & Daniel Brockington [Ponte, Stefano & Brockington, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138291201
Google: ru9QvgAACAAJ
Goodreads: 31754112
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-02-28T09:45:44+00:00

REDD+ and the problematising of Indonesia’s forest governance

Li explains that the usefulness of land for one person partly depends on the exclusion of others.30 In the context of state control over land the exclusion is legitimised through knowledges, laws and practices that are politically supported by government agencies. These form what Li calls a ‘regime of exclusion’, that is, a set of mechanisms in which state actors (sometimes in league with capitalist entities) rearrange people and their resources in ways that give privileges to the government to decide how and by whom the resources can be used.31 Peluso and Vandergeest refer to ‘political forests’ in explaining the measures taken by the colonial government to dispossess land from Indigenous people and claim it as state land.32 These measures include technologies of territorialisation, zoning, inscription of law and its enforcement, as well as ‘criminalizing many previously common practices’.33

During the New Order era Suharto and his allies employed the notion of ‘development’ to claim some 70% of Indonesia’s land as state forest.34 When a plot of land is assigned a function, as state forest for example, a series of actions follow that change the social and political relationship of the humans that interact with or through that land.35 For millions of forest-dependent communities whose lands were taken by the state there was little room for dissent. The state employed coercive forms of government, criminalising those who did resist, sometimes denouncing them as communists, which led to social exclusion and made them vulnerable to New Order anti-communist violence.36 While environmental movements preceded the political changes of 1998, ongoing oppression in the forest sector prevented progress on forest land reforms before then.37 After 1998, community groups and NGOs became much more outwardly active in pursuing forest rights and justice, albeit with limited success. Indonesia maintains one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world, much of that being driven by large-scale forest concessions provided by the state for oil palm, timber and mining interests.38

When REDD+ emerged in 2007 as a possibility for Indonesia, it was derived from broader global-scale concerns about climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions were problematised and REDD+ positioned as one relatively cheap and quick solution that, in adopting an offset mechanism, provided a means to avoid the difficult politics of reducing emissions in wealthy countries.39 REDD+ architects based their rationale on the assumption that deforestation was being driven by insufficient pricing of the carbon services of forests and provided a solution that incentivised forest protection. In other words, the entrenched political economy of global forest destruction was to be resolved by developing a technical mechanism that would pay people and countries to protect forests.

Despite the limitations of this simplistic approach to forest governance, many academics and environmental and Indigenous activists in Indonesia have seen REDD+ as providing political space to problematise the established forest order. Critics counter that REDD+ facilitates the extension of capitalism’s interests,40 in which social and environmental justice concerns are translated into technocratic prescriptions – in order to

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