Transparency in Global Environmental Governance by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-262-52618-0
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2014-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

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Making REDD+ Transparent: The Politics of Measuring, Reporting, and Verification Systems

Aarti Gupta, Marjanneke J. Vijge, Esther Turnhout, and Till Pistorius

Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries (REDD) is currently one of the most debated climate mitigation options within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations. REDD is intended to be a performance-based financing mechanism, whereby industrialized countries compensate developing countries for reducing forest-related carbon emissions. The mechanism is now labeled REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries; and the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests, and enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries). Many see great potential in REDD+ to simultaneously deal with climate change and loss of the world’s forests. It is hoped that REDD+ will deliver cost-effective climate mitigation through reduced carbon emissions and carbon sequestration, as well as co-benefits such as biodiversity conservation (Pistorius et al. 2011; Seymour 2012) and improved livelihoods of forest communities (Cowie et al. 2007). Yet whether REDD+ can satisfy these high expectations remains contested (Visseren-Hamakers et al. 2012).

A much-debated element of these discussions centers on the measuring, reporting, and verification (MRV) systems necessary to ascertain whether and how much forest carbon is being sequestered, and also whether and what co-benefits are being generated and for whom. In this chapter, we focus on the politics of REDD+ MRV systems. We view the centrality of measuring, reporting, and verification in REDD+ as aligned with the growing uptake of transparency and governance by disclosure in the global environmental domain. As noted in the introduction to this book, transparency is seen as an important means to hold the powerful to account, empower recipients of information, and thereby also improve environmental performance (Gupta and Mason, chapter 1). Yet a central question in this regard is who is being held to account by whom, and why. This becomes relevant to assess because REDD+ MRV systems are also implicated in the ascendency of neoliberal environmental governance, which emphasizes creation of new markets, efficiencies, and performance-based compensation as key to securing desired environmental aims (Duffy and Moore 2010; Pistorius et al. 2012; see also Knox-Hayes and Levy, this book, chapter 9; Orsini et al., this book, chapter 7).

In much scholarly literature, as well as in the rhetoric and practice of international institutions involved with REDD+, the design and functioning of MRV systems is framed largely as a technical and administrative challenge, requiring accurate and verifiable data, access to technology, and capacity building (Böttcher et al. 2009; GOFC-GOLD 2010; Hiepe and Kanamaru 2008). Yet what should be measured, reported, and verified, how, and by whom are fundamentally political questions, insofar as REDD+ will be constituted in large part by what is measured and valorized.

In this chapter, we analyze the uptake, institutionalization, and impacts of transparency through focusing on debates and developments around REDD+ MRV systems. In analyzing transparency about what, we focus on the scope of REDD+ MRV systems, that is, the

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