7 - Conclusion

Summary

The conclusion rearticulates the book's analysis and critique of how REDD+ brings forests within international financial flows by commodifying the sequestered carbon emissions saved from avoided deforestation or other forms of forest degradation in the Global South; and by potentially allowing ‘saved’ emissions to be used as an ‘offset’ towards the GHG reduction targets of the Global North. In these processes, new claims to international authority have been authorised and articulated, although these remain in many ways provisional and aspirational. It describes forests both materially and metaphorically as productive sites for the examination of questions of authority and the process of authorisation, because they have physically and symbolically been sites of contested authority. In closing, it gestures towards other possible ways we could live in and with nature, how we could live in relation with one another and how we could form worlds and our place in them.