6 - REDD+ at the ‘Local’ Level

Summary

This chapter examines the fraught terrain of REDD+ implementation ‘on the ground’, with a specific focus on three strategies that have been central to efforts towards social safeguards: benefit sharing, tenure reform, and rights to consultation and to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC). It reads these three strategies as mechanisms for mediating the potential tensions between different – and potentially competing – demands: those ‘from below’, for rights and recognition, and imperatives ‘from above’, for ensuring that specific obligations are enforceable through the responsibilisation of local actors. This chapter examines how these competing demands play out in REDD+ implementation and suggests that these three strategies might not necessarily be emancipatory for people living in and around forested areas, but rather they may operate to facilitate the greater disciplinary inclusion of forest peoples in the ‘green economy’ and thereby further consolidate the actualisation of new forms of global authority through REDD+.