Communities and REDD+: Losing or Gaining Control?

RECOFTC's Regan Suzuki looks at the effects REDD+ schemes may have on decentralized forest governance.

An earlier article by Dr. Agrawal presents evidence that community forests lead to higher carbon storage than government owned forests. In posing the question "Does REDD threaten to recentralize forest governance?" eminent researcher on collective resource management Dr. Arun Agrawal, and his co-authors, echo and elaborate the alarm that local people are being left out of the equation and communities stand to be disadvantaged by REDD+.

Like others working in this field, I find the unprecedented significance of REDD+ to the forestry sector, and its potential impacts, to be rather overwhelming. It is difficult to argue that REDD+ incentives will not in some cases override decentralization reforms, and that central governments will re-engage with local forest management. The question is: will this be entirely to the detriment of communities? And who decides?

For anyone striving to interpret and relay REDD+ to communities in the Asia-Pacific region, approaching these issues warrants serious, careful thought. An earlier article by Dr. Agrawal presents evidence that community forests lead to higher carbon storage than government owned forests. The same article positively associates carbon storage with two factors: forest size and degree of autonomy in decision making. They offer, as the authors note, win-win scenarios. Larger forests and greater local decision-making powers result in greater carbon sequestration and livelihood benefits.

Dr. Agrawal's work provides policy-makers and the global community with compelling reasons to support, strengthen and further decentralize decision-making powers to community forest managers. At the same time, Agrawal himself gloomily predicts the opposite will occur. As the financial stakes associated with REDD+ continue to grow, there are powerful incentives for national level authorities to become involved and wrest back some of the powers decentralized to communities and local government.

But would communities really stand to lose out entirely in such a scenario? The case is predictably not so cleanly cut. Inevitably, REDD+ implementation will require centralized management of a number of components. For example, the development of detailed forest management plans, monitoring of national-level emission reductions, and brokering of carbon trade all require capacities beyond those typically available at the local level. Others, such as ground verification of carbon stocks, are ideally suited to community management. The risk of non-payment of carbon credits — potentially billions of dollars — from failures of local-level forest management adds to the motivation for increased central government involvement.

While the benefit-sharing provisions currently being written into REDD+ policies should ensure that rewards flow in the direction of communities, the exact degree and forms of such rewards remain ambiguous and in practice will be determined on a case-by-case basis. In addition to a percentage of carbon payments, however minimal, communities stand to benefit from indirect opportunities such as employment from monitoring and data collection efforts, and improved quality of forest resources.

In remote rural communities where income generation opportunities are limited and markets far removed, is it possible that a flow of financial benefits outweighs losing a degree of management autonomy? Few will argue in favor of a loss of power and decision-making authority. But if we frame the question as being whether the trade-off of greater central government involvement is sufficiently compensated by increased financial rewards, will communities necessarily consider themselves as losers in the deal?

How will communities perceive this? Will they view REDD+ as a threat, or an opportunity? There are no clear answers, largely because we lack comparable models and experiences against which REDD+ can be held up and assessed. The closest comparison is Payment for Environmental Services (PES), which is currently small-scale, experimental, and involves significantly less money. PES offers little attraction for centralized government involvement. REDD+, the scale at which it operates and the value of the resources in question, catapults the game to an entirely different level.

It may be too simplistic to assume that a degree of recentralization will necessarily negate the value of REDD+ in the eyes of local communities. This is why it is critical that this debate goes beyond the academic sphere and becomes part of in-depth discussions with affected communities to work out how they would like to engage with REDD+. They need to be vitally involved in threshing through the various scenarios and determining acceptable bargaining terms. Regardless of whether REDD+ recentralizes forest governance or not, communities and community forestry need to play a major, if not central, role in REDD+ development.

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