Freedom to Serve: a critical exploration of the injustices ... · Paper accepted for Presentation...

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Freedom to Serve: a critical exploration of the injustices of international payments for ecosystem services

Katharine N. Farrell [katharine-farrell.org / [email protected] / [email protected]]

Division of Resource Economics,

Department of Agricultural Economics, Faculty of Agriculture and Horticulture, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany.

Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA),

Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), Spain.

Paper accepted for Presentation at the Lund Conference on Earth System Governance, 18-20 April, 2012, Lund, Sweden.

Abstract:

This paper is concerned with the question of how the increasingly popular policy concept of payment for ecosystem services (PES) is related to questions of justice and legitimacy in earth system governance. In particular, it is concerned with how the terms and conditions of international PES agreements, such as those arising from the United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries and from the Clean Development Mechanism projects associated with the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol may infringe upon the self determination, economic autonomy and biological livelihood of indigenous peoples and the rural poor in so called ‚developing’ countries. It is intended to contribute toward the conferences discussion on access to, and ownership of, resources and knowledge and will use the narrative thread of payment for the maintenance of ecosystem services as a heuristic to develop a critique of this policy concept and empirical examples to illustrate and support that position. Introduction: The loss and degradation of the world’s topical forests, mainly due to their conversion for horti- and agricultural production, has recently become a focal point in the international discourse concerning anthropogenic climate change. While it has long been a concern for ecologists and for the indigenous peoples living within these ecosystems, tropical deforestation has now also become a subject of ‘earth system governance’ (Biermann et al, 2010), after having been identified in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA, 2005) as a significant source of atmospheric carbon accumulation and a threat to the continuing availability of a number of important so called ‘ecosystem services.’ While there is substantial evidence regarding the global benefits associated with preserving these ecologically and climatologically important biological systems, the global governance question as to how they might best be protected is nowhere near so clearly beyond debate. Nevertheless a reasonably concrete, if not formally planned, global governance regime for the preservation of the planet’s topical forests has already begun to take shape, starting in 2008,


(DRAFT) a paper to be presented at the Lund Conference on Earth System Governance,18-20 April, 2012, Lund, Sweden

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with the joint FAO, UNDP, UNEP Framework Document for the United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (UN-REDD) (FAO et al, 2008), followed in 2010 by the draft decision on REDD+, taken at the Cancún Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP16 of the UNFCCC), and finally with the December 2011 proposal by the UNFCCC’s Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) to study the implications of treating „reforestation of lands with forest in exhaustion as afforestation and reforestation clean development mechanism project activities,” according to the rules of the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).1 While none of these positions are binding, in a post-Durban world, where the Kyoto Protocol is no longer explicitly in force and there is no official replacement agreement, this suite of non-binding REDD/REDD+ agreements, which have been specifically designed to function as a voluntary scheme, is now well poised to fill a rapidly widening gap between, on the one hand, the consensus that something must be done to address anthropogenic climate change and, on the other, the lack of consensus regarding what that some thing should be. Drawing mainly upon a critical reading of selected contributions toward two recent special issues of the journal Ecological Economics and the discussion of two illustrative cases – the REDD+ SES and the Yasuni ITT initiatives – this paper aims to help clarify the ontology of this emerging earth system governance regime and its associated political discourse concerning how to protect these so-called ‘ecosystem services’ and offers some reflections on the place of what Salleh (2009) has called the meta-industrial subject, within these political spaces. Background: Following the collapse of the 2011 Durban negotiations of the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the UNFCCC, voluntary agreements, including the United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (FAO et al, 2008 or REDD), now constitute, de facto, a central coordination platform for contemporary global climate change governance. The basic principle of REDD, in practice, is that poor countries and individuals in the tropics who are working to halt and reverse deforestation trends should be financially supported in their efforts by rich countries and individuals in temperate zones. While there has been much discussion about the importance of ensuring that REDD/REDD+ projects are fair to the poor individuals and countries they are purported to assist, the basic approach makes this a formidable challenge. The logic of cost effective carbon sequestration is a basic feature of REDD/REDD+ (FAO, et al, 2008; Strassburg et al., 2009; Catteneo et al, 2010) and a shining example of the principle that „the poor sell cheap” (sic Martinez Alier, 1999:39; 2002:233-234). In addition, the very idea of REDD/REDD+ embodies a tacit acceptance of what we may call, following Martinez Alier (2002) an ecological carbon debt, owed to the people of the tropics by the people of the temperate zones of the earth. This debt is associated with earlier phases of widespread temperate deforestation in Europe, Asia and North America,

1 REDD+ is the name used on the UN webpages, and elsewhere, to refer to that part the non-binding agreement of the COP16 – Cancún, México – (mainly to be found in Section C of the Outcome of the work of the Ad Hoc Working Group on long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention) which expands the vision of REDD to include “conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks” (COP16 lca; REDD+ SES Web, 2012).




which can not now be reversed because millions of people are living in the modern habitats that have replaced these forests (see Hughes, 2011 for an overview of the history of European deforestation and Kaplan et al, 2009; 2011 for a model based exploration of the complex relationships between ancient anthropogenic deforestation and current concerns about anthropogenic climate change). While the current phase of massive anthropogenic tropical deforestation is certainly a cause for great concern, it should be kept in mind that the climatological damping effects of the oxygen production and carbon sequestration provided by these forests are made more important than they would otherwise be because so many temperate forests are gone.2 Although the REDD agreements are not official treaties, due to the peculiarities of the arena of global environmental governance (sic Levy and Newell, 2005), where standards setting and voluntary compliance schemes play a central role in determining the structure of regulation, they can be presumed to be influencing the modalities of earth system governance in important ways. In any case, they are certainly in a position to affect the daily lives of millions upon millions of people, particularly those people living within and/or dependant upon the biological systems of the earth’s tropical forests for their livelihood. In the absence of a new agreement at the Durban COP17, REDD/REDD+ may now be understood to constitute an integral and substantive part of the contemporary earth system forest governance regime. Since the collection of documents, discourses and practices that make up REDD/REDD+ is huge and could not possibly be adequately summarized in the space of this paper, I will focus my discussion on some details concerning how REDD is being operationalised and on a basic principle underlying REDD, REDD+ and the Kyoto Protocol based Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), from which they take their lead: payment for ecosystem services (PES). The REDD PES:

The basic idea of PES, as has been widely elaborated elsewhere (see Muradian et al., 2010 for a comprehensive overview), is that some one’s opportunity costs (i.e. foregone potential income) associated with leaving an at-risk ecosystem undisturbed (e.g. not converting a piece of land from forest to farm) should be financially compensated through cash transfers provided by some one else, who prefers that that particular ecosystem remain undisturbed. When this principle is adopted as a component of international agreements on environmental protection (here forward IPES) – as in REDD/REDD+ – it carries with it propositions that have important implications for the justice of the associated governing activities. In particular, it carries the implicit proposition that commodification and commercialization of the management of same said protected area(s) is an appropriate and desirable method for ensuring their preservation. 1. The possibility that that which one might wish to protect can not be commodified, bought or sold is ruled out from the outset, because it is a proposition external to the logic of the approach. This means that the voices of those who wish to contest the commodification of ‘ecosystem services’ are silenced, a priori. 2. The inherently contested nature of the practice of preservation – i.e. determining what should be preserved

2 It should be noted that deforestation taking place in temperate forests of Russia is also a cause for concern and would, in princple, also be covered under REDD/REDD+. However the case of Russia, both with respect to deforestation and to international political economy and earth system governance is sufficiently exceptional that it would be unwise to begin unpacking that bag just here an now.




and how – which is a purposive act, is subsumed within the purportedly value neutral language of economic transactions (sic Farrell and Vatn, 2004). Since an economic trade between a buyer and a seller can only take place with regard to a commonly defined tradable object, one or an other position regarding what and how to preserve must be adopted by both parties to a PES transaction. It seems safe to assume that the position of those with money, power and the media at their disposal is likely to prevail under such conditions. This means that we may expect a UN endorsed, privately funded, voluntary REDD/REDD+ regime to serve the interests and preferences of those in a position to buy the use of the various ecosystem services that might be provided by a tropical forest. Among these are: conservation of biological diversity, carbon storage, oxygen production, habitat, watershed, etc. However, as has been noted by Corbera et al (2007), some of these services – e.g. habitat, watershed – are associated exclusively with the local use of an ecosystem, whereas others can be ‘used’ also from a distance – e.g. carbon storage and conservation of biological diversity. This physical distinction, combined with the power asymmetries of these situations and the basic commensurating character of commodity trading, means that we may expect a bias in rich to poor IPES transfer schemes, in favour of buying and selling those services that can be enjoyed from a distance. Concerns about the fairness and equity of PES schemes have been widely discussed elsewhere (again see Muradian et al., 2010 and also VanHecken and Bastiaensen, 2010 for an overview) and are increasingly being addressed in both theory and practice. However, I would like to propose a distinction between two types of fairness and equity concerns, one of which seems to me to have received, up until now, considerably more attention than the other. On the one hand, we may speak about fairness and equity in terms of distribution and allocation of costs and benefits associated with the maintenance and use of ecosystem services. This presumes, a priori, the existence and acceptability of IPES and takes as its point of focus the question as to how this might be done in the most honourable and equitable manner. However, I believe there is a second aspect here that should draw the attention of the democratic theorist, related to what we may call fairness in terms of franchise and self-determination, or franchise equity. This presumes that indigenous and local people living within targeted ecosystems should retain the right to decide if and if so how, i.e. on what trade terms, they might wish to sell the rights to use the ecosystem services associated with their territories and habitats. Drawing now a somewhat tighter focus, around the two questions raised above – regarding the commodification and preservation of a given ‘ecosystem service’ – we can begin to consider the implications of IPES for franchise equity. With the introduction of this idea, I wish to suggest that the various methods for facilitating the sales, purchases and money transfers falling under the heading IPES raise a basic political theory dilemma with major implications for global environmental or earth system governance: how are conflicts between an individual’s right to self-determination and the collective interests of a community mediated? On the one hand, there is an internationally recognized position that certain ecological systems on the planet earth are, let us say, planet-level-relevant. That is to say, the biological functions of these systems are believed to be important for supporting not only the life forms found within them (including in many cases humans), but also life, as we know it on the planet earth. Among the mostly widely recognized of these types of systems is, of course, the tropical rainforest, which serves as the main empirical case and point for this




paper. On the other hand there are the internationally recognized rights of indigenous people „…not to be subjected to forced assimilation or destruction of their culture” (UN-GA 61/295: Article 8), which imply that those people who are living within these planet-level-relevant ecosystems have the right to decide for themselves how they wish to relate to them, at least in so far as that relationships is relevant to maintaining the integrity of their culture. The question of individual vs collective rights has been addressed many times over in political theory from a huge range of perspectives and positions. However, for our purposes here Rousseau’s basic description in The Social Contract is more than sufficient to requirements: „Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” As proposed by Rousseau, we may understand collective action by groups of humans, including the collective action of Payment for (and it should be noted therefore also provision of) Ecosystem Services, to be dependent upon the community involved in the collective action having struck some form of political balance between two counterpoised sets of interests: those of the individual and those of the community. In exploring the structure of this political relationship Rousseau considers a range of possible politically balanced positions: from the one extreme of slavery across to the other of freely chosen association among fully enfranchised democratic citizens. While Rousseau himself was a democrat, he was keenly aware that the existence of democratic political relations is not to be taken for granted. Political power can be and often is balanced undemocratically, giving rise to stable and effective, albeit unjust, forms of collective action. The highly political question as to how the global community of humans wishes to manage its relationship with the biological functions of these planet-level-relevant ecological systems is answered by the voluntary IPES scheme REDD/REDD+ in a particular way: maintain the tropical rainforests of the planet as carbon sinks that can help to compensate for massive carbon production (past and present) due to industrial economic activity (in both the global north and the global south) and, if this is not too expensive, also use them as biodiversity depositories. If one is pessimistic, REDD/REDD+ could seem to be the realization of McAfee’s (1999:136) worst case scenario where „[b]y promoting commoditization as the key both to conservation and to the „equitable sharing“ of the benefits of nature, the global environmental-economic paradigm enlists environmentalism in the service of the worldwide expansion of capitalism… [and] helps to legitimate and speed the extension of market relations into diverse and complex eco-social systems, with material and cultural outcomes that do more to diminish than to conserve diversity and sustainability.” If one is more inclined to be optimistic, it might be argued that these new forums, which as McAfee (1999) also notes, provide new international avenues of expression for the voices of affected indigenous and local people, could be developed into the kind of context and problem specific, waxing and waning parliaments of things, that Latour (2004) proposes as a part of his experimental alternative meta-physics for a new politics of nature. Either way, thinking through what franchise equity might mean in a REDD/REDD+ context brings us then to the question of what is being sold, by whom, how and on what terms? Here I would agree with Kosoy and Corbera (2010:1229) when they argue that a focus on the efficiency and effectiveness of PES schemes leads to „masking the social relations embedded in the process of ‘producing’ and ‘selling’ ecosystem services.” I find the general distinction that they make, between two types of marketable ecosystem services values, to be helpful: i.e.




use value creation associated with the production, or maintenance, of the desired ecosystem service, and the market price that can be secured for the sale of the commodity generated by that service. In the case of REDD/REDD+ the latter would generally be sequestered carbon. However, their discussion of the fetishism of ecosystem services, which seems to me to be quite reasonable, is cantered mainly around the problem that these ‘services’ are complex and irreducible and therefore can neither be fully represented nor fully transferred in the form of a commodity. Elsewhere (Farrell, 2009[2005]; 2007) I have referred to this as the traditional critique of the commodification of the economic contributions made by priceless living systems factors of reproduction – that money values and the economic modality of commodity exchange can never accurately reflect the real economic contribution made by these phenomena. The consequences of this form of fetishism are not to be underestimated and I am in full agreement with Kosoy and Corbera (2010: 1231) when they raise concerns that „[t]he itemisation of ecosystems' net primary production has already led towards the conservation and planting of certain tree species above others, such as those with the largest carbon content or higher growth rates.” However, whereas their focus is mainly on the question of „what represents a fair price” (Ibid: 1233), I wish to consider a complementary question: whether or not pricing these services can be understood itself to be fair. The Special Issue of the journal Ecological Economics, in which this paper from Kosoy and Corbera appears (Volume 69 Issue 6), also contains several other critical commentaries on PES exercising a range of positions. However, one thing common to almost all of these contributions (see Norgaard, 2010 and Vatn 2010 for exceptions), and indeed to the vast majority of literature that I have so far read on the topic, is a presumption that the practice of payment for the maintenance of ecosystems services is de facto a positive thing. The question of fairness is then taken up with respect to how this can best be done. The possibility that local and indigenous peoples in ‘target regions’ i.e., with regard to REDD/REDD+ people living in and around the tropical forests of the planet, might choose a different modality for conservation or indeed that they might choose extractive exploitation, is rarely entertained. Instead, discussions about local participation, consultation and co-management are, as with (Muradian et al, 2010: 1207) couched in terms of „the logic of collective action and the insertion of payments within a policy mix that requires obedience to biophysical limits as a point of departure…shaped by different types of social relations.” This discourse presumes that those not living in these regions have a preordained right to concern themselves with the management of the forested lands of tropical countries, since these forests are understood to be planet-level-relevant biological systems. While concerns about the fair distribution of monetary benefits – i.e. in terms of making sure that poor local people get a fair share of the money paid for the maintenance of an ecosystem service – are certainly warranted, this discussion misses entirely the question of franchise equity. That is to say, it overlooks the possibility, for example, that full integration into cash based economic systems is not of interest to the people who live within these forests. It also disregards the possibility that such integration may, over the medium term, help to undermine the non-cash economic systems upon which their livelihoods had previously been based.3 Even among those most critical of PES, the focus continues to be on this distributional equity, as illustrated by following proposition from VanHecken and Bastiaensen (2010:790): „Of course, matters would be quite different in a situation where the PES comes from rich 3 For more on this last point see Singh, 2006.




global ES users and the payments are transferred to a host of smallerscale, poor ES providers, particularly if this were to result in the bundling of different ESs in synergetic local and global markets.” Although they argue strongly against current regimes of PES, for Van Hecken and Bastiaensen (2010) it would seem that if the rich pay the poor to do what the rich tell them to do, then this would be ok. The problem for them appears to be that the poor might be expected to pay for this themselves, which they find to be categorically comparable to the idea that vegetarians might be expected to pay for the elimination of cattle production. Returning again to the distinction made by Kosoy and Corbera (2010), between the use and exchange value of commodities generated through the maintenance of an ecosystem service, we can see how Van Hecken and Bastiaensen’s (2010) position misses the problem of franchise equity. Since, imposing a market exchange forces a particular configuration of political economic relations, if the ecosystem service that people with money wish to buy is not identical to, or at least broadly compatible with the one that local ‘vendors’ wish to maintain, then no sale will take place and the financial support will not be transferred. Here again, it comes down to being clear about what are the objects at hand and how are they related to each other:

1. we have a certain instance of ecosystem: which has specific functions, constrained by its configuration and biological processes – e.g. CO2 sequestration rates;

2. we have those specific functions of that certain instance of ecosystem: some directly interesting to humans, some not, except in that they are relevant for the continued reassertion of the identity of the ecosystem (i.e. its resilience sic Holling, 1973; Gunderson and Holling, 2002).

3. among those ecosystem functions that are directly interesting to humans - i.e. that are related to the purpose(s) / uses of the humans in question - there may be various functions relevant to various different individuals (sic O’Neill, 2001)

4. among these, there are then, finally, those that can be marketed internationally and those that can not.

As I have argued elsewhere (Farrell, 2008a), since one can not pay an ecosystem, we are here always talking about payment for the maintenance of ecosystem services. Different services can be expected to attract payments from different individuals and organisations with different ideas regarding what type of ecosystems should be preserved. In the plain language of classic political economy, we may say that while the people doing this maintaining are ‘free to sell their labour’ (sic Marx, 1847), they are not automatically free to decide what it is that they will produce, i.e. what type of an ecosystem they should be maintaining. This is touched upon by Kosoy and Corbera (2010) but they remain focused mainly on what Daly (1999:137 – following Whitehead) has called the problem of misplaced concreteness, where complex living system values are treated as if they were interchangeable with money of account values. On balance, the ideological implications of this fetishism of ecosystem services can be understood to constitute a performance of what we may call intellectual mercantilism: i.e. aggregation of colonial resources directly into the productive economy of a coloniser not through appropriation or fiat (i.e. not by force) but rather through the assimilation of the productive activities of the working peoples of a colonised region into the wage labour system of international capitalist production. This is not a condemnation of capital – the point here is not to argue that capital is good or bad but rather to note that the curators of these ecosystem services, under IPES logic, are cast as labourers, and forced




labourers at that, rather than as proprietors. A proprietor can choose what to do with their property - a labourer, who has little or no property and does not control the production process of which they are a part, can not. Within the logic of the REDD PES system it is presumed that these forested areas are a common pool resource (CPR) and that all humans on the planet have access to, and a right to use them as carbon sinks. These tropical forests are seen, so to speak, to be the lungs of our planet. However, in reality they are an excludible resource. Moreover, REDD/REDD+ is founded upon the presumption that this exclusivity can and will be maintained. The principles of sound investment in REDD/REDD+ – that which will make the product marketable and the voluntary scheme operational – are directly linked to controlled use of this forested land: i.e. payment for carbon sequestration is basically the purchase of a long term lean on the land use rights of the forested area in question (Corbera et al, 2007) and, must be so, if it is to constitute a marketable product. Here things begin to get tricky. Who has the authority to decide the public/private designation of the world’s tropical forests? And what are the rights of the people who happen to be living in these planet-level-relevant ecosystems? In spite of many years of discussion, no clear decision has been taken on these questions at the international level and it would seem that Smith’s (2002) concerns regarding the equity consequences of adopting commercialized, as opposed to political strategies, for the management of these forests were well founded. Following the collapse of the COP 17 talks in Durban, REDD/REDD+ is now one of the only functioning carbon regulation instrument on the market, so to speak, and it would appear to be attracting good interest as an investment opportunity, at least if expensive City (New York and London) workshops and mention in international financial consultant prospectuses are any indicator (EF Web, 2012; KPMG, 2012:35). While it is tempting to believe that a post crisis 21st century global economy might finally be turning over a green leaf, it is important to recognise, as Smith points out, that a rudderless system can not guarantee benefits or protection to the people who live from and within these forests. While they are often engaged in a variety of economic activities, people living directly from resources they extract from forests can be understood as examples of what Salleh (2009) has called the ‘meta-industrial’ subject: some one who has an embodied direct dependence on the use of their own physical resources to sort matter into low entropy, who is, whether by obligation or by choice, either partially or wholly externalized from industrial society. A system that uses cash payments to meta-industrial workers to compensate for the CO2 production arising from industrial work in far off lands is, from the outset, unbalanced. For example, while small scale illegal logging is certainly causing damage to tropical forests, manual extraction of hardwood from protected areas might well be the economic activity of choice for those who live there, since it ensures a direct payment corresponding in a concrete way to work invested. On what basis do industrial workers and capital investors have the right to demand that the meta-industrial subject adopt their preferred economic activity? Does the Environmental Defense Fund, for example, have the right to advocate, as they did in Durban, that „all sources of financing should be used to pay for REDD+“ (EDF Web, 2012), if these include reliance upon sources of funding that revoke the self-determination of the inhabitants of the targeted forests?




The step of determining what ecosystem services should be preserved and how is inescapably political because it is basically bound up with the most human of questions regarding purposive action – how do I, you or we, wish to relate to the world around us. Identification of planet-level-relevant ecological phenomena is certainly, at least in part, a technical and scientific matter. However, when it comes to questions of environmental management, the presumption that there is a clean line between politics and science is, at best, naïve (O’Neill, 1993; Wynne, 1994; 1996; Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1994; Yearley, 2004; Farrell, 2009[2005]; 2008b; Pielke 2007). Decisions regarding if and if so how goods and services derived from these forests should be valued and marketed can not be separated from the epistemological and ontological frames through which they are imagined (Farrell, 2007). And, decisions regarding which parts of an ecosystem should be preserved and which not, cannot be separated from the purposes and preferences of those who have the power to decide how the ecosystem will be managed (Farrell, 2011a; 2011b). This means, for example, as has been pointed out by Aguilar and Soto Monterrosa (2010:4) and by Kosoy and Corbera (2010: 1231), that a focus on carbon sequestration as the marketable output of REDD/REDD+ schemes can easily lead to a preference for the kind of plantation style afforestation programmes that have already raised great concerns under the CDM. In other words, franchise equity is not to be measured only with reference to voice in the setting of policy, but also in terms of specifying what types of goods and services are to be marketed, how they are to be produced and how the quality of the marketed goods and services is to be monitored and verified.

Bits of REDD TAR: Deciding what kind of tropical forests should be preserved, and how, is neither a matter of concern solely for the local inhabitants of these ecological systems nor for the other affected individuals, dispersed across the planet. Existing political theory provides various means of conceptualizing power relations but tends to focus either within local democracy or at the level of international negotiations between recognized states. Theory concerning the politics taking place within the democratic netherworld betwixt the two is still thin on the ground. Here we can take a few steps forward, at least ontologically, with the help of Sassen’s (2008) thinking about some of the objects to be found here, which she refers to as „partial, often highly specialized, global assemblages of bits of territory, authority, and rights (TAR) that begin to escape the grip of national institutional frames” (Sassen, 2008:61). As examples of these TAR assemblages she cites, among others: the International Criminal Court, the European Court of Human Rights, creative usages of the Alien Torts Claims Act in the courts of the United States and what she calls, following Teubner (1997; 2007) the „lex constructionis, a private ‘law’ developed by the major engineering companies in the world to establish a common mode of dealing with the strengthening of environmental standards in a growing number of countries, in most of which these firms are building” (Sassen, 2008:62). In the arena of earth system governance of carbon emissions we may speak quite comfortably about the emergence of a REDD TAR assemblage, aggregating around the idea of IPES and the problem of tropical deforestation and degradation.




The REDD+ SES Initiative: Substantial bits of this REDD TAR assemblage would appear to be aggregating around the objectives and organizational structure (territory), designated activities (authority) and privileges to speak and be heard (rights) of the REDD+ Social and Environmental Standards (SES) initiative (REDD+ SES Web-a, 2012). According to the 2011 UN-REDD Programme report „A Review of Three REDD+ Safeguard Initiatives” (Moss and Nussbaum, 2011:6) this is:

„[a] voluntary international standard for REDD+ [that] has …been developed through a multi-stakeholder process facilitated by CARE International and the Climate, Community and Biodiversity Alliance (CCBA). The resulting ‘REDD+ Social and Environmental Standards (REDD+ SES) are expected to be used as a standard for government-led programs at national, state, provincial, or other level and are designed to go beyond laying out minimum safeguards, and to identify and elaborate benefits.”

That is to say, REDD+ SES is the ‘officially’ endorsed volunteer standards initiative for REDD/REDD+. The manuals prepared by this organization are made available for download at ‘the REDD desk,’ which one reaches via a link titled, ironically, “The Little REDD Book,” in the Related Documents box on the About UN-REDD Webpage (UN REDD Web, 2012). The documents available via the REDD+ SES website and the UN-REDD website, which are dated September 2011, are signposted on the ecosystemmarketplace.com website (ESM Web, 2012) - date of posting 03 Dec 2011 - as a “New Guide for Measuring Social and Biodiversity Impacts of REDD.” The Washington DC based not-for-profit corporation Forest Trends (FT Web-a, 2012), which is cited as a contributor to the standards documents, and also has them posted on its own webpage (FT Web-b, 2012), is however, not listed on the REDD+ SES website as a part of the team (REDD+ SES Web-a, 2012). Interestingly, Forest Trends, whose mission is listed on their website as being „to promote sustainable forest management and conservation by creating and capturing market values for ecosystem services“ (FT Web-c, 2012), is also the host institution for the Global Environment Fund (GEF) supported entity ecosystemmarketplace.com (FT Web-d, 2012), where the ‘created value’ of REDD/REDD+ is to be traded. It is perhaps plausible to argue that Forest Trends, having worked as a contractor on the development of the REDD+ SES manual, need not be specifically named on the initiative’s website. However with respect to the 03 Dec. 2011 announcement on the ‘news feed’ of the ecosystemmarketplace.com website, which coincides with the Durban COP17 and reflects a three month lag from the finalization date of the set of documents produced by ecosystemmarketplace.com’s parent organisation, it would appear that the REDD TAR surrounding the politically charged relationship between 1. specifying standards for ensuring the rights of local and indigenous peoples and 2. marketing forest ecosystem services, is rather dense just here (Image 1).




Image 1: Screen Dump of a REDD TAR fragment (photo taken March 2012)

So what is this value that Forest Trends aspires to create? Once again recalling Kosoy and Corbera’s (2010) reminder to keep both ecosystem use and ecosystem exchange values in view, it quickly becomes apparent that Forest Trends is mainly concerned with creating exchange value. In old fashioned political economy language this would be called financial speculation. Without getting bogged down in the question of whether financial speculation is a good or a bad thing, let us simply note that it is a thing, and that it is presenting in this REDD TAR. This then leads me to ask: what, if any, are the franchise equity implications of using financial speculation as a means to create ecosystem services value? In order to take a closer look at the logic of this form of speculation we can turn to Tucker’s (2001) discussion of the potential for establishing call option trading in emission reduction units or carbon tradable offsets (CTO). Here the option, but not the obligation to purchase a security or equity at an agreed price is purchased for a fraction of the market price of the security or equity proper. The purchaser retains the right to exercise their option to buy within a fixed period, at an agreed price. In the event that actual market price exceeds the agreed option price, at the time the option is exercised, an immediate paper profit is realized. This is one of the conventional ways in which financial speculation creates.




Financial speculation also requires, in order to create value, a financial marketplace, where financial products can be exchanged. Although the idea of carbon tradable permits, a financial product, is taken as given in discussions about REDD/REDD+, it is worth noting that the financial products expected to facilitate these IPES schemes are reasonably new objects in the landscape of political economy. Less than 30 years ago Kneese (1977) discussed the logistics of establishing a system for tradable pollution rights as if talking of science fiction, pointing out that very idea of such a scheme „violates the third structural assumption for an efficient market – that all valuable assets can be individually owned and managed without violating the competition assumption” (Kneese, 1977:29). In other words, the transaction costs associated with creating, maintaining and operating a contrived market would be so prohibitively high that it would either prove inefficient, in the event that competition were ensured, or would tend toward cartel or monopoly, which would be the only means by which transaction costs could be kept under control. For Kneese this was unimaginable, since it would make no sense for a government to support such a program. However, in the event that a private market were to be established that was not required to ensure the preconditions for free and fair competition, then the combination of diminished transaction costs and preferential access might indeed constitute sufficient incentive for proceeding with the establishment of a cartel or monopoly. The call option financial product strategy is presented by Tucker (2001) as a win-win solution, where a country in a position to accumulate CTO’s through carbon sequestration programs, typically one not normally attractive for capital investment (in the paper Costa Rica serves as the example), is able to achieve immediate revenue for CTO’s that would not otherwise be saleable until after the sequestration could be evidenced. However, in order for a seller country to have CTO’s to sell in an option market, for which it would receive this immediate revenue, it must have a program in place that can be expected to provide additional sequestration, which must somehow be funded in the meantime. In principle, the option payments are meant to finance this activity and, since options are sometime not converted, constituting and additional revenue stream. The assumption that sequestration programs will be funded through raising debt is a basic feature of the options systems that Tucker describes and, for that matter, of any system supporting financial speculation though investment in PES, such as REDD/REDD+. This is because, as will be clear to anyone who has followed the recent Greek debt crisis, expected returns on investment in financial markets are directly related to the degree of risk associated with the investment. That is to say, speculation is attracted toward projects that are in need of time, money or both, and in which there is a real possibility that the enterprise may fail, because these are the projects where there is the best potential to cash in, in the event that they do not. Basically, the tradability of carbon sequestration in the poorest countries of the world is only likely to be marketable based on their accumulating debt, since payment is only going to be made in full once the sequestration has been achieved. The idea that countries not normally attractive to capital investors might accumulate debt in order to build cheap carbon sinks to serve the greater good of the planet is problematic for at least two reasons: 1. the living systems that are expected to provide this service can, because they are alive, die (Tsuchida, 1999) and 2. human energy and material consumption „depends not on ‘nature’ but on economics, politics and culture and exhibits large differences between rich and poor”




(Martinez-Alier, 1999:29). In the case of a country selling CTOs, the quality of the underlying ecosystem providing the carbon sequestration service could be affected through a living systems failure that the seller can not control, e.g. a natural disaster or a war might cause ecosystem scale damage in the sequestration area, leading option holders to choose not to exercise their options. This would add an already budgeted transaction cost to the balance sheet of the cash rich financial speculator while leaving the cash poor seller with debts that they were unable to repay, having lost their main revenue stream, due to the fact that the options they sold had not been exercised. Even if the options were to be exercised, as Tucker’s scenario assumes, accumulation of debt on the part of the seller places the value of the living systems derived commodity ‘low CO2 concentration atmosphere’ in counterbalance with the value of the commodity money of account. After the debt has been incurred, CTO option prices and decisions regard whether to exercise them would be impacted by an increase or decrease in the total quality of available units of the commodity ‘low CO2 concentration atmosphere’ available on the market (sic Strassburg et al., 2009; Catteneo et al, 2010). This would be a consequence of a combination of biological and political dynamics that can be impacted to some degree by law and practice. However, the total amount of debt owed by the seller will simply increase over time through interest, as a consequence of money of account dynamics, regardless of how fair or unfair the trading scheme proper turns out to be. If the scheme is reasonably fair to poor participants in terms of distribution of income, then the indebted seller may have more money at their disposal than otherwise. However, if interest rates spike, due to factors unrelated to the fairness of the REDD/REDD+ scheme, then this distributional equity might disappear quite quickly. Taking now a closer look into Forest Trends, with the question of franchise equity on the table, we find, among its board, representatives from JP Morgan Chase & Co., GEF, Greenpeace and the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Agricultural Innovation of the Netherlands, as one might well expect of a corporation concerned with financial speculation and earth system governance. While it must be said that this is a surprisingly eclectic board, it is not representative of the concerned parties in the REDD/REDD+ discourse, nor should it be, as Forest Trends is a nonprofit, tax-exempt corporation under Section 501(c)(3) of the US Internal Revenue Code. However, when I tried to learn more about one Forest Trends board member, who is listed as being associated with what appeared to me to be a Maasai organization – Shompole Community Trust, the web-link from the list of Forest Trends’ board members to this organization was blank. I could click it but then was lead to nowhere. When I eventually did find Shompole Community Trust listed on the internet, it was as an Equator Initiative prize winner in 2006 (EI Web, 2012). However, the associated domain name www.shompole.com turned up as potentially available for purchase (Image 2 below). Looking still a bit further I eventually found that Shompole is now, what ever it may once have been, an ecotourism safari lodge (ASM Web, 2012). At least as regards this particular bit of the REDD TAR, it would appear that the voice of indigenous peoples living within their traditional environments has been disciplined.




Image 2: Screen Dump of a REDD TAR fragment (photo taken March 2012)

On balance, it should also be noted that there are some signs of indigenous and local people having been able to achieve a degree of voice in the REDD+ discourse, in spite of their seemingly marked absence from the design and administration of the REDD+ SES Initiative and the ecosystemmarketplace.com, etc. For example the Indigenous Climate Portal (ICP Web, 2012), appears to have been very active in the run-up to Durban 2011, presents training manuals and research reports that address the questions of REDD from the viewpoint of indigenous peoples. But even here the REDD TAR is thick, as this group, like the REDD+ Options Assessment (Meridian Institute, 2011), the REDD+ SES Initiative and the ecosystemmarketplace.com, is supported by a prominent member of the assemblage: Norad.4 Yasuni ITT Initiative: While it would appear that the REDD+ SES bits of this REDD TAR assemblage have substantial deficiencies when it comes to what I have called above franchise equity, another bit - the Yasuni ITT initiative of the Ecuadorian government (for an introduction see Yasuni-ITT Web, 2012) - gives some promising indications as to how this might be ensured and how 4 While the Meridian Institute Options Assessment was funded soley by the Norwegian government, both the REDD+ SES Inititative and the ecosystemmarketplace.com have a number of funders, among them Norad, the Nowegian development aid program.




political theorists might effectively speak about justice and equity within these assemblages. Formally titled (Larrea et al, 2011) as “An Initiative to Change History,” Yasuní-ITT is indeed a remarkably novel enterprise, associated with one of the most exceptional places on the planet earth: the tropical rainforests of Ecuador. Within them is the Yasuní National Park and, within it, the Ishpingo-Tambochocha-Tiputini (ITT) oil field concession territory that the Yasuní ITT initiative is intended to protect. With a caveat to the reader that the history and principles of this initiative are both profound and complex (see Yasuní-ITT Web, 2012; Warners, 2010; Rival, 2010, Larrea et al, 2011 for a general introduction to the topic) the basic idea of Yasuní ITT is that oil discovered under the ITT concession, the exploitation of which can be expected to seriously negatively impact the biological organisms (including human beings) living within the boundaries of the concession, should be left unexploited.5 On the one hand, the government of Ecuador, recognizing its international responsibility as curator of this exceptional ecosystem, has vowed to suspend the concession and prohibit exploitation of millions of barrels of oil. However, since this decision has substantial opportunity costs – estimated to be in the region of US$8 billion – the Ecuadorian government has proposed that the rest of the world share with them this financial burden. In order to help them along, the government aims to sell certificates of guarantees (Certificado de Garantía Yasuní - GCY) that basically constitute private leans against the territory of the concession, to individuals and governments that wish to see Yasuni ITT remain unexploited. While the initiative can easily be criticized as a form of bio-blackmail, it nonetheless contains a logic that speaks directly to and effectively engages with some of the most slippery bits of the seemingly intractable REDD TAR described above. Significantly, the marketed value (asking price) of Yasuni ITT is not linked to the carbon sequestration capacity of the forest area that would be preserved, nor is it linked to an externally defined specification of how this forested area should be managed. The management of the area remains the responsibility and the discretion of the Ecuadorian government and is intended, at least, to ensure and protect the continued privacy of two un-contacted communities of indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation.6 Instead, the ‘price’ of Yasuni ITT is determined with reference to avoided carbon sequestration costs. These avoided costs, calculated in terms of the estimated tonnage of the carbon not released into the atmosphere because Yasuni ITT is not exploited, serve as compensation for the opportunity costs incurred by the country of Ecuador through the Yasuni ITT initiative. The REDD+ SES Initiative bits of this TAR are exerting agenda setting and problem framing power under the auspices of a suite of democratically unaccountable, voluntary, not-for-profit and quasi-commercial regulatory authorities and a closely associated ecosystem services exchange. However, both with respect to the characteristics of the marketed product and the manner in which its value is guaranteed, power is being exercised here by the government of Ecuador: a democratically accountable entity. On the one hand, the capacity to prohibit oil exploitation at Yasuni ITT, which is what has produced the marketable product of CGYs, is based on the Ecuadorian government’s democratic authority to determine what business activities are carried out within its territories. On the other, the modality through which these

5 It should be noted that other concessions in the Yasuní National Park are still slated for exploitation and that the strategy for managing the ITT concession is, up until now, the exception in Yasuní, as opposed to the rule. 6 Here it is important to keep in mind that Ecuador is one of the few post-colonial countries in the world that officially recognizes the political and territorial rights of indigenous peoples living within its territories.




CGYs are being calculated - i.e. as avoided costs - is the result of a specific choice of valuation language (sic O’Neill, 2001; Martinez Alier, 2002), again made by the democratically accountable government of Ecuador. Although there is no guarantee that this or future languages of valuation selected by the Ecuadorian government are or will be fair representations of the interests of the people living in Yasuni ITT, the selection is, in any case, made by a political authority – the state of Ecuador – in which the affected local and indigenous people have a political franchise. The Politics of Nature and the Nature of REDD+: In considering the political theory implications of getting stuck within this REDD TAR it is important to keep in mind that the principle of common but differentiated responsibility (see Stone, 2004 for an introduction to and critical review of the principle) presumes affluent countries like Norway and the United States should help to subsidies global environmental governance initiatives. It is also entirely plausible, indeed even probable, that the Norwegian government, the USAID and various other regular funders of this TAR have the best of intentions with regards to these initiatives. Nonetheless, from a political theory point of view, there remain substantive problems here that can not be resolved through recourse to the presumption that one is doing ones duty and motivated by good intentions. Firstly, one of the reasons that the Norwegian government has excess cash is because they are involved in the sale of the very petroleum that is contributing to both the anthropogenic accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere and the industrialization of deforestation in the tropics. While it would be absurd to propose that the problem of deforestation in the tropics could be solved if Norway would just refrain from selling oil, it is equally absurd to presume that the Norwegian government is a disinterested and therefore politically neutral actor in this arena. For whom do they speak and with what authority is not clear, nor is it clear how this can be addressed democratically. There are no existing global governance mechanisms by which the local residents of affected forest communities can hold the government of Norway accountable for its actions or for the actions - including the lobbying of the ecosystemmarketplace.com during COP17, and the discursive framing of the REDD+ SES initiative manuals - carried out by the individuals it contracts and/or finances. Similar to what has been seen in recent months and years with WikiLeaks, the Anonymous internet hackers movement and the bizarre Fellini-esque saga of the KONY 2012 initiative, at least with regard to the REDD+ SES bit of this REDD TAR, it is, today, far easier to generate global awareness of a topic than to establish mechanisms and modalities through which that awareness may be turned into purposive, collective democratic action. This is not simply a question of achieving transparency, since, in the absence of democratic mechanisms of engagement, there is no reason to presume that awareness that one is being exploited can or will be converted into the annulment of that exploitation. A slave does not remain under the control of their master because they are unaware of being enslaved but rather because they are unable to revoke their master’s authority to continue with their enslavement. Here we are concerned rather about what we may describe as the ‘right to rule’ and we would do well to keep in mind Arendt’s admonition that „[p]ower needs no justification, being inherent in the very existence of political communities; what it does need is legitimacy” (Arendt, 1970: 52).




This brings to the fore the question as to how democratic are, or could, the procedures be through which the individual freedoms of participants in an IPES scheme are abdicated in the interest of the collective objectives of the scheme? That is to say, to what degree and in what manner (freely or otherwise) do the individuals living within a target ecosystem subordinate their own ideas regarding how they wish to relate to that ecosystem to the idea held by the scheme? On what basis are the actors that comprise the RESS IPES TAR assemblage given the right to rule? None: or perhaps better said, on the basis of opportunity and initiative. They would appear to be a case in point of what Arendt (1970) has called the rule of Nobody. However, in place of the state based bureaucrats to whom she was referring (Arendt, 1994[1963]; 1970), we have now an international assemblage of technocrats, scientific and social justice experts and selected individuals represented the affected parties, who have all, in one way or an other, somehow managed to achieve voice within the discourse on REDD+, none of whom have been assigned accountability for the political character of the decisions that they are taking. According to the details posted on their website (REDD+ SES Web-b, 2012) the REDD+ SES Initiative, which is run in partnership by Climate, Community & Biodiversity Alliance and CARE, is comprised of:

Climate, Community & Biodiversity Alliance (CCBA), a private entity that „has developed and is promoting rigorous standards for evaluating land-based carbon projects” (REDD+ SES Web-d, 2012), which is a private foundation based in Arlington, VA, whose website is hosted, with all rights reserved, by Conservation International. CCBA is, itself, comprised of:

CARE [yes, interestingly, this is the same CARE with whom the initiative is being partnered];

Center for Environmental Leadership in Business at Conservation International;

The Nature Conservancy; Rainforest Alliance; Wildlife Conservation Society

and funded (REDD+ SES Web-c, 2012) through donations from: The Blue Moon Fund; The Kraft Fund (administered by the NY Community Trust); BP; Hyundai; Intel; SC Johnson; Sustainable Forestry Management (SFM); Weyerhaeuser

CARE International Poverty, Environment and Climate Change Network (a US$ 1 billion per annum turnover poverty alleviation charity – CARE Annual Report 2010);

CARE Brazil; Clinton Climate Initiative representatives from Indonesia, the UK and Tanzania (a

part of the US$ 300 million per annum turnover William J. Clinton Foundation – Annual Report 2010);

Ministry of Forestry and Soil Conservation, Government of Nepal;




The Federation of community Forestry Users, Nepal; Ministry of the Environment, Quito, Ecuador.

There are a range of international entities, NGOs and foundations that pop up across this TAR with regularity, including USAID, Norad, GEF, IUCN, The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, Rainforest Alliance, and Fauna & Flora International and also a fascinating diversity, including, for example, the open source, adaptive management, project development software Miradi that „makes it easy for anyone to create a world-class biodiversity conservation project” (Miradi Web, 2012). Although it would take us off topic here to begin tracing these actor networks in their entirety, that promises to be a fascinating and potentially quite informative exercise. What is within my reach here is to conduct a brief archaeological excavation of the some of the content of the REDD+ SES and a recent related scientific paper ‘Towards cost-effective social impact assessment of REDD+ projects: meeting the challenge of multiple benefit standards,’ which was written by two individuals based in two different organizations within the REDD+ SES bit of the REDD TAR assemblage (Richards and Panfil, 2011 – associated with Forest Trends and Climate, Community and Biodiversity Alliance, respectively). In both the REDD+ SES manual and this academic article there is a strong emphasis on the need to monitor and generate reliable data concerning the actions and outcomes of REDD IPES projects. The idea is that the cost-effectiveness of a project is related to ensuring that targets are met. It is argued that ‘buyers’ of ecosystem services are only going to be willing to pay, in advance, for such services, in the event that there is good evidence available that the purchased product – e.g. carbon sequestration – will be delivered. For Richards and Panfil (2011), ensuring that the poor involved in these projects receive cash, private property rights (against which, it should be noted, they can then sell leans) and health care services is balanced out by repeated steps and measures designed to establish what Foucault (1991[1975]) might have called a panopticon of monitoring and validation procedures designed to discipline the recipients of these funds into behaving according to the expectations and rules of free flowing cash capital based market exchange. The same logic can be found throughout the Options Assessment Report (Meridian Institute, 2011) prepared on behalf of the Norwegian Government, prior to the Durban COP17, by a Washington, DC based Meridian Institute (Merid Web, 2012), which is available for download from the UN-REDD website as a Related Document, appearing directly below the link to the COP16 lca official Cancún text on REDD+ (UN REDD Web, 2012). That Smith (2002) and McAfee’s (1999) nightmare scenario – the pursuit of reforestation projects along the lines of the CDM, i.e. converting the degraded forests of tropical regions into carbon storage facilities – is on the table as an option under REDD/REDD+ is clear both within this report and with its placement on the UN REDD ‘About’ page:

„Given the difficulties and lack of agreement among experts on defining forest „degradation,” it seems it would be an enormous task to attempt to get agreement on definitions of all potential activities included under a REDD mechanism as described in the Bali Action Plan. Fortunately, the existing IPCC GPG framework provides approaches and methods for accounting for changes in carbon stocks from changes in the use and management of all forestlands, and this framework has already been accepted by all Parties” (Meridian Institute, 2011: 20).




Deliberative Systems, peppered with bits of REDD TAR - a possible Way Forward: Sassen (2008) proposes that TAR assemblages represent a historicizing phenomenon that is „de-essentializing the national by confining it to a historically specific configuration and making it a reference point by positing that its enormous complexity and large capture of society and the geopolity make it a strategic site for the transformation” (Sassen, 2008:75). Rather than usurping, displacing or overriding national authority, they may be understood to be making use of national sovereignty – i.e. putting it to work in serving the particular interests of the TAR assemblage’s constituency. This new modality of political performance, which is both national and transnational in the one instant, places before the political theorist the question, what then, if any, might be the political role of the democratic nation state in controlling the political power exercised by these assemblages? While it is still a long way from being a fully formulated democratic theory proposition, we can find some suggestions for how this might be accomplished by building upon Dryzek and Stevenson’s (2010; see also Dryzek, 2009) revival of Mansbridge’s (1999) concept of deliberative systems, which Parkinson (2003; 2006) had earlier suggested might, if they can be effectively designed, help overcome some of the representation related legitimacy problems of deliberative democracy. Building on the idea that deliberative systems are an emergent phenomena, that in and of themselves constitute a performance of democracy, Dryzek and Stevenson (2010; Dryzek, 2009) propose to apply the concept to support theory work not only about local and national politics but also about politics ‘beyond the state.’ For this work, they propose the use of six criteria that serve both to help the theorist determine whether or not a deliberative system is present and, in the event that one is, to guide analysis of its democratic legitimacy. In their empirical study, which explores the characteristics of discourses taking place within the UNFCCC negotiations, Dryzek and Stevenson (2010) focus mainly on phenomenological questions: i.e. Is there a deliberative system present in earth system governance of climate change? Is it sufficiently persistent that it would be appropriate to use deliberative democracy theory to talk about international climate change politics? Their conclusions are, basically: 1. yes there is a deliberative system observable in and around the UNFCCC negotiations that is sufficiently persistent for it to merit analysis from a deliberative democratic theory point of view and 2. that the system performs rather poorly when assessed against their criteria, particularly with regard to the degree of real deliberation (i.e. in the Kantian and Habermasian sense); the accountability of deliberants toward one and other and the ability of affected parties to achieve voice within the deliberations. Elsewhere (Farrell, 2009[2005]), I have proposed building on Barry’s (1999) idea of collective ecological management and Parkinson (2003) and Mansbridge’s (1999) original, more normative discussion, in order develop the constitutional architecture of a deliberative system might serve as a viable basis for establishing democratic discourse that spans the epistemological, geographical and cultural divides of environmental politics by providing „a complex, iterative process, where expertise, accountability and legitimacy interact in problem formulation and resolution…[that] might be legitimated through iterative, multi-institutional governance structures” (Farrell, 2009[2005]: 251).




If IPES and the various bits of REDD TAR discussed above are understood to be parts of an existent deliberative system, representing an array of loosely related and discursively intertwined epistemological dispositions and vested interests, then perhaps it is reasonable to asks whether or not and if so how this assemblage might be developed into a legitimate deliberative system. To do this, we could use the criteria provided by Dryzek and Stevenson (2010) as a starting point and Sassen’s (2008) observations about the ontology of these assemblages as a guide. Recalling Sassen’s proposition, that entities within a TAR are positioned to deploy national political power to serve the ends of the assemblage, we may consider more closely an appropriate concrete example. What might then be the preferred configuration of a deliberative system comprised of relationships between the Norwegian government, the Ecuadorian government, their respective democratic citizenries and ministries, the ecosystemmarketplace.com, Forest Trends, the REDD+ SES initiative, the UN REDD Desk and the COP to the UNFCCC? Taking this question forward by considering possible deliberative system links between two entities already to be found within the REDD TAR, we can begin to imagine what might be involved. The Yasuni ITT Initiative, which is an official program of a democratically elected government is, if we follow Sassen (2008) and conventional democratic theory, a firm foundation upon which to build a legitimate deliberative system. This is not to say that Yasuni ITT is without problems, nor to propose that there are no issues of democratic accountability in Ecuador. My point is merely that Ecuador, being a constitutional democracy, whatever its flaws, provides a democratically legitimate starting point for this theoretical work. In addition, since both indigenous people and nature are explicitly ascribed rights before the law in the 2008 constitution of Ecuador, it would seem to be a particularly appropriate starting point for considering how a system might be built that ensures franchise equity for the inhabitants of the world’s tropical forests. Let us then consider what might be a legitimate relationship between Yasuni ITT and The Forest Dialogue, a privately run international deliberative forum, hosted by the Global Institute of Sustainable Forestry at Yale University.7 The Forest Dialogue was established in the late 1990s as a result of discussions that began within the Working Group Towards a Sustainable Forest Industry, an international group of individual forest companies within The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) (FD Web, 2012). It is most certainly a discursive forum, focused on facilitating dialogue and its membership is drawn from universities and think tanks, forest industry companies, labour unions, and environmental and local and indigenous people’s NGOs. However, since it is a private voluntary initiative, decisions regarding who has the right to speak in this forum, as opposed to how one is allowed to speak within it, are not made democratically or, indeed, even with reference to any national or international government’s specifications. In spite of the fact that the forum does appear to make an effort to include a wide range of voices, if its constituency is presumed to be all those concerned about the future of the world’s forests, then it can not be considered legitimate or indeed able to be legitimated. If, instead, this entity is left to be what it is and allowed to claim its territory within the REDD TAR, as it were, it can be understood as the sanctioned voice for the forest industry, established and supported by that

7 It is worth noting here, with respect to keeping an eye on the density of this REDD TAR, that Michael Jenkins - President and CEO of Forest Trends „holds a Master's of Forest Science from Yale University“ (FT Web-e, 2012) and that 3 other members of his staff have also worked or studied with this Yale community.




constituency. Since it has no authority to concern itself with questions regarding the democratic will of indigenous people living within the forests that its constituency would like to exploit, The Forest Dialogue might be legally obliged to engage in deliberations with the Yasuni ITT staff of the government of Ecuador when developing its positions regarding how to protect the rights of the local and indigenous peoples of the world’s tropical forests. While representatives of the government of Ecuador can, of course, not be presumed to have the right to speak on behalf of all indigenous peoples of the planet, since we are talking here about a deliberative system, this is not what would be expected of them. Rather than a delegated voice, in a deliberative forum these representatives from the government of Ecuador would be contributing their reason, experiences and reflections on how such representation has been achieved in Ecuador. Such interventions, in a discursively open deliberative forum, would be expected to provide the discursive community with material that can be used to develop appropriate strategies for achieving similar results in other settings, presumably but not necessarily in collaboration with other national governments. While The Forest Dialogue already includes various individuals associated with local and indigenous people’s organisations – International Alliance of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples of the Tropical Forests (IAITPTF), Panama; Forest Peoples Programme, United Kingdom; Asociación Coordinadora Indígena y Campesina de Agroforestería Comunitaria Centroamericana (ACICAFOC), Costa Rica – from a democratic theory perspective it is necessary to make a distinction between this self selected collection of non-governmental entities, which may well have the best of intentions and appropriate knowledge, and the formal democratic entity of the Ecuadorian government. The point here is not merely that the presumed interests of the people of a given tropical forest be included within a discourse, but that the affected individuals are themselves assured franchise and voice. This means that the deliberation that is required within The Forest Dialogue is, in the first instance, not about what these people might want, but rather about how it might be possible to find out what it is that they want. Conclusions: The aim of the paper has been to critically consider the implications of IPES schemes like REDD/REDD+ for the self-determination of individuals living within and directly from the tropical forests and sensitive ecosystems that these schemes are intended to protect. Following Sassen (2008) it has been proposed that REDD/REDD+ is performing in the world of earth system governance as a TAR assemblage, both operating beyond and at the same time exploiting the political authority traditionally attributed to the national, and that it is doing so in a manner that is unlikely to take into account, never mind protect the rights to self-determination of the indigenous peoples living within the tropical forests that are its main point of focus. Building on Kosoy and Corbera’s (2010) discussion of the fetishism of ecosystem services, I have proposed that consideration of the fairness of IPES schemes in general and REDD/REDD+ in particular should take into account not only questions of distributional (is the PES revenue pie being shared in a fair manner?) but also franchise equity (are we sure that we all want pie?) and have agued that the current REDD TAR does not provide either epistemological or performative space for this. Two bits of the REDD TAR – the REDD+ SES and the Yasuni ITT initiatives – were then discussed in some detail, with the former serving as an illustration of how franchise equity is generally being ignored in the current earth system governance discourse on REDD and the latter providing an




illustration for how this might be remedied. Finally, picking up on Dryzek and Stevenson’s (2010) recent revival of Mansbridge (1999) and Parkinson’s (2003; 2006) work with the idea of deliberative systems, a brief exploration was conducted regarding how it might be possible to formally link up already existing empowered spaces within the REDD TAR – such as the Yasuni ITT Initiative and The Forest Dialogue – in order to open up pathways for improving franchise equity within this political space. The prospect of perhaps being able to begin a dialogue about how to go about remedying this particular deficiency in the current earth system governance of our planet’s forests may seem a disappointingly weak and vague outcome but it is at least a promise that there may yet be some reason remaining to hope. References: Aguilar, M.Y. and F.E. Soto Monterrosa. 2010. Análisis crítico: Reducción de las Emisiones

por Deforestación y Degradación de bosques (REDD) y sus implicaciones para Mesoamérica Managua, Nicaragua: CABAL, S.A.

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