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Abstract
High levels of faith and finance are being invested in REDD+ as a promising global climate change mitigation policy. Since its inception in 2007, corruption has been viewed as a potential impediment to the achievement of REDD+ goals, partly motivating ‘safeguards’ rolled out as part of national REDD+ readiness activities. We compare corruption mitigation measures adopted as part of REDD+ safeguards, drawing on qualitative case evidence from three Southeast Asian countries that have recently piloted the scheme: Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. We find that while REDD+ safeguards adopt a conventional principal-agent approach to tackling corruption in the schemes, our case evidence confirms our theoretical expectation that REDD+ corruption risks are perceived to arise not only from principal-agent type problems: they are also linked to embedded pro-corruption social norms. This implies that REDD+ safeguards are likely to be at best partially effective against corruption, and at worst will not mitigate corruption at all.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. UN Sustainable Development Goal 13 is to ‘take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts’. On 22 April 2016, 175 UN Member States signed the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, aiming to reduce the pace of climate change.
2. A regional and country overview of activities is provided by the UN-REDD Programme at: http://www.unredd.net/index.php?option=com_unregions&view=overview&Itemid=495.
3. NICFI pledged USD 1 billion of Norwegian government money to REDD+ programming in both Indonesia and Brazil in 2010.
4. Criticisms of REDD+ relate to broader scepticism towards performance-based aid allocation systems, of which REDD+ represents one type (see McGillivray and Pham Citation2017).
5. In Indonesia, for example, a multi-stakeholder REDD+ Taskforce was created, later leading to a National REDD+ Agency, the first cabinet-level REDD+ body to exist in any country. The agency was discontinued in 2015 with Indonesian Presidential Decree No. 16. Responsibility for REDD+ in Indonesia rests at the time of writing with a sub-directorate of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry (see http://www.redd-monitor.org/2015/01/30/indonesias-decision-to-put-the-redd-agency-in-the-ministry-of-environment-and-forestry-is-not-in-accordance-with-norways-us1-billion-redd-deal).
6. PAPI is the largest time-series national governance and public administration survey in Vietnam based exclusively on citizen experiences. The index was first piloted in three provinces in 2009, and was extended to 30 provinces in 2010. By 2011 it covered all 63 provinces (see http://papi.org.vn/eng/).
7. Implementation challenges in REDD+ consultation processes, such as the Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) mechanism, reportedly abound. Fontana and Grugel (Citation2016) report from Bolivia that FPIC there has sometimes embedded existing social, cultural, and economic tensions.