![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Tropical forests are newly valuable because of the carbon they sequester. Yet it is not clear who will benefit as a result. This article examines forest carbon’s new value in Acre, Brazil. It argues that a state program (the System of Incentives for Environmental Services – SISA) shifts forest carbon’s value from land to certain forms of labor. This approach allows the government to allocate it to poorer people without access to formal land tenure, a form of environmentally-premised redistribution. It also increases governmental power, favors intensive land use, and threatens to unmoor forest carbon from struggles for rights.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on this article. William Boyd, Lisa Curran, Jim Ferguson, David Gilbert, Susanna Hecht, Andrew Mathews, Ben Orlove, and Sylvia Yanagisako, as well as Wendy Wolford, Jenny Goldstein, and other participants in the Copenhagen-Cornell workshop on land rights and Amelia Moore and other members of the 2015 Rappaport Prize Committee, also provided valuable feedback on different drafts. The Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and Stanford University generously provided research funding. I wrote parts of the article during a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and a Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center. I also want to thank the many people with whom I worked and spent time in Acre, Brazil. All faults are mine alone.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Maron Greenleaf is an anthropologist and legal scholar interested in the political and social dynamics of human-environment interactions. She studies how environmental governance can both address and exacerbate inequity. Maron holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University, a J.D. from New York University, and a B.A. from Yale University and recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. She is currently a lecturer and post-doctoral fellow in Dartmouth College’s Department of Anthropology.
Notes
1 Deforestation surged in 2018 in anticipation of Bolsonaro’s lax enforcement of federal deforestation restrictions and active encouragement of deforestation (see Lopes Citation2018).
2 Rural producers in Acre tend to be of mixed European, indigenous, and African ancestry. Some migrated, or have forebears who migrated, to the state for land. But many, including most of those with whom I worked and who are the focus here, are descendants of rubber tappers. Their forbearers moved to Acre through debt peonage in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century in the midst of a rubber boom and a severe drought in the Northeast, where most migrants (predominantly single men) were from (Bakx Citation1988, 144).
3 Michel Foucault used the term ‘biopower’ to describe governmental action to promote the health and wellbeing of governed populations that extends and shapes state power (Citation2003).
4 This research included semi-structured interviews with rural people (mostly rural producers in the municipality of Feijó), bureaucrats, and others involved in efforts to reduce deforestation, participant observation at government agencies, workshops, and community meetings, and surveys of 240 rural families conducted with the Center for International Forestry Research as part of its Global Comparative Study of REDD+.
5 Many Latin American governments embraced neo-extractivism in the aughts (Gudynas Citation2012; Morais and Saad-Filho Citation2011), including Brazil’s Workers’ Party, which was in power at the federal level from 2003 to 2016 and at the state level in Acre from 1999 to 2018.
6 KFW retired the credits, rather than trading or using them to compensate for German emissions. The Acreano state set aside another 17.7% as a ‘risk management mechanism’ (KFW n.d., 2).
7 As of the end of 2016, KFW reported that almost 17,000 indigenous, rubber tapper, and small-scale farming families (e.g. rural producers) had received KFW funded benefits (KFW n.d., 7).
8 The term ‘extractivists’ refers to people who collect materials like brasil nuts and latex, rather than those employed in extractive industries.
9 Many rural Amazonians practice a combination of agriculture and extractivism (Fraser et al. Citation2018). Rural producers who practice only limited extractivism or have abandoned it altogether may still sometimes identify as extractivists in Acre. This reflects the continued salience of the extractivist identity even as extractivist land uses decline (Vadjunec, Schmink, and Gomes Citation2011), as well as efforts to access extractivist land rights (see below).
10 Dehm (Citation2016, 191–192) documents prominent REDD+-related pronouncements supporting land tenure reform.
11 Interview September, 2014. Unless otherwise specified, all quotations are the author’s translations from Portuguese from interviews or conversations during research in Acre.
12 SISA permits such projects, deducting their forest carbon from the state’s tally.
13 For example, soccer’s international governing body FIFA bought carbon credits from one of the Acreano projects to offset emissions from administering the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.
14 Like many rural producers in Acre, those gathered were organized into a ‘rural producers’ association.’ The man talking was the association president.
15 Social movements that advocate for the creation of settlements, including on posseiros’ own land, have not been active in much of Acre.
16 Interview August, 2014.
17 Interview August, 2014.
18 Interview with state official, August 7, 2014.
19 This logic of ‘land sparing’ has been critiqued elsewhere (e.g. DeFries and Rosenzweig Citation2010; Kaimowitz and Angelsen Citation2008; Thaler Citation2017).
20 Incentives are common in neoliberal environmental governance (see Fletcher Citation2010).
21 SISA’s administrators developed ‘social and environmental safeguards’ meant to protect against such appropriations.
22 The Cadastro Ambiental Rural, created in the 2012 revision to the federal Forest Code, requires landholders to register boundaries and forestry coverage of land they own or claim.