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ABSTRACT
This research presents a case study of a high-profile carbon forest sequestration project in Southwest China, which claims to achieve ‘triple-win’ outcomes for livelihoods, biodiversity and climate change. However, over the last 15 years, each household that participated in the project has only received 10–20 USD (about 0.67–1.33 USD annually), despite the requirement for farmers to convert their agricultural land into tree plantations. We argue that contemporary capitalism engaged in climate change mitigation efforts has effectively recast the rural governance of land from a territorial arrangement to multiple actors exerting control over carbon credit certification, which creates a new form of climate injustice and social exclusion in agrarian change.
Acknowledgements
This research financially benefited from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project No. 72063037) and Yunnan Provincial Senior Talent Support Program. The authors thank the editors and Prof. Jun Borras for the invitation to contribute to the JPS Forum on Climate Change and Critical Agrarian Studies. The early version of this manuscript benefited from four anonymous reviewers’ constructive comments. English editing by Austin G. Smith and mapping by Huafang Chen are also acknowledged.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 This phenomenon has been also broadly categorized under the umbrella of neoliberal conservation, involving the use of market instruments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (see Igoe and Brockington Citation2016; Fletcher Citation2020).
2 The existing literature documents green grabbing for conservation as occurring in the forms of national park establishment, ecotourism project, afforestation programs for climate change and biodiversity conservation (Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones Citation2012; Yang and He Citation2021).
3 Sikor et al. (Citation2013) described this shift as from a ‘territorial’ to a ‘flow-centered’ governance arrangement to indicate increasing numbers of outside actors who govern contemporary land-use systems. To explain this phenomenon, Liu, Yang, and Li (Citation2016) and Hull and Liu (Citation2018) used the term ‘telecoupling’, referring to the connections between distant land systems in ecosystem services.
4 Unlike the typology of exclusion developed by Xu (Citation2019) as an analytical framework, we suggest ‘certificated exclusions’ as an emerging phenomenon in natural resource governance that describes the exclusionary process through the certification of a given resource.
5 Within this transition to modernization, land markets emerged as a result of market liberalizations and the reform to redistribute collective-owned land to individual households, which allowed the capitalistic engagement that changed the land relations (Ye Citation2015).
6 Broadly speaking, agrarian change driven by booms in tree crop planting along the borderland of Southwest China has been also examined by Xu (Citation2019) and Zinda and He (Citation2020).
7 The State Forest Administration was renamed the State Forestry and Rangeland Bureau in 2018. In response, the provincial- and county-level forest bureaus were respectively renamed to the Provincial Forestry and Rangeland Bureau and the County Forestry Rangeland Bureau in 2018.
8 A forest farm (lin chang 林场) is a type of forest enterprise engaged in afforestation and commercial logging for profit.
9 CCB Standards can be applied throughout the lifetime of the project to evaluate the social and environmental impacts of land-based carbon projects. The standards are effectively combined with a carbon-accounting standard, including the Carbon Fix Standard (CFS), the CDM and the Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS).
10 Borras et al. (Citation2022) also suggested the technocentric approach for climate mitigation as a narratives in agrarian climate struggle.
11 A German-based company for certification. See https://www.tuvsud.com.
12 1 USD = 6.77 RMB in 2008.
13 For more about the harvest quota system see He (Citation2016).
14 Forest is classified in two categories in China: (1) ecological forests, which are used only for protecting ecological functions and where no harvest activities can be carried out; and (2) commercial forests, which are used for economic purposes that allow for harvest to profit.
15 Interviewed at Tengchong in 10 July 2014.
16 Interviewed at Tengchong in 15 July 2014.
17 Interviewed at Tengchong in 17 February 2021.
18 Interviewed at Tengchong in 15 July 2014.
19 Interviewed at Tengchong in 17 February 2020.
20 For example, the Country Forest Department and TNC/CI knew that they had to select for reforestation deforested land that had been barren for at least 20 years.
21 Interviewed at Tengchong 12 July 2014.
22 Interviewed at Tengchong 15 July 2014.
23 Interviewed at Zhoujiapo in 17 February 2022.
24 Interviewed at Tengchong in 18 February 2022.
25 The SLCP is a Central Government-financed project for forest restoration that provides payment for 16 years for farmers to establish forestland in marginal agricultural land (see more details in He Citation2020).
26 Interviewed at Zhoujiapo in 21 February 2022.
27 Interviewed at Tengchong in 14 July 2014.
28 The labor cost is equivalent to 3000 RMB per ha subsidy minus the seedling cost (1650 RMB per ha).
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Notes on contributors
Jun He
Jun He is a professor of human ecology at the National Centre for Borderland Ethnic Studies in Southwest China and the School of Ethnology and Sociology, Yunnan University, China. He serves as Associate Editor for Society & Natural Resources. His research interests lie in the global value chain, indigenous knowledge, non-timber forest products, agroforestry and forest governance. His publications have appeared in World Development, Land Use Policy, Human Ecology, Forest Policy and Economics and Development and Change, among other venues.
Jiping Wang
Jiping Wang is a PhD candidate at the National Centre for Borderland Ethnic Studies in Southwest China, Yunnan University, and a lecturer in development studies at the School of International Chinese Language Education, Yunnan University. Her research examines the agrarian study in tropical frontiers with a focus on crop booming and land relations in China.