Marketization as political technology: unintended consequences of climate finance in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Abstract

Climate finance involves the transfer of money from advanced economies into developing countries in order to contribute to carbon mitigation or climate adaptation efforts while simultaneously advancing poverty alleviation and sustainable development objectives. Dominant carbon mitigation efforts resemble what Michel Callon calls ‘civilizing markets’, a deliberate harnessing of formal markets to achieve social goals by engaging with multiple political constituencies in market design. This paper looks at carbon marketization in the Democratic Republic of Congo and finds that, despite inclusive planning, climate finance experts produce unintended consequences by assigning social and environmental goals separate strategies within a national portfolio of climate finance interventions. Resulting from the challenges of finding commensurate criteria for measuring market impacts in both social and environmental domains, this programmatic segregation obscures the interconnections between poverty, forest use and climate change in the Congo. Findings suggest a need to reconcile the design of environmental-focused markets with the difficult-to-measure embedded social benefits of informal natural resource economies.

Keywords:

• marketization
• climate finance
• economic performativity
• development
• REDD+
• forest governance

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Stefan Timmermans, Edward Walker, Sheila Jasanoff, Susan Silbey and two anonymous reviewers for their rich and thoughtful comments on different drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank Nadine Laporte and Glenn Busch for logistical and intellectual support in the field along with their indispensably good humor. All errors are obviously my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The ‘+’ in REDD+ stands for ‘and conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks’. This distinction has become crucial for expanding the type of activities for which tropical forest countries can be compensated through the REDD mechanism, particularly for countries such as the Congo where historic deforestation rates are low. Thus, slowing deforestation is not necessarily the major priority compared to preventing an upward trend in future deforestation.

2 Measuring deforestation in Africa, as Fairhead and Leach (1998) have pointed out, is a difficult and deeply political act because of the lack of consistent sources of time-series data and reliance on expert extrapolations made in past assessments about the ‘historical’ state of tropical forests. This has led to an over-estimation of previous forest cover by many international forest experts and an under-appreciation of what Fairhead and Leach call a ‘dynamic landscape perspective’, or the notion that African landscapes have undergone extensive and continuous management by local populations over centuries. There is much more to say about the actual nature of deforestation and forest degradation in the Congo, but this paper focuses particularly on the effects expert consensus had on the ability of different groups in the DRC to participate in the negotiations around carbon marketization.

3 To put overall Congolese carbon emissions in context with other countries, they remain very, very low. Consulting the World Resource Institute’s Climate Access Indicators Tool (CAIT), Congolese emissions (1850–2013) account historically for roughly 0.004 per cent of global emissions from both industrial sources and land use and forestry-related sources. Nonetheless, the DRC ranks 39th in total greenhouse gas emissions largely because of recent emissions from land use and forestry, ranking them above more industrialized countries such as the Netherlands, Algeria and Uzbekistan. CAIT tool: http://cait.wri.org/historical (accessed 11 September 2017).

4 Bryant et al. (2015) analyse how the destruction of a hyper-greenhouse gas (HFC-23) from a plant in Gujarat, India resulted in the pollution of local groundwater supplies; Reyes and Gilbertson’s (2010) collection of cases includes examples of a biomass power-plant in Thailand that produces, along with CERs, toxic levels of silica, and another involving the construction of wind farms in Satara, India that result in the violent and inadequate resettlement of vulnerable populations; and Newell and Bumpus (2012) explore how a CDM-sponsored methane flaring project at a landfill in Argentina corresponded to increased levels of respiratory illness for surrounding communities.

5 It is worth noting here that the DRC ‘Investment Plan’ – which implies a return on capital – engages ‘investments’ from public aid agencies from developed countries. At this stage, there are very few private investors or private purchasers of Congolese generated carbon credits. What is important, though, is that the FIP is anticipating a private market in the future, and thus designing carbon investment strategies with full marketization in mind.

6 Getting these community concession rights has been exceedingly difficult because such reforms alienate members of the DRC parliament and other local power brokers who frequently benefit from ambiguous land use laws – typically by helping private interests secure legal (or illegal) extractive rights concessions on community lands within their political districts in exchange for a kickback or another quid pro quo (Interview with a Congolese Deputé from the Lake Tumba region, 17 May 2011).

7 These donor members include Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Japan, Norway, United Kingdom and the United States. The initial recipient country members on the Sub-Committee at the time covered by this paper included Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Indonesia, Mexico and Peru.

8 This account is based on interviews with the Rainforest Foundation Norway’s principal representative in the DRC at the time and FIP joint-mission member Anne Martinssun.

9 This was the second to last version of the document. The final version requested $65 million, which, according to my contacts involved in the process, was spread relatively equally across the different categories.

10 A third factor deserves mention: To a certain extent FIP planners were encouraged to think less about how REDD+ funding could target poverty in deep forest communities because the FIP was only one of two principal REDD+ interventions within the DRC. The other was the Congo Basin Forest Fund (CBFF), a funding initiative set up in 2008 by NORAD and the UK Department for International Development (DFID) to support low-carbon pilot projects aimed specifically at forest and forest-adjacent communities in nine Congo Basin countries. Unlike the FIP, the CBFF was not interested in figuring out how to marketize carbon. Plagued by poor coordination, NORAD and DFID decided to close down the entire fund, cancelling 10 projects in the DRC after only $9.5 million of an initially agreed-upon $27 million had been disbursed. Of the 10 CBFF projects in the DRC, three nonetheless targeted commercial charcoal farming in savannah zones.

11 The project essentially offers a neutralization of emissions introduced by charcoal burning. Since the charcoal it would produce comes from trees that would not have been planted, but for the company’s activities, Ibi Bateke recycles carbon already circulating in the atmosphere and blocks new emissions from being released, thus its activities are ‘additional’ under the rubric of the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism.

12 The most recent project audit of Ibi Bateke posted on the project tracker of the BioCarbon Fund in May of 2013 indicates that Novacel’s calculations for both revenue and carbon reductions were wildly optimistic. Of 4,200 hectares, only about 1,200 hectares were actually planted by the end of 2013 because of lack of sufficient revenue. The company, as of 2017, is seeking additional loans from the FIP to continue planting.

13 While the initial Investment Plan said nothing in this regard, subsequent Investment Plan implementation documents, approved by the FIP-SC between 2014 and 2015, have shifted some funding away from charcoal farming and into community forestry and other small-grants activities in 16 forested territories outside the principal FIP investment areas to spur alternative livelihoods such as bee-keeping, snail farming and the harvesting and sale of non-timber forest products. But even with some recalibration of funding, forest communities are not supported to develop commercial charcoal production, which is still being concentrated in degraded savannah lands.

Additional information

Funding

Fieldwork for this project was supported by the Woods Hole Research Center and a Public Service Fellowship from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The writing of this paper was supported by a Graduate Summer Research Mentorship from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Notes on contributors

Ian Gray

Ian Gray is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California Los Angeles. He was previously a Research Fellow at the Medialab of Sciences Po, in Paris, and received a Master in City Planning from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His current research is focused on the politics of calculating and preparing for risks from climate change in urban settings.