Carbon Forestry and Sociospatial Difference: An Examination of Two Carbon Offset Projects among Indigenous Smallholders in Costa Rica

Abstract

This article examines why some kinds of households are positioned to take advantage of carbon offset projects that target secondary forest fallow. It does so by assessing the results of two offset projects targeting this land use in the Cabécar Indigenous Reserve, Costa Rica. For one project, it finds that a small group of male landowners have most of the land in fallow; however, the presence of this land use is subsidized by the productivity of female land in cash-crop production. In the second project, payments were targeted toward land in the area's fertile floodplain, and resulted in an exclusion of some households from the area's dominant livelihood activity: cash-crop production. These results demonstrate the difficult trade-offs involved in designing equitable and attractive offset projects.

Keywords:

• agriculture and the environment
• carbon offsets
• forest fallows
• gender and development
• inequality
• livelihoods

Acknowledgments

I thank Sandra Candela and Marvin Uva for their close assistance with conducting the surveys.