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ABSTRACT
In this article I argue that generating carbon credit value centres on a double movement of first naming something as waste and then removing it, a movement entangled with imagined pasts and futures. I explore this through the transformations that TAMS, a project to restore fallows from slash-and-burn agriculture in Madagascar’s rainforest, underwent through its engagement with carbon markets. TAMS initially aimed to benefit both forest and local farming communities. Its objective was then shifted to using the forest for carbon credits. I argue that the ‘calculative logic’ of carbon offset production drove this move by first identifying the fallows as waste and then removing them; other forms of understanding and using these fallows were systematically ‘unknown’: debased and forgotten. Reformulating the fallows as waste excluded local farmers from their livelihood. The promise of carbon value was never realised, but the effects of its anticipation were wasted present livelihoods.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Catherine Alexander and Patrick O’Hare for carefully reading and commenting on multiple drafts of this paper, and for their patience and advice. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers provided by Ethnos whose insights I have found very useful. The research presented here was generously funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). I would also like to thank the Department of Anthropology at Durham University and the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. I will be forever grateful to the people of Mahatsara, for their help and friendship, and I would like to extend my gratitude to Louise Holloway, for her interest in and contribution to this research.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 If in the 1970s fallow periods in eastern Madagascar ranged between 8 to 15 years, today they have reduced to 3 to 5 years. Additionally, the time needed to restore fertility increases with each production-fallow cycle in which fire is used, and this means that by the third cycle land begins to degrade at a much faster pace (Styger et al. Citation2007)
2 The Merina are the ethnic group who inhabit the highlands in and around Antananarivo and make up the bulk of the national elite.
3 During French rule the town was called Périnet after the French colonial engineer in charge of this railway section who died during building works.
4 The BioCF was created in 2004 as part of the World Bank’s Carbon Finance Unit and uses private-public funding for forest and agro-ecosystem carbon projects.
5 The legal contract between entities who buy and sell carbon.
6 The promise of work and carbon money was a contested claim and not shared by some of the organisations involved in the project.
7 This is her real name; the rest of informants in this article have been anonymised.
8 The Voluntary Market operates outside Kyoto Regulations and is available to any initiating actor such as a private company or NGO. Projects can adhere to particular carbon standards for regulation and verification, but the process is generally known to be much easier than for compliance markets, especially because it does not necessarily involve government participation.
9 McConnell argues that eastern Malagasy categorise fallows according to the degree of regeneration allowed in the following way: ‘ramarasana (just harvested); dedeka (1—2-year fallow), savoka (3—10-year fallow) jingeranto (secondary forest)’ (Citation2002:219). Styger et al. (Citation2007), on the other hand, offer a classification of fallow land in eastern Madagascar that links species succession with the number of fallow cycles after deforestation, and which goes from forest, to tree fallow, shrub fallow, herbaceous fallow and, finally, grassland.
10 According to Styger et al. for Betsimisaraka farmers ‘each fallow type integrates a range of attributes and characteristics, including species life form, species composition and associations, cycle reference, vegetation growth rate, appearance, fallow height, age and agricultural potential’ (Citation2007:262)
11 ‘In the form of peat’, Taussig elaborates, ‘the bog is a cheery, life-maintaining thing, to be sure. Yet as muddy prehistoric substitute for the oak forests than once covered the island, and as the remnant of what the wealthy landowners have otherwise appropriated or drained through centuries, the bog is a poignant sign of destruction, exclusion and poverty. Black butter comes to mind’ (Citation2003:12).
12 Developed during the 70s in Australia, permaculture was posed as an alternative to dominant understandings of ‘development’ through the application of ‘systems ecology, landscape geography and ethnobiology’ to areas as diverse as the design of buildings, farming systems or urban areas (Veteto and Lockyer Citation2008:51).
13 As Lohmann succinctly puts it: ‘The credits generated by a greenhouse gas-saving project built as a result of carbon finance are calculated by subtracting the emissions of a universe with the project from the emissions of a hypothetical ‘baseline’ or business-as-usual universe’ (Citation2009:509).
14 Referred to as the ‘Ankeniheny-Zahamena-Mantadia Biodiversity Conservation Corridor and Restoration Project (Reforestation Component)
15 The division between a ‘first’ and ‘second’ nature in such processes, therefore, becomes tricky because although recycling entails the ‘production of originals’ (Alexander and Reno Citation2012:2), these are not intended to go back to nature as such, but are rather expected to recover their productivity as constitutive elements of potential new objects and materials and therefore begin a new production cycle. The idea of restoring degraded fallows is itself an apt way of illustrating how ‘the boundaries between the natural and social are continually being crossed’ (Ferry and Limbert Citation2008:8) making distinctions between a ‘first’ and ‘second’ always blurry.
16 I understand the term resource in the broadest possible sense, as ‘objects and substances produced from nature for human enrichment and use’ (Ferry and Limbert Citation2008:3), and not necessarily defined as such by those engaged in bringing them about.
17 The validity of these contracts was also a disputed element within TAMS’ different organisations. When interviewed on this matter at this stage of the project, CI, for example, claimed that these contracts were still in place, whereas ANAE acknowledged that without the delivery of TAMS’ promises and with the apparent liquidation of the project, it did not make sense to ask farmers to stick to them.