Constructing walls of carbon – the complexities of community, carbon sequestration and protected areas in Uganda

Abstract

Carbon forestry represents a degree of continuity and discontinuity with traditional conservation practices, rescripting forestry management/governance and land access through projects on the ground in variegated, context-dependent ways. Utilising the comparative lens of two distinct projects operating on state-led protected areas in the east of Uganda, and focusing on their contested boundaries, this paper reflects on these dynamics and tries to make sense of the implications for the rural communities within the project vicinities. The projects and their framings reassert the claims to territory of the state in different ways which are contingent upon and emergent from the local institutional and historical context, or ‘legacies of the land’, which can be seen in context to be disputed and contested. Whilst it must be said that there can be selectively progressive elements within carbon forestry initiatives, it can be observed that techno-centric interventions, which depoliticise their local contexts and selectively transnationalise access to land and forestry resources, can further marginalise local communities in the process.

Keywords:

• carbon forestry
• community-based conservation
• market environmentalism
• territorialisation
• marginalisation

Notes

1. Critics of carbon forestry assert that market environmentalism underpinning carbon forestry cannot be seen to amount to effective climate mitigation whilst simultaneously attempting to reconcile with large industrial emitters, or as is relevant to New Forests, large industrial plantations (CCS 2012). This is not to say that profit maximisation is the only motivation for carbon forestry. Indeed, as Bakker (2005) has pointed out, there are broad array of goals and a variety of social, cultural and environmental factors in the neoliberalisation of nature.

2. The BDDG was granted 2.7 million shillings (UGX) which they used to purchase 20 cows (which were given to 10 beneficiaries who then passed on the calves produced to other members) to share between its members, and to fertilise with manure their fields which before that date had poor soil fertility.

3. This was evidenced by the xenophobic forced circumcisions of ‘outsiders’ by gangs of youths in Mbale in 2012 (on the basis that ‘outsiders’ working there should also likewise be circumcised).

4. Where politicians promise the land in return for votes; notable in the 1980s and more recently in 2006 where a minister famously stated ‘trees don't vote, people do’.

5. Bans on hunting and eating of game meat were also imposed at this time.

6. In a VCS document (DNV 2012), the BFC claims the forest was gazetted in 1948, however the UFRIC report and villagers put the date at 1974.

7. This sort of contextualised colonial history has its corollary in the relationship between colonial agriculture and malaria proliferation in Egypt, documented in Timothy Mitchell's book entitled the ‘Rule of Experts’ (2002).

8. The District Environment officer for Mayuge asserts that district(s) with sugar production tend to be poorer in comparison to other regions of the country (Interview by the first author, July 2012).