Reconsidering REDD Law Life Limits and G PDF

Reconsidering REDD+:
Law, Life, Limits and Growth in Crisis
Julia Dehm
Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree

of Doctor of Philosophy
September 2015
Melbourne Law School

The University of Melbourne
ORCID ID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9495-6705

Produced on archival quality paper
ABSTRACT
This thesis examines the legal and social implications of an emerging carbon
sequestration scheme under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change (UNFCCC), called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest
Degradation (REDD+), in order to investigate contemporary reconfigurations of
control by the global North over land and resources in the global South. It critically
examines the rise of carbon markets as a dominant climate mitigation strategy and
their distributive consequences. This thesis argues that this marketisation of climate
governance operates to foreclose possibilities for climate justice.
This thesis makes an original contribution by asking novel questions in relation to the
REDD+ scheme and its legal framework. Its primary concerns lie with interrogating
the new form of authority, new modalities of power and the reconfiguration of social
and legal relations this scheme produces. In particular, the thesis is concerned with the
social implications of REDD+, given the 1.6 billion people globally living in and
around forest areas and dependent in some way on forests for their livelihoods. There
is now an extensive body of academic literature that examines the social impacts of
REDD+ that primarily focuses on how to avoid doing harm or realise rights or co-
benefit through REDD+ implementation. This thesis offers a unique contribution to
this literature by focusing not only on the question of formal title rights, but also their
underlying basis of authorisation and the broader political economy of the carbon
economy. It therefore provide a complex account of appropriation of forested land
through the reconfiguration of legal authority over land, that occurs alongside, and is
perhaps even facilitated by, greater tenure formalisation.
Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ i

DECLARATION
This is to certify that:
i. the thesis comprises only my original work towards the PhD except where
indicated in the Preface,
ii. due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used,
iii. the thesis is fewer than 110 000 words, exclusive of tables, maps,
bibliographies and appendices, as approved by the RHD committee.
Signed: ....................................................................
Julia Dehm
Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ ii

PREFACE
The discussion of the Kalimantan Forest Carbon Partnership (KFCP) in Chapter 8

draws on research that was previously published in a report co-authored by Rebecca
Pearse and myself and edited and published by Friends of the Earth International
(Rebecca Pearse and Julia Dehm, ‘In the REDD: Australia’s Carbon Offset Project in
Central Kalimantan’ (Friends of the Earth International 2011)). For that report I was
primarily responsible for the research and writing up of the case study of the
Kalimantan Forest Carbon Partnership while Rebecca Pearse was primarily
responsible for the research and analysis of the background discussion on REDD+.
Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ iii

THESIS OVERVIEW
Introduction
Chapter 1: ‘A Business Plan for the Planet?’
Part 1: Background
Chapter 2: Methodology and Literature Review
Chapter 3: Background to REDD+
Part 2: Public, private and market ordering
Chapter 4: REDD+: At the Intersection of Property and Contract
Chapter 5: Constructing a Carbon Market: The Development of the International

Climate Regime
Part 3: A Globalist Rationality of Optimal Use and its Scales of Implementation
Chapter 6: The Offset Relation and the Governance of Nature
Chapter 7: The Proprietorial Dimension of Authority: Establishing an Nested

Jurisdictional Scheme
Part 4: Implementing REDD+
Chapter 8: REDD+ at the National Level: Managing the Carbon Sequestration

Potential
Chapter 9: REDD+ at the Local Level: Creating the Contracting Subject
Conclusion
Chapter 10: Climate Justice and Planetary Co-habitation
Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ iv

DETAILED TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract ...................................................................................................................................................... i!
Declaration ................................................................................................................................................ ii!
Preface ..................................................................................................................................................... iii!
Thesis Overview ...................................................................................................................................... iv!
Detailed Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................v!
List of Figures ........................................................................................................................................ viii!
Abbreviations ........................................................................................................................................... ix!
Thanks and Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. xii
!
Chapter 1: Introduction: Reconsidering REDD+ ......................................................................................1!
I ‘A Business Plan For the Planet?’ ...........................................................................................................1!
II Thesis Question ......................................................................................................................................8!
III Situating REDD+ ................................................................................................................................10!
IV Unpacking REDD+ ............................................................................................................................17!
V A Note on Case Studies .......................................................................................................................21!
VI Outline of the Thesis ..........................................................................................................................24!
Part 1: Background .................................................................................................................................30!

Chapter 2: Methodology and Literature Review .....................................................................................30!
I Introduction ...........................................................................................................................................30!
II Background to the Literature on REDD+ ............................................................................................30!
III Thesis Methodology ...........................................................................................................................36!
A Examining the Effects of REDD+ .......................................................................................................36!
B Governing Through Conducting Conduct............................................................................................39!
C Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) ...................................................................43!
D Climate Justice .....................................................................................................................................46!
IV Conclusion ..........................................................................................................................................49!
Chapter 3: Background to REDD+ .........................................................................................................51!

I Introduction ...........................................................................................................................................51!
II UNFCCC Negotiations ........................................................................................................................51!
A Forest Emission Reference Levels and/or Forest Reference Levels....................................................60!
B Measuring, Reporting and Verification ...............................................................................................61!
C Safeguards ............................................................................................................................................62!
III REDD+ as a Series of Practices and Programs ..................................................................................66!
A Forest Carbon Partnership Facility ......................................................................................................68!
B UN-REDD Programme ........................................................................................................................73!
C Bilateral Funds and Coordination ........................................................................................................74!
IV REDD+ as a Concept or Idea of a Pricing Mechanism ......................................................................75!
V REDD+ as a Series of Knowledge Practices .......................................................................................79!
VI REDD as a ‘Social’, Development and Rights Project ......................................................................81!
A Discourses on Social Risks and Benefits .............................................................................................82!
B Safeguards as a Point of Convergence .................................................................................................87!
VII Conclusion.........................................................................................................................................92!
Part 2: Public, Private and Market Ordering .........................................................................................95!

Chapter 4: REDD+: At the Intersection of Property and Contract .........................................................95!
I Introduction ...........................................................................................................................................95!
II Transnational Climate Law ..................................................................................................................96!
III Bringing Together Public and Private ................................................................................................99!
A Implications of Looking at the Public and Private Together .............................................................101!
B The Co-constitutive Nature of Public and Private Ordering ..............................................................102!
C Contracts, Third Parties and Social Risks ..........................................................................................104!
D Private Forms of Enforcement ...........................................................................................................106!
IV World Bank Climate Finance as a Key Bridging Mechanism .........................................................108!
V Authority in REDD+ ..........................................................................................................................113!
A The Distinction Between Public and Private International Law........................................................113!
Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ v

B Private Ordering and Public Authority ..............................................................................................115!
VI REDD+ as a Property Right .............................................................................................................117!
A The Carbon Certificate.......................................................................................................................117!
B The Peculiar Case of the Carbon Commodity ...................................................................................118!
VII Conclusion: Making and Stabilising a World .................................................................................122!
Chapter 5: Constructing a Carbon Market: The Development of the International Climate Regime ...125!
I Introduction .........................................................................................................................................125!
II Framing Climate Change ...................................................................................................................130!
A ‘Common Concern’ or a Problem of Differentiated Power? .............................................................132!
B Climate Change as a Current or Future Problem ...............................................................................133!
C Climate Change as a Problem of ‘Effects’ Not ‘Causes’ ...................................................................134!
III Expressing Climatic Limits: Aggregate Assessments, Limits and Growth ......................................135!
A Transcendental Norm of Growth .......................................................................................................136!
B Balancing Collective and Individual Interests ...................................................................................137!
C Calculative Practices, Efficiency Assessments and the Sacrificial ....................................................138!
IV Limits and Growth: Substitutability, Decoupling and Natural Capital ............................................141!
A Substitutability, Aggregate Limits and Carbon Dioxide Equivalent .................................................143!
B Decoupling, Legislative Limits and New Rights ...............................................................................144!
C Green Capital, and the Production of ‘Additional’ Carbon Credits ...................................................147!
V The Form of the International Climate Architecture: From ‘Top-Down’ to ‘Bottom-Up’ ...............149!
A Polycentricity .....................................................................................................................................150!
B Debates over the Form of the Regime ...............................................................................................152!
C Carbon Markets in a Decentralised Regime ......................................................................................156!
VI Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................161!
Part 3: A Globalist Rationality of Optimal Use and its Scales of Implementation ...............................164!
Chapter 6: The Offset Relation and the Governance of Nature............................................................164!
I Introduction .........................................................................................................................................164!
I Establishing a Strategic Relation Between Extraction and Sequestration ..........................................165!
II Effects of this Strategic Relation .......................................................................................................167!
III Background to REDD+ Practices .....................................................................................................170!
A Conservation Practices .......................................................................................................................171!
B Sustainable Forest Management ........................................................................................................173!
IV Value and Value Practices ................................................................................................................179!
V Towards a Theory of Co-articulation Not Transition ........................................................................180!
VI Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................182!
Chapter 7: The Proprietorial Dimension of Authority: Establishing A Nested Jurisdictional Scheme184!

I Introduction .........................................................................................................................................184!
II Rival Jurisdictional Claims ................................................................................................................187!
III From Proprietorial Claims in Forests to ‘Concern’ for their Function .............................................191!
IV Property Rights in the Carbon Economy ..........................................................................................196!
A A Three-Tiered Schema of Rights .....................................................................................................196!
B Property and the Disaggregation of Rights ........................................................................................200!
C Control, Management and Use Rights in the Carbon Economy ........................................................203!
(i) Rights in Sequestered Carbon ...........................................................................................................204!
(ii) Rights in Carbon Sequestration Potential of Land as Management Rights .....................................206!
(iii) Rights in the Underlying Forested Land: Title Without Control ....................................................209!
VI Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................210!
Part 4: Implementing REDD+ ..............................................................................................................212!

Chapter 8: REDD+ at the National Level: Managing the Carbon Sequestration Potential ...................212!
I Introduction .........................................................................................................................................212!
II Reconfiguring the International: From Antagonism to Mutual Interests ...........................................215!
A The Reconfiguration of Temporality, Responsibility and Justice .....................................................215!
B Of Greater Interest than Alternative Uses: Rerganising Forested Spaces .........................................225!
III REDD+ Readiness: Assistance, Intervention and Coercing Interests ..............................................236!
IV Demonstration Activities: the Kalimantan Forest Carbon Partnership ............................................243!
A The Kalimantan Forest Carbon Partnership as an Illustrative ‘Demonstration Project’ ...................244!
Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ vi

(i) Background to the Project .................................................................................................................245!
(ii) Project Design ..................................................................................................................................248!
(iii) Reviews of the Project ....................................................................................................................249!
(iv) Evaluating the Project .....................................................................................................................252!
V Conclusion .........................................................................................................................................255!
Chapter 9: REDD+ at the Local Level: Creating the Contracting Subject ...........................................257!
I Prologue: From Rebellion to Reform ..................................................................................................257!
II Introduction ........................................................................................................................................260!
III REDD+ at the Local Level: A Terrain of Compromise ...................................................................261!
A Managing Social Risks: Ensuring Social Feasibility .........................................................................262!
B Tenure Reform as a Key Safeguard ...................................................................................................265!
IV Disciplinary Inclusion in the ‘Green Economy’ ...............................................................................266!
V Tenure Reform as a Strategy for ‘Fixing People in Place’ ................................................................268!
A Decentralisation .................................................................................................................................270!
B Land Formalisation, Commons and Customary Recognition ............................................................271!
VI Two Trajectories Towards Formalisation ........................................................................................274!
A Rights Realisation Through Project Implementation.........................................................................274!
B Rights before REDD+ ........................................................................................................................275!
(i) International Law and Indigenous Peoples .......................................................................................278!
(ii) The ‘Subject’ of Indigenous Rights .................................................................................................279!
(iii) Indigeneity as Environmental Stewardship ....................................................................................282!
(iv) Safeguard Policies and Determining Indigeneity ...........................................................................285!
(v) Interpreting Free, Prior, Informed Consent ......................................................................................287!
(vi) The Productive Effects of FPIC ......................................................................................................291!
VII Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................293!
Chapter 10: Conclusion: Climate Justice and Planetary Co-Habitation ...............................................295!

I Thesis Overview ..................................................................................................................................295!
II Implications and Future Research Questions .....................................................................................297!
III Foreclosing Climate Justice? ............................................................................................................298!
IV Alternative Visions ...........................................................................................................................299!
References..............................................................................................................................................301!
I Primary References .............................................................................................................................301!
A Treaties...............................................................................................................................................301!
B UNFCCC Decisions ...........................................................................................................................301!
C Other UNFCCC Documents ..............................................................................................................304!
D Other UN Documents ........................................................................................................................307!
E Other Documents................................................................................................................................310!
F World Bank Documents .....................................................................................................................310!
G UN-REDD Documents ......................................................................................................................311!
H Indonesian Documents .......................................................................................................................311!
I Australian Documents .........................................................................................................................312!
J Social Movement Documents .............................................................................................................312!
II Secondary Sources .............................................................................................................................313!
A Books, Chapters, Journal Articles and Working Papers ....................................................................313!
B Reports ...............................................................................................................................................341!
C Newspaper and Blogs.........................................................................................................................350!
D Media Releases ..................................................................................................................................353!
E Websites .............................................................................................................................................354!
Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ vii

LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: ‘Our Home is Not a Carbon Toilet’, 2012, picture from Yayasan Petak Danum (YPD) ..........4
Figure 2: ‘Our House is Not Toilet Carbon’ 2, 2012, picture from Yayasan Petak Danum (YPD) ..........4
Figure 3: FCPF Milestone of REDD+ Readiness, http://www.forestcarbonpartnership.org/readiness-

fund, 31 October 2013 ...................................................................................................................71
Figure 4: Bilateral and Multilateral Flows of Financial Contributions to REDD+ Countries, As

Reported by Funders. Source Voluntary REDD+ Database (October 2013) ................................75
Figure 5: Map of Existing, Emerging and Potential Emission Trading Schemes from Kossoy,
Alexandre, ‘State and Trends of Carbon Pricing 2014’ (The International Bank for
Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank 2014), 11).................................................161
Figure 6: Land Use Choice With and Without REDD Payments, taken from Salas, 2013, 7 ...............227
Figure 7: Global GHG Abatement Cost Curve Beyond Business-As-Usual (2030), source:
McKinsey&Company, 2009, 7 ....................................................................................................229
Figure 8: ‘Indonesia Has the Potential to Reduce CO2 Emission by up to 2.3 Gt per year by 2030’,
source: ‘Indonesia’s Greenhouse Gas Abatement Cost Curve,’ 2010, 13. ..................................230
Figure 9: Map of KFCP Project Area:, source: Design Document, ix. .................................................245
Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ viii

ABBREVIATIONS
AAU Assigned Amount Unit

ADP Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform of Enhanced Action
ARPAG Aliansi Rakyat Pengelola Gambut (Central Kalimantan)
A/R Afforestation and reforestation
AWG-LCA Ad-hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action
AWG-KP Ad-hoc Working Group on the Kyoto Protocol
BAU Business-as-usual
CBDR-RC Common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities
CDM Clean Development Mechanism
CERs Certified Emission Reductions
CIFOR Center for International Forestry Research
CMP Conference of the Parties Serving as Meeting of the Parties to the
Kyoto Protocol
CO2 carbon dioxide
CO2e carbon dioxide equivalent
COP Conference of the Parties
CPF Collaborative Partnership on Forests
ER Emission Reduction
ERPA Emission Reduction Purchase Agreement
ER-PIN Emission Reduction - Program Idea Note
ETS Emissions Trading Scheme
EU European Union
FAO Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations
FCPF Forest Carbon Partnership Facility
FoEI Friends of the Earth International
FPIC Free, prior and informed consent
FPP Forest Peoples Programme
Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ ix

FVA Framework for Various Approaches
GHG greenhouse gas
IETA International Emissions Trading Association
IIED International Institute for Environment and Development
IIPFCC International Indigenous Peoples’ Forum on Climate Change
IISD International Institute for Sustainable Development
INDC Intended Nationally Determined Contribution
IUCN International Union for the Conservation of Nature
JI Joint Implementation
KFCP Kalimantan Forest Carbon Partnership
LCLUCF Land use, land-use change and forestry
MRV Measuring, Reporting and Verification
NGO Non-Governmental Organisation
NAMA Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions
NDC Nationally Determined Contributions
NMM New Market Mechanisms
ODA Overseas Development Assistance
ODI Overseas Development Institute
ppm parts per million
QELRC quantified emission limitation or reduction commitments
RERL/FRL Forest emission reference levels/forest reference levels
REL/RL Reference Emission Levels/reference level

REDD+ Reducing Emission from Deforestation and Degradation
R-Package Readiness Package
R-PIN Readiness Plan Idea Note
R-PP Readiness Preparation Proposal
RRI Rights and Resources Initiative
SBI Subsidiary Body for Implementation
SBSTA Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice
Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ x

TEEB The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity
TWAIL Third World Approaches to International Law
UNDP United Nations Development Programme
UNDRIP United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
UNEP United Nations Environment Programme
UNFF United Nations Forum on Forests
UNPFII United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples
UN-REDD United Nations collaborative initiative on Reducing Emission from
Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) in developing countries
UNFCCC United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
WALHI Wahana Lingkungan Hidup Indonesia / Friends of the Earth Indonesia
WB World Bank
WRI World Resources Institute
YPD Yayasan Petak Danum / Water Land Foundation
Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ xi

THANKS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The friend comes first… More important, the friend precedes and enables thought itself…
That one never thinks alone, that one always thinks in common, is an ancient truth of
thought… And the friend is the other with whom one is in common when thinking… My
friend is my surplus thought: it is with my friend that I may come to think anew and
differently, it is in my friend that I may become different from what I thought I was in the
first place… One can think only as many, one can think only among friends, one can think
only in the common.1
Although writing is predominately a solitary process, sometimes painfully so, the

process of thinking and the production of ideas is necessarily a collective process
grounded in collegial exchange. This thesis would not have been possible without the
rich scholarly interactions I have been so fortunate to enjoy and the support of family
and friends.
Firstly, thanks are due to my thesis supervisors Margaret Young, Maureen Tehan, Lee
Godden and Kirsty Gover for their guidance throughout the conceptualisation of this
project, the freedom they allowed me to explore my ideas, their clarifying comments,
helpful suggestions and their support throughout. Special thanks are due to Sundhya
Pahuja for her support of this project, her critical encouragement and probing
questions that opened up new lines of enquiry.
Teishan Ahearne and Jessica Malka Richter accompanied me on my fieldwork in

Jakarta and Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, and were the best travelling and
intellectual companions anyone could wish for as we explored places, visions of social
justice and culinary delights.
Thank you to the many friends and colleagues at Melbourne Law School especially
Thomas Andrew, Tsegaye Regassa Ararssa, Marie Aronsson, Olivia Barr, Madelaine
Chiam, Anna Driedzic, Debolina Dutta, Luis Eslava, Jake Goldenfein, Liz
MacPherson, Shaun McVeigh, Rose Parfitt, Darren Parker, James Parker, Oishik
Sircar, Vesna Stefanovski, Cait Storr, Adrian Storrier and Marc Trabsky.
At the final stages of writing this thesis, I was a Resident Fellow at the Institute of
Global Law and Policy (IGLP) at the Harvard Law School. I am grateful to David
Kennedy for this opportunity and to my colleagues Lina Cespases, Tomaso Ferando,
1
Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri, In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosphy and
Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ xii

and Maya Savevska as well as Delia Harrington, Melinda Peterson and Kristen
Verdeaux. Many thanks also to members of the broader IGLP network who provided
comments on sections of this project in various stages of development at Writing
Workshops especially Swethaa Ballakrishnan, Yugank Goyal, Onur Ulas Ince, Vik
Kanwar, Ratna Kapur, Usha Natarajan, Pavithra Tantridoga and Robert Wei.
This thesis was initially inspired by my activist work through Friends of the Earth
International (FoEI) on the international climate regime and REDD+. Special thanks to
friends from FoE Australia for the many critical conversations on these themes which
have strongly influenced my thinking, especially Rebecca Pearse, Ellen Roberts and
Holly Creanaune. Special thanks also to the Indonesian activists who I met through
activism on this topic: Pius Ginting, Muliardi, Norhadie, Deddy Ratih, Arie Rompas
and Teguh Surya. I was fortunate to attend two Friends of the Earth International
meetings while writing this thesis (Kampala, 2013 and Paris, 2014) where I benefited
from insights shared by Dipti Bhatnagar, Jeff Conant, Lucia Ortiz, Claudia Ramos-
Guillén and Isaac Rojas in particular. The arguments advanced in this thesis however
do not reflect, and at time depart sharply from, the position of these individuals or
organisations. Many thanks also to Daniel McIntyre for many, many conversations on
these themes and questions.
Various works in progress on this thesis have been presented at conferences and
workshops including Melbourne Doctoral Forum on Legal Theory (Melbourne Law
School, December 2010 & 2011), Towards a Radical International Law (London
School of Economics, May 2011), European Society of International Law Legal
Theory Workshop (Tallinn, May 2011), Post-Graduate Research Conference (Sydney
Law School, October 2011), Law and Society Association of Australia Conference
(Wollongong, December 2011), International Law and the Periphery (American
University in Cairo, February 2012), Critical Legal Conference (Sussex, September
2014), Third World Approaches to International Law Conference (American
University in Cairo, February 2015) and a subsequent Workshop (Windsor, June 2015)
and Transnational Law Summer Institute (Kings’ College London, July 2015). Thanks
for many interlocutors for critical comments and suggestions on all these occasions but
especially Connal Parsley, Matthew Craven, Vidya Kumar, Jason Beckett, Tyler
McCreary, Umut Özsu and Peer Zumbansen.
Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ xiii

Thanks are also due to Esther Faye for listening, and to Erin Buckley, Robbie
McEwan, Nader Ruhayel, Ben Silverstein, Jordy Silverstein and Sian Vate for
nourishing and supportive friendships throughout this process. An immense debt of
gratitude is also due to Ola Szeleczky for her important guidance. Many thanks are
also due to Karen Engle and Ana Almaguel for their support in the final weeks of this
thesis, as well as to Barbara Casey and Mihret Getabicha.
Completing this project would not have been possible without the joy of ongoing
conversations with Adil Hasan Khan, and his support and love. Finally, my deepest
thanks to my family, my sisters Sara and Anna, and to my parents Doris and Burkhard
Dehm who instilled in me passion for social justice and offered incredible support
throughout this project.
Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ xiv

C H A P T E R 1:
I N T R O D U C T I O N : R E C O N S I D E R I N G REDD+
I ‘A Business Plan For the Planet?’
Bottom line what is happening here, bottom line the almost 200 governments of the world
are doing nothing less than writing a global business plan for the planet… we cannot
underestimate what is happening here before our eyes… we can’t underestimate the
privilege it is for all of us to be participants in this process... for countries to come together,
every single country with one voice and contribute to the writing of a global business plan
2
for the planet for the next 50 years is a mammoth undertaking.
It was in these terms that Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)3 described the work
of the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP) in Durban in December 2011. The
‘spiritual core of this global business plan’ was according to Figueres, an emerging
carbon offsetting approach: Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest
Degradation or ‘REDD+’. 4 REDD+ is a scheme to address the contribution of
greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, thereby bringing
together questions of sustainable management of forests and climate change
mitigation. The stated aim of REDD+ is to ‘make forests more valuable standing than
they would be cut down’5 by providing economic incentives to address tropical
deforestation and forest degradation in the global South through the production of
2
Transcribed by author from CIFOR, ‘Closing Remarks - Forest Day 5, 2011’
<http://blog.cifor.org/5782/countries-draft-%E2%80%9Cglobal-business-plan%E2%80%9D-for-
planet-at-climate-summit-figueres-says/>.
3
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, opened for signature 5 September 1992,
771 UNTS 107 (entered into force 21 March 1994).
4
I use the term ‘REDD+’ throughout this thesis (unless directly quoting someone using a different term)
to refer to these carbon sequestration schemes. When first proposed in 2005 this scheme was initially
referred to as RED (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation). It was subsequently known as REDD,
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation in Developing Countries or Reducing Emissions from
Deforestation and Forest Degradation. The ‘+’ on the end of the ‘REDD+’ refers to the additional
components, beyond reducing emissions from deforestation and reducing emissions from forest
degradation, namely conservation of forest carbon stocks, sustainable management of forests and
enhancement of forest carbon stocks that were endorsed in the Cancun Agreements (Decision 1/CP16,
‘The Cancun Agreements: Outcome of the Work of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term
Cooperative Action Under the Convention’ FCCC/CP/2010/7/Add.1 (15 March 2011), para 70).
Pursuant to this agreement these activities should receive as much emphasis as reducing emissions
from deforestation and reducing emissions from forest degradation.
5
UN-REDD Programme, Frequently Asked Questions and Answers - The UN-REDD Programme and
REDD+, November 2010, <http://www.unep.org/forests/Portals/142/docs/UN-
REDD%20FAQs%20%5B11.10%5D.pdf>.
Julia Dehm – Chapter 1 – Introduction 1

carbon credits from such ‘result-based actions’ actions.6 Controversially, the proposal
also involves such credits being purchasable by countries in the global North as
‘offsets’ that can be used towards their own international climate mitigation
compliance obligations. The dominant rhetoric around REDD+ stresses its potential
as a ‘win-win-win’ solution that brings together the different thematic areas of climate
mitigation, biodiversity protection and poverty reduction. For Figueres, REDD+ is
also ‘about mitigation, it’s about adaptation and it’s about improving the quality of
life of particularly of (sic) the people living in and around the forested areas’.7 For her,
this ‘triple bottom line’, or triad of mitigation, adaptation and poverty reduction, is the
‘compass with respect to writing this global business plan’.8
However, Figueres’ glowing description of REDD+ and its envisioned role in a

‘green economy’ has been strongly contested, predominately by the ‘climate justice’
movement that has questioned both the environmental integrity and the social justice
of such carbon offsetting regimes. 9 Central to debates on REDD+ has been the
question of the social impact of such schemes on the approximately 1.6 billion people
globally who live in and around forested areas, many of whom identify as indigenous,
and who depend on forests in varying degrees for their livelihoods. 10 For some
commentators, REDD+ schemes represents a form of ‘green grabbing’, ‘the
appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends’ that has been recognised
6
This thesis analyses and engages with REDD+ as a market-based carbon ‘offset’ scheme although a
formal decision of funding for REDD+ has not been made. This methodological decision is based on
analysis, elaborated upon in Chapter 3, that REDD+ has effectively become a market-based scheme
even in the absence of a formal decision to that effect by the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties
(COP). A formal decision about REDD+’s funding will not be made until December 2016 at the
earliest. This thesis engages with UNFCCC COP decisions on REDD+ until the Paris Conference of
the Parties in December 2015.
7
‘Closing Remarks’ above n1.
8
Ibid.
9
Larry Lohmann, ‘Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privitisation and
Power’ (The Dag Hammarskjöld Centre, 2006), Steffen Böhm and Siddhartha Dabhi (eds), Upsetting
the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon Markets (MayFlyBooks, 2009), Sarah-Jane Clifton, ‘A
Dangerous Obsession: The Evidence Against Carbon Trading and for Real Solutions to Avoid a
Climate Crunch’ (Friends of the Earth, England, Wales and Northern Ireland, 2009), Ronnie Hall,
‘REDD Myths: A Critical Review of Proposed Mechanisms to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation
and Degradation in Developing Countries’ (Friends of the Earth International, 2008), Rebecca Pearse
and Julia Dehm, ‘In the REDD: Australia’s Carbon Offset Project in Central Kalimantan’ (Friends of
the Earth International 2011), Ashley Dawson, ‘Climate Justice: The Emerging Movement Against
Green Capitalism’ (2010) 109(2) South Atlantic Quarterly 313 and Naomi Klein, This Changes
Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (Simon & Schuster, 2014).
10
Johan Eliasch, Climate Change: Financing Global Forests: The Eliasch Review (Earthscan, 2008), 9.
See discussion in Chapter 3, VI for more details.

as ‘an emerging process of deep and growing significance’.11 They highlight the dual
dynamics of accumulation and dispossession, and the unequal geographies of
authority over resources, resource control and access. The Indigenous Environment
Network, for example, has described REDD+ as a form neo-colonialism or
‘CO2lonialism’.12
In response to an Australian government sponsored REDD+ project on their land in

Central Kalimantan, Indonesian villagers issued a statement entitled ‘Our Land is Not
Your Carbon Toilet’, which was released to coincide with the Rio+20 Earth Summit
in June 2012. In relation to the Kalimantan Forest Carbon Partnership (KFCP), a
REDD+ demonstration project, they wrote:
This situation makes us even more certain than ever, that a “solution” to climate
change by way of carbon market mechanisms and the “green economy”, and
promises of financial returns for developing countries, is nothing but empty talk.
These ideas are nothing more than a new face of capitalism in the shape of ecological
imperialism. This has formed our view of the developed countries’ solution to
climate change through the REDD scheme, as only turning our homes into a carbon
toilet.13
11
See James Fairhead, Melissa Leach and Ian Scoones, ‘Green Grabbing: A New Appropriation of
Nature?’ (2012) 39(2) Journal of Peasant Studies 237, 238.
12
Indigenous Environment Network, ‘REDD: Reaping Profits from Evictions, Land Grabs,
Deforestation and Destruction of Biodiversity’ (Indigneous Enviornment Network, 2009)
<http://www.ienearth.org/REDD/index.html#36> and Indigenous Environment Network, ‘No To
CO2onialism! Indigenous Peoples’ Guide: False Solutions to Climate Change’ (2009)
<http://www.uky.edu/~tmute2/nature-society/password-protect/nature-society-pdfs/Indigenous-
Peoples-Guide-Env.pdf>.
13
Petak Danum Kalimantan Tengah, Our Land is Not a Carbon Toilet for Dirty Industries of
Developed Countries, 2012, copy on file with author.

Figure 1: ‘Our Home is Not a Carbon Toilet’, 2012, picture from Yayasan Petak Danum (YPD)
Figure 2: ‘Our House is Not Toilet Carbon’ 2, 2012, picture from Yayasan Petak Danum (YPD)
The diametrically opposed understandings of REDD+ and the new legal and social
relationships it authorises and establishes is the impetus for this thesis. The statements
by Figueres’ and those of the villagers in the KFCP project area in the quote above
are not anomalies, but are representative of divergent views in debates on REDD+.
The stakes in these debates are ultimately about how the tensions between life, growth,

capital, and limits are resolved in the face of the socio-bio crisis facing the planet.
These two very different articulations and understanding of the same processes
represent hegemonic and counter-hegemonic perspectives, respectively to the
question of how the international community should respond to the climate crisis.
While the former focuses on greater global efficiency in resource use, the latter is
focused on questions of distribution of resource use, access and control. Moreover,
while the former is organised around a global management of resources through their
commodification and incorporation within markets, the framework of the latter vision
is local decolonial resource control. At stake in the debates over REDD+ are therefore
not just competing visions of how the international community addresses the climate
crisis, but broader contestations about how international law and globalised capital
distributes benefits and risks unequally.
It is important to foreground the importance of the problem that REDD+ purports to

address. There is a compelling need to address the duel challenges of climate
mitigation and deforestation. The fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in 2014, found warming of the climate
system and its anthropocentric causes to be ‘unequivocal’ and that ‘atmospheric
concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide have increased to levels
unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years’.14 The 2010 Global Forest Resources
Assessment by the Food and Agricultural Organisation found that although rates of
deforestation had declined in the last decade, rates were still alarmingly high: 13
million hectares of forests were lost through conversion or natural causes annually
(compared to 16 million annually in the 1990s).15 Of annual GHG emissions, 12 to 20
percent are attributed to deforestation or forest degradation.16 As compelling as the
urgent need to address each of these issues is, the argument presented in this thesis is
that REDD+ does not offer a comprehensive means to address all these urgent
imperatives. Similar to other ‘liberal environmental’ measures,17 this thesis argues
that the interventions that REDD+ enables are arguably more directed towards
14
‘IPCC, 2013: Summary for Policymakers’ in T.F. Stocker et al (eds), Climate Change 2013: The
Physical Science Basis: Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambrdige University Press, 2013), 4-5.
15
‘Global Forest Resources Assessment’ (Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations
2010) <http://foris.fao.org/static/data/fra2010/KeyFindings-en.pdf>.
16
G. R. van der Werf et al, ‘CO2 Emissions From Forest Loss’ (2009) 2 Nature Geoscience 737.
17
Steven Bernstein, The Compromise of Liberal Environmentalism (Colombia University Press, 2001).

sustaining growth18 than considering the possibility that sustainability might require
confronting the impossibility of unlimited consumption and production on a finite
planet.19 This thesis claims that presenting REDD+ as a ‘solution’ presupposes a very
narrow and technical understanding of the ‘problem’. Moreover, it contends that
REDD+ does not properly address the climate crisis but rather operates to accentuate
the social and political inequalities underpinning it.
Since REDD+ was first proposed in 2005, a growing body of literature on the scope,
challenges, effectiveness and potential of such schemes has emerged. While this
thesis engages with this burgeoning literature, it departs from many of the common
concerns in existing scholarship in that it is not primarily concerned with how
REDD+ can be made to work or with the ‘gap’ between the policy ideal and
implementation on the ground. This thesis’ key concern is rather understanding and
interrogating the productive effects of REDD+. That is, I analyse the new social
relations and new forms of power and authority that REDD+ creates. I investigate
how this scheme produces contemporary reconfigurations of control by the global
North over land and resources in the global South. In order to do so, I develop a
framework for understanding the ways in which authority is exercised internationally
in the absence of situations of direct appropriative control through legal mechanisms
such as property and contract that are enabled and protected by public and private
international law, the disciplinary dynamics of international markets, as well as the
partnership and capacity-building interventions directed towards ‘conducting the
conduct’20 of beneficiaries.
The rise of carbon markets as the dominant mode and form of international climate
governance means that power and control over land and land-use practices in the
global South is increasingly authorised and exercised through transnational markets in
18
Wolfgang Sachs, ‘Sustainable Development and the Crisis of Nature: On the Political Anatomy of an
Oxymoron’ in Maarten Hajer and Frank Fischer (eds), Living with Nature: Environmental Politics as
Cultural Discourse (Oxford Scholarship Online, 2003); Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development:
The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton University Press, 1995), 192-211.
19
See Dennis Meadows et al, The Limits to Growth (Universe Books, 1972); Tim Jackson, Prosperity
Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet (Earthscan, 2009).
20
Michael Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977-1978
(Palgrave Macmillion, 2007), 193, see also Tania Murray Li, ‘Fixing Non!market Subjects: Governing
Land and Population in the Global South’ (2014) 18 Foucault Studies 34.

the new ‘fictitious commodity’21 of carbon. The REDD+ projects produce a tradable
novel carbon property right through the future-orientated contractual promise that
forested land in the global South will be used, controlled and managed in specific
ways. It is envisaged that such REDD+ ‘offset’ credits would be purchased by
countries in the global North in order to meet their own domestic and international
greenhouse gas reduction targets, 22 and thereby, through the operations of the
transnational carbon market, displace the site and material responsibility for climate
mitigation to forested countries in the global South. This spatial displacement of
emission reductions through carbon markets raises important questions about how the
costs of climate mitigation will be distributed globally.23
The REDD+ scheme is grounded in addressing the ‘common concern’ of climate

change mitigation in aggregate, globalist terms and seeking aggregate, lowest-cost
mitigation strategies, which it suggests will allow greater aggregate mitigation
ambition. Against such a globalist framing, this thesis is concerned with the
distributive consequences of the dynamics of climate change and also of the
mechanisms used to respond to climate change. The dynamics of climate change raise
unavoidable questions of justice24 and bring attention to the differentiated impacts,
21
I draw this terms from Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins
of Our Time (Beacon Press, 2001), although Polanyi used the term ‘fictitious commodities’ to describe
land, labour and money. See also Chapter 4, VI.
22
For a discussion of country submissions and proposals see: UNFCCC Secretariat, Financing Options
for the Full Implementation of Results-based Actions Relating to the Activities Referred to in Decision
1/CP.16, paragraph 70, Including Related Modalities and Procedures: Technical Paper,
FCCC/TP/2012/3 (26 July 2012).
23
The UNFCCC articulates the principle that the responsibility for climate change mitigation should be
based on ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ (UNFCCC, Article 3(1)). Carbon markets are
likely to organise responsibility otherwise.
24
There is a vast literature on questions of climate justice: see Karin Mickelson, ‘Beyond a Politics of
the Possible? South-North Relations and Climate Justice’ (2009) 10(2) Melbourne Journal of
International Law 411, Jeremy Baskin, ‘The Impossible Necessity of Climate Justice?’ (2009) 10(2)
Melbourne Journal of International Law 424 and other articles in that Special Edition; Anna Grear,
‘Towards ‘Climate Justice’? A Critical Reflection on Legal Subjectivity and Climate Injustice:
Warning Signals, Patterned Hierarchies, Directions for Future Law and Policy’ (2014) 5 Journal of
Human Rights and the Environment 103, Stephen Humphreys, ‘Climate Justice: The Claim of the Past’
(2014) 5 Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 134 and other articles in that Special Edition;
in political economy J Timmons Roberts and Bradley C Parks, ‘Ecologically Unequal Exchange,
Ecological Debt, and Climate Justice: The History and Implications of Three Related ideas for a New
Social Movement’ (2009) 50(3-4) International Journal of Comparative Sociology 385, Bradley C
Parks and J. Timmons Roberts, ‘Climate Change, Social Theory and Justice’ (2010) 27 Theory, Culture
and Society 134, Ludvig Beckman and Edward A. Page, ‘Perspectives on Justice, Democracy and
Global Climate Change’ (2008) 17(4) Environmental Politics 527; informing policy approaches
Barbara Adams and Gretchen Luchsinger, ‘Climate Justice for a Changing Planet: A Primer for Policy
Makers and NGOs’ (United Nations and UN Non-Governmental Liason Service, 2009), Sonja Klinsky
and Hadi Dowlatabadi, ‘Conceptualisations of Justice in Climate Policy’ (2009) 9 Climate Policy 88;

vulnerabilities and historical responsibilities for climate change. This thesis
demonstrates how in the context of a global climate crisis, where the contours of the
disaster already reflect gaping global inequalities of wealth and power, REDD+ not
only fails to heed the imperatives of climate justice, but also presents a ‘false solution’
that still further exacerbates these dynamics.
II Thesis Question
This thesis engages with questions concerning authority, distributional consequences

and justice by intervening in debates about the social impacts of REDD+ projects.
Dominant approaches to address the social impacts of REDD+ have focused on ways
in which the risks REDD+ projects present can be managed and their potential
benefits promoted through safeguard mechanisms, rights-based approaches, tenure
reforms and community-based management practices. I suggest these approaches are
limited in two key ways. Firstly, these analyses do not adequately situate ‘local’
dynamics within the broader political economy of REDD+. They therefore risk
obscuring underlying questions regarding the reconfiguration of authority, power and
control through REDD+ implementation. That is, such accounts fail to engage with
how ‘appropriation’ can take place through the reorganisation of authority over land
and resources and through the restructuring of property and other legal rules, as well
as through direct coercive taking of land and displacement. This thesis, in contrast,
foregrounds the question of how REDD+ reorganises and rearticulates authority over
forested land and land use activities in the global South. These forms of authority and
control are articulated through the legal mechanisms of property and contract as well
as the material compulsions of economic coercion and competition. This thesis
acknowledges that REDD+, as envisioned and described within environmental
economics, could involve greater tenure rights and community resource management
at the local level (although current practices and examples provide little cause for
optimism regarding their materialisation). However, this thesis’ overall focus is on
from social movement perspectives Patrick Bond, Politics of Climate Justice: Paralysis Above,
Movement Below (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2012), Nicola Bullard Ulrich Brand, Edgardo
Lander and Tadzio Mueller (ed), Contours of Climate Justice: Ideas for Shaping New Climate and
Energy Policies (2009), Bertie Russell and Andre Pusey, ‘Movements and Moments for Climate
Justice: From Copenhagen to Cancun via Cochabamba’ (2011) 11(3) ACME: An International E-
Journal for Critical Geographies 15, Martina Austen and Philip Bedall, ‘Climate Justice – Point of
Reference for a Counter Hegemony or Nebulous Empty Phrase?’, NoteFromBelow 29 July 2010 and
Dawson, 2010, above n9; on human rights perspectives see Stephen Humphreys (ed), Human Rights
and Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

analysing the way in which formal legal decentralisation, and establishment of
nominal ‘self-governance’, occurs concurrently and alongside a greater enmeshment
in informal and market-based governance structures that neutralise and constrain the
possibilities of self-governance by disciplining its exercise. Central to this thesis is the
theorisation of the relationship between public and private forms of international law
and regulation and how these nested polycentric forms of governance are assembled
‘from above and below’25 at different jurisdictional scales: the local, the national and
the international.
Secondly, dominant approaches that address the social impacts of REDD+ projects by
managing risks and promoting benefits are also limited in that they do not address the
‘instrument effects’26 of the interventions that they propose. Critiques of the social
impacts of REDD+ projects have lead to the proliferation of a body of literature
concerned with the social impacts and social feasibility of REDD+ and the promotion
of co-benefits27 in order to ‘redeem REDD’.28 As such, the scope of REDD+ as a
project, and its field of intervention, has expanded from the more narrow questions of
climate mitigation to encompass biodiversity protection and poverty alleviation. In
these accounts, however, there is limited reflection about the ways in which these
‘social’ interventions themselves operate as governance practices. Balakrishnan
Rajagopal has identified the way in which critiques of the international system and the
‘failures’ of its projects, have a tendency to get ‘converted into institutional
proliferation and practice’.29 He described how critiques often produce their own
‘instrument-effects’, which, although unintended, have proven to be as important as
intended effects.30 I draw on these insights to analyse how proposed measures to
mitigate risks and promote benefits of REDD+ themselves have productive effects
and may work to further consolidate the reorganisation of authority that REDD+
represents. These strategies may also operate to more deeply embed market
25
William Boyd, ‘Climate Change, Fragmentation, and the Challanges of Global Environmental Law:
Elements of a Post-Copenhagen Assemblage’ (2010-2011) 32 University of Pennsylvania Journal of
International Law 457, 549.
26
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Knopf Doubleday Publishing
Group, 1977) cited in Balakrishnan Rajagopal, International Law from Below: Development, Social
Movements and Third World Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 76.
27
See Signe Howell, ‘‘No RIGHTS–No REDD’: Some Implications of a Turn Towards Co-Benefits’
(2014) 41(2) Forum for Development Studies 253.
28
Michael L Brown, Redeeming REDD+: Policies, Incentives, and Social Feasibility for Avoided
Deforestation (Routledge and Earthscan 2013).
29
Rajagopal, above n26, 76.
30
Ibid, 83.

rationalities by facilitating the responsibilisation of the contracting subject upon
which REDD+ depends.
III Situating REDD+
This thesis argues that REDD+ is a deeply transformative international legal project
that encompasses legal arrangements, practices, ideas and epistemologies. Margaret
Young has argued that ‘REDD+ is itself emerging as an international legal regime,
characterized by newly instituted and diffuse agencies... and a broad range of state
and non-state participants’.31 She defines a ‘regime’ as a set of ‘norms, decision-
making procedures and organisations coalescing around functional issue-areas and
dominated by particular modes of behaviour, assumptions and biases’.32 Others have
described how REDD+ represents a point of convergence or a site of ‘shared
community and norm generation’ through which a specific ‘logic of problem
amelioration’ is being cultivated, generating consensus on the nature of the ‘problem’
and suggesting financial incentives as a key ‘solution’ through which to address it.33
This coalescence around a functional objective is clearly observable alongside as the
normative and institutional interplay between actors and the development of an
epistemic community concerned with these questions. However, this thesis
approaches REDD+ not so much as a clearly delineated institutional regime but as a
‘transnational legal assemblage’.34 For example, William Boyd has argued that
to understand REDD and the conditions for making it work, it needs to be approached not
simply as a global project but as an emerging global assemblage of people, practices,
organisations, law, technologies, and territories that is taking shape at multiple sites around
the world.35
31
Margaret A Young, ‘REDD+ and Interacting Legal Regimes’ in Christina Voigt (ed), Research
Handbook on REDD-plus and International Law (Edward Elgar, forthcoming).
32
Margaret A Young, ‘Introduction: The Productive Friction between Regimes’ in Margaret A Young
(ed), Regime Interaction in International Law: Facing Fragmentation (Cambridge University Press,
2012) 1, 11.
33
Constance L McDermott, Kelly Levin and Benjamin Cashore, ‘Building the Forest-Climate
Bandwagon: REDD+ and the Logic of Problem Amelioration’ (2011) 11(3) Global Environmental
Politics 85.
34
See Gavin Sullivan, ‘Transnational Legal Assemblages and Global Security Law: Topologies and
Temporalities of the List’ (2014) 5(1) Transnational Legal Theory 81, on community forest
management as an assemblage see also Tania Murray Li, ‘Practices of Assembledge and Community
Forest Management’ (2007) 36(2) Economy and Society 263.
35
Boyd, above n25, 523.

He advances an understanding of REDD+ as an ‘assemblage’ (as distinct from either
a horizontal ‘transplant’ or a vertical ‘download’) of ‘various global forms and
projects on the one hand and their instantiations in the partial, situated contingent
settings of national and sub-national institutions on the other’.36 This thesis argues
that the analytics of a ‘transnational legal assemblage’ is a useful lens for examining
REDD+ because its focus on ‘materiality, distributed agency and heterogeneity’37
allows for greater examination of how REDD+ holds together different (and
contradictory) practices and thereby produces a logic or rationality that differs from
the articulation of its functional objectives.38 Secondly, the concept of assemblage
also allows greater analytical attention to the ‘continuous work of pulling disparate
elements together’ and the ways in which alignment is forged in contingent ways
between disparate (and perhaps contradictory) objectives of differentially situated
actors.39 This is particularly evident in the way in which the offset relation establishes
a strategic co-articulation of activities generating carbon pollution and activities
promoting carbon sequestration. Finally, this lens directs greater attention not just to
the interaction between domestic and international law but also to how authority
within the national-state might be ‘reassembled’ in response to transnational
processes.40
REDD+ cuts across several thematic areas of international law, strategically

interlinking questions of climate, forests, biodiversity, poverty reduction, and
indigenous rights. While REDD+ does not establish an institutional arrangement as
such, it provides a vocabulary that brings together some of the key trajectories in
these various areas of international law. For example, although REDD+ is a creature
of the climate regime (under the UNFCCC umbrella),41 it increasingly intersects with
and has also transformed the forest regime (the International Arrangements on Forests
through the UN Forum on Forests process)42 as well as the biodiversity regime (as
36
Ibid, 468.
37
Sullivan, above n34, 82.
38
See Chapter 6 for a discussion of this.
39
See Li, 2007, above n34, 264-5.
40
Sullivan, above n34, 92, see also Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to
Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press, 2006).
41
See Chapter 3, II.
42
UNFF was established by the Economic and Social Council, (Report on the Fourth Session of the
Intergovernmental Forum on Forests Economic and Social Council, Resolution/2000/35). A key
outcome of the UNFF process has been the Non-legally Binding Instrument on All Types of Forests,
GA Res 62/98, UN GAOR 62nd sess, 74th plen mtg, Agenda Item 54, A/RES/62/98 (31 January 2008).

developed by the COPs of the Convention on Biological Diversity)43. Moreover,
REDD+ also engages the indigenous rights regime (organised around ILO
Convention 16944, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the
UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues)45, the Rio+20 sustainable development
agenda46 and general poverty eradication and development strategies represented in
the proposed post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).47.
REDD+ has featured in several high-level statements in recent years. It appeared in

the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon’s 2012 Five Year Action Agenda48 setting
out the global priorities of the international organisation, of which ‘sustainable
development’ was the top thematic area. Addressing climate change was the second
point of the Action Plan. It prominently included as a means for ‘mitigation and
adaptation action on the ground’ the objective of ‘facilitat(ing) and execut(ing)
agreements on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+)
to protect forests and sustain the livelihoods of the people who depend on them’.49
Elsewhere, a representative from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP)
wrote that the organisation has ‘placed REDD+ at the heart of its climate change
strategy’.50 From the UNEP’s perspective, REDD+ has a ‘transformative potential’
for livelihoods and economies in forested landscapes. For them, the realisation of the
economic benefits of reducing carbon emissions is only the first step towards realising
multiple benefits of forests. For the UNEP, therefore, REDD+ is not just a
transformative project, in and of itself, but more broadly presents an ‘opportunity that
allows us to catalyse further investments in other ecosystem services from forests,
43
Convention on Biological Diversity, opened for signature 6 June 1992, 1760 UNTS 79 (entered into
force on 29 December 1993).
44
International Labour Organisation (ILO), Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention (ILO No. 169),
opened for signature 27 June 1989, 28 ILM 1382 (entered into force 5 September 1991).
45
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, GA Res 61/295, UN GAOR 61st
sess, 107th plen mtg, Supp No 49, UN Doc A/61/67 (13 September 2007).
46
The Future We Want, GA Res 66/288, UN GAOR 66th sess, 123rd plen mtg, Agenda Item 19, Supp
No 49, A/RES/66/288 (11 September 2012).
47
Report of the Open Working Group of the General Assembly on Sustainable Development Goals, UN
General Assembly, 68th session, A/68/970 (12 August 2014), see Goal 15.
48
United Nations, The Secretary-General’s Five Year Action Agenda, 25 January 2012,
<http://www.un.org/sg/priorities/sg_agenda_2012.pdf>.
49
Ibid, 4.
50
Ibrahim Thiaw (Direction, Division of Environmental Policy, Implementation, UNEP) ‘Forward’ in
Xianli Zhu et al, ‘Pathways for Implementing REDD+: Experiences from Carbon Markets and
Communities’ (UNEP Riso Centre, 2010) <http://www.acp-
cd4cdm.org/media/237951/pathwaysimplementingreddplus.pdf>, 8.

thus adding further ‘layers’ of revenue streams from standing forests’. 51 Further,
REDD+ is inherently linked to the both vision articulated in the 2014 State of the
Forest Report52 and its focus on ensuring the socio-economic benefits of forests are
‘valued’ in the post-2015 development framework.
Although this thesis is specifically focused on REDD+, it is important to

contextualise and situate REDD+ within the broader terrain of approaches in relation
to climate change. Carbon trading schemes such as REDD+ arguably gain traction
against a background in which climate denialism still features in public debate53 and
technological interventions such as geoengineering are also being presented of
‘solutions’. 54 Some commentators such as Mirowski have argued that denial,
geoengineering and carbon markets together form a ‘neoliberal complex’.55 However,
my argument is more limited in acknowledging the role this ‘background’ plays in
enabling REDD+ to appear as a progressive, ameliorative policy. That is, REDD+
gains pertinence within the field of climate politics because of a quasi-fatalistic sense,
that this is this perhaps the best we can hope for.56 REDD+ is promoted by its
supporters including former World Bank President Robert Zoellick as ‘the best
chance, perhaps the last chance, to save the world’s forests’. 57 It gains impetus
because of how untenable failing to act in the light of the dual crisis of climate change
and tropical deforestation. This thesis, however, seeks to problematise the form of
‘action’ that REDD+ promotes by stressing it is not the only form of action available
to address this very real crisis. It argues that REDD+ represents a form of ‘action’ that
obscures analysis of the background structural conditions that drive unsustainable
51
Ibid.
52
‘State of the World’s Forests: Enhancing the socioeconomic benefits from forests’ (Food and
Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations, 2014) <http://www.fao.org/3/a-i3710e.pdf>.
53
Klein, above n9, Chapter 1.
54
For a critical discussion of geo-engineering see Holly Jean Buck, ‘Geoengineering: Re-making
Climate for Profit or Humanitarian Intervention?’ (2012) 43(1) Development and Change 253. In
addition to these approaches are strategies in the US to green the military, designed to maintain
continual military hegemony even in an oil-constrained world; see Emily Gilbert, ‘The Militarization
of Climate Change’ (2011) 11(3) ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 1.
55
Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial
Meltdown (Verso, 2013), Chapter 5, see also Philip Mirowski, Jeremy Walker and Antoinette Abboud,
‘Beyond Denial’ (2013) 210(Autumn ) Overland.
56
See Wendy Brown, ‘“The Most We Can Hope For...”: Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism’
(2004) 103(2/3) The South Atlantic Quarterly 451 for a discussion of the politics of fatalism in relation
to human rights.
57
Cited in Jeff Conant, ‘Do Trees Grow on Money?’, Earth Island Journal: News of the World’s
Environment Autumn 2011
<http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/do_trees_grow_on_money/>.

deforestation. It highlights how REDD+ locates the problem of tropical deforestation
in the global South and prescribes international intervention to address this problem,
rather than addressing the way the international community is already implicated in
deforestation through demand for timber, pulp, palm oil and agricultural expansion. In
this way, schemes such as REDD+ foreclose more radical engagements that challenge
ecologically unequal exchange, whilst also authorising the proliferation of new forms
of control.
Similarly, at the local level, REDD+ is emerging alongside intensified processes that
restructure land relations and promote human dispossession in the global South. A
key characteristic of the present era is the ‘explosion’ of (trans)national commercial
land transactions and speculation (‘land grabbing’) driven by large-scale export-
orientated agricultural production (including biofuels), as well as extractive industries
and conservation practices.58 The LandMatrix database documents over 1000 large-
scale land concluded deals (over 200 hectares) since 2000, affecting almost 40 million
hectares of land, an areas over 4,300 times the size of Manhattan.59 In Indonesia, there
have been 120 such large-scale deals primarily for agriculture and forestry. These new
forms of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ 60 have produced, as Saskia Sassen
documents, a new global logic of expulsion. 61 The expulsion of life deemed
‘superfluous’ 62 or ‘disposable’, 63 she argues, is not accidental. Rather, such
expulsions are produced by a ‘systemic logic at work’ in ‘predatory formations’ that
are part of ‘larger assemblage of elements, conditions and mutually reinforcing
58
For a discussion of ‘land grabbing’ see: Nancy Lee Peluso and Christian Lund, ‘New Frontiers of
Land Control: Introduction’ (2011) 38(4) The Journal of Peasent Studies 667 and the Special Edition
of which it is an introduction. For a discussion of the methods of land grabbing see Ian Scoones et al,
‘The Politics of Evidence: Methodologies for Understanding the Global Land Rush’ (2013) 40(3) The
Journal of Peasent Studies 469 and the remainder of the Special Edition. For a discussion of biofuels
see Saturnino M. Borras, Jr., Philip McMichael and Ian Scoones, ‘The Politics of Biofuels, Land and
Agrarian Change: Editors’ Introduction’ (2010) 37(4) Journal of Peasant Studies 575and the remainder
of the Special Edition. For a discussion of ‘green grabbing’ see Fairhead, Leach and Scoones, above
n11 and the remainder of the Special Edition.
59
‘Land Matrix’ website <http://www.landmatrix.org/en/> accessed 6 February 2015.
60
David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford University Press, 2005).
61
Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Harvard University
Press, 2014), see also Saskia Sassen, ‘A Savage Sorting of Winners and Losers: Contemporary
Versions of Primitive Accumulation’ (2010) 7(1) Globalisations 23.
62
See João Biehl and Torben Eskerod, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (University of
California Press, 2013).
63
See Mark Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples
(Polity, 2007).

dynamics’.64 The very real and present fear of dispossession has dominated many
civil society debates and academic discussions on REDD+. There have been
numerous accounts of predatory and opportunistic practices associated with REDD+
by ‘carbon cowboys’, that is, lone operators who promote and sign communities up to
fraudulent market conservation schemes on false pretences without regard to, or in the
absence of, a legal framework. Examples of such exploitation are documented in a
recent UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples report:
...numerous reported cases of REDD-plus projects involving indigenous communities that

appear to have signed highly disadvantageous agreements as a consequence of a lack of
understanding of the implications, a lack of access to advice or information, bad faith on
the part of the REDD-plus developer and in some cases, a breakdown in community
governance arrangements or corruption on the part of local officials. Terms of such
purported contracts have included, for example, “agreements” that the community will
cease to use its forests for any production purposes, including subsistence, hunting and
gathering activities. Notwithstanding the fact that the community (or certain members of
the community claiming to act on its behalf) may have signed an agreement, clearly the
free, prior informed consent of the community has not been given, nor are the terms
mutually agreed by any reasonable definition of the terms. In some cases, the document
has been prepared in the language of the developer with no faithfully translated version
provided to the community. Such cases have been observed in many regions, including
the Amazon and the Congo Basin countries and in the Asia-Pacific region.65
This quote speaks to critical ‘on the ground’ realities about how REDD+ is being
implemented and the abuses of power evident in some REDD+ schemes. However,
the UNPFII report positions these examples as one end of a spectrum, highlighting
also opposite cases ‘where the initiative for a project springs from a community
decision, perhaps as a way of funding its own previously determined territorial
management and community development aspirations’.66 The report thereby implies
that the problems associated with REDD+ are not inherent to the scheme but are the
product of the lack of good governance, information or understanding, corruption or
bad faith. It further positions properly implemented REDD+ schemes as an
64
Sassen, 2014, above n61, 77-78.
65
Paul Kanyinke Sena, Myrna Cunningham and Bertie Xavier, Indigenous People’s Rights and
Safeguards in Projects Related to Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation:
Note by the Secretariat’ UN ESCOR, Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, 12th sess, Agenda Item
5, UN Doc E/C.19/2013/7 (5 February 2013) [26].
66
Ibid [25].

opportunity for indigenous peoples to consolidate rights.67 Although it is critical to
continue examining empirically how REDD+ projects are implemented, narrowing
the focus of academic investigation to how REDD+ is being implemented risks
obscuring the ways in which power and authority over forested law is reorganized
through REDD+ even in properly implemented REDD+ projects. While attentive to
questions of implementation and struggles around how REDD+ is implemented, this
thesis also subjects to critique ‘best-case scenarios’ of REDD+, or REDD+ as it is
envisioned in policy documents and ‘best-practice’ manuals. It thereby critically
examines both the idealised concept and idea of REDD+ and the way in which
REDD+ is implemented and actualised in practice. Given that the dominant response
in the REDD+ literature to abuses in REDD+ processes is to call for better
implementation, it is necessary to examine what work references to ‘best-case
scenario’ REDD+ models do, and how this horizon of an ‘ideal’ type of REDD+
project operates to justify increased attempts at (better) implementation.
There are several other reasons why subjecting the ‘ideal-type’ REDD+ project to
critique is valuable rather than focusing primarily on current implementation
problems. Firstly, although there have been many ‘demonstration projects’ and
voluntary market projects, the implementation on REDD+ remains in preliminary
stages, thus making it difficult to assess outcomes of a UNFCCC REDD+ scheme. In
a different context, Steffen Böhm, Anna-Maria Murtola and Sverre Spoelstra have
reflected on the fact that ‘the atmosphere business is moving fast – perhaps too fast
for traditional academic outlets such as edited volumes and journal issues’.68 These
problems are amplified in cases where practices precede norms. Secondly, the
decision to focus on ‘best case scenarios’ of REDD+ is informed by the above
analysis of how easily critiques of ‘failure’ in international law are ‘converted into
institutional proliferation and practice’.69 Finally, considering the ‘best case scenario’
of REDD+, I focus not on the instances where rights of local communities have not be
realised, but develop a more structural critique of the conditional nature of right
realisation even in ‘best-practice’ REDD+ implementation. This focus on ‘best case
scenario’ REDD+ also helps direct attention on the often overlooked ways in which
67
Ibid [59].
68
Steffen Böhm, Anna-Maria Murtola and Sverre Spoelstra, ‘The Atmosphere Business’ (2012) 12(1/2)
Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organisation 1, 10.
69
Rajagopal, above n26, 76.

promoting ‘participation’ in these schemes can operates as a form of disciplinary
inclusion of peoples living in and around forests into globalised competitive capitalist
markets, directed at fixing peoples ‘in place’ as environmental service providers in the
emerging ‘green economy’.
IV Unpacking REDD+
This thesis unpacks REDD+ on several levels: as an international level agreement, as

a way of valuing nature in economic terms, as a set of knowledge practices and as a
social and developmental project. It examines REDD+ as an international legal
agreement under the UNFCCC first proposed in 2005 at the eleventh Conference of
the Parties (COP) and was included as a key element of the ‘Paris Agreement’
adopted at COP21 in December 2015.70 The Paris Agreement encourages Parties to
take action to implement and support, including through results-based payments, the
existing framework as set out in related guidance and decisions already agreed under the
Convention for: policy approaches and positive incentives for activities relating to
reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and the role of
conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks
in developing countries; and alternative policy approaches, such as joint mitigation and
adaptation approaches for the integral and sustainable management of forests, while
reaffirming the importance of incentivizing, as appropriate, non-carbon benefits
associated with such approaches.71
The most significant agreement on REDD+ is the ‘Warsaw Framework on REDD+’

adopted in December 2013 at COP19 in Warsaw, Poland.72 The Warsaw Framework
on REDD+ establishes methodological rules for carbon accounting or the
measurement, monitoring and reporting of ‘result-based actions’. No formal decision
has yet been made by the UNFCCC about how REDD+ credits could be incorporated
into international carbon markets. However, the carbon accounting framework
established by the Warsaw decisions provides the basis for creating an internationally
verified and exchangeable carbon offset commodity.
70
‘Paris Agreement’ Annex to Decision 1/CP.21 ‘Adoption of the Paris Agreement’
FCCC/CP/2015/10/Add.1 (29 January 2016), Article 5.
71
Paris Agreement, Article 5(2).
72
The ‘Warsaw Framework for REDD+’ is made up of Decisions 9-15/CP.19. There were three further
draft decisions specifically on REDD+ at the Bonn intersessionals in June 2015 (SBSTA/SBI42) that
were confirmed in Paris (COP21, 2015). However, these decisions add little by way of substance and
will be referred to only briefly.

This thesis also engages with REDD+ as a concept or idea (emerging from the field
of environmental economics) that making the ‘value’ of standing forests and the
ecosystem services they supply as a carbon ‘sink’ legible in economic terms provides
economic incentives for forest protection as a climate mitigation strategy. In this
sense, REDD+ must also be understood as a project of and for the economic valuation
of the natural world in marketised terms and a vision of market-orientated
environmental governance. In examining REDD+ as a vision of market-orientated
environmental governance, this thesis is concerned with elaborating the public and
private legal ordering necessary to constitute, structure and maintain these forms of
market governance. What is established (or sought to be established), is a competitive
regime of economic valuation of land use activities, so that decisions over land use
activities are governed by a rationality of maximising aggregate land use productivity,
within a framework that allows for the intensification of extractivist activities
alongside the intensification of conservation activities. Finally, REDD+ has to also be
understood as an epistemological project that involves the production of a specific
ways of seeing forests namely as a ‘carbon stock’ as well as the construction of a
specific global vantage point.73 Understanding REDD+ as an epistemological project
also highlights the role that knowledge production plays in the constitution and
stabilisation of these new forms of governance.
This thesis analyses REDD+ both as a vision of market-orientated environmental

governance and as a project of materialising or actualising this vision. It therefore
pays close attention not just to the vision or idea of market-orientated environmental
governance but also the processes and practices of creating and instituting this mode
of marketised governance as well the modes of technical knowledge or expertise and
regimes of representation and legibility this depends upon. The vision embedded in
REDD+ is one of deeply transformed modes of valuation of and engagement with the
natural environment, of the internal governance of practices of forested countries in
the global South, and also of restricting the modes of relations and forms of life
within those populations living in and around, and whose livelihoods are often
dependant upon, forests. The process and practices of creating and instituting this
vision are therefore also of (re)constituting the world, subjectivities and social
73
William Boyd, ‘Ways of Seeing in Environmental Law: How Deforestation Became an Object of
Climate Governance’ (2010) 37 Ecology Law Quarterly 843, 863-866 & 884-891.

relationships in market-oriented terms. Through an examination of how the specific
governance rationality of aggregate resource utility maximisation is actualised at three
different jurisdictional scales, this thesis teases out the contradictions this governance
rationality generates as well as its distributional consequences. In particular, I analyse
how it displaces burdens onto those most materially marginalised and imposes
sacrifices on those ways of life not scripted as ‘valuable’ in economic terms.
This thesis develops a methodological framework that brings together these different
institutional, economic, epistemological and social stories of REDD+. This requires
being attentive towards not only the ‘articulated and consistently emergent
relationship between knowledge and value’,74 but also the mutually co-constitutive
relationship between legal and economic structures and how they are bound together
within an epistemological frame that is productive of a ‘regime of value’.75 Moreover,
holding these various conceptions of REDD+ as a legal agreement, a series of
practices, a concept or an idea, allows for the interrogation of multiple sites of norm
creation and contestation.
However, there are several fundamental challenges involved in holding these various
conceptions of REDD+ together. Specifically, there is a different conception of social
ordering that underpins REDD+ as a legal regime compared to REDD+ as an
economic ‘regime of value’. In these different conceptions of REDD+, there are also
divergent conceptions of who the key ‘actors’ are and how relations between such
actors should be structured. For example, when REDD+ is discussed as a legal
agreement, the key forum for action is assumed to be the institutional umbrella of the
UNFCCC, the key actors are states and relations between them are structured by ideas
of ‘common concern’ and the equitable sharing of responsibilities. When told as a
historical narrative, the legal agreement underpinning REDD+ is commonly a story of
struggle and antagonism in the process of seeking to reach compromise and
agreement. On the other hand, in an account of REDD+ as the articulation of new
economic values and incentives, the key actors are various ‘stakeholders’ all seeking
to maximise their interests within a competitive market that is this account’s primary
74
Kaushik Sunder Rajan, ‘Two Tales of Genomics: Capital, Epistemology, and Global Constitutions of
the Biomedical Subject’ in Sheila Jasanoff (ed), Reframing Rights: Bioconstitutionalism in the Genetic
Age (The MIT Press 2011), 193.
75
Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’ in Arjun Appadurai (ed),
The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 1986) 3,
14-15.

terrain. This is a narrative of voluntary forms of private ordering and agreement
making, entrepreneurial action, empowerment and opportunity seizing in the
emerging ‘green economy’. It is a story not of conflict but of the spontaneous
convergence of symbiotic interests, of ‘win-win’ outcomes and the promotion of
additional co-benefits. Finally, when taken as a series of practices the account of
REDD+ is primarily one of various forms of ‘partnerships’ between private and
public actors, information exchange and legal ordering through transnational
contractual arrangements. In this account, clear delimitations between the state and
the market break down, and co-constitutive relationship between the state and the
market – where the state is enabling of the market while market rationalities are also
disciplining state action – come into focus.
A key intervention this thesis makes is to productively bring these different accounts
and perspectives together in order to allow for a more complex understanding of the
new forms and configuration of power and authority envisioned, actualised and
consolidated through REDD+. In this endeavour lies two distinct methodological
challenges. The first is the need to overcome a narrow disciplinary focus and to read
across specialised bodies of literature directed respectively at public international law,
forms of private ordering, or market governance and political economy. The literature
on transnational climate governance and the political economy of the carbon markets
is most attentive to the ways in which ‘climate politics is increasingly conducted by,
through and for the market’76 with a resultant reconfiguration of the state’s role as
‘facilitator’ or ‘enabler’ of markets.77 For example, Bernstein, et al., argue that the
regulation of climate change is no longer governed by centralised multilateral treaty
making under the umbrella of the UNFCCC but is augmented by other non-state
activity.78 They see the governance of climate change as ‘an amalgam of private and
public initiatives at multiple scales’79 of which carbon markets are now globally the
most dominant feature. 80 Scholarship on such transnational ordering increasingly
identifies and engages with these multi-sited, multi-layered and multi-actor forms of
76
Newell and Peterson cited in Ian Bailey, Andy Gouldson and Peter Newell, ‘Ecological
Modernisation and the Governance of Carbon: A Critical Analysis’ (2011) 43(3) Antipode 682, 697.
77
Emily Boyd, Maxwell Boykoff and Peter Newell, ‘The “New” Carbon Economy: What’s New?’
(2011) 43(3) Antipode 601.
78
Steven Bernstein et al, ‘A Tale of Two Copenhagens: Carbon Markets and Climate Governance’
(2010) 39(1) Millennium - Journal of International Studies 161, 170.
79
Ibid.
80
Ibid.

governance. 81 Nonetheless, through various practices of ‘boundary-making’ these
domains of public, private and market ordering, and their respective actors, are
delineated to different physical and conceptual spheres.
In a similar vein, there remains a disconnect between literature focused on analysing

the progressive development of COP decisions under the UNFCCC umbrella and a
different body of literature that analyses carbon markets. Steven Bernstein identified
stark distinctions between the Copenhagen COP meeting in the Bella Centre and the
carbon market expo held next door, observing that although they were held in parallel,
very different actors were present and prevailing moods about the future direction of
the regime were starkly distinct.82 More recently, Trevor Sikorski, a Barclays Capital
carbon trader, observed after attending the Durban COP ‘that the carbon market and
global climate change discussions are fairly remote cousins, only vaguely acquainted
with each other, hardly speaking to each other really’.83 He had tried a 15 minute
experiment in which he asked COP delegates to name current carbon prices only to
find an extremely limited awareness of ‘the chaos reigning supreme in the carbon
market’ at the time.
V A Note on Case Studies
In order to ground my discussion of the policies, practices and approaches

constituting REDD+, this thesis adopts REDD+ implementation in Indonesia as an
illustrative case study of approaches towards REDD+ at the national level. More
specifically, it adopts an Australian sponsored ‘demonstration project’, the
Kalimantan Forest Carbon Partnership (KFCP), as a case study to illustrate relevant
approaches of how REDD+ projects manifest and materialise themselves on specific
sites.
81
Jacqueline Peel, Lee Godden and Rodney J. Keenan, ‘Climate Change Law in an Era of Multi-Level
Governance’ (2012) 1(2) Transnational Environmental Law 245; Chekwumerije Okereke, Harriet
Bulkeley and Heike Schroeder, ‘Conceptualising Climate Governance Beyond the International
Regime’ (2009) 9(1) Global Environmental Politics 58; Philipp Pattberg and Johannes Stripple,
‘Beyond the Public and Private Divide: Remapping Transnational Climate Governance in the 21st
Century’ (2008) 8 International Environmental Agreements 367; Liliana B Andonova, Michele M
Betsill and Harriet Bulkeley, ‘Transnational Climate Governance’ (2009) 9(2) Global Environmental
Politics 52 and Harriet Bulkeley et al, Transnational Climate Change Governance (Cambridge
University Press, 2014).
82
Bernstein et al, above n78.
83
Larry Lohmann, ‘Beyond Patzers and Clients: Strategic Reflections on Climate Change and the
‘Green Economy’’ (The Corner House, 2012) <http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resource/beyond-
patzers-and-clients>, 19.

The choice of Indonesia as an illustrative case study can be justified on several
grounds. Firstly, given its alarming deforestation rates, Indonesia is a significant
jurisdiction for REDD+ implementation; almost half its current GHG emissions
derive from land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) activities and
Indonesia accounts for one third of global deforestation-related emissions.84 Moreover,
the Indonesia government has consistently supported REDD+ in UNFCCC
negotiations85 and was proactive in bringing domestic and international stakeholders
together to canvas REDD+ options.86 The Indonesia government has unilaterally
committed to reducing its GHG emissions by 26 percent by 2020 (compared to
business-as-usual (BAU)), 87 recognising that more ambitious targets could be
achieved with international support (41 percent)88 or in the context of an international
market for avoided deforestation carbon credits. The Climate Change Sectoral
Roadmap, Indonesia’s National Climate Strategy, proposed that 14 percent of planned
emission reductions could be achieved in the forestry sector. 89 The Indonesian
government has passed several regulations to prepare for REDD+ implementation,90
although a central one, Reduction of Emission from Deforestation and Degradation
Procedure,91 has been severely criticised by the UN Committee on the Elimination of
Racial Discrimination on the grounds that indigenous peoples’ rights to lands,
territories and resources were insufficiently taken into account in these regulations
84
Luke Arnold, ‘Deforestation in Decentralised Indonesia: What’s Law Got to Do With It?’ (2008) 4(2)
Law, Environment and Development Journal 75, 100.
85
See in particular, Indonesia and Australia, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest
Degradation in Developing Countries, Joint Submission to the AWG-LCA and SBSTA,
FCCC/AWGLCA/2009/MISC.6.
86
Ibid.
87
UNFCCC, Letter from Rachmat Witolar (Executive Chair, Indonesian National Council on Climare
Change) to Yvo de Boer (Executive Secretary UNFCCC) Indonesia Voluntary Mitigation Actions, 30
January 2010.
88
Fidelis E Satriastanti, ‘Spell Out Indonesia’s Carbon-Cutting Plan, SBY Told’, JakartaGlobe
(Jakarta), 27 September 2009 <http://thejakartaglobe.com/home/spell-out-indonesias-carbon-cutting-
plan-sby-told/332150>.
89
Indonesia Climate Change Sectoral Roadmap (ICCSR) <http://indonesiacarbonupdate.net>, 8-9.
90
These are Ministry of Forestry Regulation P.30/Menhut-II/2009 ‘Reduction of Emissions from
Deforestation and Forest Degradation Procedure’ (Indonesia); Minister of Forestry Regulation
P.68/Menhut-II/2008, ‘The Implementation of Demonstration Activities on Reduction of Emissions
from Deforestation and Degradation’; Ministry of Forestry Decree P.36/Menhut-II/2009 ‘Procedures
for Licensing of Commercial Utilization of Carbon Sequestration and/or Storage in Production and
Protected Forests’; and Ministry of Forestry Regulation P.61/Menhut-II/2008 ‘Provisions and
Procedures for Issuing Ecosystem Restoration Forest Timber Utilisation Permits for Natural Forests in
Production Forests through Applications’.
91
Ministry of Forestry Regulation P.30/Menhut-II/2009 ‘Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation
and Forest Degradation Procedure’ (Indonesia).

and their process of development,92 following a complaint by NGOs.93 As part of an
$1 billion agreement between Indonesia and Norway (signed in May 2010)94 – that
establishes a two year moratorium for new conversion concessions – a REDD+
Taskforce was established as part of the Presidential Working Unit for Supervision
and Management of Development (UKP4). The Taskforce released a National
Strategy for REDD+ in June 2012.95 After significant delay, Indonesia established a
REDD+ Agency in September 2013, external to any Ministry and reporting directly to
the President, although it now appears this Agency will be part of a merged Ministry
for Environment and Forestry.96 As well as the bilateral agreement with Norway,
Indonesia is part of the 2008 Indonesia-Australia Forest Carbon Partnership, 97
Germany-Indonesia Cooperation, 98 the World Banks’s Forest Carbon Partnership
Facility, 99 the UN-REDD Programme100 among others. The REDD+Desk lists 45
readiness activities underway in Indonesia and 30 REDD+ projects101 whilst the
Voluntary REDD+ Database list a total of US$189.2 million in international funds
pledges to support REDD+ in Indonesia.102
The KFCP is a ‘demonstration project’ that is part of Australia’s $200 million

International Forest Carbon Initiative (IFCI) which seeks to rehabilitate 120,000
92
United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights, Letter from Fatimata-Binta Victoire Dah,
Chairperson of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination to Dian Triansyah Djani,
Indonesian Ambassador to the United Nations, 28 September 2009
<http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cerd/docs/early_warning/Indonesia28092009.pdf>.
93
AMAN, SawitWatch and FPP, Request for Further Consideration of the Situation of Indigenous
Peoples in the Republic of Indonesia Under the Early Warning and Urgent Action Procedures,
Submission to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, 75th session, 29 July 2009
<http://www.forestpeoples.org/documents/law_hr/cerd_indonesia_urgent_action_jul09_eng.pdf>.
94
Letter of Intent Between the Government of the Kingdom of Norway and the Government of the
Republic of Indonesia on Cooperation on Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Deforestation and
Forest Degradation (May 2010), <http://www.redd-monitor.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Norway-
Indonesia-LoI.pdf>.
95
‘REDD+ National Startegy’ (Indonesian REDD+ Task Force, 2012) <www.satgasreddplus.org>.
96
Chris Lang, ‘Indonesia’s REDD+ Agency to be swallowed by the Ministry of Environment and
Forestry?’, REDD-Monitor 19 January 2015 <http://www.redd-monitor.org/2015/01/19/indonesias-
redd-agency-to-be-swallowed-by-the-ministry-of-environment-and-forestry/>.
97
Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, International Forest Carbon Initiative
<http://www.climatechange.gov.au/government/initiatives/international-forest-carbon-initiative.aspx>
accessed 26 March 2010.
98
REDD+Database, Germany-Indonesia Cooperation <http://reddplusdatabase.org/arrangements/475>.
99
Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, Indonesia R-Plan, submitted May 2009,
<http://www.forestcarbonpartnership.org/fcp/sites/forestcarbonpartnership.org/files/Documents/PDF/F
eb2010/Indonesia_Rplan_May2009_with_disclaimer.pdf>.
100
UN-REDD Programme, Indonesia, <http://www.un-
redd.org/UNREDDProgramme/CountryActions/Indonesia/tabid/987/language/en-US/Default.aspx>
accessed 25 May 2010.
101
The REDD+Desk, REDD+ in Indonesia, <http://theredddesk.org/countries/indonesia>.
102
Voluntary REDD+ Database, Indonesia <http://theredddesk.org/countries/indonesia>.

hectares of land degraded by the disastrous Soeharto-ero Ex-Mega Rice Project in
Central Kalimantan. First announced in September 2007, it was quietly ended in July
2013103 (although certain targeted areas of work continued until June 2014) despite
few of its initial targets having been achieved. As an early ‘demonstration project’,
the KFCP attracted significant activist,104 academic and policy attention105 as well as
being subject to internal governmental reviews.106 Given its objectives to make both a
‘real and practical contribution’ on the ground and influence the development of the
international regime, the project is significant in its ambitions and therefore a useful
case study of REDD+ implementation.
VI Outline of the Thesis
This thesis is divided into an introductory part and three subsequent substantive parts.
The first two of the substantive parts of this thesis are concerned with understanding
the new forms of authority and modes of governance that the idealised
implementation of REDD+ seeks to materialise. The last part, consisting of the last
two substantive chapters, addresses the actualisation of these new forms of authority
at the national and local scale respectively.
Part I of this thesis provides a background descriptive account of REDD+ and my

methodology. Chapter 2 reviews the recent but growing body of literature around
103
For a critical appraisal see Rebecca Pearse, ‘Don’t cry for carbon in Kalimantan’, New Matilda, 2
July 2013 <http://newmatilda.com/2013/07/04/dont-cry-carbon-kalimantan> and Stephen Howes,
‘KFCP: Began with the bang, ending with a whimper’, DevPolicyBlog 1 July 2013
<http://devpolicy.org/in-brief/kfcp-begun-with-a-bang-ending-with-a-whimper-20130701-2/>.
104
Pearse and Dehm, above n9, ‘Central Kalimantan: REDD+ and the Kalimantan Forest Carbon
Partnership’ (Forest Peoples’ Programme, Pusaka and YPD, 2011); James Goodman and Ellen Roberts,
‘What a Scam!: Australia’s REDD Offsets for Copenhagen’ (WALHI, Friends of the Earth Australia,
AidWatch, 2009).
105
Erik Olbrei and Stephen Howes, ‘A Very Real and Practical Contribution? - Lessons from the
Kalimantan Forests and Climate Partnership’ (Development Policy Centre Discussion 2012)
<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2041832>; Jonathan Pickering, ‘Missing the Peat
for the Trees? A response to the Olbrei-Howes KFCP Critique’, Development Policy Blog 5 April 2012
<http://devpolicy.org/missing-the-peat-for-the-trees-a-response-to-the-olbrei-howes-kfcp-critique/>;
Anja Rosenberg and Jane Wilkinson, ‘Demonstrating Approaches to REDD+: Lessons from the
Kalimantan Forest Carbon Partnership’ (San Giorgio Group, Climate Policy Initiative, 2013); Anu
Lounela, ‘Climate Change Disputes and Justice in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia’ (2015) 56(1) Asia
Pacfiic Viewpoint 62; Mari Mulyani and Paul Jepson, ‘Social Learning Through a REDD+ ‘Village
Agreement’: Insights from the KFCP in Indonesia’ (2015) 56(1) Asia Pacfiic Viewpoint 79 and Lisa
Courtney-Mercer, Forest Conservation and Indigenous People: A Case Study of the Kalimantan Forest
Climate Partnership (KFCP) – A Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD)
Project, and the Effects on the Dayak Indonesian in Central Kalimantan, the Kapuas River Region
(Masters Thesis, Saint Mary’s University, 2014).
106
D Barber, J Hudson and A Sari, ‘Indonesian-Australian Forest Carbon Partnership: Independent
Progress Report’ (Australian Department of Foriegn Affairs and Trade, 2011).

REDD+ and the broader context in which I locate my discussion of REDD+. In this
chapter, I also explain in more detail the methodological and theoretical framework
that informs the thesis. Chapter 3 examines the background and history of REDD+ on
several different registers. Firstly, it examines REDD+ as a legal agreement providing
an account of the gradual and progressive development of norms under the
institutional umbrella of the UNFCCC. Secondly, I briefly outline a history of
REDD+ as a concept or idea that forest protection can be ‘incentivised’ through the
increased financial valuation of nature and through payment for environmental
services (PES) schemes. Thirdly, I examine REDD+ as a series of practices, both
experimental and preparatory, designed to actualise REDD+ projects in material ways
including ‘demonstration projects’ and REDD+-readiness programmes. Fourthly, I
briefly outline how the actualisation of REDD+ depends upon a specific episteme and
way of seeing the world. Finally, I outline REDD+ as a project of social
transformation and intervention providing a background to the debates surrounding its
social impacts on those populations that live in and around forest areas.
The thesis argument that REDD+ represents a reconfiguration of authority over

forested areas is developed in the main three parts of the thesis. Part 2 addresses the
legal structuring and organisation of REDD+ globally. Chapter 4 identifies how while
the framework of REDD+ is a product of public international environmental law,
private international law mechanisms play a key role in making the relations REDD+
establishes enforceable. This argument proceeds through an analysis of how the
REDD+ mechanism is legally structured through the mechanisms of both property
and contract. It identifies that the REDD+ carbon offset commodity represents a novel
property right that is authorised by the UNFCCC regime, but that these offsets are
also produced by private contractual arrangement over land use activities. This
chapter highlights the bridging role that institutions such as the Climate Finance
Funds of the World Bank play between the public law regime and the forms of private
ordering through their practices of ‘market construction’. The analysis in this chapter
highlights the public law infrastructure that is required to establish REDD+ as a
regime of private ordering directed to achieving public purposes. This chapter
therefore reframes REDD+ as a project concerned with constituting the world in
contractual terms and then guaranteeing and securing contractual performance.

Chapter 5 provides a detailed account of the property regime in which the REDD+
commodity circulates by examining the COP decisions of the UNFCCC. This chapter
gives an account of the history of the UNFCCC negotiations of which REDD+ is a
part, in order to describe how the international legal climate mitigation framework has
become orientated towards the establishment and protection of a decentralised
international carbon market. It demonstrates how the construction of the ‘offset’
occurs against a background of unequal appropriation of atmospheric space. It
therefore highlights the power relations that are implicated when these new forms of
carbon property are produced, allocated and circulated. It argues that the various
sequential stages in the development of the UNFCCC regime can be understood as the
progressive self-limitation of international authority.
In contrast to Chapter 4 and 5 which analyses the legal structuring of REDD+ through
the frame of transnational and international law respectively, Part 3 examines
REDD+ as an ‘assemblage’ that attempts to hold together – without however,
resolving – contradictory positions over where authority over forested areas should lie
and how such authority should be exercised. Chapter 6 examines the offset not as a
thing but as a relation between different practices and modalities of resource
governance. It argues that the claim of equivalence between carbon emitted in the
North and additional carbon sequestered in forests in the global South establishes a
strategic relation between the practices of resource extraction on one hand and the
practices of conservation, preservation, sustainable management of forests and
enhancement of carbon stocks that make up REDD+ on the other. This chapter draws
attention to the novelty of the strategic relation the offset establishes, noting that it
holds together practices and modalities for governing nature that have traditionally
been understood as in tension or conflict. This chapter argues that the strategic
relation of the offsets is generative of a rationality of aggregate global resource
maximisation that is made legible through the concept of ‘value’ and organised by
calculative practices. The chapter concludes that this rationality of aggregate global
resource maximisation is central to the form of governance of nature REDD+
instigates, and moreover, that the actualisation of REDD+ requires the internalisation
of this rationality at different jurisdictional scales. As such, the analysis in Chapter 6
provides a crucial building block for arguments about the actualisation of REDD+ at
the national and local level that are then developed in Chapter 8 and 9 respectively.

Chapter 7 examines the jurisdictional aspect of how REDD+ is assembled and how
authority is allocated between the global, national and local scales. It notes the
historical conflict regarding the ‘proprietorial dimension’ of authority over forested
areas, and the rival international, national and local claims to authority over forest
areas. This chapter examines how REDD+ circumvents these conflicts by allocating
international jurisdiction over the carbon sequestration functions that forests serve,
without however, transferring ownership of forests. It analyses how different property
rights to the land, to the carbon sequestration potential of the land and to the carbon
sequestered in the land are established in the process of operationalising the forest
carbon economy. This chapter analyses the allocation of these respective property
rights to different jurisdictional scales as a technology by which rights and
responsibilities in relation to forest carbon sequestration are distributed to these
respective jurisdictional scales. I argue that the disaggregation of the atom of property
in the control, management and use rights (allocated globally, nationally and locally
respectively) establishes a nested jurisdictional schema that facilitates self-governance
at each respective jurisdictional level. I also show how these forms of self-governance
are, however, made conditional upon being exercised in relation to globally
determined objectives.
My discussion of the disaggregation of property rights also provides a critical

building block for an argument developed further in Chapter 9. The analysis of how
property rights are disaggregated into control, management and use rights respectively
draws attention to how the analysis of tenure arrangements at the local level needs to
examine not just the allocation of property rights through REDD+ but also the nature
and content of the property rights being distributed. I therefore argue that
formalisation of adat – or customary – tenure rights at the local level could prove to
be a ‘hollow’ or ‘pyrrhic’ victory, if rights to control land use activity have already
been vested in international or transnational actors. My evidence and reasoning about
the implementation of REDD+ at the national and local level in Chapters 8 and 9 is
therefore based on the framework set out in Chapter 7.
Part 4 is focused on the implementation of REDD+ at the national and local levels.
Chapter 8 addresses the role of national level institutions and regulatory infrastructure
to manage the carbon sequestration potential of land. It examines first how REDD+

comes to be seen as in the ‘interests’ of host nation-states. It argues that making
REDD+ legible as in ‘interests’ of host states depends upon the erasure of Northern
historical responsibility for climate change and moving away from a redistributive
understanding of the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and
respective capabilities’. The chapter also argues that making REDD+ legible as in the
‘interests’ of host states depends upon underlying assumptions of future growth and
the displacement of land use activities that are not considered sufficiently
economically productive. It argues that the factors that make REDD+ cohere as in the
interests of host nation-states are therefore also those that undermine any possibility
of environmental effectiveness and social equity in these schemes. In addition, this
chapter interrogates the formally ‘voluntary’ nature of host state engagement in
REDD+ by examining the process of REDD+-readiness by which the regulatory
infrastructure for REDD+ is established. I consider the ways in which these processes
are prescribed by various multilateral and bilateral institutional processes and situate
them within a broader history of international rule of law and good governance
promotion initiatives. This chapter concludes with an examination of the Kalimantan
Forest Carbon Partnership as an example of a ‘demonstration project’. The discussion
of this case study demonstrates the way REDD+-readiness requires public resources
to create the conditions for private market ordering. The discussion also highlights the
role experimentation plays in establishing these novel markets and the very real and
complex problems REDD+ implementation ‘on the ground’ confronts.
The challenges confronting REDD+ implementation at the local level are taken up in
more detail in Chapter 9, the final substantive chapter of the thesis. This chapter
understands discourses about both the ‘social impact’ and the ‘social feasibility’ of
REDD+ as intimately concerned with making the reconfiguration of the authority
represented by REDD+ real ‘on the ground’. This chapter builds on the discussion in
Chapter 3, where I describe how discourses on the social impacts of REDD+
converge. In this convergence there is a focus on how implementation should be
managed, with discussion centred on how to manage the social risks of REDD+ and
promote the benefits of REDD+. This chapter identifies that contrary to many
accounts, the logic in ‘best-practice’ REDD+ implementation is not directed towards
displacement of forest peoples but rather ‘fixing people in place’ and their
disciplinary inclusion in the green economy. It traces how REDD+ can therefore be

positioned within a broader history of the promotion of decentralisation and
localisation in order to achieve international objectives. The remainder of the chapter
addresses how tenure reform and processes of consultation towards free, prior and
informed consent provide limited ability to contest the reorganisation of authority that
REDD+ represents. I argue that while these mechanisms may provide means of
realising rights in REDD+ they are of limited utility in resisting REDD+.
The conclusion rearticulates the overall thesis argument and draws out its wider
implications and possible future research directions. The conclusion returns to the
concerns of climate justice that have animated this thesis. It reiterates the ways in
which REDD+ forecloses possibilities for climate justice, both by abrogating
questions of historical responsibility and legitimating ongoing fossil fuel extraction. It
shows how instead REDD+ imposes limits that restrict the possibilities for forest
communities to self-determine their livelihoods and futures. In concluding, I
emphasise that there are other ways that the problem of climate change could be
approached and draw on the statements of people resisting the KFCP to demonstrate
some of these possible alternatives.

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Reconsidering REDD+:

Law, Life, Limits and Growth in Crisis

Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree

Melbourne Law School

ORCID ID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9495-6705

Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ i

This is to certify that:

Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ ii

The discussion of the Kalimantan Forest Carbon Partnership (KFCP) in Chapter 8

Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ iii

Chapter 1: ‘A Business Plan for the Planet?’

Chapter 2: Methodology and Literature Review

Chapter 3: Background to REDD+

Part 2: Public, private and market ordering

Chapter 4: REDD+: At the Intersection of Property and Contract

Chapter 5: Constructing a Carbon Market: The Development of the International

Part 3: A Globalist Rationality of Optimal Use and its Scales of Implementation

Chapter 6: The Offset Relation and the Governance of Nature

Chapter 7: The Proprietorial Dimension of Authority: Establishing an Nested

Part 4: Implementing REDD+

Chapter 8: REDD+ at the National Level: Managing the Carbon Sequestration

Chapter 9: REDD+ at the Local Level: Creating the Contracting Subject

Chapter 10: Climate Justice and Planetary Co-habitation

Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ iv

Part 1: Background .................................................................................................................................30!

Chapter 3: Background to REDD+ .........................................................................................................51!

Part 2: Public, Private and Market Ordering .........................................................................................95!

Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ v

Chapter 7: The Proprietorial Dimension of Authority: Establishing A Nested Jurisdictional Scheme184!

Part 4: Implementing REDD+ ..............................................................................................................212!

Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ vi

Chapter 10: Conclusion: Climate Justice and Planetary Co-Habitation ...............................................295!

Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ vii

Figure 3: FCPF Milestone of REDD+ Readiness, http://www.forestcarbonpartnership.org/readiness-

Figure 4: Bilateral and Multilateral Flows of Financial Contributions to REDD+ Countries, As

Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ viii

AAU Assigned Amount Unit

Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ ix

REL/RL Reference Emission Levels/reference level

Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ x

Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ xi

Although writing is predominately a solitary process, sometimes painfully so, the

Teishan Ahearne and Jessica Malka Richter accompanied me on my fieldwork in

Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ xii

Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ xiii

Julia Dehm – Reconsidering REDD+ xiv

I ‘A Business Plan For the Planet?’

Julia Dehm – Chapter 1 – Introduction 1

However, Figueres’ glowing description of REDD+ and its envisioned role in a

Julia Dehm – Chapter 1 – Introduction 2

In response to an Australian government sponsored REDD+ project on their land in

Julia Dehm – Chapter 1 – Introduction 3

Julia Dehm – Chapter 1 – Introduction 4

It is important to foreground the importance of the problem that REDD+ purports to

Julia Dehm – Chapter 1 – Introduction 5

Julia Dehm – Chapter 1 – Introduction 6

The REDD+ scheme is grounded in addressing the ‘common concern’ of climate

Julia Dehm – Chapter 1 – Introduction 7

This thesis engages with questions concerning authority, distributional consequences

Julia Dehm – Chapter 1 – Introduction 8

Julia Dehm – Chapter 1 – Introduction 9

III Situating REDD+

Julia Dehm – Chapter 1 – Introduction 10