RE​DD+ 

 
Devan Bhardwaj | 16AR10012 
 
 
India is a surprisingly recent entrant into the REDD+ arena. Surprising because almost 
all the forest land is state controlled and it would have been easy for a centralised 
forest administration to have formulated a REDD+ programme early on. However, the 
first steps towards a REDD+ were initiated by a USAID programme called Forest Plus in 
collaboration with the Indian government aimed at strengthening REDD+ 
implementation in India. REDD+ is being crafted as one of a number of instruments 
employed under the National Action Plan for Climate Change (NAPCC) to offset carbon 
emissions. 
To guide the implementation of REDD+ in India, the Ministry of Environment and 
Forest and Climate Change released in August 2018 the National REDD+ Strategy 
(Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change , 2018); henceforth referred to 
as REDD+ Strategy. We report here our initial analysis of the REDD+ Strategy, to 
identify who benefits and who loses from the programme and what the social and 
environmental costs might be. Our ongoing work on carbon forestry in India poses a 
series of critical questions: how does the dominant narrative of the drivers of forest 
degradation influence REDD+ implementation? What are local responses to the 
implementation of the programme? How are state and non-state actors assembled to 
design and implement carbon forestry projects? We raise these questions in the 
context of the growing discontent with REDD+ particularly its funding, 
implementation, and in delivering stated outcomes across the globe (Fletcher et al., 
2016). We argue here that REDD+ centralises state control of the forest and is, 
therefore, an important political tool to make forests legible and investable even 
though actual financial flows are small. A problematic conception of drivers of 
deforestation and degradation of forest Forest policy in India has always been 
premised on the local user as the main threat to forests. 
The British identified fire, grazing and cultivation as the main drivers of forest loss 
and this continues to dictate forest administration today. The REDD+ Strategy 
identifies two types of drivers of forest degradation: Planned and Unplanned. The 
‘planned drivers’ include developmental activities (dams, road, cities and town 
expansion including biomass removals from the forest as silviculture requirements) 
carried out by the State. ‘Unplanned drivers’ on the other hand are collection of 
fodder and fuelwood by the local households, small timber and non-timber based 
forest products (NTFP), illegal logging and uncontrolled felling; agriculture and 
housing; unregulated livestock grazing and fodder collection. With such a 
classification of drivers it is nobody’s guess who will lose when REDD+ programmes 
identify what practices will need to be avoided. While the REDD+ Strategy identifies 
the need to manage ‘unplanned drivers, and activities’ the Strategy is silent on 
managing the more environmentally damaging ‘planned activities’ consisting mostly of 
development and infrastructural activities implemented by the State. This is a 
problematic assumption for two reasons that leads to strong biases against local users. 
First, the use of the binary ‘planned and unplanned’ is highly problematic identifying 
the practices of local people as unplanned (meaning random and not reasonable), 
while that of the State as planned (reasonable and particular). There is enough 
evidence that development projects are socially and environmentally disastrous and 
therefore labelling developmental activities as ‘rational planned actions’ is like 
sanctioning the destruction of the environment carried out by the State in the name 
of development. Second, by explicitly identifying local people and their practices as 
the main drivers of forest degradation and the target of attention under REDD+ the 
Strategy misses a significant opportunity of building shared platforms with local 
people. A dogma of Community participation and Joint Forest Management (JFM) 
‘Community participation’ appears as a crucial factor in the implementation of the 
programme. The REDD+ Strategy claims that a large number of JFM groups across the 
villages are effectively functioning and efficiently managing the forest. We need to 
understand that the emphasis on the role of communities in the effective 
management of forest is not new. The idea of ‘community’ as a homogenous entity 
has been a cornerstone of most of the forest conservation and regeneration 
programmes across the regions including programmes such as social forestry and 
eco-development. The JFM approach was floated in the 1990s and involved the 
formation of Village Forest Committees (VFC) consisting of a group of villagers 
selected by the forest department looking after the local forest. The JFM, consisting 
of members chosen and not elected, functioning under the supervision of a forest 
officer, makes it an extended arm of the forest department as well as a den of local 
elites completely marginalising the voice of the poor and marginalised people in the 
village (Lele, 2014). Despite the intense criticism of JFM by scholars and activists, the 
state continues to promote the village forest committees as the preferred 
institutional arrangement under all their programmes, including as they do in the 
REDD+ strategy. This undermines decentralisation and devolution of forest 
governance. Rather than the VFC, the state should be devolving authority to the Gram 
Sabha, which is a legally sanctioned and democratically inclusive local body consisting 
of all villagers. The two progressive legislations enacted to grant rights to forest 
dwellers and Adivasi namely the Forest Rights Act of 2006 (FRA) and the Panchayats 
Extension to Scheduled Areas Act -1996 (PESA) recognise Gram Sabhas as the main 
institution to exercise the rights of the people over the forest and forest land. The 
identification of VFCs as the village institution violates several provisions of FRA and 
PESA. REDD+ resurrects the JFM approach and breathes fresh life into a centralised 
system of forest management. Carbon enhancement and degraded forest The REDD+ 
Strategy reflects the growing global concern for increasing carbon stock in forests. It 
defines ‘enhancement of the carbon stocks’ as “conversion of non-forest or degraded 
forest to forest through afforestation, reforestation, restoration forestry and forest 
management practices leading to enhancement of carbon stocks” (REDD+ Strategy 
p.20). The critical question left unanswered is who decides what a forest is and what 
constitutes a degraded forest. In the past, there have been instances of forest land 
that were used by local people, which were converted to plantations or diverted to 
development projects by the state by labelling it as ‘degraded forest land’ (Gadgil 
and Prasad, 1978; Chandrashekhar et al., 1987). Feasibility of Carbon Markets as 
Dependable Income Source The REDD+ Strategy indicates that funds will be sought 
from multiple platforms consisting of bilateral sources, private corporations, and the 
green climate fund (GCF). However, the funding scenario for REDD+ does not appear 
to be very positive. Even though GCF is seeking annual funding of US$ 100 billion, the 
actual amount that has been received since establishment in 2010 has been US$ 6.9 
billion. This is an enormous gap in funding and says a lot about the lack of 
commitment of the developed economies and international organisations towards 
REDD+ (Sunderlin et al. 2015). Secondly, the global carbon credit market has not 
turned out to be a profitable venture and some have argued that REDD might be dead 
(Fletcher et al., 2016). In light of unpredictable funding and a volatile carbon market, 
the important question is what purpose does REDD+ serve if all indications are that it 
will fail? We believe that REDD+ helps the state to centralise control of the forest. 
The institutional arrangements and technologies associated with monitoring of forest 
carbon and biomass makes the forest legible and investable and helps the state wrest 
control of the forest from local actors. Conclusion In all, India REDD+ National 
Strategy (2018) raises a raft of concerns regarding the role of people, the actual 
drivers of deforestation, the reliability of the carbon market and the State’s 
willingness to recognise and safeguard the rights of people. The REDD+ Strategy as 
presented is not a path-breaking document, but merely a continuation of earlier 
policies and programmes. The REDD+ Strategy helps to keep alive the interest of the 
State at a time of increasing calls for the devolution of state powers over forest land. 
The Strategy demonstrates the coercive nature of the Indian state which, in its drive 
to meet carbon sequestration targets is adversely affecting people’s well-being and 
thereby the sustainability of the forest. The implementation of REDD+ and 
incentivising the avoidance of forest use reinforces the historical injustice to the 
forest dependent people of India.