Roots of inequity: How the implementation of REDD+ reinforces past injustices
By S. Chomba, J. Kariuki, J. Lund, F. Sinclair. 2016
164 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The extent to which REDD+ initiatives should be a mechanism to address poverty and provide other co-benefits apart from carbon storage, is hotly debated. Here, we examine the benefit distribution policy and practice of a prominent REDD+ project in Kenya with the aim of understanding the extent to which it addresses equity. We reveal that while the project design was attentive to equity concerns in distributing benefits amongst the project implementer, landowners and the wider population of small-scale farmers and pastoralists in the area, in practice, the initial flow of benefits were concentrated in the hands of a few. This was because developments in land tenure since pre-colonial times had involved processes of dispossession and elite capture, enabled by colonial and post-colonial land policies that left the majority of local people with little or no land entitlement. As the distributive policy of the project maps onto the existing unequal land distribution, it reinforces inequality. By illustrating how current, well-intended, REDD+ efforts inadvertently come to entrench a long process of dispossession of marginalized people, we call attention to the pivotal importance that historical context plays in discussions of equity and social safeguards related to implementing REDD+ initiatives and related policy.
Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Global and Planetary Change, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/07110efe7d03a64bcc0c6bd140b3fbbe61b175b1
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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
- William D. Sunderlin
- Sven Wunder
- Katharine R. E. Sims
- F. Paumgarten
- C. Shackleton
- A. Angelsen
- S. Shackleton
In Global and Planetary Change
- William D. Sunderlin
- Sven Wunder
- S. Engel
- P. McElwee
- A. Angelsen
- Katharine R. E. Sims
- A. Vatn
- E. Corbera
In Soil Science
Citations in the corpus
- What is REDD+ achieving on the ground? (2018, background): “The lack of tenure clarity at REDD+ project sites [21,26] is a legacy of historical tenure arrangements that result in inequitable benefit distribution [54], challenges in documenting customary land rights [25,55], resource conflicts that can arise when local people aren’t involved in REDD+ decision”