This article critically evaluates the discourses concerning the social impacts of Reducing Emission from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) carbon offset schemes on people living in and around forest areas. In particular, the article critically evaluates two of the strategies proposed to mitigate potential social risks from REDD+ and to promote benefits to forest peoples and indigenous peoples: tenure reform and processes of free, prior and informed consent (FPIC). The article suggests that these strategies may not lead to the outcomes forest peoples and their advocates are seeking and provide only constrained tools for contesting REDD+ projects. This article suggests these strategies may instead operate to facilitate the greater disciplinary inclusion of forest peoples in the so-called 'green economy'.
This article critically evaluates the 2015 Paris Agreement, highlighting the almost dichotomous responses it received from the mainstream press as compared to the climate justice movement. This article foregrounds that divide in order to ask further questions of the Agreement and the international climate regime, including questions about what voices and perspectives are heard in scholarship on international climate law. The article suggests the need to engage with international climate law in ways that are attentive to the productive effects of international agreements, as well as the need to examine their distributional effects, to interrogate what new social relations they establish and stabilize as well as how power and authority might be reorganized or rearranged by practices authorized by international environmental law.
The ‘object’ of 1tCO2e has become central to how we imagine the problem of climate change and its possible solutions. This chapter explores the complex relationship between international law and 1tCO2e an as ‘object’. It demonstrates the way in which international law plays a fundamental and constitutive role in defining, stabilizing, and protecting the ‘object’ of 1tCO2e. It shows that there is nothing ‘natural’ or ‘inherent’ in thinking about carbon as standardized, commensurable, substitutable, and exchangeable, but rather that the imaginary of carbon as a fungible ‘object’ is a mode of legibility structured by international law. Simultaneously, this mode of legibility has been the enabling precondition for the marketized form that international climate change regulation and governance has taken. As such, this chapter analyses how the ‘object’ of 1tCO2e is thus both the effect of and the enabling condition for specific modes of international legal regulation.
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