Environmental justice and REDD+ safeguards in Laos: Lessons from an authoritarian political regime

Abstract

Balancing agendas for climate mitigation and environmental justice continues to be one of the key challenges in climate change governance mechanisms, such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+). In this paper we apply the three-dimensional environmental justice framework as a lens to examine the REDD+ process in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Laos) and the REDD+ social safeguards. We focus particularly on challenges to justice faced by marginalized communities living in forest frontier areas under an authoritarian regime. Drawing on policy analysis and open-ended interviews across different policy levels, we explore procedural, distributional, and recognitional justice across the REDD+ policy levels in Laos. We find that REDD+ social safeguards have been applied by both donors and state actors in ways that facilitate external control. We underscore how authoritarian regime control over civil society and ethnic minority groups thwarts justice. We also highlight how this political culture and lack of inclusiveness are used by donors and project managers to implement their projects with little political debate. Further obstacles to justice relate to limitations inherent in the REDD+ instrument, including tight schedules for dealing with highly sensitive socio-political issues under social safeguards. These findings echo other research but go further in questioning the adequacy of safeguards to promote justice under a nationally driven REDD+. We highlight the importance of recognition and political context, including aspects such as power relations, self-determination and self-governance of traditional or customary structures, in shaping justice outcomes.

Forest environmental frontiers around the globe: Old patterns and new trends in forest governance

“…First, the traditional forest frontier characterized by deforestation, forest degradation, and land use change related to agricultural expansion (but also to urban development, as for instance discussed in Kanowski and Edwards (2021)) is still important and dominates forest environmental policy conflicts especially in the tropics (Pokorny et al 2021;Brockhaus et al 2021;Ramcilovic-Suominen et al 2021). This frontier is connected to a reverse land use change frontier-the restoration frontierthat is increasingly global by nature (DeJong et al 2021;Schultz et al 2021;Sotirov et al 2021).…”

“…Third, conflicts related to the distribution of forest use rights between different groups of the population, for instance between different ethnicities (e.g., First Nations and today's majority populations), characterize the forest environmental frontier in several world regions, especially in the tropical world regions (Pokorny et al 2021;Ramcilovic-Suominen et al 2021) and Australia/New Zealand (Kanowski and Edwards 2021). Related to that, controversies over the best way to govern diverging demands and expectations of forests occur, marking, for instance, a frontier between formal and informal practices and ways to account for them, but also between (free) market governance and state intervention.…”

“…Fourth, climate change (adaptation and mitigation) and its increasing impact on forests across the planet results in an increasingly significant forest frontier that is characterized by the physical impact of a warmer climate (mostly by means of larger, more intense and more frequent disturbances), as well as by the often deeply ideologically rooted conflicts of how to deal with such shifting environmental patterns (Brockhaus et al 2021;Ramcilovic-Suominen et al 2021;Seijger et al 2021;Schulz et al 2021;Sotirov et al 2021;Takahashi et al 2021).…”

“…The deforestation phase is arguably connected to conflicts between the groups that aim to convert the forest into agricultural production areas and infrastructure projects and forest-dependent groups, thus resulting in what we have labeled above the ''classical'' deforestation frontier. Conflicts along this frontier are characterized by the high importance of social equity issues and trade-offs between environmental benefits from forests, livelihoods of different forest-dependent groups, and socio-economic development or growth (Brockhaus et al 2021;Pokorny et al 2021;Ramcilovic-Suominen et al 2021). When the forest area reaches a context-dependent minimum, and re-afforestation begins to occur, the nature of the forest environmental frontier changes slowly, but still conflicts related to land use rights and livelihoods remain critical (De Jong et al 2021).…”

“…Finally, the evolving climate change (adaptation and mitigation) frontier characterized by both the increasing physical impacts of climate change and related disturbances and the importance of forests as subjects of climate change mitigation and adaptation policies spans across all stages of the forest transition (Schultz et al 2021;Brockhaus et al 2021;De Jong et al 2021;Ramcilovic-Suominen et al 2021;Sotirov et al 2021). It partially reinforces other frontier conflicts, e.g., related to the polarization between conservation and forest use beliefs and interests, but may also challenge and transform existing governance arrangement and ideological constellations by the physical impacts (and related urgency to respond) of climate change on the world's forest (Schultz et al 2021).…”