Reducing deforestation in Colombia while building peace and pursuing business as usual extractivism?

Abstract

In this article, I examine the contradictions and tensions in Colombia's simultaneous embrace of REDD+ and a peace-building process premised on continued extractivism. Colombia is emerging from an internal conflict that lasted more than 50 years. In this process rural land-use is being transformed, generating new conflicts over land use and control with detrimental effects on Colombia's forests. Based on official documents, reports, existing scholarly work, interviews and observations collected during fieldwork in the Colombian Amazon, I analyze the ways in which peace-building and post-conflict transition have precipitated factors which have aggravated land conflicts and led to the escalation of deforestation in Colombia. I argue that Colombia's current REDD+ efforts mainly serve to attract international funding and legitimize the status quo since they remain disconnected from the structural processes that directly and indirectly drive deforestation. As such, REDD+ in Colombia contributes to a contradictory neoliberal approach to development, which promises to safeguard the environment, while supporting large-scale extractive industries, mining, cattle ranching and intensive agriculture, resulting in the increase in deforestation and forest degradation.Key Words: Colombia, post-conflict, peace-building, extractivism, deforestation, REDD+

Negative emissions and the long history of carbon removal

“…REDD+ for example was mainly expected to be financed through private, carbon market funding (Lederer, 2012), but in practice has become dependent on equally scarce public support. Moreover, funding often does not cover the opportunity costs of forest conservation, which means that REDD+ schemes are unable to compete with more profitable forms of land use and end up coexisting with the continued development of extractive industries and large‐scale agriculture, which in many regions are the primary drivers of deforestation (Krause, 2020; McAfee, 2012; Turnhout et al, 2017). This is one example of structural tensions and contradictions between the prioritization of cost‐minimization and the social and environmental outcomes of climate policy, which critics have argued are internal to the economizing logics of neoliberal environmentalism (Corson, MacDonald, & Neimark, 2013; Leach & Scoones, 2015; Lohmann, 2011; McAfee, 2012).…”

Policy persistence: REDD+ between stabilization and contestation

“…Contrary to a strict opposition of REDD+ aidification to commodification, and the assumption that carbon-based conservation seeks to disincentivize commercial investments in agriculture and mineral resources at least in principle (see Fletcher et al 2016;Angelsen et al 2017), REDD+ actually blurs the divide between the private and public spheres further. Rather than supplant them, REDD+ exists alongside the extractivist and growth-oriented policies that fuel the drivers of the very processes of deforestation and forest degradation that it was supposed to abate (see Krause 2020). As such, the specific political economy spawned by REDD+, when traced across its entire web of actors, processes, rationalities and impacts at various scales, lends itself to the commodification argument (Fletcher et al 2016;Fletcher and Büscher 2017).…”

“…Mobilizing this understanding of policy persistence, we revisit the trajectory of REDD+, drawing on the growing body of REDD+-related political ecology research, as well as the five articles in this Special Section, each of which illustrate different facets of the processes of REDD+ stabilization and contestation. Based on a detailed account of REDD+ and development in Colombia's post-conflict transition and peacebuilding, Torsten Krause (2020) observes the paradoxical embrace of both REDD+ and extractivism in the country, illustrating the thinly veiled contradiction inherent to REDD+ as a spatio-temporal fix for the climate crisis. Franziska Müller (2020) analyzes Norwegian REDD+ education strategies and tools, showing how they draw upon powerful repertoires of depoliticization and repoliticization that seek to summon local communities, and thereby lend stability to the fragile global articulation of REDD+.…”

“…These cases bring insights from diverse geographical settings. They draw on a range of theoretical resources, including governmentality (Müller 2020;Setyowati 2020), Science and Technology Studies (Ramcilovic-Suominen and Nathan 2020), and critical policy studies and political economy (Asiyanbi and Massarrella 2020;Krause 2020). Together, this collection illustrates how the persistence of REDD+ is the result of dispersed counteracting forces, for instance, the deliberate policy pursuit of government in Colombia, the maneuverings of local groups in Indonesia, the technical empowerment plans of donors as in the example of Norway, and the cross-scalar implementation of REDD+ in Laos.…”

Dense satellite data reveals landscape connectivity decline in the Andes-Amazon region

“…Connected habitat helps to develop zero-deforestation initiatives that currently proliferate in Colombia (Furumo & Lambin, 2020) and Sustainable Land-use systems as alternatives to conventional unproductive cattle ranching (Bonatti et al, 2021). The extreme loss of connected habitat observed indicates that the application of these initiatives remained very weak as tools for effective environmental conservation and governance (Furumo & Lambin, 2020; Krause, 2020). The structural reasons for deforestation are not taken deeply into account through these initiatives or other national policies.…”