Slippery violence in the REDD+ forests of Central Kalimantan, Indonesia

Howson, P ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3731-2775, 2018. Slippery violence in the REDD+ forests of Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. Conservation & Society, 16 (2), pp. 136-146. ISSN 0972-4923

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Abstract

Due to increasing global demand for palm oil, coal, and timber, Indonesia has become the largest contributor of greenhouse gases from primary forest loss in the world. Carbon market mechanisms, like Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+), are being promoted by many elements of Indonesia’s government as an effective policy response. The REDD+ programme is designed to enable the provision of financial compensations to protect and restore standing forests by making them more valuable than the timber they contain. However, the logic of REDD+ constructs people living in and around project sites as environmentally destructive and therefore in need of incentivisation to do otherwise. Local people are compensated for the ‘opportunity costs’ of not degrading forests. Within this frame ‘locals’—suffering from the malaise of dispossession—are Othered as illegal loggers, poachers, greedy miners or arsonists. In reality, REDD+ often facilitates the continuation of violence, legitimising an image of small-holders, rather than large international corporations, as the cause of forest degradation in Indonesia. Focusing on the Sungai Lamandau REDD+ project of Central Kalimantan, I discuss how, for some of Sungai Lamandau’s landless farmers, REDD+ is accelerating the very violence and environmentally destructive behaviours it claims to discourage. Farmers are becoming embroiled in other ongoing processes, pushing them towards illicit livelihood strategies, sometimes with devastating outcomes.

Item Type:	Journal article
Description:	In: Special Section: Green Wars.
Publication Title:	Conservation & Society
Creators:	Howson, P.
Publisher:	Wolters Kluwer - Medknow
Date:	11 April 2018
Volume:	16
Number:	2
ISSN:	0972-4923
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.4103/cs.cs_16_150 DOI 228937 Publisher Item Identifier
Rights:	Copyright: © Howson 2018. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use and distribution of the article, provided the original work is cited. Published by Wolters Kluwer - Medknow, Mumbai. Managed by the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Bangalore. For reprints contact: reprints@medknow.com.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Arts and Humanities
Record created by:	Jill Tomkinson
Date Added:	20 Nov 2018 12:01
Last Modified:	21 Nov 2018 14:32
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/35073

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