The last forty years has seen both unprecedented loss of natural tropical forests and innovation in forest governance, implying that more work is needed to refine the theory and practice of forest governance in a carbon challenged world. This dissertation used the Tanzanian case of the recently introduced international program to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) to empirically explore the design and performance of emerging forest governance arrangements. Drawing from extensive ethnographic field data (participant and non-participant observations, oral histories, key informant interviews, focus group discussions, documentary reviews and household surveys) conducted over five years (2009-2014), with actors in Kilwa and Lindi Districts in South-Eastern Tanzania, this dissertation makes several contributions organized into three substantive chapters.
The first chapter, entitled “Negotiating forests under the REDD+ context in South-Eastern Tanzania” provides descriptions of how local forest residents creatively deploy the use of modern technologies of mobility (cellphones and motorcycles) and the discourses of decentralization, democracy and participation to continue performing otherwise banned cultural-ecological practices of shifting cultivation and wood extraction blamed for the reported forest disappearance.
The second chapter, entitled “Deliberative democracy and the making and unmaking of illegitimate forest institutions” exposes and analyzes the paradoxical eruption of REDD+ resistance despite the adoption of participatory and democratic processes in making and implementing REDD+ interventions arguing that the adoption of deliberative democratic processes remain alien to local residents and has resulted in the production of legally legitimate but democratically illegitimate and often unfair forest institutions pushing local residents to opt for resistance as alternative mechanisms for contesting the introduced forest institutions.
The third chapter, entitled “Mismatched: why do REDD+ payments fail to avoid deforestation in human dominated miombo ecosystems?” challenges and expands on the application of recently introduced carbon payment as an innovative financing scheme for encouraging adoption of sustainable forest management practices in the tropics. I argue that when those inadequate payments are aligned to seasonality of cultural-ecological practices causing forest change and if injected at the appropriate spatial scale (individual and/or community) where decisions affecting forests are made, they have a greater chance of achieving intended impacts.PHDNatural Resources and EnvironmentUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133186/1/bimshale_1.pd
