THE PRICE OF TREES: PRODUCING CARBON COMMODITIES AND CONSERVATION IN MALAWI’S PROTECTED AREAS By Heather M. Yocum A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Anthropology – Doctor of Philosophy 2013 ABSTRACT THE PRICE OF TREES: PRODUCING CARBON COMMODITIES AND CONSERVATION IN MALAWI’S PROTECTED AREAS By Heather M. Yocum This dissertation focuses on the creation of carbon commodities and reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD+) carbon projects in Malawi. REDD+ projects are carbon offset project in which carbon credits can be generated from halting or slowing the rate of tree cutting and engaging in activities that promote conservation of plants, soils, and trees that remove carbon from the atmosphere. How do the different actors involved in the creation of these carbon projects—villagers, community organizers, government officials, aid workers, representatives from donor organizations, investors, carbon developers, and NGO personnel— transform the chemical element carbon that is present in the trees, plants, and soils of forests in Malawi into a commodity that can be bought and sold internationally on the voluntary market? Based on 12 months of field research in 2009 and 2011-12, this dissertation describes the microprocesses of creating carbon commodities and carbon projects and provides a thick description of how conservation and human relationships are mediated by market capitalism. The actions of people engaged in production are the visible, material practices through which markets are made to work in the world. The work done by different actors as they measure carbon stocks, craft programs to promote forest conservation, generate models to estimate emissions reductions, draft national and international policies regulating carbon sales, and explain the project to rural communities are all actions which bring carbon commodities—and carbon markets—into being. I describe the technical rationality employed by experts as they ii produce carbon credits as objects which can be enumerated, mapped, and managed, as well as the disjunctures which occur as they attempt to explain the concept of “selling air” to rural Malawians and other non-experts. I explore the intersection of conservation, community forest access, and the protection of carbon stocks within the protected areas. I also consider the role of public aid money in subsidizing the creation of REDD+ projects, as well as the importance of investor preference in shaping carbon projects and determining their ultimate success or failure. Throughout, I attend to the compromises and contingencies which shape REDD+ projects, as well as how the process of creating carbon commodities is shaped by and (re)produces particular systems of organization and relations of power. An ethnography of carbon commodity production is one way to engage with larger questions about the expansion of markets into conservation. Scholars studying market-based conservation have had difficulty establishing a clear link between theoretical discussions of capitalist expansion with case studies detailing the impacts of these projects in specific places and on certain populations. My research offers a thick description of carbon commodity production as one way to understand how these markets are manufactured and what impacts this will have on social relations, environmental management, and social and environmental justice. iii Copyright by HEATHER M. YOCUM 2013 iv For my family, and for Jim v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The ChiChewa word for research, kafukufuku, means to uncover something from the dirt with a stick, something just below the surface. In ChiTumbuka, the root verb, kufuku, means to hold one’s hands out in preparation to receive a gift. There can be no better way to describe the generosity of the people with whom I worked in Malawi and their willingness to share their time and knowledge with me. Any mistakes or errors are entirely mine. This research would not have been possible without Duncan Chiza Mkandawire, Elton Nyamwela, and the communities living near Nyika, Vwaza, and Mkuwazi. Duncan and Elton were collaborators in this project. In Rumphi, Duncan allowed me to accompany him to community meetings and provided transportation on the back of his motorcycle. In Mkuwazi, Elton Nyamwela was a skillful translator, ChiTonga tutor, and cultural liaison. I could not have accomplished nearly so much without their logistical help and insights into natural resource management and village life. The people living in Kamphenda, Sijenheni, Waliro, Kazuni, Chankalamu, Chasamba, Thazima, Kamphenda, Kazuni, Sijenheni, Waliro, Ching’anya, Chakuluma, Kwerenji-Phetera, Mateyu, Ndiweri, and Simoni graciously allowed me to live and work in their villages and took time to answer my questions. Zikomo kwambili! Tawonga chomene! Michael Whiteman, Cheri Sugal, and Leonard Sefu opened their carbon project and their institutions to me, making a significant portion of this research feasible. Cheri’s willingness to share her work with me added new depth to this project. I would also like to thank the University of Malawi for providing institutional affiliation. Diamon Kambewa and Wapulumuka Mulwafu provided critical insights and also helped with the logistical aspects of research in Lilongwe and Zomba. Mrs. Maisha Kataya and I were research and yoga partners. I’d also like to thank the vi Department of National Parks and Wildlife and Total LandCare staff in Rumphi and Mzimba, as well as the Department of Forestry staff in Nkhata Bay for taking time to answer my questions and allowing me to attend their meetings. I am profoundly grateful to the members of my Ph.D. committee. Their guidance and critical feedback have been integral to this project and to my growth as a scholar. My advisors, Anne Ferguson and Laurie Medina, are the kind of mentors that grad students dream of. Anne has been a faithful supporter of my ideas—through all their iterations—and helped me navigate my way around graduate school and field work. She gave me a job that I loved and advice that I needed. I have benefitted enormously from Laurie’s provocative questions which continually challenged me to engage more deeply and fully with the story that my data had to tell. James Pritchett’s ability to craft a question reshaped the way that I approach ethnography, engage with theory, and the way that I teach. When I first arrived in Malawi, Leo Zulu allowed me to tag along to his meetings at the Forestry Department and jump started my field research. His guidance and attention to the everyday lives of people have grounded this project. I’ve also benefitted from the relationships I built during my time at MSU. Bill Derman taught me about political ecology and changed the course of my research. Linda Hunt offered encouragement and helpful advice about the writing process. Nancy Smith always had a smile and made sure I never missed a deadline. Marissa Rinkus’ advice on grant-writing was invaluable. Rowenn Kalman, Tazin Karim, Rebecca Meuninck, and Anna Jefferson all read and commented on portions of several chapters. Their insights, feedback, and enthusiasm for my work were invaluable. Wilson Ndovie was an excellent ChiChewa teacher and cultural coach. I am grateful to the institutions which provided financial support to this research. A Fulbright IIE Student Scholar Award and a Gender, Justice and Environmental Change Doctoral vii Dissertation Research Award from MSU’s Center for Gender in Global Context funded my dissertation field research. I was able to study ChiChewa with the support of the Center for Advanced Study in International Development, Center for Gender in Global Context, and the African Studies Center. My first research trip to Malawi was funded by an International Studies and Programs Pre-dissertation Travel Award. The MSU Graduate School provided a generous fellowship to support my graduate studies and also provided a semester of funding during the writing process. The Department of Anthropology provided research and travel funds, teaching opportunities, and general support throughout my time there. Numerous people provided support and love in the form of food, shelter, and fun when I needed it most. Kimberly Smiddy opened her home to us while we lived in Lilongwe, and put up with all of my comings and goings during my frequent travels between the capital and my research sites. She also made sure that we were not alone on Thanksgiving, Christmas, or the 4th of July. I will always be grateful for her insight on culture and politics in Malawi and the fantastic meals we enjoyed at her house. Liz, Siyani, Mathews, the Chikoza family, and the staff at Matunkha helped make Rumphi feel like home. Josie and Alice made Butterfly Space a relaxing and joyous place to live in Nkhata Bay. Becky, Ryan, and Riley graciously provided a home for us when we relocated back to Colorado. The staff at Espresso Royale in East Lansing, Sojourner’s Tea and Coffee in Denver, and Ziggi’s Coffee in Longmont provided caffeine and a space to think and write. I would not be where I am today without my family and friends. My parents taught me to love and explore this great big world, and they only cringed a little when I actually did it. They have been unfailing in their support of me and my life in every way, and I will be forever grateful for that very precious gift. Sonny, thank you for baking delicious bagels and making viii extraordinarily strong coffee to fuel my writing. Holly, thank you for letting me crash on your couch during vacations, for taking me scuba diving, and for making Oklahoma so much fun to visit. Becky and Steve, you embraced me as your daughter, took care of our cat, and let us live with you when we moved back to the US. For all that and more, thank you. And to Jim. There are no possible words to describe how much your love and support throughout this process have meant to me. You’ve been beside me in some way or another for my entire adult life. You moved with me across the country to Michigan, then across the world to Malawi, and now you’ve brought me back to ‘our’ mountains. Your humor helped to get me through some tough times, and you were always ready to give me the tough love I needed to kick it up a notch. Your faith in me is astounding. Thank you. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES……………………………………………………………………………...xiii LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………………..xiv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS…………………………………………………………………....xv CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION..…………………………………………………………………………..….1 Carbon Projects in Malawi……………………………………………………………...5 Out of the Black Box………………………………………………………………….....9 Chapter Outline…………………………………………………………...........………13 Notes about Place Names, Local Government Structures, and Terminology………17 CHAPTER 2 STUDYING CARBON – THEORY AND METHODOLOGY……………………………...21 Neoliberal Natures…………………………………………………………………..….21 Critiques of Carbon Markets and Market-based Conservation…………………….31 CHAPTER 3 SITUATING CARBON IN MALAWI……………………………….……………..………...35 Research Sites…………………………………………………………………………..35 Nyika and Vwaza………………………………………………………...………35 Mkuwazi………………………………………………………………………….36 Comparing Carbon Projects………………………………………………...…………39 Background and History…………………………………………………….…………42 Comanagement in Protected Areas……………………………………………………47 Current Development Projects in the Area…………………………………………...52 Methods………………………………………….………………………………………52 Locating Sites, Cultivating Networks….………………………………………………54 Rumphi, Nyika National Park, and Vwaza Marsh Wildlife Reserve…………….57 Nkhata Bay and Mkuwazi Forest Reserve……………………………….………60 Terra Global Capital……...……………………………………………………..62 Positionality ……...…………………………..…………………………………………63 Power ……………………………………………………………………………63 Position…………………………..………………………………………………66 CHAPTER 4 COUNTING CARBON……………………………………..………...………………………..73 Introduction…………………………………..…………………………………………72 Part I: History and Confluences………………….……………………………………75 Seeing the Global Forest……………………………..…………………..…..…75 Economic Theory of Ecosystem Services……………………………..…….…78 A Brief History of REDD(+)(++) Policy………………………………….……81 x History of Scientific Forestry………………………………….……………….84 Part II: Measuring Carbon Stocks and Creating Carbon Factors …..……………..86 Creating the Carbon Factor……………………………………………………86 Creating the Baseline Scenario ………………………………….………….…88 Conducting the Biomass Survey…………………………………………….…92 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………...……...101 CHAPTER 5 “IT BECOMES SCIENTIFIC…”…………………………………………………………….103 The Model and the Matrix…………………………………………………………....104 The Project Scenario………………………………………………..…………………106 Ethnographic Encounters – Carbon Project Meetings……………………………..109 Generating Data……………………………………………………………….………110 Investors, Projects, and Communities……………………..………………………...118 Creating Categories……………………………………..…………………………….120 Conclusion………………………………………………………………...………...…125 CHAPTER 6 PEOPLE, PROTECTED AREAS, AND PRODUCING CARBON……………………….128 Land Use and Evictions…………………………………………………….…………132 Resource Use………………………………………………….………………………..135 Creating Poachers, Catching Poachers………………..……………………………..139 State Capacity and Distributing Benefits……………...…………………………….147 Conclusion…………….…..…………………………………………………………...154 CHAPTER 7 GOOD AIR, BAD AIR: COMMUNICATING “CARBON” AND REDD+………………157 The Politics of Carbon Knowledge …………………………………………………..157 Training the Trainers…………………………………………………………………160 Running the NVA……………………………………………………………………...162 Organizing in Rumphi ………………………………………………………………..168 Community Meetings………………………………………………………………….170 Community Reactions………………………………………………………………...175 Terra Global and Carbon Finances.………………………………………………....183 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………….……….191 CHAPTER 8 MKUWAZI AND THE INVISIBLE HAND……..………………………………………….194 Mkuwazi………………………………………………………………………………..194 Development Funding and Carbon…………………………………………………..202 Carbon, Development, and Conservation………………………………..…………..204 Conclusion……………………………………………………………….…………….210 CHAPTER 9 RECONSIDERING CARBON PRODUCTION (CONCLUSIONS)…..…………………..212 Producing the Carbon Economy…….…………………….…………….…………...214 xi People, Parks, and Policing………………………….…………….…………..214 Labor and the Production of Value…….…………………….…………….…..217 The Emerging Carbon Knowledge Economy…….…………………….……………220 REDD+ Futures? …….…………………………………………...…….…………..…223 Social and Environmental Justice: The Politics of REDD+……...…….…………...225 APPENDICES …………..……………………….…………………….…………….………...229 Appendix A: List of Interviews………………………………………………………...230 Appendix B: List of Focus Groups……………………………………………………..232 Appendix C: Detailed Methods for the Focus Groups…………………………...…….234 Appendix D: List of Foreign Words…………………………………..…...….………..237 REFERENCES…...……………………………………………………………...….………….238 xii LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Comparison of Two Carbon Projects……………………………………………....41 Table 2: Sample of project planning matrix based on one used by the carbon developer and the community organizer to estimate carbon equivalents of livelihood projects. This sample is adapted from the author's field notes …………………………………………….112 xiii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Map of Malawi………………………………………………………………………...6 Figure 2: Map of Malawi’s Northern Region with Nyika National Park, Vwaza Marsh Wildlife Reserve, and Mkuwazi Forest Reserve...…………………………………………….7 Figure 3: Graph Illustrating Net Emissions Reductions (NERs) …………………………...89 xiv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS CBNRM Community Based Natural Resource Management CCB Carbon, Community, and Biodiversity Standard COMPASS II Community Partnerships for Sustainable Resource Management II COP Conference of Parties DBH Diameter at Breast Height DNPW Department of National Parks and Wildlife FRIM Forestry Research Institute of Malawi GIS Geographic Information System GPS Geographic Positioning System IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change LEAD Leadership for Environment and Development MEET Malawi Environment Endowment Trust MK Malawi Kwacha (national currency of Malawi) NERs Net Emissions Reductions NGO Non-governmental Organization NRMC Natural Resource Management Committee NSO National Statistical Office NVA Nyika–Vwaza Association for Natural Resources and Rural Development PES Payments for Ecosystem Services REDD+ Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation SCOPE Scientific Committee of the Environment xv tCO2 Metric tonnes of carbon TFCA Transfrontier Conservation Area TGC Terra Global Capital TLC Total LandCare UN United Nations UNDP United Nations Development Programme UNESCO United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization UNFCC United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change US$ United States Dollar US United States of America USAID United States Agency for International Development USDA United States Department of Agriculture VCS Verified Carbon Standard VNRMC Village Natural Resource Management Committee WB World Bank ZNRMC Zone Natural Resource Management Committee xvi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION We are all sitting in the church in the middle of a small village near the Malawi-Zambia border. The tree-covered hills of the wildlife reserve are visible out of the open windows. The community organizer stands in front of the group. He is tall and gesticulates wildly as he introduces the carbon project to the people who have come to the meeting. He tells them that people breathe out bad air. He goes on to explain that trees also breathe, but that they need the bad air that people breathe out. Trees exhale the good air, making more of the good air that people need. Trees and people need each other to breathe. “There are organizations that will pay us to keep the trees that breathe this bad air,” he tells them. “There are foreigners who want to buy this air.” There is some quiet chuckling and a few people start muttering comments to their neighbors. One man’s voice rises above the rest as he stands up and asks, “How can you buy air?” This is a story about the production of carbon commodities. Carbon commodities take the form of carbon credits or offsets which can be exchanged on carbon markets to offset greenhouse gas emissions or pollution in an effort to mitigate climate change. Although carbon is one of the most common elements on the planet, carbon credits are still rare. This study details the way that carbon commodities are being produced in two different carbon offset projects in Malawi, a small country in southern Africa. How do the different actors involved in the creation of these carbon projects—villagers, community organizers, government officials, aid workers, representatives from donor organizations, investors, carbon developers, and non-governmental organization (NGO) personnel—transform the chemical element carbon that is present in the 1 trees, plants, and soils of forests in Malawi into a commodity that can be bought and sold internationally on the voluntary market? An ethnography of carbon commodity production is one way to engage with larger questions about the expansion of markets into conservation. This dissertation examines the situated practices of actors engaged in the production of carbon commodities as a way to understand how conservation and human-environment interactions are mediated by market capitalism. I am also concerned with understanding how social relationships and human-nature relationships are changing in the face of increasing environmental pressures and new ways to manage the environment, as well as how human efforts to mitigate climate change bring new challenges to the pursuit of social and environmental justice. This dissertation describes the micro-processes of creating carbon commodities and carbon projects as a way to engage with these larger questions. Focusing on how commodities are produced provides a way to ground a discussion of markets in the actions of the people instead of attributing agency to the market itself. The actions of people engaged in production are the visible, material practices through which markets are made to work in the world. The work done by different actors as they measure carbon stocks, craft programs to promote forest conservation, generate models to estimate emissions reductions, draft national and international policies regulating carbon sales, and explain the idea of selling air to rural communities are all actions which bring carbon commodities—and carbon markets— into being. One way to produce carbon commodities is through the creation of carbon offset projects. Carbon offset projects are one type of payments for ecosystem services, market-oriented conservation projects which offer direct payments and financial compensation for conservation- 2 friendly practices. Under these carbon offset projects, the carbon stored in trees, plants, and soil can be measured, converted into carbon credits, and then sold on the voluntary carbon market to buyers who wish to reduce their carbon footprint or offset emissions from industry, energy use, or travel. Reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) projects are carbon offset project in which carbon credits can be generated from halting or slowing the rate of tree cutting and engaging in activities that promote conservation of plants, soils, and trees that remove carbon from the atmosphere. REDD+ is often billed as a win-win-win solution that will simultaneously help to mitigate climate change, alleviate poverty, and conserve the environment. The program is supported by the United Nations and the World Bank as well as by foreign aid and development agencies, transnational environmental NGOs, and private-sector investors. REDD+ projects are designed to promote conservation by compensating people and governments for the opportunity costs of not cutting down trees. Communities and governments can receive payments for choosing to conserve forests instead of clearing them to expand agricultural production or build infrastructure. The profits made from the sale of the carbon credits generated through REDD+ projects are designed to benefit forest-dependent communities by providing alternative sources of income and thereby decreasing their dependence on forest resources. REDD+ projects often include additional livelihood and development benefits, such as the construction of clinics and schools. Additionally, REDD+ projects often contain mechanisms to promote additional benefits for biodiversity conservation, for example by protecting forest habitats for diverse animal and plant species and encouraging the planting of native tree species during forest regeneration efforts. 3 However, scholars, policy makers, and social justice advocates have posed serious questions about the ability of REDD+ to deliver on these “win-win-win” promises. At the very least, they point out, REDD+ will benefit some actors more than others. At worst, it may increase inequalities between and within nations and communities; disempower forest-dependent communities and destabilize their claims to land and access to forest resources; or fail to achieve the environmental goals of conserving forests and reducing carbon emissions. What all of these critiques and concerns have in common is their fundamental link to the processes through which carbon credits are produced as commodities to be sold on the carbon market. Where ever the concerns are mounted from—the scientific community about the robustness of standards of measurement; from economists about the best way to implement carbon trading and price environmental commodities; from policy experts about creating the appropriate governance structures nationally and internationally to support the burgeoning carbon market; or from those concerned with issues of equity and environmental justice— critiques of REDD+ are inextricably linked to how carbon credits are produced. 1 These are questions about production, labor, and value: how are these carbon commodities being produced, who is involved in their production and in what ways, and who will benefit and what will those benefits look like? What types of technological practices and social relationships are necessary to produce environmental commodities and forge a market for ecosystem services where they will be bought and sold? 1 Even the acronym “REDD+” reflects this concern over the conditions of carbon commodity production. The “+” stands for the additional social and biodiversity benefits of the program. REDD policies were changed to add these additional benefits to address concerns that the production of carbon offsets could lead to potential human rights violations if people were displaced during the creation of carbon offset projects, or that mono-crop tree plantations would supplant biodiverse forest habitats. For a brief discussion of the history of REDD+, please see Chapter 3. 4 Carbon Projects in Malawi Since 2008, Malawi’s government has been cooperating with international donors, aid agencies, NGOs, and private sector investors to implement REDD+ projects in its national parks, wildlife reserves, and forest reserves. The projects planned for these protected areas are meant to conserve forests, protect biodiversity, mitigate climate change, and bring development to rural communities who live near these protected areas. The carbon trade has the potential to bring in large amounts of money for Malawi. Malawi has 9,335 square miles (24,177 square kilometers) of forests covering almost 20 percent of the total land area. Most of these forests are protected in Malawi’s national parks, wildlife reserves, and forest reserves. If all of the carbon stocks in these forests were open to the carbon market, the Forestry Department estimates that Malawi could earn up to US$407 million each year from the carbon trade, and carbon would surpass tobacco as Malawi’s main foreign exchange earner (Kayambazinthu and Onaka 2012). The win-win-win rhetoric of REDD+ is incredibly appealing to a country like Malawi, where new sources of income and development aid are important for meeting the social and environmental challenges that come with a changing climate. Malawi is one of the poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa and is ranked 170th out of 187 countries on the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Index (UNDP 2013). In a country of almost 16 million people, the average person lives on less than US$1 per day. With 139 people/square kilometer, Malawi is one of the most densely populated countries in southern Africa (World Bank 2012). Small-scale agriculture is the primary economic activity in rural areas, but many people grow cash crops such as tobacco, engage in small enterprises and supplement their income by selling forest-based products. Eighty five percent of people live in rural areas and depend on rain-fed agriculture for growing food crops of maize, beans, pumpkins, and other 5 Figure 1: Map of Malawi Map credit: Adrianne Daggett 6 Figure 2: Map of Malawi’s Northern Region with Nyika National Park, Vwaza Marsh Wildlife Reserve, and Mkuwazi Forest Reserve Map credit: Adrianne Daggett 7 fruits and vegetables. Only nine percent of Malawians have access to electricity; most people are dependent on fire wood or charcoal to meet their energy needs (National Statistical Office and Inner City Fund Macro 2011). Even those in urban and peri-urban areas who do have access to electricity rely on charcoal and firewood to supplement their energy needs during the frequent power outages. This study considers two carbon offset projects planned for protected areas in Malawi’s Northern Region. The first REDD+ carbon project in a protected area in Malawi was planned for the Mkuwazi Forest Reserve. This project was funded by the Community Partnerships for Sustainable Resource Management program (COMPASS II), a USAID-funded project that aimed to augment rural livelihoods and incomes through the promotion of community-based natural resource management. Project partners included the Department of Forestry, researchers from the University of Malawi, and two Malawian NGOs. COMPASS II supported the activities needed to certify a project to sell carbon under Plan Vivo, a foundation based in the United Kingdom with close ties to the University of Edinburgh and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). COMPASS II worked with the project partners to create a comanagement agreement between the Forestry Department and communities living near the reserve, to conduct the biomass surveys, and to prepare all of the necessary documentation and reports for the Plan Vivo Foundation. Initially, the project was slated to begin selling carbon in 2010, but it was indefinitely delayed when project planners were unable to find a buyer for its initial offering of carbon credits. The second project is located in the adjacent protected areas of Nyika National Park and Vwaza Wildlife Reserve. This carbon offset project is currently in the advanced planning stages, and is expected to be certified in early 2014. Initial project activities have already begun, 8 including conducting biomass field surveys to measure how much carbon is contained in the project area and holding informational community meetings with the target villages. This project is being developed by Terra Global Capital, a private, for-profit carbon finance and carbon development company. Terra Global will perform all of the initial studies and generate the reports that are necessary as they seek certification for selling carbon credits on the voluntary carbon market. Terra Global has been subcontracted by Total LandCare, an NGO based in Malawi which works on sustainable agriculture and rural livelihoods. The carbon project is one part of the Kulera Biodiversity Project, a three-year, US$8 million, USAID-funded project to protect biodiversity by creating alternative livelihood projects and income-generating opportunities for rural communities. The livelihood activities planned as part of the carbon project have synergies with those planned for the biodiversity project as a whole, and the carbon project is intended to be one revenue-stream which will help promote conservation. Out of the Black Box By focusing on the relations of production, this narrative decenters fetishist accounts of carbon commodities and carbon markets as things that already exist. A commodity is something that is exchanged for something else. In capitalist market economies, commodities are exchanged for money, and are understood to be equivalent to a certain amount of money. When these commodities are bought and sold on the market, the specific histories and context of how it was produced disappears and the commodity appears to have monetary value in and of itself. The consumer relates to the commodity based on the price alone; the producer likewise relates the value of their labor to the price that they are paid for that labor. In this way, the exchange-value of goods masks the social relationships between the people who produce the commodity, the capitalist who makes the profit, and the consumer who purchases it. This commodity fetish 9 disguises the specific histories which make the production of that commodity feasible and possible (Marx 1973; Marx 1990; Marx and Engels 1978). Recentering these social relations removes this black box of production and exposes the specific practices and histories that are entailed in creating commodities. There is a growing literature about the ways that carbon commodities are produced politically and discursively (Bayon 2004; Descheneau 2012; Lane 2012; Lansing 2009; Lederer 2012; Lohmann 2008; Lohmann 2011; Lovell and Liverman 2010; Paterson and Stripple 2012; Spash 2010; Stephan 2012; Stephan and Paterson 2012) as well as case studies of the impact of specific carbon offset projects on people and places where they are implemented (Beymer-Farris and Bassett 2012; Checker 2009a; Fletcher and Breitling 2012; Milne 2012; Milne and Adams 2012; Paladino 2011; Wittman and Caron 2009). Carbon markets and commodification have been studied as a process through which carbon emissions are made commensurable (Lohmann 2011; Stephan 2012), monetized and traded as carbon offsets or credits (Descheneau 2012), and eventually financialized as abstract objects traded on financial markets (Bracking 2012). Empirical studies of carbon offset projects include an analysis of power relations at national and local scales in allocating benefits and crafting carbon agreements in Cambodia (Milne 2012; Milne and Adams 2012) and Papua New Guinea (Filer and Wood 2012); the loss of access to forest resources or land (Beymer-Farris and Bassett 2012; Checker 2009a); the tradeoffs between social benefits, conservation, and profits (Wittman and Caron 2009) as well as how these tradeoffs are exacerbated by real-world constraints such as limited time and resources (Paladino 2011); and how the creation of ostensibly free-market projects such as REDD+ require government intervention and financial support (Fletcher and Breitling 2012). 10 Missing from this literature are in-depth case studies which provide a thick description of how all of these processes, technologies, and actors actually come together across scales in a single carbon project. A more nuanced understanding of how carbon markets actually work, and how the economy of carbon is being produced, can be understood from an ethnographic analysis of how these concerns play out in one specific case study. Anthropology in general and ethnography in particular are uniquely positioned to provide these detailed, extended case studies. A focus on production integrates questions of agency and scale by looking at the ways in which exchange value is produced. I do this ethnographically, situating this analysis in environmental anthropology and drawing on political ecology. Environmental anthropology is a subfield of cultural anthropology that explores the ways that humans manage, govern, use, and conceptualize the non-human world. Environmental anthropology is particularly useful for examining the ways that culture, institutional and political affiliation, gender, age, socioeconomic position, and level of education affect the way that people understand and interact with the non-human world (Biersack 1999; Haenn and Wilk 2006; West 2005). I also draw on a political ecology to frame this study. Political ecology focuses on how economic and political processes impact environmental change across scales (Robbins 2004:14). It examines social processes which cause environmental change as well as issues of power in shaping the control of resources, both materially and conceptually. Scholars have used a political ecology framework to reexamine the social and political dimensions of environmental change and the ways in which social and ecological vulnerability and inequality are reproduced through political-economic systems. 11 A political ecology approaches anthropogenic climate change—as well as efforts to mitigate and adapt to the changing climate—as the result of specific historical processes and political decisions. One of the major critiques of the carbon market is that it is a market solution to a market problem (cf. Bond 2008; Lohmann 2008; Lohmann 2011; Sullivan 2009). Anthropogenic climate change has been caused by the increased amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a result of the process of industrialization and the burning of fossil fuels. A political ecology draws attention to the specific histories of resource extraction, use, and the social and geographic distribution of benefits and harm that these processes have caused. Environmental anthropology explores relationships of power embedded in these histories by focusing on specific sites where policy decisions are made, the articulation and co-production of local and transnational processes, and the ways that individuals and groups navigate and reproduce asymmetrical relationships of power. An ethnography of commodity production exposes the full array of non-market activities and arrangements that are necessary to create REDD+ projects and carbon offsets. Following production as it occurs in different spaces and different moments demonstrates the complex forms of agency that make markets work and which make them real in the world. Although carbon markets are supposed to control greenhouse gas emissions by full cost accounting which puts a price on pollution, this perspective obscures many of the of the things that went into creating the conditions for creating the carbon project in the first place. Carbon commodities are not completely new and their production is based on pre-existing forms of enclosures and practices: development; creating protected areas and conservation spaces; under-development; decentralization and community-based natural resource management; and the histories of 12 resource extraction and accumulation which fostered both underdevelopment and the conditions for anthropogenic climate change. This study also draws attention to the emergent nature and circular logic of carbon commodity production. Since carbon markets are so new, carbon markets and carbon commodities are shaped by the best practices developed through trial and error as these projects are created and implemented and encountered by different people in different parts of the world. The expert knowledge required to create and implement these projects is produced through the practice of creating the very carbon commodities and carbon projects that are supposed to be the outcome of this expertise. Chapter Outline In the same way that markets and the creation of exchange value can obscure the specific histories which have created them, ethnography can likewise obscure the very real practices which have been used to produce ethnographic texts. In Chapters 2 and 3, I situate studies of market-based conservation, the production of carbon commodities, and this narrative in terms of the existing literature on market-based conservation, carbon projects, and REDD+. I describe the socio-historical landscape of protected areas in Malawi as well as the political-historical landscape of advances in technology and the processes of policy creation and decision-making which have led to the creation of REDD+. In the second half of Chapter 3, I expose the implicit aspects of my research and how these factors influenced the creation of this narrative. In addition to a description of my field sites and research practices, I pay particular attention to my own positionality and its influence on the research process. To impart exchange value to these commodities requires producing the actual carbon product and the social relationships which bring the product into being. Carbon commodities 13 require intensive processing in terms of policies which create a marketplace for them, the science and technology needed to produce them in forms legible to market exchange, and the physical process of actually measuring trees and the concomitant techno-work which is done to convert these measurements into carbon credits. In Chapter 4, I examine the creation of a representational economy of carbon through a discussion of the accounting methods used to estimate the amount of carbon contained in Malawi’s forests. I provide a brief history of REDD+ policy and the technical and discursive work which has made payments for ecosystem services and environmental markets possible. The carbon stored in trees and soil can only be converted to saleable carbon credits through the creation of meticulous procedures for measuring current carbon stocks and estimating their future growth. In spite of this detail, calculating carbon stocks is still an imprecise science. By comparing the written field operating procedures for carbon accounting and with the actual experiences of field researchers, I call attention to the slippage between vision and execution in the practice of enumerating carbon credits. During this technical process, carbon project developers also assign specific monetary values to the different types of labor activities which must be done to actually conserve or expand the carbon stocks. In Chapter 5, I provide a detailed account of the specific meetings and conversations which are involved in creating the project documents for a single REDD+ carbon project as an example of the simultaneous co-production of these projects and the expertise associated with them. By focusing on the specific sites where these projects are created, I examine both the compromises and contingencies which structure the shape of individual carbon projects as well as how this process (re)produces categories of space and people. I focus particularly on the meetings during which the impact of proposed project activities are estimated, modeled, and subsequently converted to carbon credits. The language, methods, and categories 14 of space and people used in established project reports are repackaged and reused, even when the socio-natural contexts for the two projects might have little or nothing in common. The use of specific categories and project document forms renders the project legible to investors, donors, and carbon verifiers—an important step in creating carbon credits as marketable commodities. However, the circular nature of self-reference also serves to entrench these categories in national climate policy discussions and legitimize their use in plans for other carbon projects. Excerpts from interviews with carbon developers illustrate the extent to which trial and error in the field informs policy decisions at the institutional, national, and international scales. The need to conserve carbon stocks further muddies an already complicated history of land use, evictions, and contested authority over access to land, forests, and forest resources. In Chapter 6, I examine resource ownership, access, and natural resource management in Malawi’s protected areas. In protected areas, carbon tenure is a double-edged sword which expands the legal rights of communities to receive financial benefits from carbon sales while stripping away the de facto access to forest resources on which they currently rely. Communities are allowed to collect non-timber forest products from the protected areas; however, the state lacks the capacity to enforce these rules, so illegal hunting, fishing, and cutting down trees are commonplace. The state will receive a portion of the profits from the carbon sales and will use the funds to hire additional patrols to protect the resources—and grow the carbon stocks—in the reserves. In this way, the legal agreements necessary to create REDD+ projects undermine communities’ current access to forest resources and privilege the (contested) authority of the state over these areas. Producing carbon commodities also requires explaining the idea of buying and selling ecosystem services to rural Malawians who are expected to participate in conservation-friendly activities to increase the carbon stocks. However, differential access to the technologies and 15 knowledge associated with carbon projects privilege some actors over others, both during the production process as well as during the exchange or sale of these commodities. In Chapter 7, I demonstrate how the successful creation of saleable carbon commodities depends on the routine withholding of key information about project costs and benefits from target communities. I interrogate the politics of knowledge surrounding carbon commodity production and the role of these knowledge asymmetries in the creation of exchange value. I draw on ethnographic accounts of community trainings and meetings during which the carbon projects are introduced to rural Malawians in order to critically interrogate the issues of inequality and knowledge dissemination. Using these training meetings as an example, I discuss both the strategic withholding of information by trainers and consultants as well as the situational and linguistic particularities which complicate efforts to translate the carbon project into language and practice that communities are able to understand. I compare the explanations of the carbon project provided during these meetings with follow-up data from the community focus groups to illustrate the serious gaps in understanding between community members and project planners about what is actually occurring in the market transactions engendered by this carbon project. These misunderstandings are a critical step in the creation of carbon commodities since they secure the initial consent of communities that might chose not to participate if they were fully aware of all project details. In Chapter 8, I recenter the role of the market in these market-based conservation projects and discuss the role of the investors, and donor aid in the ultimate success or failure of carbon projects and the creation of value from REDD+ projects. Mkuwazi Forest Reserve is an example of one specific carbon project for which a market never materialized. Originally considered market ready in 2009, the REDD+ carbon project planned for the Mkuwazi stalled because there 16 was no buyer for the credits produced through this particular project. Community organizations, leaders, donors, and forestry officials worked to create the social institutions and carry out the carbon measurements necessary to be approved to sell carbon; however, their inability to conjure a market for this carbon has meant that the development activities and projects promised to the affected communities has never been realized. Important Notes about Place Names, Local Government Structures, and Terminology Malawi is divided into three regions: the Northern Region, Central Region, and Southern Region. Each of the three regions has a major city where important government offices and university branches are located. These regions are subdivided into twenty eight districts. The district and the administrative center share the same name. Thus, if someone says that they are from Rumphi, they can be referring either to the town or the general area, even though they are most likely referring to the district. For clarity, I follow the Malawian practice of referring to the administrative center as the name of the district followed by the word boma (town or government). For example, Rumphi is a district in the Northern Region, and Rumphi boma is the administrative center and principle town within that district. In addition, Malawi also has a system of recognized traditional authorities. Individuals have clan affiliations and are recognized as members of households which are in turn part of a 2 village. Each village has a headman. Several villages together comprise a group village under 2 The position is most often referred to as “headman.” The majority of village headmen are men although women do serve in this capacity. Two of the seven village heads near Mkuwazi are women. When women occupy this position, they are referred to as either the headman or the headwoman. On our way to one of these two villages, my research assistant, Elton, told me that we were going to meet with the headman, but that “this headman is a lady.” 17 the authority of a group village headman. Above the group village headman is a hierarchy of Traditional Authorities. The most senior of these Traditional Authorities is the Paramount Chief. Traditional authorities serve important administrative capacities within their home areas and play an important part in providing public services and development. They are expected to help settle local disputes and to support the creation of development committees at the village and area level to channel public funds to government-sponsored development projects. Most NGO- and donorsponsored development projects will also involve these traditional leaders in project implementation. For example, the paramount chief plays an important advisory role in the comanagement agreement between communities and the DNPW. I use the terms village and group village because that is how Malawians identify and locate themselves both socially and geographically. The mudzi (village), often synonymously referred to as kwathu (our place), remains an important identifier in Malawian life. The term connotes an ultimate sense of place and belonging, whether or not people are physically present there (Englund 2002). Even those who have lived their entire lives in urban areas claim a village, a group village, and a traditional authority and, if possible, are usually buried in their village of origin. Likewise, I use the term community to refer to the people living in villages near the protected areas who are the targets of the REDD+ project. I use this term primarily because it is used by those working to create the REDD+ projects in this case study as well as by policy makers in the international agreements which guide REDD+ policy and practice more broadly (Ogle 2012). There is a wealth of literature concerning the homogenization that the term community invokes, and the very real diversity of interests and priorities within the social and 18 3 discursive category community. The assumption that there is a homogenous community which can act as a holistic, bounded entity to enter into legally binding agreements to sell carbon is yet another disjuncture which anthropologists have noted about REDD+ and carbon offsets, and one which has important implications for social and environmental justice (cf. Milne and Adams 2012). Every community has multiple and overlapping groups within it. In Malawi, the most visible social distinctions are based on socio-economic status, gender, and age. Communities are comprised of households and individuals who come from a variety of economic and educational backgrounds, who practice different religions, who benefit from different degrees of access to resources, and who have diverse opinions, opportunities, and desires. This diversity has shaped the data that I co-produced with the individuals with whom I worked. Although this diversity is highlighted in some parts of this text, detailed descriptions of individuals’ positionality are not the primary goal of this particular research project. Neither this study—nor the REDD+ project 3 The term “community” has been invoked by different actors and interests for different purposes (Creed 2006). Who is included in a community is always situated and conditional, and uncritical uses of the community or stakeholder language are ahistorical and a-spatial, obscuring the very real power asymmetries that can exist between different groups or individuals included (or excluded) from any community. Communities are diverse, and different individuals and groups within the community are affected differently when new projects and programs intertwine with existing rights and responsibilities (Ferguson and Mulwafu 2005; Moore 1998; Moore 1999). For more specific information about the impacts of environment and development projects in Malawi differentiated by gender and age, see Ferguson and Mulwafu (2005); Ferguson (2005); and Mulwafu (2011). The invocation of the undifferentiated “community” as the target for conservation interventions ignores the multiple and overlapping systems which legitimize rights to resources. For an excellent discussion of the politics, erasures, and equity issues entailed in “community” and conservation, see Chapter 5 of Nature Unbound (Brockington, Duffy, and Igoe 2008). Within communities and households, use of and rights to natural resources depends on gender (Mawaya and Kalindekafe 2010), age, and socio-economic as well as access to institutions of power, such as village headmen, chiefs, elected committees or local officials (Zulu 2009; Zulu 2012). Kerr’s discussion of gendered entitlements to land, food, financial, and other resources within Malawian households is also enlightening (Kerr 2005), as are those of Mandala (2005). 19 that I discuss—were designed to account for the diversity or different positions and interests of individual community members. Therefore, I use the term community knowing full well that it is inadequate to convey the diverse and complex lives of rural Malawians, but with the understanding that this is the way that local people are conceptualized and dealt with by the majority of project planners for these carbon projects. 20 CHAPTER 2: STUDYING CARBON – THEORY AND METHODOLOGY Much of the literature produced about market-based conservation from the social sciences has focused either on the broad changes and trends in the political economy of carbon and conservation or on the way that these market-based programs are encountered in specific sites where they are being implemented. On the one hand, these observations tend to be expansive, focusing on the ways that capitalism is reordering relationships between people in nature and opening new sites of accumulation (Arsel and Büscher 2012; Igoe and Brockington 2007; Büscher et al. 2012; Igoe 2010). These studies often reify these processes without critically interrogating how this process actually happens. Capitalism and markets do not exist over and above society, and meta-level narratives can perpetuate the reification of capitalism and markets as things that acts on society rather than a set of practices operationalized through society (Mitchell 1998; Mitchell 2002). On the other hand, the situated, empirical studies tend to expose snap shots of what market-based conservation looks like. These studies are useful for examining the specific effects of market-based conservation, but often do not integrate these situated cases across temporal or geographic scales. I have adopted a slightly different approach to understanding the ways that capitalism is reshaping human-environment relationships which focuses on the agency of different actors at several key moments and across the micro- and meso-scales. Neoliberal Natures Neoliberalization is one way that social scientists have tried to make sense of the expansion of capitalism and markets into conservation and social life. The extension of market rationality into social and political life is one of the defining aspects of neoliberalism (Foucault 21 2010; Lemke 2001). Neoliberalism refers to the “ideologies, philosophies, polices, and practices based on economic liberalism and neoclassical economic theories, and in particular on a reduced role for the state, and increased role for the private sector, and market deregulation” (West 2012:26). Under neoliberalism, the role of the state is primarily to enforce private property rights and create the conditions for the market to function freely; however, the state should not intervene in the functioning of the market itself (Friedman 2002). Protections for labor and the environment are rolled back, and goods and services which were previously owned by the state or the public are transferred to private ownership (Harvey 2005). There is a growing body of literature examining the extension of neoliberal practices into 4 environmental management and conservation. Neoliberalization of the environment has been examined as processes of privatization and changing property relations (Mansfield 2007), reregulation and reterritorialization (Igoe and Brockington 2007), and the reconstitution of political, discursive, and ecological limits (Arsel and Büscher 2012). Privatization and reregulation have created new forms of environmental commodities by privatizing genetic resources (Hayden 2003; Mushita and Thompson 2007; Shiva 2000) and reregulating environmental conservation so that it is governed through the market instead of by legal mandates (Büscher et al. 2012; Igoe and Brockington 2007). Privatization of nature includes enclosing common property resources, extending property rights to new forms of nature such as genetically modified organisms and DNA, and shifting environmental management and conservation to market-based mechanisms and away from the regulatory function of the state 4 The reconceptualization of neoliberalism (or plural forms of neoliberalisms) into neoliberalization as a process has helped to expand scholarly studies to include empirical case studies and theoretical studies (Heynen and Robbins 2005). 22 (Mansfield 2007:394). These new areas of privatization include allocating private property rights to pollution sinks such as forests or the atmosphere in the form of carbon credits, creating property rights to ecosystem services such as carbon offsetting and reconstituting social relationships around the provisions of ecosystem services. Decentralization has re-regulated environmental management as local governments, NGOs, and communities have been given more responsibility for managing the environment (Castree 2008a). Neoliberalization also reregulates the relationship between citizens, the state, and the environment as it reterritorializes landscapes (Igoe and Brockington 2007). Neoliberalization of nature has also been conceptualized as the process of overcoming the ecological limits which shape the forms and institutions of global capitalism, to which capitalism responds by reconfiguring social-ecological relationships in order to create new frontiers of accumulation, such as carbon markets (Arsel and Büscher 2012). The literature on neoliberal natures has been critiqued for its lack of coherency and nebulousness. While many environmental anthropologists and geographers situate their analyses of environmental governance within the trope of neoliberalism, it is not necessarily clear what neoliberalization of the environment actually looks like (Castree 2008b; Castree 2008a). Many of the studies of neoliberalization and capitalist expansion into environmental governance have been explored either through a political economy framework or through empirical studies of place-based projects. It has been more difficult to make the connection between these meta- and micro-narratives and explore how and if the connections posited at either level bear out in relation to the other. These broader critiques are not off base—they are prescient and based on an aggregate understanding of what it actually means, in the broadest terms, to commercialize, capitalize, and financialize conservation. However, despite (or maybe because of) the sheer 23 number of studies of neoliberalism and nature, scholars have not been able to link these analytical critiques with the diversity displayed in the case studies in order to “generate convincing explanations of the neoliberalization of nature as a historically and geographically differentiated, yet global (or at least translocal) phenomenon” (Bakker 2010:721). Likewise, Loïc Wacquant (2012) argues that anthropologists have tended to treat neoliberalism as either an invasive economic ideology comprised of more or less totalizing set of austerity and privatization practices enacted under the Washington Consensus; or as a set of malleable and “mobile calculative techniques of governing” (Ong 2006:13 in Wacquant 2012:70; Ong 2007). The problem with the former is that it is a good tool for dealing with the effects of economic policy and social changes but too limited in its scope to include the very real changes in the relationship between states and citizens that are both the impetus for these policies and a result of them. The problem with the latter is it is too malleable, with too many different techniques and practices attributed to it to actually make a compelling case for what neoliberalism is. One of problems in connecting these grounded case studies to studies of the political economy is that neoliberalization of the environment might look very different depending on where it is located temporally, geographically, and socially. Empirical studies of neoliberalization of the environment and conservation often appear different from the theoretical discussions of neoliberalism which appear in the literature. These case studies demonstrate the simultaneous presence of ostensibly neoliberal processes with other forms of environmental management. For example, Fletcher and Breitling (2012) discuss the various state interventions necessary to create a viable, “free standing” market for PES in Costa Rica. Likewise, the creation of REDD+ projects in Tanzania’s Rufiji Delta will require the criminalization and statemandated eviction of people living and farming in near the mangrove forests targeted by the 24 project (Beymer-Farris and Bassett 2012). Communal lands in South Africa and Lesotho are opened for the construction of golf courses to generate tourist revenue as developers use threats to relocate elsewhere to coercively leverage community consent (Büscher and Dressler 2012). Intra-community coercion and pressure is used to generate community consent for REDD+ projects in Cambodia, problematizing the concept of willing-buyer, willing-seller that is foundational to free market discourses (Milne and Adams 2012). These case studies expose a heterogeneity which problematizes grander critiques of the political economy by illustrating the real and complex situations in which these processes are actually occurring. These case studies add layers of nuance that make it difficult to construct clear linkages to theoretical analyses of neoliberalism with any sort of confidence, and so they remain relatively compartmentalized within the existing literature despite their interconnectivity and mutual constitution. Different approaches have been created in order to reconcile this distance. One argument is that neoliberalization of the environment does not exclude previous forms of coercive conservation or incarnations of the welfare state, but instead hybridizes with these previous forms in order to reconstitute social relations under the auspices of market logics (Fletcher 2010; Polanyi 2005). This is also referred to as variegated neoliberalism (Bakker 2010; Büscher and Dressler 2012). Bakker (2010) attempts to construct a typology of hybrid forms of neoliberalism based on scale and the type of social and ecological system targeted. Likewise, Fletcher (2010) draws on Foucault’s concept of governmentality and biopower to create a range of hybridized techniques and tactics deployed to manage people and nature. Due to this hybridity, empirical studies of ostensibly neoliberal projects may end up looking very much like previous forms of environmental governance when these projects are encountered in the spaces and communities in which they are taking place (Roth and Dressler 2012). Another method for connecting the 25 conceptual and empirical studies of neoliberalism stems from using a governmentality approach. Anthropologists draw heavily on Foucault’s concept of governmentality and biopower and understand neoliberalism as a set of techniques and technologies to control human and nonhuman life (Büscher et al. 2012; Foucault 1991; Foucault et al. 1991). Extending the market into the governance of environmental resources can be understood as part of the tactics of a neoliberal governmentality (Foucault 2010): techniques of governance that focus on creating and managing incentives in order to promote specific types of behavior (Fletcher 2010). Wacquant suggests this dichotomy can be avoided through the focus on state-craft and the reformulation and (re)articulation of state, market and citizenship “that harnesses the first to impose the stamp of the second onto the third” (Wacquant 2012:71). In other words, by reconstituting the relationship between the state and its citizens through the ideologies of the market. Situating the current trends in marketization of the environment in a much longer historical context of shifting social relationships as they relate to production is another approach which might help to bridge this gap. Roth and Dressler (2012) argue that there has been an overemphasis on the newness of neoliberal conservation in many of these studies which has obscured the very real trends and tendencies which are holdovers both of earlier forms of conservation, capital accumulation, and commodity production. Similarly, Nancy Peluso argues that “neoliberal environments simply constitute the current contradictions, obfuscations and differences of these times, and these become manifest primarily in the social productions and the productions of knowledge about so-called natures. Neoliberal policies in parks, with wildlife, or in ecosystems are no less contradictory, obfuscatory or afflicted with unintended consequences than were the politics of socio-natural relations in other eras of capitalist production” [emphasis in original] (Peluso 2012:85). 26 Attention to the ways that social relations are reconstituted across temporal and geographic scales can bring new insight into the commonalities between the case studies and broader political and economic processes. Based on case studies from South Africa and the Philippines, Büscher and Dressler (2012) argue that the distinctly neoliberal turn common to all market-based conservation is reconstructing what nature means to communities by shifting the focus to what nature means for communities. In advanced capitalism, the nature is particularly constructed as a site of income generation, development, and as a way to integrate communities into commodity production and transnational value chains (Büscher and Dressler 2012). In this way, neoliberalism is both plural in terms of being locally situated and differentiated, but also systematic, in that the differences produced by local particularities are themselves conditioned by neoliberalization. Attention to how these relationships change across geographic, temporal, and conceptual scales thus becomes an important way to interrogate the way that neoliberalization is operationalized and to connect these empirical case studies with larger theoretical discussions of the political economy of carbon. Focusing on the connections between actors at different scales as they engage in environmental markets can expose how carbon commodities (re)distribute benefits and harm across different communities and actors in developing countries (Brockington, Duffy, and Igoe 2008; Bumpus 2011). Differences of scale may also account for this apparent gap between vision and execution in environmental markets (Roth and Dressler 2012). For example, the practices through which REDD+ projects are created may look distinctly neoliberal when analyzed from the perspective of transnational carbon developers who see themselves as actively crafting a new market for environmental commodities, whereas from the point of view of community members who stand to lose access or control over forest resources, these practices 27 might seem to be another moment in a centuries-long process of resources appropriation and exchange over which they have little control. My approach draws on the consideration of history and scale, but combines this contextualized approach with a focus on agency. I do this ethnographically to provide an extended case study of carbon commodity creation as a way to move between scales while still providing a thick description of the politics of production as they occur. A focus on the agency in productive processes exposes how neoliberalization and capitalism are embodied and operationalized differently depending on the positionality of the individual and their relationship to other actors and agents. By actors, I refer to individuals as well as institutions such as the state and government agencies, for-profit private companies, communities, NGOs, and other organizations. Broad scale analyses help frame situated case studies and allow researchers to make linkages between processes that are taking place in different times and spaces and by all accounts may look rather different. Micro-analyses allow for a reflexive critique of these broader statements by providing examples from which to build a grounded theory of how and why capitalisms and neoliberalization(s) appear as they do. However, while a focus on the political economy of carbon can be helpful for thinking through connections between broad-scale political and economic processes as well as pointing out some of the larger shifts taking place across the globe in terms of environment, conservation, and capital accumulation, these observations nevertheless paint broad brush strokes that can obscure the processes through which these things are happening. If neoliberalism’s raison d’être is to expand the reach of global capitalism (Büscher et al. 2012:7; Harvey 2005), who or what operationalizes and embodies this reason for being? And if neoliberalism is understood to be a set of techniques and technologies, who is deploying them and how are they doing so? 28 Neoliberalization and capitalism cannot, by themselves, do anything in the world; they are abstract concepts made real in the world through the actions and practices which operationalize them. Capitalism and neoliberalization are experienced as real in the world because of actions by people who leverage institutional power, actions which are legible within the market system that we call capitalism. Multi-sited studies which focus on processes of commodity production can elucidate the practices through which markets expand into environmental management and conservation. I draw on Tsing’s (2005) analytical framework to inform the design and methodology of this study. Tsing uses ethnographic methods to study the confluence of transnational processes, financial flows, and environmental policy as they occur in a particular space. Tsing does this in order to interrogate late 20th century capitalism and trouble the ideas about markets flowing smoothly—and intact—from place to place across the globe. The ethnographic gaze can be directed towards the specific spaces in which decisions are made (Wedel et al. 2005) or the processes and relations through which state and non-state actors exercise power. International policies which seem to be created and enacted by nation states are in fact produced by individuals, institutions, and networks which represent—or act against—the state. However, scholars have examined the politics and compromises involved in creating World Bank policy documents (Filer 2009) and the complex process of negotiation and concessions involved in translating and adapting international policies to local contexts (Merry 2006) to illustrate the contingencies and discontinuities in these processes. MacDonald and Corson (2012) argue that policy decisions like The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity— a critical report advocating for the expansion of markets for biodiversity and other natural commodities—are shaped more by the network and assemblages of key actors than by 29 explanatory logics of ecological economics and market-based payments for environmental services. For example, a powerful individual such as a banker may have much more influence over the final version of the report than an ecologist or an NGO (MacDonald and Corson 2012). Focusing attention on the practices through which political decisions are made and policies are crafted makes it possible to decenter these reifying discourses and gain a fuller understanding of how states operate. Tracking the creation of carbon projects in Malawi as they are produced provides a unique insight into how commodities, social relationships, policy, and value are co-produced in this process. In her study of bioprospecting in Mexico, Corinne Hayden (2003) analyzes the creation of international benefits sharing arrangements between foreign companies and the Mexican researchers who identify new sources of plant-based pharmaceuticals for them. This focus on commodity creation “in the making” as Hayden puts it, “affords particular insights into the processes through which…tenuous circuits of exchange are established” (Hayden 2003:5). Likewise, the operationalization of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity project demonstrates the importance of specific moments in the production of projects and policies to expose the performative nature of the “merging of economic and ecological rationale” (MacDonald and Corson 2012:163). These process through which carbon projects are formed can become a key site to understand how social relationships are reformed as knowledge brokers become benefit recipients and as scientists become key players in the creation of new forms of market-“mediated ‘value’” (Hayden 2003:6). The carbon project and the network of actors who create it are mutually constituted and bring each other into being: the interplay of the project, subjects, and objects create these new forms of value even as these new forms of value are the impetus which brings the different players together. 30 Critiques of Carbon Markets and Market-based Conservation Advocates for market based solutions to environmental problems have expressed concern over the markets’ ability to deliver on social, ecological, and climate outcomes (Caney 2010). First of all, it is difficult to reliably measure how much of an ecosystem service has been produced through REDD+ or other offsetting activities, and therefore how much carbon has actually been sequestered (Norgaard 2010). In their review of carbon offset and watershed conservation projects in Latin America, Grieg-Gran, Porras, and Wunder (2005) found that local elites and owners of large tracts of land benefitted from these projects at the expense of the very poor or small-scale land owners. While the carbon and watershed projects did in some cases increase land tenure security for some participants, the inclusion of land in carbon or watershed projects meant that the owners were no longer able to benefit from other social programs, since land could not be used as collateral for accessing credit (Grieg-Gran, Porras, and Wunder 2005). For example, REDD+ and other carbon offsets may not achieve the livelihood benefits due to an emphasis on the technical or profit-making aspects of the projects. Organizations and target communities implementing carbon projects might divert scarce resources and time towards creating carbon projects in the hope of generating substantial rewards (Grieg-Gran, Porras, and Wunder 2005). A case study of the impacts of carbon offset projects in Guatemala and Sri Lanka found that in communities where offset projects were implemented, scarce financial and labor resources were diverted to fulfill the technical, donor-driven requirements of the project instead of poverty alleviation (Wittman and Caron 2009). Likewise, the community participation and capacity building components of a REDD+ project in Mexico were set aside when time and budgetary constraints forced project planners to prioritize meeting technical standards for project monitoring over livelihood and development components (Paladino 2011). Carbon projects can deliver development and conservation targets, but this requires that individual projects are 31 designed with the specific social, historical, and ecological context of the target area and population (Paladino 2011). This means longer project planning and development, and increased education, outreach, and capacity building with communities, all of which increase the initial costs and time horizons of the projects. The most important factors influencing livelihood and development outcomes in carbon offset projects are the connections between participating communities and other actors in the value chain and the power asymmetries which contour those relationships (Bumpus 2011). The outcomes of REDD+ carbon projects depend on the conditions of production. Furthermore, as more carbon projects are created and more communities engage in carbon offsetting, increases in supply and competition may create downward pressure on the price for carbon credits. Like any other commodity, rising prices will spur increased production, which in turn can reduce the price of the commodity. Unlike other payments for ecosystem service programs in which the value chain is geographically constrained, carbon offsets can be produced anywhere where carbon is stored and bought by any investor anywhere in the world (Grieg-Gran, Porras, and Wunder 2005). Watershed programs, by contrast, in which users downstream compensate users upstream for protecting the water sources, are linked by geographic location and material-physical properties of water. This means that carbon credits, due to their mobility as a commodity, are subject to the same forces that drive down production prices for other commodities and the carbon market, and the ability to generate development and social benefits from the sale of carbon credits, will likely become much more competitive over 5 time. 5 For example, see Paige West’s discussion of the production and circulation of coffee (West 2012). 32 Environmental justice advocates have also expressed concern that rural people will lose access to forest resources or be forced out of forest spaces targeted for carbon development. Carbon offset projects in Honduras have exacerbated tensions between farmers and land owners and resulted in continued violence and intimidation of peasant organizers and activists (Wong 2012). In one widely-publicized case, 6,000 people were violently evicted from the newlycreated Mount Elgon National Park in Uganda to make way for a carbon offset project funded by the Dutch Electricity Generating Board and implemented by the Uganda Wildlife Authority and an environmental NGO. In retaliation, some of the villagers burned the newly-planted trees and continued to graze their cattle and grow food crops in the park. Villagers report that the Wildlife Authority responded violently by burning homes, committing rapes, and violently assaulting people. The Wildlife Authority claims that villagers assault its officers by throwing stones, destroy their vehicles, and continually trespass in the park (Checker 2008; 2009b; 2009a). The additional social and environmental benefits of REDD+ do not make these projects immune to potential violations of social and environmental justice. In Tanzania, the creation of REDD+ projects in mangrove forests near the coast necessitates the removal of people who lived in the area for hundreds of years (Beymer-Farris and Bassett 2012). Further, all of the attention to getting the policy and technology right for the emerging carbon market directs funding, political capital and attention, and research and technological development towards creating new and more accurate ways of accounting for carbon, pricing carbon, and agreeing on the details of REDD+ and other policies rather than working to curb emissions directly (cf. Lohmann 2008). Carbon markets have been studied as a political choice which further entrenches capitalism (Lohmann 2010); avoids acting or reducing emissions in a meaningful way (Bond 2008; Lohmann 2008; Spash 2010); or part of a broader trend towards 33 neoliberalization of the environment and market-based conservation which also “results in market-oriented ‘solutions’ to tensions between conservation, livelihoods and economic growth” (Roth and Dressler 2012:364). Environmental justice advocates point towards the need to radically reduce fossil fuel consumption and emissions. During the annual Conferences of Parties for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, political haggling over the details of REDD+ have derailed potential agreements on substantive emissions reductions goals. The financialization of carbon commodities paves new inroads for banks to profit from carbon products, further entrenching the profit-making aspect of the carbon offset at the expense of the social and environmental, not to mention, the climate benefits (Bracking 2012; Spash 2010). This energy and attention has foreclosed meaningful debate at the policy level about alternative, nonmarket solutions to climate change, such as the concept of carbon taxes levied by the state for excess emissions, a per-capita emissions levels, ecological debt, or efforts to reduce fossil fuels consumption (Bond 2008). While my research does not directly engage with many of the concerns expressed in ideological or practical critiques of carbon markets, or try to directly link my case study to the generation of a synthesis of what neoliberalization is or does, my work nevertheless contributes to these literatures by providing a thick description of the particular, situated, material production of carbon credits by a full range of actors engaged in a forest carbon project in Malawi. 34 CHAPTER 3: SITUATING CARBON IN MALAWI Each story comes with its own forms of erasures, making some people, processes, and places visible while obscuring or downplaying others. The information about how technicians measure carbon and estimate emissions reductions that is contained in official project validation documents tell one part of the story. Missing from that story are the social conditions—both historical and contemporary—which make producing carbon in protected areas in Malawi unique and, in many ways, possible. In this chapter, I situate carbon production and carbon offset projects within a broader social and historical context. Research Sites Nyika and Vwaza Nyika National Park and Vwaza Marsh Wildlife Reserve are adjacent protected areas. The Nyika Plateau is located in the Northern Region across three districts—Chitipa, Karonga, and Rumphi—and in places spans nearly across the width of the country from Lake Malawi east to the Zambian border in the west. Nyika is a high, undulating plateau rising from 2,952 feet to over 8,200 feet (900-2,500 meters) above sea level. It is dominated by open grassland covering three-fifths of the park with miombo woodlands growing on most of the remaining third of the area, and denser evergreen forests on the surrounding slopes and valleys (Malawi Environment Endowment Trust 2009). Vwaza Marsh Wildlife Reserve is located in Mzimba and Rumphi Districts in the Northern Region, just south of Nyika National Park and extending west to the Zambian border. The marshy wetlands give way to low hills in the south and east of the reserve where the river pools to form Lake Kazuni. The name Vwaza comes from the sound that elephant and human 35 feet made when getting stuck in the sucking mud of these wetlands as they attempted to navigate the area. The reserve is home to fifty species of mammals including numerous species of antelope, elephant, buffalo, and abundant hippo and there have been reported sightings of the endangered African wild dog. Vwaza is also an important habitat for the 341 bird species that make their home there either permanently or during seasonal migrations (Department of National Parks and Wildlife 2004a). The people living near the Nyika and Vwaza areas are predominately chiTumbukaspeaking or ANgoni (Zulu) people with a small minority of chiChewa-speaking migrants. Most people living near the protected areas are small-scale farmers, growing maize, ground nuts, pumpkins, beans, fruits, and vegetables, and many people also cultivate tobacco and cotton for sale. Animals—particularly elephants—coming out of the reserve and destroying crops or raiding fields are a constant complaint of the communities living near Vwaza. About half of the arable land is leased by commercial growers to produce tobacco or cotton. Over the past decade, the falling prices for tobacco have caused some farmers to desert the cash crop and either grow more maize or to abandon their fields and allow the regrowth of trees and natural vegetation. Mkuwazi Mkuwazi Forest Reserve is located in Nkhata Bay District, about 11 kilometers from Nkhata Bay boma, in the Northern Region of Malawi. The area was legally declared a protected area in 1927 to conserve one of the last remaining stands of lowland evergreen forest in Malawi. The reserve centers around a small mountain, Mkuwazi Hill, which rises 800 meters above the plain surrounding Lake Malawi, and the lowland evergreen forests which surround its base. The relatively high level of rainfall in Mkuwazi (1600-2,200 millimeters annually—almost double 36 the rainfall in Nyika and Vwaza) means that the forests here are a mix of broadleaf evergreen 6 trees on the valley floor and drier, miombo woodlands on the hillsides. This mixed forest at this elevation is unique in Malawi. Mkuwazi Forest Reserve is bordered by villages and small-scale farms as well as the Vizara Rubber Plantation and sugar plantations owned by the Limphasa Sugar Corporation. Mkuwazi is also considered a biodiversity hotspot in Malawi: it is home to an endemic species of damselfly, and several primates including blue (samango) monkeys, vervets, and even the endangered Bush Baby. It is also home to several rare plant species which are found nowhere else in the country. The people living in the villages surrounding Mkuwazi are predominately chiTongaspeaking agriculturalists. Although the Vizara Rubber Plantation and the associated timber company, Vizara Eco-Timbers, provide opportunities for formal employment for many in the area, people still earn most of their livelihoods through small-scale farming. This is the preferred livelihood activity in the area, with many who are employed through Vizara and who live on the estate dream of the day when they can return to their own farm. Most people grow cassava, which is processed into the principle food dish, and vegetables, and many grow soy beans or tobacco for sale. The cassava is washed, put out on the road or another flat area to dry, and then pounded into flour, mixed with a little water, and formed into small pyramid-shaped cones which are again dried in the sun. This nkhondaole is then pounded into flour again, sieved, and mixed with boiling water to make a thick paste. People in this area enjoy a longer growing season and higher rainfall than most areas in the Northern Region, and they are also well-positioned to 6 One-third of Mkuwazi is composed of miombo woodlands, one-third is broadleaf evergreen forests, and the rest is comprised mostly of scattered trees with rocky outcrops and open meadows towards the top of the hill (Malawi Environment Endowment Trust 2009). 37 benefit from the streams which flow from Mkuwazi across the valley floor towards the lake. For those with access to land near perennial streams, wetland gardens can be used to grow a variety of vegetables in the dry season. The carbon project in Mkuwazi Forest Reserve was started in 2008 as part of a larger livelihoods and conservation project originally funded by USAID’s COMPASS II program. This program aimed to promote conservation and community development through community-based natural resource management (CBNRM). Development Alternatives International was subcontracted to implement the five year project which ran from April 2004 through May 2009 in seven districts prioritized for their biodiversity. The Mkuwazi Forest Reserve was selected to pilot the development of REDD+ carbon projects in Malawi as part of a broader initiative to create self-sustaining enterprises in the area. In the comanagement agreements signed with the Department of Forestry, seven communities surrounding the forest reserve were given use-rights to non-timber products in the reserve. Plan Vivo, a non-profit organization based in Scotland, was subcontracted to work with the government, NGOs, and the University of Malawi to develop the carbon project. Plan Vivo has close ties to the University of Edinburgh. The organization emphasizes participatory project planning in which communities create a land use plan (a “plan vivo”). Plan Vivo oversees the development of this plan in accordance with their standards for verifying carbon. Once the plans have been approved, the carbon can be traded on the voluntary market. The Malawi Environment Endowment Trust (MEET), a Malawian NGO, was designated as the administrative and financial manager for the carbon project after hand over from COMPASS II. The Forest Research Institute of Malawi (FRIM) and Leadership for Environment and Development (LEAD) were to provide technical support for ongoing monitoring, reporting, and verification purposes. The Department 38 of Forestry was to continue working with communities to promote CBNRM and conservation of the carbon resources. When I was in Malawi in May-August 2009, the final project planning documents had been submitted to Plan Vivo and returned for minor edits to FRIM for revision. The project in Mkuwazi is currently stalled. The District Forest Officer at the time of the project creation has been transferred to another area. There was general confusion amongst the different organizational partners as to the actions that needed to be carried out after the handoff from USAID, and which organizations were responsible for those actions. According to emails from Plan Vivo personnel in the UK, the project is in the final stages of approval as of 2011. The project needs to sell 5,000 metric tonnes of carbon to prove project success before the rest can be certified to be sold on the carbon market. The project has yet to find a buyer. Comparing Carbon Projects The two carbon projects planned for these areas offered several points of comparison. First, both projects were in the Northern Region, where the people shared similar cultural attributes and had similar patterns of land use, access, and natural resource use. Second, both projects were funded by USAID programs to facilitate income-generating entrepreneurial enterprises and promote decentralization and comanagement of natural resources. Third, they were pilot projects to ground test the production of carbon credits under the REDD+ mechanism in Malawi. Finally, the projects were both designed by organizations subcontracted to create the carbon project and implemented through the combined efforts of community representatives, the Malawian government, partner NGOs, and USAID and its sub-contractors. In other ways, the two project areas are very different. Mkuwazi is a small forest reserve located in the lowlands near Lake Malawi, while the other consists of two adjacent protected areas—Nyika National Park and Vwaza March Wildlife Reserve—which include a high plateau, 39 grasslands, evergreen and pine forests, and a riverine valley, and a large, perennial wetland, respectively. The scope and scale of the two projects are also very different. The Plan Vivo project in Mkuwazi targets seven villages closest to the reserve. The Kulera Project is located in two adjacent protected areas and will target 147 group villages collected into 25 zones located within five kilometers of the borders of these protected areas. The NGOs and state departments partnering with the carbon developers in the projects are also different. Mkuwazi is a forest reserve under the auspices of the Department of Forestry and the carbon project was developed by Plan Vivo, an NGO in the UK, which was subcontracted by Development Alternatives, Inc., the consulting company implementing the COMPASS II project. The Nyika-Vwaza project was developed by a private carbon developer in the US, TGC, subcontracted through the NGO TLC which received grant funding from USAID. These areas are administered by the Department of Parks and Wildlife, under the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife. These two projects also illustrate two different stages in the process of creating carbon commodities. The Plan Vivo project in Mkuwazi was slated to begin selling carbon at the end of 2009, while the Nyika-Vwaza project is still in the planning stages and project planners hope to be certified to sell carbon some time in 2014. Exploring the planning process and the beginning stages of implementation in the Nyika-Vwaza Project allowed me to examine issues like the creation of carbon tenure, how project planners create project budgets and timelines, and the ways that communities are being introduced to the idea of carbon commodities. This project is still in process, and so it provided a unique opportunity to delve into the micro-processes involved in the expansion of market-based conservation projects. In Mkuwazi, on the other hand, the carbon project which had been met with so much enthusiasm had failed to materialize. Trying to grasp how the project partners and those living in the seven target villages understood 40 what had happened—or hadn’t happened—to the project provided the opportunity to explore what happens when markets don’t materialize as expected. Table 1: Comparison of Two Carbon Projects Mkuwazi Forest Reserve Nyika National Park and Vwaza Marsh Wildlife Reserve Project: Community Partnerships for Sustainable Resource Management (COMPASS II) Kulera Biodiversity Project (USAID via TLC) Funder: USAID USAID Implementing Development Alternatives, Inc. Organization: Total LandCare (TLC) Plan Vivo (University of Edinburg, Scotland, UK) Terra Global Capital, LLC (San Francisco and Washington, DC, USA) Carbon (Technical) Standard: Plan Vivo  Verified Carbon Standard (VCS)  Climate, Community, and Biodiversity Standard (CCB) Government Partner Department of Forestry Department of National Parks and Wildlife (DNPW) In-Country Partners:  Malawi Environment Endowment Trust (MEET)  Forestry Research Institute of Malawi (FRIM)  Leadership for Environment and Development (LEAD) Nyika-Vwaza Association for Rural Development and Natural Resource Management (NVA) Carbon Developer: Key Players Seven villages adjacent to reserve boundary: Ching'anya, Target Communities: Chakuluma, Mateyu, Kwerenji, Pethera, Ndiweri, and Simoni Status:  Development phase ended in 2009  Currently stalled; unable to identify a buyer 41 Villages within 5 km of the border of the protected areas: 220,000 people; 147 VNRCs in 25 Zone NRCs  In the final stages of project certification  Expect to begin selling carbon in 2014 Background and History The creation of protected areas always means preserving the land for specific people and specific purposes while excluding other people and uses. Nyika, Vwaza, and Mkuwazi were all protected because they are home to unique plants and animals, and because they are beautiful landscapes. These areas have also been targeted for extraction of many of these same natural resources, often simultaneously. Since the 1800s, Nyika Plateau has been variously targeted for agricultural development, pine plantations, a wilderness preserve, a tourist destination for Europeans, a site for resettlement of Jewish refugees after World War II, and a hunting area (McCracken 2006; Morris 2001). Vwaza Marsh was originally protected as a popular hunting retreat for white colonial officers and settlers, and subsequently as a tourist destination offering game drives and photo safaris (Morris 2001). Today, local access to Nyika, Vwaza, and Mkuwazi is still restricted for the people living nearby, even as concerted—though largely unsuccessful—efforts have been made to remake them into tourist destinations to generate much needed foreign capital. Both conservation and resource development resulted in the alienation of land and eviction of the people living there. Northern Malawi was settled over 3,000 years ago by hunter-gatherer groups and agriculturalists. The APhoka began farming in the area in the 1400s, and by the time European explorers arrived in the late 1800s, the APhoka were living on the high areas of the plateau as well as in the fertile valleys surrounding it, growing a variety of agricultural crops including maize, peas, beans, and millet (McCracken 2006). Established iron smelters, the APhoka were also involved in trade with other groups near Lake Malawi and beyond, exchanging axes, hoes, spears, and knives for salt and other commodities (McCracken 2006). The hills, waterfalls, and lakes on the highest parts of the plateau were revered as the dwelling-places of ancestral spirits 42 and the earth-snake god Kaliume, who protected the animals living on the plateau. In addition to the ritualistic activities taking place at these sites, hunting and honey collection were the main livelihood activities on the plateau (McCracken 2006). Other groups had established the area as an important trade route extending from present-day Mozambique across Lake Malawi and into Zambia and southern Tanzania. Slaves and ivory were moved towards the coast, and shells, cloth, and firearms were moved inland (McCracken 2003; Mulwafu 2011). Despite the fact that there were already thousands of people living in Northern Malawi when white settlers arrived, Europeans asserted their legal authority over land. Unlike neighboring Zimbabwe and Zambia, Malawi lacked the vast reserves of extractable minerals like diamonds, gold, or copper. This meant that the most important resources were land and water. It also meant that the British invested fewer financial and personnel resources in Malawi than in neighboring colonies. Cecil Rhodes provided GB£10,000 annually to support British administration of the Nyasaland Protectorate in present-day Malawi (Mulwafu 2011). Between 1894 and 1930, Rhodes and his British South Africa Company claimed 2,700,000 acres of land in the northern part of Malawi, including the Nyika Plateau (McCracken 2006). From the beginning, the creation of protected areas reflected the priorities and needs of some groups over those of others. In the 1920s, villagers living within the boundaries of the newly-created Mkuwazi Forest Reserve were required to move while a white man built a small house and lived on top of the hill so that he could watch the steam ships on Lake Malawi (Interview, May 9, 2012, Ndiweri village). In 1941, the colonial administration established the Lake Kazuni Game Reserve near Vwaza Marsh, protecting the lake and the land within a fivemile radius of the lake. The area was renamed the Vwaza Game Controlled Area in 1956, when hunting was restricted to those who could afford expensive permits, establishing a de facto 43 whites-only shooting area for game and waterfowl (Department of National Parks and Wildlife 2004a; Morris 2001). In the same year that residents of Vwaza were forcibly evicted and that all hunting within the reserve was declared illegal, a tourist operator was granted a concession to run hunting safaris for tourists (Morris 2001). The creation of protected areas coincided with the push for financial self-sufficiency in the British colonies and protectorates and a growing concern over managing natural resources. Parts of the Nyika Plateau were set aside in 1948 to protect the region’s primary watershed as well as the numerous plant and animal species that thrived there. In the 1950s, European conservationists advocated for the preservation of the Nyika Plateau as a wildlife habitat while the Colonial Development authorities pursued an unsuccessful plan to establish vast pine plantations on Nyika to produce pulp for export and timber for railroad construction (McCracken 2006). Likewise, Mkuwazi was protected as a forest reserve to preserve the last stands of lowland evergreen forest at the same time that the fertile valleys nearby were targeted for the cultivation of rice for export. The first forestry legislation was passed in 1911, and within fifteen years nearly 3,000 square miles of forests (nine percent of the land area) had been designated as protected areas in order to conserve important watersheds and prevent soil erosion (Mulwafu 2011:109). There were also prohibitions against the cutting of high-value timber tree species without the consent of the government. The Forestry Department was established in 1926 revision of the forestry legislation. These revisions included strict penalties and fines for cutting trees within protected areas, and expanded protection of certain tree species even outside of designated forest areas. In the same year, J.B. Clements, the Chief Forest Officer of Nyasaland, began the Village Forest program to promote village participation in conservation initiatives on African Trust and communal lands. This program included planting trees to reforest areas that 44 had been under commercial cultivation of cotton and tobacco to meet local consumption needs for firewood and poles. These areas were demarcated by forestry officials with the help of village headmen and traditional authorities and were to be equivalent to two acres per household. Land alienation and the creation and expansion of protected areas continued under the new government after Malawi’s independence in 1964. Official wildlife policies emphasized the importance of scenic landscapes and African wildlife as part of Malawian national heritage and underscored the potential for economic growth through expanding the tourist industry (Morris 2001). Less than a year after gaining its independence, the Malawian government created Malawi National Park in 1965 on 367 square miles of the Nyika Plateau. In 1973, the DNPW was established to oversee the growing number of national parks and wildlife reserves established or expanded under the rule of autocratic President Hastings Kamuzu Banda’s regime. After financial liberalization in the early 1990s, increasing attention towards the generation of income and foreign exchange—always in short supply in Malawi—resulted in the creation and expansion of concessions to cater to an international tourist industry (Morris 2001). In spite of these efforts, tourism is still underdeveloped and the slow trickle of foreign visitors to the protected areas has never generated the expected returns. The creation and expansion of these protected areas meant that thousands of Malawians were forcibly removed from these areas. When Nyika National Park was expanded to its current size in 1975, approximately 5,000 APhoka were removed from the plateau and surrounding valleys by government workers and the Young Pioneers, the paramilitary wing of Banda’s Malawi Congress Party (McCracken 2006). Likewise, between 1977 and 1984, over 2,000 Malawians were evicted from Vwaza Marsh Wildlife Reserve. Some people relocated to other villages, but some people refused to move and so were arrested and forcibly removed from the 45 reserve (Interview, May 19, 2012, Kazuni area). Homes and other buildings were razed. Although locals legally were prohibited from hunting in the area under any circumstance after 1977, a tourist concessionaire began organizing the first hunting safari for tourists the following year (Department of National Parks and Wildlife 2004a). The state of Malawi has also prepared and submitted requests for Nyika National Park and Vwaza Marsh Wildlife Reserve to be declared UNESCO World Heritage Sites due to the long history of human habitation in these areas, presence of sacred rain shrines and locations of important spiritual entities, and the burial places of important chiefs (Government of Malawi 2000; Malawi National Commission for UNESCO 2011). Nyika and Vwaza also form part of a transfrontier conservation area (TFCA) linking them to other protected areas on the Zambian side of the plateau. The TFCA management plan specifically mentions the Kulera Project as an example of community participation to meet the requirements that the TFCA augment community livelihoods (World Bank 2011). After the movement to multi-party democratic elections in 1994, people began to utilize protected area resources much more freely. During the Banda regime, the fines and penalties for encroaching on protected areas could be severe. Many rural Malawians understood the end of the authoritative regime and expansion of democratic freedoms to mean that the trees and animals inside of the protected areas were now theirs to freely exploit. Political rhetoric calling for the people of Malawi to exert their freedom and take back their government through democracy combined with Malawi’s history of patronage politics to construe the idea that people could now access land that was government controlled. As the citizens of Malawi were told to move into new spaces in the public space of democracy, people translated this to mean that they should also access physical spaces controlled by the government, including protected areas. Candidates 46 running for Parliament attempted to increase their popularity amongst voters by encouraging people to clear new agricultural land within the uninhabited reserves. Illegal use of resources increased. For example, charcoal production, while technically illegal, is a major driver of deforestation but also provides employment to thousands of people. Approximately 60 percent of the supply is produced in protected areas. Chronic lack of funds and personnel left the state without the capacity to enforce the rules protecting Malawi’s national parks, forest reserves, and game reserves. In the 1990s, the state recognized the drawbacks of “fences and fines” or “fortress conservation” (Brockington, Duffy, and Igoe 2008) and attempted to create more participatory conservation programs which benefit local communities (Bell 1987; Morris 2001). The creation and implementation of these programs has been slow, and they are not always successful even when they are in place. The comanagement program created by the DNPW and managed by the NVA in Nyika and Vwaza is considered by the government of Malawi to be one of the more successful attempts to comanage these protected areas. Comanagement in Protected Areas The state agencies are partnering with the communities in order to comanage protected areas in Malawi, including Nyika, Vwaza, and Mkuwazi. The DNPW instituted CBNRM to more equitably share the responsibilities and benefits of the protected areas with the communities. Under the Resource Use Program, villagers living within five kilometers of the protected area boundaries are allowed to access an increasing set of resources and benefits from within a designated Resource Use Zone extending five kilometers inside of the protected areas. Starting in 1989, community members were allowed to keep bees inside of Nyika National Park, and in 47 1994 the program was expanded to include collection of additional non-timber forest products such as termites, mushrooms, thatching grass, caterpillars, reeds, medicinal plants, and wild fruits. Fishing is also permitted at select sites during the non-breeding season. The DNPW extended the Resource Use Program to Vwaza Marsh Wildlife Reserve in 1995 (Department of National Parks and Wildlife 2004a; 2004b). In 1996, the DNPW instituted a financial benefits-sharing program to fund small development projects in the communities. Any funds generated from gate entry fees are shared between the National Treasury (50 percent), the DNPW (30 percent), and the communities (20 percent). Communities also receive 15 percent of any concessions made with private tour operators to run photographic safaris in Nyika and Vwaza. These resources are used to fund small construction projects or to repair existing infrastructure such as clinics, small bridges, and teacher’s houses. Village NRCs work with the village development committees to create project proposals to access these funds. Originally, the money was distributed to the village NRCs via a regional steering team, but in 2002 a new umbrella organization was formed to represent the NRCs and cooperate with the DNPW in its education and extension efforts (Department of National Parks and Wildlife 2004a; 2004b). The Nyika–Vwaza Association for Natural Resources and Rural Development (NVA) was founded in order to help organize the NRCs, facilitate the distribution of financial resources from the benefits-sharing program, help oversee sponsored development projects, and to be the liaison between the village NRCs and the DNPW. The NVA is comprised of an elected executive board and a board of trustees. The board of trustees includes the Divisional Manager of the DNPW as well as the high-ranking Traditional Authorities from each of the four districts, such as the Paramount Chief Chikulamayembe. The members of the executive committee are elected 48 every three years by the zone NRC representatives during NVA meetings. The NVA is supposed to hold annual meetings for its members, and the executive board is supposed to meet quarterly. Due to lack of consistent funding, the NVA has struggled. Holding regular meetings is expensive, since attendees must be compensated for their travel expenses and lodging, and are given daily allowances for meals. In Malawi, these allowances are a key source of income for many people who work in the NGO sector and civil service. This is one of the rare instances of people being compensated for time spent attending meetings. The NVA rents an office and employs one full-time secretary. These expenses, as well as the meeting allowances, must be paid for out of the money the NVA receives from the DNPW benefits-sharing program, the dues paid by the NRCs, grant proposals, and (seldom-used) donation boxes located in the protected areas where tourists can give additional monies. Each village can create an NRC. The NRCs are grouped into zone NRCs to facilitate organizing and training efforts. The NRCs are responsible for monitoring the resource use within the reserve and are expected to record this information and provide the written reports to the zone NRC, the NVA, and the DNPW. The NRCs are also supposed to report illegal activities and have the capacity to fine people for collecting resources without a permit. In reality, the reports are often turned in late and reporting on illegal activities rarely happens. The NRCs, in consultation with the village and area development committees, prepare written requests for funding to finance development activities in their area. The NRCs are also supposed to pay dues to the NVA which they are expected raise either by collecting dues from members or by conducting community patrols of their designated resource-use zone. If the NRCs apprehend people caught illegally obtaining resources from the reserve without a permit, the committee can impose a small fine. 49 The NVA also struggles with basic functions like record-keeping and financial transparency, as so many small organizations do. Records and minutes of meetings were not kept consistently. Financial reports and budgets were not ready for many of the planned annual and executive management meetings. This was likely due to inability to travel to the bank to get the numbers, but also compounded by poor record keeping due to low capacity. In the only financial report available, the NVA received anywhere from MK15,000 to over MK176,000 each month from the DNPW from July 2004 to July 2005 (NVA minutes December 2005). In total, the NVA received MK1,855,522 from the DNPW, of which over MK1,000,000 was spent on a school improvement project; however, one-third of the total revenue for the organization was spent on administration and funding the management meeting, including paying for travel and allowances for food. The meeting minutes from the 2009 management meeting report that the NVA spends 80 percent of its funds on administration (including meetings and site visits to communities), but many of the financial reports and annual budgets are missing from the organization’s files, so it is unclear how the money was spent. Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) is attractive for multiple reasons. CBNRM offers an alternative to top-down, “fences and fines” or “fortress conservation” and is built on modernist discourses of participation, conservation, and poverty alleviation which are difficult to divorce from development policy discourses and which are reproduced through bureaucratic management structures in-country and by donor agencies (Blaikie 2006). It can also serve as a graceful exit strategy for central governments strapped for cash and donor organizations seeking an exit (Zulu 2008). However, there have been many problems with the implementation of CBNRM in Malawi, including reproduction of local power asymmetries, committee control of resources 50 which undermined community involvement with conservation, and increased destruction of resources instead of conservation. The focus on the village as the primary level of implementation for CBNRM initiatives maybe too small to adequately address conservation and ecological problems which occur on much larger scales (Zulu 2009). Committees frequently received benefits for their work which incited jealousy and resentment amongst other villagers. Committee members often illegally siphoned resources from the CBNRM initiative by giving themselves or their family members loans, small jobs (e.g. clearing forest boundaries), or paying themselves “soap money” (Interview, January 13, 2012, Rumphi) (Zulu 2008). Comanagement projects can redistribute rights and responsibility for forest management which can create new elites in the form of village forest committees (Zulu 2008) as well as exacerbate elite capture of resources (Zulu 2009) or the marginalization of women and poor households (Ferguson 2005). Comanagement agreements have been found to increase the incomes of women and the poorest households although men and local elites capture a disproportionately high share of program benefits (Jumbe and Angelsen 2006). Poor households and women depend on the forest resources for multiple livelihood uses (Jumbe and Angelsen 2007; Sibale and Banda 2004). The blend of democratic, neoliberal, and Western institutions with traditional authorities, kinship systems, and neo-patrimonialism cause a gap between rhetoric, policy, and ecological and social outcomes (Zulu 2012). This has serious implications for the introduction of PES projects in these areas, since pilot carbon projects are slated to take place in forested areas in which comanagement or CBNRM arrangements already exist. 51 Current Development Projects in the Area The success of the REDD+ projects depend on the ability of livelihood interventions to decrease forest use to increase carbon stocks; however, the historical lack of broad scale successes for similar livelihood projects may pose problems for the carbon project in the future. Many of the livelihood and development projects planned as part of the REDD+ projects in the Nyika-Vwaza areas and in Mkuwazi are eerily similar of previous development projects implemented in these areas with limited success. One example is beekeeping and honey production. Beginning in 1989, the German Development Organization funded a program to promote beekeeping inside of the Nyika National Park as a way to help communities generate income from the park. Beekeeping has since been introduced as an income-generating activity inside of Vwaza Marsh Wildlife Reserve. These projects were sponsored by various organizations, including the German Development Organization, USAID’s COMPASS II, and World Vision, amongst others, and co-sponsored by the DNPW. Income generation from hives has remained low. By 1997, there were 104 beekeeping clubs with 872 members, although by 2004, many groups were defunct and no longer functioned (Morris 2004:104). When I spoke with villagers in 2011-12, beekeeping and honey production were commonly cited during focus groups as one of the most important resources that people get from inside of the reserves. Although honey from Nyika is now for sale in many stores across Malawi, income from the beekeeping projects are low. Methods In the same way that focusing on the actors involved in creating carbon projects lends itself to understanding how carbon credits are produced and why that production looks the way it 52 does, making the implicit aspects of research and introducing the positionality of the individuals involved leads to an understanding of how this narrative was produced, and why this text appears as it does. Just as the carbon markets and carbon credits produced in Northern Malawi are conditioned by place and space, the production of this narrative was influenced and shaped by the positionality of the researcher, the research assistants, and the people with whom I worked. I spent a total of 13 months studying carbon projects in Malawi during the academic summer break in 2009 and again from October 2011 to July 2012. During a pilot study from May to August 2009, I conducted semi-structured interviews with Malawian state officials who were involved in policy-making decisions or programming related to climate change and carbon projects. I also conducted multiple interviews with donors, NGOs, and researchers from the University of Malawi who were involved in creating some of the first carbon projects in the country. When I returned in 2011, I was able to compare two actual carbon projects. I spent a significant amount of time observing community meetings during which the project was introduced, community trainings aimed at inculcating pro-conservation activities and values, and budget and planning meetings with state officials, NGOs, community representatives, and the carbon developers. In order to understand how community members understood the carbon project, I also held focus groups with community members living near the protected areas. I held separate focus groups for men, women, village natural resource management committees, development committees, and entrepreneurial bee-keeping associations. These focus groups were designed to ascertain how community members understand the proposed carbon projects, their roles and 53 responsibilities in them, and what it actually means to buy and sell carbon credits, a topic to which I will return in Chapter 7. 7 Locating Sites, Cultivating Networks Every analytical enterprise is embedded in beliefs about the morality and the politics of research; every process of inquiry privileges a particular way of knowing the world. Amita Baviskar (2004:2) The path that any research project takes is a fine balance between purposeful design and coincidence. In a work which focuses on the situated practices of production, it would be remiss to leave out the very real and contingent ways that this research project unfolded as a confluence of deliberate intent and serendipitous occasion. The descriptions of my research methods which appear throughout this narrative only tell part of this story. A much richer understanding of any research findings can be gained from understanding the process through which the researcher was able to access these spaces in the first place (Harding 1991; 2001). Research and the production of knowledge are inherently political pursuits which privilege some stories and obscure others (Harraway 2001). All knowledge is “socially situated” (Baviskar 2004:3) and cannot be divorced from the context in which it was generated. Rather than impeding the pursuit of knowing, however, examining the social context and positionality from which knowledge is produced can bring fuller and richer understanding of the many ways that people live and experience the world we share (Harding 2001:165; Harraway 2001). The following is my attempt at making the implicit aspects of my research explicit and providing the reader some insight into the confluence of partial perspectives that went into the creation of this narrative. 7 For additional details about the focus groups, see Appendices B and C. 54 My position as a Fulbright Student Scholar and a student at a university that had cultivated ties with NGO, government, and university institutions in Malawi facilitated initial access to many donor agencies, government departments, and researchers. Visa issues kept us in Lilongwe for the first two months of our trip, so I used this time to schedule interviews with many of the policy makers, civil servants, researchers, and NGO professionals that I had met in 2009. I was able to meet the American Ambassador, and this initial meeting opened doors for me at USAID, the primary donor agency funding the project in Mkuwazi. One of the first calls that I made after arriving was to an MSU alumna who was working on forest carbon and carbon accounting on small-holder farms. She had been living in Malawi for several years, and was familiar with some of the other carbon projects that were ongoing in different parts of the country. She told me about a newer carbon project which had started since my first field visit, the Kulera Biodiversity Project, run by an organization called TLC, and gave me the contact information for Kulera’s director. Mike and I had a very productive first meeting. He was a former Associate Dean at Idaho State University. A former Peace Corps Volunteer in Kenya, he had lived, worked, and travelled in Africa for many years. Mike knew the founder of TLC because of the institutional ties between the Idaho State and Washington State University, where Trent was a faculty member. When Kulera needed a project director, TLC’s founder had contacted Mike. Mike was enthusiastic as I explained my research interests. He was very open describing the Kulera Project and the REDD+ carbon project. He was very candid and seemed eager to help me, suggesting additional people to contact. He openly invited me to use their project as my case study. I was not ready to give up on Mkuwazi yet. An internet search for “Mkuwazi” yielded the names of several social forestry researchers who had just spent the previous few months in the 55 Mkuwazi-area and were sharing power points and informal write-ups about their research online. One graduate student shared with me the names of two key contacts in the Mkuwazi area, including her research assistant, Mr. Elton Nyamwela, and some of her notes on the logistics of living and working in that area. I made a short trip north to Nkhata Bay, the closest town to Mkuwazi Forest Reserve, and was able to meet with the District Forest Officer, but I was unable to reach the others whose contacts had been given to me by the researchers from the UK. I then made a short trip to the Southern Region of Malawi to the cities of Blantyre and Zomba to speak with my contacts at MEET, LEAD, and FRIM, as well as speak to an umbrella group which helped facilitate networking amongst Malawian environmental NGOs and a legal organization called Center for Environmental Policy and Advocacy which had recently begun to publish pamphlets on climate justice and critiques of the national climate change policy in Malawi. While these meetings were productive, and my contacts at these organizations willing to work with me, it seemed that Mkuwazi might not be the best location to study carbon projects in Malawi. Back in Lilongwe, I had a second meeting with Mike. He offered to set up a dinner meeting with the consultant for Terra Global Capital the next time she was in town. My husband and I met Mike and Cheri at the Capital Hotel, one of the key meeting hotels for business, aid, and development personnel. She was also enthusiastic about my interest in the carbon project in Nyika and Vwaza. When I told her that I had planned to do my research in the Mkuwazi area on the Plan Vivo project, she suggested that I focus more on the Verified Carbon Standard and the Community, Carbon and Biodiversity Standard—the two that the Terra Global Capital and Kulera Project would be working with—instead of Plan Vivo. She echoed Mike and told me that I should make a trip north, to Rumphi, to learn more about it. She also invited me to visit the 56 Terra Global offices in San Francisco after I returned to the US to meet the other people working on the project. Before leaving, I wanted to visit the Department of National Parks and Wildlife. If I was even considering studying a project taking place inside of the national parks, I wanted to get the support of the Department administering those areas if possible. Mike gave me the contact information of Leonard Sefu, the Director, who had been working with TLC and TGC to start the carbon project in Nyika and Vwaza. When Director Sefu and I met, I shared with him Mike’s suggestion that I study the carbon project in the national parks in the north, and he also seemed enthusiastic about the prospect. The Director had also been aware of the Plan Vivo project, and told me that they were much more hopeful about this current project with TLC and TGC. He contacted several key people who worked for the DNPW’s Regional and District offices to express his support for my research and tell them to expect me. He also directed me to other members of his department who were working on coordinating research and community-based natural management with villages near the parks so that I could ask more specific questions about the policies and practices of the DNPW and get copies of their official policies. By the end of the week, I had decided to include the Kulera Project’s REDD+ carbon project in my research. Rumphi, Nyika National Park, and Vwaza Marsh Wildlife Reserve Rumphi is the closest town to Nyika and Vwaza. It is a small town in the Northern Region of Malawi, about 90 minutes north north-east of the Northern Region capital of Mzuzu on the main north-south highway before it meets the Lakeshore Road. It is nestled between hills with farms clustered around the Rukuru River as it snakes across the floor of the valley. From the tops of the hills you could see the whole valley, and far off in the distance the higher hills of the 57 Nyika Plateau. Visa and passport issues—as well my uncertainty regarding whether to focus on Mkuwazi or Nyika—meant that my husband and I did not go to Rumphi until January. When we arrived at the height of the rainy season it was lush, green, and a wonderful scenic change from the dusty streets of Lilongwe and the drier fields of the Central Region. All of those involved with the carbon project in the area had pointed me to one man in Rumphi—Duncan Chiza Mkandawire. Duncan was the chairperson of the Nyika Vwaza Association, an umbrella organization representing all of the village natural resource management committees within five kilometers of Nyika National Park and Vwaza Marsh Wildlife Reserve. Part of Duncan’s job as the NVA chairperson was to work with the DNPW, TLC, and TGC to help implement the carbon project by explaining the project to communities during the NVA’s organizing meetings in the villages. Duncan also offered to help me locate a place to stay and transportation to the area where he lived—an area named for its largest village and central trading center, Kamphenda—if I wanted to interview some community members or have a site visit. I was able to take advantage of this offer, and spent several days in Duncan’s village. This was particularly advantageous since I had accompanied Duncan to three community meetings within an hour’s walk of Kamphenda, so I was able to conduct follow-up focus groups in these communities regarding their understanding and perceptions of the proposed carbon project. One of the DNPW extension officers from Kamphenda whom I had met during one of the first community meetings, Bellings, found an empty house for us to stay in during our short visit, lent us bedding, buckets to draw water, and utensils for eating and cooking, and directed people to us to sell us firewood and charcoal so we could cook in the outdoor kitchen. Bellings also introduced me to a young man 58 who served as my interpreter and meeting facilitator. With their help, I was able to conduct eight focus groups in the area. I was unable to visit to the Regional office of the DNPW since it was located in Thazima, one of the entrances to Nyika National Park, approximately 60 kilometers from Rumphi on a “dusty” (unpaved) road which was notorious for its poor condition. However, Director Sefu had contacted the DNPW officials there on my behalf and I was also able to have a brief phone conversation with them regarding my research on the carbon projects in the area. Since I had the Director’s support, and because I was focusing more on the carbon projects than on anything that the DNPW was doing directly, they did not object to the research. However, when I met the head official from the Thazima Gate at a meeting several weeks later, he did not seem very keen to have a foreign researcher poking her head around villages in his area. When I proposed an extended visit of a few weeks to the Thazima area (since it had originally been the second site of the Plan Vivo carbon project and was now the site of the TGC project) to speak with community members and DNPW workers, I was told that it would be difficult to travel there, difficult to find a place to stay, and difficult to find people to interview. I decided that the logistical difficulties of travelling to Thazima, coupled with what I perceived to be a lack of enthusiasm for my presence, would make a visit to there an unproductive venture. The DNPW officials stationed near Kazuni in Vwaza Marsh were much more willing to work with me. During the community meetings, Duncan had introduced me to Mrs. Kataya, the head of extension services for the DNPW offices at Vwaza Marsh and co-facilitator several of the community meetings which I attended. Mrs. Kataya facilitated my short trip to the Vwaza area, helped me arrange transportation, and introduced me to the Director, the extension workers, and other DNPW personnel working there. Mrs. Kataya also located an extension worker who 59 served as a research assistant and translator during the focus groups held in the area. I had requested someone from the community to serve as an interpreter and facilitator, since the presence of a DNPW extension officer—who was nominally in charge of park-people relations and was required to report any unauthorized activity or resource extraction within the park— would compromise the responses people offered during the focus groups regarding resource use and concerns or questions that they might have about the carbon project that had been introduced. However, Mrs. Kataya said that she did not know anyone else in the area that would be able to serve in this capacity. I conducted an interview with this individual the day before we were to begin working with the community regarding his understanding of the carbon project and his role in the community-DNPW relationship. We also had a brief discussion of my research, of the types of questions that I would be asking, and my expectations of his role as an interpreter. It was a very brief and possibly inadequate training, but he did a commendable job. During the focus groups, I did not ask any questions about activities or resource extraction that might be illegal or construed as elicit, though some participants did offer this type of information during the course of the group interview, despite the presence of the extension officer. Nkhata Bay and Mkuwazi Forest Reserve In April, I returned to Nkhata Bay, a small town on the shores of Lake Malawi popular with backpackers and tourists. Nkhata Bay is the closest town to Mkuwazi Forest Reserve, the site of the (stalled) Plan Vivo project. It was also the location of a backpacker lodge and NGO called Butterfly Space where Jim had done volunteer work on our initial site visit in November 2011, and where he was able to continue with his volunteer activities. We were able to live right on the shores of the lake, which was incredibly beautiful. This time, I was able to contact Mr. 60 Elton Nyamwela, the man who had worked as a research assistant for a graduate student from the UK the previous June. Elton was an excellent research assistant, translator, and co-facilitator, as well as one of my key informants. He had been part of the group that had signed the comanagement agreement, and also served as a member of the Block Management Committee, the community body created to comanage the forest with the Department of Forestry. In addition, he was an important member of the community and was involved in several community groups, development projects, and community-support organizations, so he was acquainted with many of the key people involved in environment and development issues in the area. Elton’s membership in a prominent Evangelical church, his participation in a variety of community organizations, and his previous experience as a research assistant allowed him to cultivate an extensive social network that I was able to benefit from by virtue of my associated with him. Elton lived and farmed in Ching’anya, one of the seven villages which had been targeted for the Mkuwazi carbon project. Group Village Headman Ching’anya was very friendly to visitors and facilitated my research in the area. He allowed me to use the space under the large tree in his compound to conduct focus groups, and he gave permission for me to contact the village headmen in the other two villages under his jurisdiction. His friendliness and enthusiasm about working with outside researchers—along with the village’s convenient location right next to the main road—meant that many of those conducting research in or near the forest reserve had worked in Ching’anya. With Elton’s help, I was able to hold interviews and focus groups in all seven of the targeted villages in the Plan Vivo project. He told me that the other researchers he had worked with had not visited all seven village headmen, but he encouraged me to do so. Elton was able to 61 meet with each of the five village headmen and two village headwomen and get permission for me to visit and conduct interviews and focus groups there. Elton said that it would be polite if I brought refreshments with me to the meetings, so I brought the standard snack fare of soda and bread buns and distributed them at the end of each focus group or interview. I also presented the GVH Ching’anya with two kilograms of beef, which Elton told me was a culturally appropriate way to thank an important elder person. Terra Global Capital It was Duncan who first told me about an upcoming meeting he was going to have in Lilongwe with Terra Global Capital. When I asked if I could attend, he said that he had nothing to hide, so he thought it would be ok. I did not receive a response to my initial email, but when I walked into the meetings, the carbon developer remembered me from our dinner meeting with Mike, agreed to let me sit in on the meetings, and even asked me to record minutes. I took extensive, personal field notes which I edited down as meeting minutes. I provided copies to TLC, TGC, and Duncan as the NVA chairperson. I also agreed to serve as an email contact for Duncan, relaying any information that TLC or TGC sent by email to Duncan via phone. Cheri personally invited me back to Lilongwe for additional meetings in May, and to TGC’s offices in the US upon my return. I was able to visit the TGC offices in November 2012, at which point I was offered a short-term consulting position to help TGC write the community portion of the Community, Carbon, and Biodiversity (CCB) project document. Ethically, this presented a challenge, since I still take issue with the carbon markets as the “win-win-win” solution to help people, the environment, and the climate. However, taking this job provided an opportunity to share some of the concerns about the project voiced by the communities with whom I had worked. I accepted 62 the contract. I reminded Cheri and the staff at TGC that I was still doing research on this topic, and that my experience working on this document would likely become part of the larger project. In this account, excerpts of TGC written materials only appear if they are available publically via the TGC website or as part of the growing collections of publically available carbon project methodologies kept by third party verifiers like the CCB or the VCS. No proprietary information which is not publically available online has been shared unless I have received explicit permission from TGC or TLC to share this information. My ongoing interactions with TGC personnel have added an additional layer of richness to this ethnography, and I have a new-found appreciation for the difficulties of trying to actually produce a carbon project that would attract investors, satisfy the strict accounting and monitoring requirements necessary to sell carbon, as well as design a development project that would meet both conservation and development goals. Positionality Power Beyond the work of cultivating and maintaining research networks, and in addition to the logistical difficulties confronting those doing field research anywhere, there are other, more individual factors which influenced my research questions, the people that I met and worked with, and the course of my research. Race, ethnicity, age, gender, nationality, religion and a host of other factors influence the way that researchers produce data, where they conduct research, and the type of research they conduct. For example, in the 1950s, Elizabeth Colson was unable to conduct research in her chosen area of Luapula province on the border of present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo because colonial administrators felt the area was too dangerous for a woman. For similar reasons, Marion Pearsall conducted her research near Lake 63 Malawi, far away from potential problems near the border (Schumaker 2001:133). Although times have changed, such influences and factors are rarely considered in ethnographic accounts and narratives produced from our field research. Feminist and post-structural scholars have advocated for increased reflexivity in academic writing that calls attention to the way that personal traits and context shape field research. Any field researcher has to contend with asymmetrical relationships of power and the dialogic nature of inter-subjective spaces contoured by gender, age, socio-economic status, nationality, race and ethnicity, political perspective and other subjective factors (Collins 1991; DeWalt and DeWalt 2002). Research assistants, institutions, and even participants can influence the shape of research by facilitating some connections and not others, by granting or denying access to specific social spaces, or by selectively answering the researcher’s question (DeWalt and DeWalt 2002; Walker 2010:87-88). For example, the participants in my focus groups were largely determined by my research assistants’ willingness and ability to operationalize my research plans. Likewise, their role as translator and interpreter influenced the way that I asked questions, how my questions were perceived by participants, and how I understood and interpreted participants’ responses. Nevertheless, as the researcher I made the ultimate decisions about which perspectives to privilege, and how to present those stories in the text (Kirsch 1999). No matter how much the research experience itself is contoured by those working with (or against) the researcher, the researcher has disproportionate power to interpret those events and summarize, analyze, and present those interpretations here and in other academic writings. I chose to use methods such as open-ended interviews and focus groups in order to provide participants with a greater degree of freedom to answer as they chose (DeVault 1996). I frequently asked focus groups about information that I had heard either during informal 64 conversations or during formal sessions in order to gauge their response and inform my own interpretation of that data. However, I am sure that their willingness to communicate openly about their opinions of the project was tempered by my associations with key project players, including the DNPW and NVA. The choice of these methods and building reflexivity into the study design and timeline can give participants greater degree of control over the range and content of their responses (DeVault 1996; Esim 1997; Kirsch 1999). However, an interview or focus group can never completely dispel all hierarchical power relationships because the interview itself is an “artificial, staged performance” controlled disproportionately by the researcher (Kirsch 1999:31). There are different ethical issues when considering “studying up” and including organizations and government agencies as part of a research project. The budget and project planning meetings that I attended, as well as my subsequent work with carbon developers and international consultants, became an important “site” of my research. These relationships are no less imbued with asymmetrical relationships of power, although they look somewhat different than those discussed above. Most of the consultants with whom I work are cosmopolitan professionals who make a great deal more money than I do, move in social and professional circles that are difficult for outsiders to access, and have highly sought after knowledge and skill sets. These professionals work in a business environment which at times seems as foreign to me as some of villages I visited. Issues of consent and proprietary knowledge require constant negotiation, more so since my research could potentially pose more immediate (though qualitatively different) risk to these organizations than to my Malawian informants: the consultants and companies that I discuss here are easily identifiable and have millions of dollars 65 at stake in a sector in which bad press could negatively affect potential profits and project outcomes. Position In addition to those issues which any researcher encounters, my positionality also shaped my research experience. Being a young, short (5’3”), white, American woman shaped my interactions with those whom I met in the field and in some ways determined the spaces to which I was able to gain access. Although I am married, I do not have children, and by Malawian standards neither my husband nor I is considered fully adult before the birth of our first child. I remain skeptical about carbon markets as the “magic bullet” to address under-development, promote conservation, and mitigate climate change, it was sometimes difficult for me not to impose my own thoughts and feelings on the responses I received in my research. I am sure at times these opinions came through implicitly in the way that I structured my questions and I interpreted responses. All of these personal traits and circumstances can be felt to varying degrees throughout this project in my choice of topic, research design, the questions that I asked, the way these questions were answered, and the analysis to which I have subjected them. I can only guess at the way that the positionality of those who worked closely with me, particularly my research assistants, shaped the way that my questions were interpreted and participants’ responses translated back to me. I was also able access to spaces that would be difficult for many of the Malawians with whom I worked. I have had access to a high level of education, even by American standards. I was able to walk into government offices and interview donors, state officials, and civil servants, activities that most rural Malawians could not easily accomplish. The fact that I was foreign and had close ties to the DNPW and NVA meant that many people assumed that I was working for a 66 development organization or that I was a Peace Corps Volunteer. I had to repeatedly remind people in the focus groups that I did not work for an aid organization although it probably seemed like I was conducting either a pilot study or an impact assessment for the carbon projects I kept asking about. Further, I had the economic means to travel from my own country, travel to different field sites within Malawi, pay to stay in lodges, and buy food from markets and restaurants when I wanted, things which are out of reach to all but the wealthiest Malawians. I had the power to leave Malawi whenever I chose, to go back to the US, and resume my very comfortable and privileged life in the US with unlimited electricity, fast internet, no fuel shortages, and my own vehicle. This fact of mobility, of options and choice, are inextricably tied to my whiteness, my American-ness, and my relative affluence. This was never far from my mind or the minds of the Malawians with whom I lived and worked. Being an outsider and a white American also marked me as wealthy, and potentially connected to aid organizations and NGOs that might be able to channel resources to people. This meant that my husband and I were often asked for things that we could not provide: rides in vehicles (which we did not have); a new school, clinic, or borehole for the community; jobs in America; admission to colleges in the US or the UK; school fees for primary and secondary school, or college tuition for universities in Malawi and abroad. We are wealthy by Malawian standards. I received US$27,000 in grant money to cover our living and travel expenses and the donations we made to volunteer organizations with whom my husband was working. Our monthly allowance was more than many people’s yearly income. This disparity in lifestyles and opportunity was the most difficult and embarrassing aspect of forming relationships with Malawians, and one which was difficult to negotiate. 67 Being a woman in southern Africa carries with it specific social responsibilities and cultural norms dictating proper behavior and dress. Although being a foreigner and outsider gave me a much greater degree of freedom than the Malawian women with whom I lived and worked, there were still moments when being female trumped being foreign. For example, Duncan gave me the name Chimwemwe, which means “happiness” or “joy” in ChiTumbuka, the dominant language in the Northern Region of Malawi. He gave me the family name Mkandawire, since he explained that “the Mkandawire’s had been in the area longer than any other group, even the Gondwe’s,” which was the name of the Traditional Authority for the area. It was also (probably not coincidentally) Duncan’s last name. When we travelled to community meetings, I would often overhear jokes about the azungu woman who rode around on the back of Duncan’s motorcycle in khaki trousers and who shared his last name. The jokes were in ChiTumbuka, but I still understood the friendly jokes and jibes about Duncan’s new azungu ‘assistant.’ The issue of transportation also influenced my choice of field sites. My husband and I chose not to drive a vehicle while we were in Malawi. This was a conscious decision on my part because I wanted to use the same public transportation that most Malawians use to travel. In the rural areas where I worked, cars are ostentatious displays of wealth driven by government or NGO workers, Members of Parliament, researchers, and wealthy relatives visiting from the towns and cities. Except for Peace Corps Volunteers and backpacking tourists, all foreigners drive vehicles. While not having a vehicle helped decrease the social distance between myself and the people with whom I was working (DeWalt and DeWalt 2002), there were many times that providing transportation to and from town would have been one of the more immediate ways that I could have contributed something to the individuals with whom I worked. 68 In addition, during our time in Malawi, the country experienced chronic, severe fuel shortages which crippled the country which would have made using a car very expensive and time consuming. At one point, the capital city had neither petrol nor diesel for eleven days, and Rumphi boma routinely waited between three and five weeks for a single fuel delivery. The politicking and skills necessary to regularly procure fuel could be a rich topic for research, but here I will just say that it would have taken time and money that neither my husband nor I had to spend. This situation influenced the selection of field sites, since I had to work in areas that were accessible by public transportation, within walking distance of major roads, or that someone I knew—like Duncan—could take me. Fortunately, Duncan agreed to be my transport in Rumphi, and the Mkuwazi area lies adjacent to the Lakeshore Road and regular matolas (private vehicles that carry passengers for money) and minibuses ran along this route. In Rumphi, I travelled mostly on the back of Duncan’s motorcycle. Malawi, like most of southern Africa, has strict cultural norms concerning the physical contact between men and women in public. I would hang onto the back of the motorcycle and keep as much space as possible between myself and Duncan, so that neither of us would feel uncomfortable. This made it difficult to get a secure grip, though, and several times I was almost thrown off when we went over large bumps on deeply rutted roads. I did not sit sideways with my legs on one side like most Malawian women, but straddled the seat of the motorcycle behind Duncan. In southern Africa, a woman’s legs above the knee are highly sexualized, so the act of straddling a motorcycle seat in trousers behind a man that one is not related to is unusual at best, and potentially alarming to many rural people, although most people understand the constraints of transportation. Travelling this way also required that I wear trousers, not a calf-length skirt, 69 8 which is the appropriate dress for women in all rural and most urban areas. Wearing trousers on the back of the motorcycle in very rural areas was necessary for my safety but culturally inappropriate. When we went to community meetings, we would roar up on Duncan’s motorcycle, he dressed in an old leather jacket and black pinstripe trousers, me in khaki trousers and a button down shirt. Before I even took off my helmet, I would pull out my chitenje (cloth wrap) and tuck it around my waist, covering my trousers and legs almost to the ankle. I would pull his notebook and pen out of my backpack. At the end of the meetings, after we had said goodbye to those in attendance, and spoken with the village headmen (sometimes a woman), the VNRMC members, and any friends or family, we would make our way back to the motorcycle. Dozens of kids and a few adults would follow us out, standing near the DNPW and TLC Land Rover pick-ups and Duncan’s motorcycle. I would store all of my supplies, buckle my helmet and put on my sunglasses, and wait until Duncan started the motorcycle before I would take off my chitenje wrap. It never failed that the women would point and laugh and a few kids would scream with laughter when I took off my traditional wrap to expose my khaki trousers before I climbed onto the back of the motorcycle. My husband came with me to Malawi, requiring that we work out a schedule and locate places to stay which met both of our needs. On previous research trips I had stayed in femaleheaded households. With a second person, housing and food options become much less flexible (Starrs et al. 2001). Malawians generally prefer that married people stay in a room separate from other members of the household if space allows. While very young children might sleep with 8 In January 2012, several Malawian women were attacked and stripped of their clothing in the main markets in the cities of Lilongwe, Blantyre, and Mzuzu when the jeans and trousers that they were wearing were deemed to be culturally inappropriate. 70 their parents, older children do not, and there is strict spatial policing of rooms where married people stay and sleep, and where unmarried people and children sleep. We had to find places to live that met both of our requirements for living space. Personal preferences and situational circumstances made it more convenient that we stay in a place of our own, and since we moved around between research sites several times, that meant we usually stayed in backpacker lodges. This provided privacy and flexibility, but not living with a family meant that I was unable to form the close, personal relationships with Malawians that I had on my previous visits to the field. I also chose to work in areas in which my husband could find productive ways to spend his time. When the accompanying spouse is male, this can conflict with Western and local concepts of masculinity, particularly as it relates to employment (Flinn 1998:11). Our frequent moves in-country meant that it was difficult for Jim to find long-term volunteer opportunities, and the lack of reliable internet and electricity made it difficult for him to enhance his skill set as an engineer. Jim would sometimes cook, do laundry, and fetch water—all considered women’s work in Malawi (and many places in the US as well!)—while I was conducting interviews or typing notes. Some of the most interesting conversations I had with rural Malawians revolved around the division of household labor in our family, our close friendship, and my ability to work closely with male participants and research assistants without risking the jealousy of my husband. While not the focus of my research, these informal conversations allowed me to ask questions about family relationships and gender roles in the areas where I was working and helped me to contextualize many of the social dynamics that I witnessed during public community meetings and training sessions. 71 In short, all of these personal traits and interpersonal factors contoured the landscape in which I conducted this research and produced this narrative. Making these connections explicit provides a richer context for the how and why of the production of this narrative. I hope that this openness gives insight into the story that follows. 72 CHAPTER 4: COUNTING CARBON “The wind which turns our mills, and even the heat of the sun, work for us; but happily no one has yet been able to say, the wind and the sun are mine, and the service which they render must be paid for,” (Say 1829:250 in Gómez-Baggethun et al. 2010:1211). "It’s time to recognize that nature is the largest company on Earth working for the benefit of 100 percent of humankind — and it’s doing it for free," Jean-Christophe Vié, Deputy Head of IUCN’s Species Programme (Associated Press 2009; Sullivan 2010:4). “There is value in the trees. There is value in Mkuwazi. We just have to get it out.” (Former Regional Forest Officer, April 18, 2012) Introduction The quotes above represent different moments in translating the essential use value of environmental processes into exchange value. The moment when the concept of commodifying ecosystem services becomes a feasible policy prescription is the moment when the question must be asked: if there is value in something, how can it be realized? In the case of trees, how can the carbon inside of them become a tradable commodity? How can the value “get out?” This chapter traces the historical trajectories of technologies, philosophies, policies, and accounting practices which have converged to make the carbon commodities possible. This is done first by re-imagining forests as commensurable pollution sinks where carbon is stored, and then through the development of detailed accounting and measurement procedures to disembed carbon from its ecological and social context. In a report on the importance of forests to climate change, biodiversity, and preventing desertification, the UN’s Joint Liaison Group of the Rio Conventions states that "global forest vegetation stores 283 Gt of carbon in its biomass, 38 Gt in dead wood, and 317 Gt in soil (top 30 centimeters) and litter. The total carbon content of forest ecosystems has been estimated at 638 Gt for 2005, which is more than the 73 amount of carbon in the entire atmosphere" (Joint Liaison Group of the Rio Conventions 2008:3). How is it even possible to know how much carbon is contained in all of the trees and soils across the entire globe? How are such huge amounts of carbon measured and accounted for across forests that are as ecologically diverse as they are geographically dispersed? This quote, along with the two quotes which begin this chapter, illustrates two important shifts in how forests are conceptualized as they are stripped of their particularities and become part of the market. First, the concept of a single, undifferentiated system of global forests has become a totalizing reference for socially situated and geographically located forests spaces. While these concepts are not necessarily mutually exclusive, the undifferentiated forest creates a space for scientific and political interventions which are legible to market exchange in ways that socially and geographically situated forests are not. Second, the concept of forests as carbon sinks—places where carbon is stored—is facilitated by new forms of scientific management and technologies that measure, enumerate, and calculate the carbon content of forests on local, regional, or global scales. The confluence of science, policy, and technology makes the concept of forests-as-sink possible while also creating equivalencies and consistencies necessary to convert carbon into a tradable commodity. In the first part of this chapter, I highlight some of the historical moments and confluences which have helped to make the creation of carbon commodities and carbon forestry possible. In the second section, I discuss the creation of a representational economy of carbon forest in Malawi by detailing the specific practices through which carbon credits are produced as they are enumerated, measured, and monitored. This mind-numbing precision is necessary for the technical certification required to sell carbon offsets; however, in spite of the attention to detail and procedure prescribed by the model, there is still the potential for massive cumulative 74 error in estimating carbon stocks since the prescriptive representation of the model can never completely map onto the real world. Part I: History and Confluences The creation of carbon sinks, carbon credits, and carbon markets are not—and never were—an inevitable outcome of capitalist expansion. Instead, carbon commodities and markets are the current outcome of a confluence of policy, technology, and knowledge “put together contingently out of heterogeneous elements each having their own conditions of possibility” (Uhrqvist and Lövbrand 2009:18). It is this confluence which has led to carbon sinks and carbon commodities as solutions to climate change which are thinkable, producible, and even logical. Seeing the Global Forest The ability to view and study the earth as a holistic set of inter-related systems is made possible by advances in satellite, communications, and computer technologies. Satellites and increased computational power enabled scientists to generate data on the biosphere at a global scale. This “second Copernican revolution” has brought about a shift in the way that the environment is conceptualized socially, studied scientifically, and managed politically (Schellnhuber 1999:C19). Technology is an integral part to making this happen. As Uhrqvist and Lövbrand note: “[I]t is difficult to overestimate the importance of technological advancements during the second half of the 20th Century. The rise of satellite observation systems, the growing network of Earth-bound measurement stations, the emerging capabilities in data handling and numerical modeling gave scientists the ability to map the planet in ways that was practically impossible at the end of the Second World War…By the mid 1980s the newly won technical capabilities had not only enabled a worldwide information exchange within the scientific community. It had also given rise to a global change research agenda that approached the Earth 75 as a complex and integrated system in need of rational management” [sic] (Uhrqvist and Lövbrand 2009:11). After World War II, a host of technologies such as civil aviation, satellites, and burgeoning computer and telecommunications networks provided new ways to generate, aggregate, analyze, and store data. In 1957-58, these technological advances facilitated some of the first coordinated efforts to collaborate globally on scientific research on the earth’s geophysical systems during the International Geophysical Year when scientists from across the globe gathered at the North Pole to study earth systems. The need to organize and store massive amounts of data produced by this effort prompted the International Council of Scientific Unions to create a new oversight body, the Council on Scientific Data, to oversee the creation of new systems for collecting, coding, and distributing scientific data across disciplines and across continents (Uhrqvist and Lövbrand 2009). The massive amounts of data on geophysical processes and atmospheric cycles required massive amounts of computational power to process and make sense of this data. Global Circulation Models which predict possible outcomes of increased carbon emissions and related temperature changes across the globe require huge amounts of computing power. Advances in computer technologies in the last half of the twentieth century and the early 2000s made the simulation of these complex models possible. Particularly important for atmospheric research relating to climate change was the civilian use of Earth Observation Satellites. The International Council of Scientific Unions launched the Global Atmosphere Research Program in 1967, utilizing newly available satellite technology to advance studies of weather patterns and the climate system (Uhrqvist and Lövbrand 2009). This program was the precursor to the International Climate Research Program, started in 1979, and which continues to produce interdisciplinary research of the global climate system. The second proliferation of these Earth Observation Satellites coincided with the end of 76 the Cold War which saw increased efforts at international scientific collaborations and the redeployment of satellite technology for civilian purposes (Litfin 1997). Scientific debates over the changing climate began to enter the mainstream media and capture public attention in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These debates both drew on the increasing amounts of global environmental data generated by these satellites and reinforced the need to collect more data on the state of the earth. In the 1990s alone, NASA launched over fifty Earth Observation Satellites (Litfin 1997). Around the same time as the Global Atmosphere Research Program was launching satellites, similar technologies were being used by biologists to study the biosphere. Biological scientists began to collaborate with UNESCO’s emerging Biosphere Program in order to bring science and policy-making together to create scientifically-informed environmental management policy. The bridging of science and policy was further developed through the creation of the Scientific Committee of the Environment (SCOPE) in 1969. SCOPE co-evolved with the UNEP to “offer integrated assessments of key environmental issues at the interface of science and decision-making” (Uhrqvist and Lövbrand 2009:10). These technologies were the precursors to envisioning global forests as carbon sinks. While advances in satellite technology facilitated efforts to monitor and study geophysical processes and atmospheric cycles, the advances in computational power made the processing of this information possible. This enabled them to link separate forests across the globe as part of a system of global forests; likewise, greenhouse gas emissions from different parts of world can be monitored and compiled into global carbon emissions. The ability to envision geographically and socially situated forests and emissions as part of an undifferentiated system of global forests and global emissions makes it possible to link the carbon cycling provided by forests and trees with 77 the total greenhouse gases being emitted all over the world. Emissions and forests are thus linked together in a representation of the global carbon cycle. This is a key step in the creation of tradable carbon commodities, since it represents any forest anywhere in the world as a potential sink for carbon emissions which come from any activity anywhere in the world. The technologies which make such global-level visions possible also facilitate the translation of carbon into carbon commodities which are tradable in environmental markets. Economic Theory of Ecosystem Services In regards to climate change, the market is increasingly seen as the way forward for rational management. This trajectory also has its own intellectual history. Starting in the eighteenth century, there has been a gradual shift in the way that economists understand the role of the physical world which enabled them to theorize a price for ecological processes like carbon sequestration and nutrient cycling (Gómez-Baggethun et al. 2010). In the 1700s, pre-classical economists considered land as the primary source of value and wealth. This changed during the Industrial Revolution when advances in technology spurred radical shifts in production and social organization. These changes caused nineteenth century economists like Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx to focus on labor as the primary source of value (GómezBaggethun et al. 2010). Land was still present in their analyses, but economists considered land as a source of value only to the extent that it could be transformed by labor into other useable goods. The Industrial Revolution spurred scholars to examine interactions between labor and capital instead of labor and land, to focus on monetary systems instead of physical systems, and to emphasize the production of exchange value (Gómez-Baggethun et al. 2010). This trend 78 continued into the early 20th century, and intensified with the “marginal revolution” in which the value of a good was related only to its utility, and the utility of different goods could be ranked, compared, and substituted. By the time the oil crisis of the 1970’s hit, the idea that natural resources could and would be substituted for manufactured goods was well-accepted, and the depletion of natural resources was re-cast as an issue of monetary scarcity rather than one of resource scarcity (Gómez-Baggethun et al. 2010). Meanwhile, other economists turned their attention to goods and services which were ignored in market calculations because they did not have a specific price or dollar value. These environmental and resource economists “expand[ed] the scope of analysis of orthodox Neoclassical economics by developing methods to value and internalize economic impacts on the environment into decision making – e.g. through extended cost-benefit analysis” (GómezBaggethun et al. 2010:1212). Around the same time, in 1960, Ronald Coase, an economist at the University of Chicago, published The Problem of Social Cost, an influential paper in which he argued that pollution should not be thought of as absolutely bad, but as the result of a rational choice made by producers to produce commodities at the lowest cost (Coase 1960). The best way to solve the pollution problem was not to impose a tax or a fine, but to expand property rights that would allow for trading of the right to access pollution sinks so that the range of other goods and services in the economy could be maximally realized. He argued that as soon as pollution was too abundant it would cease to be the most efficient way to use resources since it would increase other costs across the economy, and therefore would find equilibrium in the economy as a whole (Coase 1960; Lohmann 2006). Coase won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1991 for this work. 79 The term natural capital—a precursor to the idea of ecosystem services—first appeared in 1973. As conservation became an increasingly important political and social concern in the 1970s and 80s, environmental advocates began to draw on the language of value and cost-benefit analysis to demonstrate the importance of conservation. The publication of an article in Nature in 1997 titled “The value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital” was a watershed moment in the creation of environmental services—including carbon cycling and climate regulation—as the authors estimated that the annual value of ecosystem services was US$33 trillion, almost twice the amount of all the good and services produced globally in a single year (Costanza et al. 1997:253). A few years later the UN released the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a report which detailed the importance of ecosystem services for human life and which promoted payments for ecosystem services as an approach for financing both conservation and improved livelihoods for the world’s poor (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005). The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, a 700-page report which decried climate change as the worst market failure of our time, was another watershed moment in mainstreaming the idea of ecosystem services and markets into environmental policy prescriptions (Stern 2007). To date, carbon sequestration is the most prominent and most often traded ecosystem service, although markets for biodiversity and water conservation are growing quickly (GómezBaggethun et al. 2010). Trading pollution credits started in the US in the early 1990s when amendments to the 1990 Clean Air Act included a mechanism for trading sulfur dioxide credits to reduce pollution in response to acid rain problems and halt destruction of the ozone layer (Parson 2003; Vogler 2000). The UK created a greenhouse gas emissions trading system based 80 on carbon credits in 2000. Five years later, the European Union created the European Trading System, the first regional regulatory, market-based carbon emissions reductions program. 9 A Brief History of REDD(+)(++) Policy Although the potential for generating emissions offsets from the conservation of forests was recognized during the negotiations for the Kyoto Protocol, they were not included in the final agreement. The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)—part of the Kyoto Protocol which detailed the procedures for producing emissions reductions credits through the use of clean energy—included provisions for offsetting emissions through planting trees, it did not recognize emissions reductions generated from conserving existing forests. This was in part due to the technical difficulty of accurately quantifying emissions reductions from forest conservation, the potential that deforestation activities would merely shift to other areas outside of the project areas, a process known as leakage (West 2010), and concerns regarding potential misuse, fraud, and corruption in remote areas where these projects would likely take place (Depledge 2008). In addition, countries with large forest areas—namely Brazil—voiced strong objections to any program that would potentially open their natural resources to control or co-optation by Northern countries who would design, implement, and monitor these programs (Depledge 2008). However, political stalemates and the difficulties in reaching a comprehensive climate treaty with mandatory emissions reductions also made the REDD option more attractive. In the years after Kyoto, there was renewed interest in forest offsets as a mitigation strategy. The South showed increasing interest in REDD as a potential source of development aid while government and business interests in the North recognized REDD’s potential for 9 For an excellent discussion of the specific actors, networks, and technologies that helped bring pollution markets into being, see Lane (2012) and Lohmann (2006). 81 producing cost-effective ways to reduce emissions through the purchase of emissions credits (West 2010). The Coalition for Rainforest Nations, along with countries with large tracts of tropical forests such as Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica, raised the issue of carbon offsets from forest conservation during the annual climate negotiations. They demanded emissions credits as compensation for the opportunity costs of conserving existing forests and foregoing resource development and alternative land uses (Depledge 2008; Myers 2008; West 2010). The REDD concept was introduced at the Conference of Parties in Montreal in 2005, partly in response to the concerns of developing countries and partly due to the US’s demand that any binding treaties for emissions reductions require action from both industrialized countries and developing countries. New technologies for measuring, and monitoring carbon stocks, land use change, and forest cover helped counter previous concerns about the ability to do so. After this initial proposal in 2005, the UNFCCC launched a two year study which was presented at the climate negotiations in Bali in 2007. The Bali Action Plan set the stage to create the technical, policy, and financial aspects of REDD projects. This work plan included plans for creating the Work Programme of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice which would develop methodologies for measuring and monitoring emissions accounting and forest carbon stocks in forests. It also created the Advanced Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action, the UN body which would continue to explore and develop policy and financing mechanisms for REDD (Corbera, Estrada, and Brown 2010). These technology and policy working groups hold meetings during the year to prepare to present findings and recommendations at the COP meetings. Negotiators also created several government-sponsored institutions which would focus on regional capacity building in REDD, as well as the World Bank’s US$250 million Forest Carbon Partnership 82 Facility to provide capacity building to developing countries pursuing REDD policies (Myers 2008). UN-REDD, a basket fund for donors to contribute to REDD funding in developing countries, was also established in 2008 (Yeang 2013). The details of REDD became a major sticking point in the climate negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009, and negotiators were unable to reach a legally binding decision. During the climate negotiations in 2009-2012, REDD became even more vague as specific targets were weakened or taken out of the policy language while the REDD-related bureaucracy proliferated. In 2009, specific language detailing safeguards for indigenous peoples were weakened (Lang 2009b) and measurable targets (i.e. decreasing emissions from deforestation by 50 percent by the year 2020) were removed from the text (Lesniewska 2010; Vidal 2009). This was in large part due to the US’s refusal to accept the original draft agreement developed from the technical and policy working groups (Lang 2009a). Six countries—the US, UK, France, Japan, Australia, and Norway—collectively pledged US$3.5 billion in funding to develop and build capacity for REDD (Minang and Murphy 2010). At the climate meetings in Cancun, Mexico in December 2010, negotiators decided that countries should develop nationallevel carbon accounts for REDD. Negotiations on the use of market mechanisms to finance REDD were stalled by Bolivia, whose negotiators voiced repeated and sustained objections to the inclusion of any market mechanism in REDD projects (Ecosystem Marketplace 2010). The 2011 climate meetings in Durban resulted in the decision that REDD developing countries should report on efforts to institute safeguards to secure against environmental degradation and human rights violations in relation to REDD projects (Carpenter 2012). By this time, the “+” had been added to REDD to reflect the increased attention that both livelihood and environmental benefits should be considered as important components of any 83 REDD project (Paladino 2011). In Doha in December 2012, there was general agreement that other ecosystem services secured through REDD+ projects—such as water conservation, biodiversity protection, and increased property rights for forest peoples—should also be incentivized, presumably through the market, though no mechanism to do so was identified. However, neither the particulars of a financing mechanism for REDD+ nor the methods by which national-level emissions reductions should be verified or monitored have been finalized (Eni-ibukun et al. 2012; UNDP Climate Community 2012; Zwick 2012). At the time of this writing, any decisions on substantive agreements on how to measure, implement, or finance REDD+ had been postponed until the following climate talks scheduled for November 2013. History of Scientific Forestry In his work on forest governance in India, Arun Agrawal (2005) traces the creation of forests as a space that can be enumerated and scientifically managed through statistics. He argues that the numbers and statistics used to describe forests come to stand in for the very forests they were meant to describe. In this way, numerical statistics and methods for accounting for forest value become recursive in ways that qualitative, non-numerical descriptions do not. These numbers and statistics generated about forests are in some ways considered more real than qualitative descriptions of the forest. These statistics became prescriptive rather than descriptive and management of forests becomes synonymous with managing the rise and fall of certain statistical indicators, such as the productive capacity of timber. The techniques developed in scientific forestry enumerated forests based on the amount of timber in commercially valuable tree species. In the 1800s, tree species were categorized in terms of geography and climate, and co-occurring species of trees grouped into vegetation zones that could be mapped at increasingly larger scales. Foresters would walk along a single line— 84 such as a river or road—and note the different types of forests and trees along that transect. They would then go into these different vegetation zones and measure the diameter of the trees. Field teams carried colored nails with them to mark the trees which had been measured with a colored nail corresponding to the size category of the tree. When they were finished, the team could count the nails that remained, subtract them from the original number, and have an accurate count of the sizes and numbers of trees in a stand. This could then be multiplied by a formula to estimate the amount of timber in a stand of trees (Agrawal 2005:40, 243). When individual measurements of trunk size, height, and number of trees within a stand of forest could be counted, these quantifications could be extrapolated to entire regions by relying on the vegetation zone classifications. This process was created to enhance the productive capacity of forests to ensure sustainable and permanent yields with the ultimate goal of both providing a reliable source of hardwood timber and to maximize revenue (Agrawal 2005). Many of the methods developed to measure timber stocks in the late 1800s are similar to the practices used to measure carbon stocks in forests today. During biomass field surveys to measure carbon stocks, a team will measure the number and size of the trees in a given area. Although teams today use geospatial technologies and remote sensing to establish and map the basic vegetation zones they are dealing with, practices in the field today are remarkably similar to those in the 1800s. Once the size and type of trees in each stand are measured, these numbers can then be put into a formula with a carbon factor in order to estimate how much carbon is contained in the sample plot, which can then be extrapolated to the similar forest areas nearby. The next section details these measurement practices. 85 Part II: Measuring Carbon Stocks and Creating Carbon Factors A critical component of producing carbon commodities requires enumerating and accounting carbon credits. The creation of a “representational economy of forests”—the categories, numbers, and statistics that are so central in describing and representing forests—was a key step in creating new ways of defining, managing, and creating value from forests in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Agrawal 2005:33). Likewise, a representational economy of carbon forestry produces value through the creation of measuring and accounting techniques that convert forests into carbon units. This process reduces the social and ecological complexity of the human and natural forest landscape, imbuing the carbon with exchange value and transforming forest carbon into a commodity form which is legible to investors and tradable on carbon markets. Without this work, there would—of course—still be carbon in trees; it would just not have any value on the market. Creating the Carbon Factor It is impossible to individually measure all of the carbon that is in the soils and trees within a project area. In order to make this process more time and cost effective, carbon developers and foresters have created procedures to measure representative samples of the forest through remote sensing analysis and biomass surveys. Those sample measurements are extrapolated to entire forest areas, countries, or regions. One of the steps necessary to extrapolate these measurements is to calculate the carbon factor for different species and sizes of trees. The carbon factor is an estimate of the amount of carbon contained in trees of a certain size based on the species of tree, the density of the wood, and the annual amount of rainfall they receive. This number can then be multiplied by the number of trees in a sample plot, and then extrapolated to entire forest areas in a reserve, a 86 country, or even the entire globe. The equations to calculate the amount of carbon are represented in a chart that has been approved by the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism. These measurements are constantly being refined as new studies test the validity of these estimates and create further equations to increase their accuracy. Ironically, conserving forests through carbon forestry requires cutting down trees. This destructive harvesting is necessary to actually measure the carbon contained in trees and plants in order to refine the way that carbon measurements are estimated for tree species. Cutting down trees to measure their carbon is the job of one of the forestry researchers that I met in Lilongwe. She focuses on a specific type of acacia tree, known as mnsangu or winter thorn (Faidherbia albida), which is commonly found in fields and gardens. Malawian farmers like mnsangu because this tree drops its leaves during the rainy season and so does not shade out the crops growing near it. Its leaves are especially high in nitrogen and so they provide valuable organic matter and nutrients to the soil just as food crops are being planted. During the dry season, when other deciduous trees lose their leaves, this tree sprouts new growth which provides both fodder for animals and a valuable source of shade when working to prepare fields for the next planting season. Valued for these multiple uses, these trees can grow quite large. Large, established trees like these are also targeted for use in carbon factor studies. Once a tree is cut down for the destructive harvest, the larger branches are separated from the main trunk. The densities of the different parts of the tree are recorded and core samples are taken from the trunk and largest branches. Samples from the recently cut trees are sent to a lab, weighed, placed in driers, and repeatedly re-weighed until they reach a constant mass, indicating that all moisture has been removed. These samples are used to calculate the dry mass fraction. This is an important number used to establish the ratio of fresh mass to dry mass so that the 87 amount of carbon present in any standing or lying deadwood for the different species can be calculated. To measure the amount of below-ground carbon in trees and plants, samples of the root system are also taken, weighed, and recorded. The field team digs up trees and their root systems to estimate the “root to shoot” ratio, meaning the amount of below-ground woody biomass trees have in their root systems compared to the above-ground branches and trunks. The samples from the same depth from different points in the sample plot are combined to create an average for the plot (Ryan, Williams, and Grace 2011). Based on this information, scientists can establish a basic ratio to estimate the amount of underground biomass a tree has based on its size above ground without digging up every tree within the sample plot. Creating the Baseline Scenario The most important number in any carbon offset project is the amount of greenhouse gases that will not be released into the atmosphere due to project activities. These are known as Net Emissions Reductions (NERs). NERs are measured in metric tonnes of carbon emissions (tCO2), and are equivalent to the amount of carbon credits which can then be sold. The NER is not the difference between the amount of carbon stored in the project area at the beginning and at the end of the project in thirty years. To calculate the NERs and carbon credits generated through a REDD+ project, the carbon developer has to be able to estimate the amount of future deforestation and forest degradation that would likely occur without the project and then compare that to the projected amount of carbon that will likely be kept in trees by the livelihood and development activities of the project. 88 This is accomplished through the creation of a baseline scenario and a project scenario. The baseline scenario is calculated using data from ecological surveys and remote sensing images of the project area. The project scenario requires estimating the amount of carbon emissions which will take place when the planned livelihood and conservation activities are implemented. The project scenario and baseline scenario can be visually represented on a graph in which the X-axis is time in years, the Y-axis is carbon emissions. The area between these two lines represents the amount of carbon emissions which will be avoided because of the carbon project. These NERs are converted into carbon offsets which can be sold on the carbon market. Figure 3: Graph Illustrating Net Emissions Reductions (NERs) Historical Scenarios Baseline Scenario CO 2 Emissions (Millions tCO ) Project Scenario 2 Year -15 (historical reference period) Year 1 (project begins) Net Emissions Reductions (NERs) Year 30 (project ends) Time (years) The number of NERs is calculated through the use of highly complex models with hundreds of variables. These models—and how to generate the component variables—are 89 described in very long documents which must be approved by a third party before any carbon credits can be sold. TGC’s methodology is 182 pages long. The model itself contains over 90 primary variables, each of which is comprised of multiple other variables. Most of these variables come from data generated during two important phases of creating the baseline scenario: creating initial carbon estimates using remote sensing and the creation of permanent sample plots in the project area. Both the remote sensing data and the permanent sample plots will be revisited throughout the life of the project to ensure that the carbon stocks are being conserved. Most of the work to create the baseline scenario of land use change and initial estimates of carbon stocks is done by imaging experts, computer modelers, and foresters in computer labs far from the actual project site. These experts rely on aerial photos to classify land type and land use patterns inside of the project area and in an adjacent reference area. The reference region serves as a control to compare the rates of deforestation, degradation, and land use change in the in the project area to calculate the impact of the project activities and to refine the initial estimates of project-related emissions reductions. The imaging experts use high resolution aerial photographs from specific time-intervals ten to fifteen years prior to the start of the project: one image from 0-1 years prior to the start of the project; one image from 2-5 years prior; one from 6-9 years prior; and one from 10-15 years prior. The quality and availability of the images impacts the precision of the estimates these imagers can generate. The modelers control for potential errors by creating discount rates if images for the area are not available, or if they are not of high enough resolution. For example, the estimated deforestation and degradation rates must be discounted by 10 percent if there are only four images available for the area (Terra Global Capital, LLC 2010). 90 For every photograph of the project and reference areas from each of the time intervals, the imaging experts categorize the land. Each photograph is divided into a grid pattern and labeled with an X- and Y-coordinate. Each of these grid-cells can be as small as one pixel by one pixel, and a single photograph may be hundreds of grid-cells across by hundreds long. Every grid-cell is then analyzed and categorized according to one of the following land use classifications: forests; wetlands; grassland; cropland; settlements including developed land, roads, and human settlements ‘of any size’; and other land, including “unmanaged land areas that do not fall into any of the other five categories” (Terra Global Capital, LLC 2010:14). The forest category includes both areas which have a sufficient amount of large trees and canopy cover to qualify as standing forests, as well as degraded forest areas targeted for reforestation efforts. Each grid-cell classified as forest area is then further divided into different forest strata based on the type of trees present, the density of the forest cover in that area, and the different ecological indicators like slope, soil composition, tree and other plant species present, and local climate. This stratification is the way that images of forests are used to estimate the amount of carbon in the forest itself, and hence the carbon credits that section of forest can generate. Once the specific forest strata are assigned, the imaging experts apply the appropriate carbon factor which corresponds to each type of strata. Once the carbon equivalencies of each grid-cell are listed, they can then be aggregated to generate an initial estimate of the carbon stocks in the project zone. These numbers can also be extrapolated to produce carbon stock estimates for any area which has been similarly mapped. This step is an important moment in the generation of carbon commodities since it creates equivalencies between units of forest and units of carbon. The identification of forest strata pictured in aerial photographs enables imaging experts to create representational maps of forests 91 and the carbon stocks therein. The grid-cell units with similar forest strata and carbon factor attributes then become interchangeable. In the project, this interchangeability is demonstrated in the way that biomass sample plots are then selected. The sample plots are selected by a computer program using a stratified sampling system to ensure that all of the different forest strata and non-forest land are represented (Terra Global Capital, LLC 2012). The number of sample plots is determined based on the degree of accuracy desired and the suspected accuracy of the of the forest strata classification generated by the imaging experts (Terra Global Capital, LLC 2010:49). While the physical location and proximity to villages is considered when projecting future land use change and deforestation, these factors are not considered when selecting the sample sites. All of this can be done without setting foot on the ground. However, eventually field teams will visit these plots to physically measure the carbon. Conducting the Biomass Survey A five-person field crew visits the sample plot sites selected by the computer program in order to take photos, record biomass measurements, and create permanent markers so that the same plot can be continually monitored and the carbon stocks periodically remeasured during the life of the project. At the beginning of the project, the initial carbon stock estimates are validated during these “ground-truthing” field visits and adjusted if necessary (Terra Global Capital, LLC 2010:30). Instead of generating the model and its component variables based on the information from the biomass plots, the data gathered during the field visit is used to check the model for accuracy. In the future, the permanent sample plots will be revisited so that the carbon stocks can be re-measured and the carbon credits generated by the project can be updated. Each crew has a crew leader, an assistant who is a trained forester, and three community workers. The process of measuring and calculating the biomass in the sample plots is incredibly complicated, and the 92 procedures that the field teams must follow are described in a separate document nearly fifty pages in length (Terra Global Capital, LLC 2012). The survey team pulls up in a Land Rover pickup truck. The research team is armed with clipboards, GPS units, and digital cameras. The accompanying park guards from the DNPW are clad in camouflage and armed with rifles which offer some protection against the elephant, buffalo, bush pigs, baboons and other wild animals living inside of the protected areas. The location of the plot has been selected by the modelers’ computer program, but the field team still has to record the location and mark the boundaries of the 25-square-meter plot. For each sample plot, the team records the GPS location and then buries a piece of metal rebar in the southwest corner as a permanent plot marker. The trees closest to one corner have a square of bark removed and the trunk painted brightly to serve as a visual indicator of the plot’s location. One member of the team generates a sketch of the plot which includes important markers like large trees or boulders, and directional notations indicate the relative direction to roads or villages. The sketch also includes all of the live trees that were measured, the location of sub-sample vegetation plots, and any standing or lying dead wood. Another team member takes photos in each of the cardinal directions in order to provide a visual of the plot. For each sample plot, the field team measures both the aboveground and belowground biomass (Terra Global Capital, LLC 2010:52). Calculating above ground biomass requires measuring the size of trees and other plants. For determining the aboveground biomass, each tree growing in the sample plot with a trunk larger than five cm in diameter must be measured. To do this, the field crew measures the diameter of the tree at breast height (DBH), or at a height of 1.3 meters. Each person in the field crew must be measured, while wearing the shoes they will wear while in the field, so that they know where the 1.3 meter mark falls on their bodies so that 93 measurements produced by different members of the team will be consistent. Each tree is measured and then marked with toilet paper so that no tree is counted twice. 10 This level of precision is necessary to ensure that carbon measurements are taken correctly and that they are repeatable when the team returns to remeasure these areas throughout the life of the project. However, this level of precision can create a weirdness all its own as procedures in the model attempt to control for the complications that exist in the world outside of the lab. Trees don’t grow in straight lines and their branches don’t always fit inside the boundaries of the biomass plots. While it may seem obvious that the trees wouldn’t necessarily grow in ways that fit the neatness of the model, there is a need to account for the differences between the ideal biomass plots as envisioned through the model and the actual biomass plots located in the protected areas. For example, the instructions for how to measure the trees are so detailed that they provide separate procedures for how to measure trees with large forking branches above the DBH, trees with large forks below the DBH, and for trees growing at odd angles or on a slope. If the tree is growing on the boundary of the plot, the team will have to decide if it is more than half inside of the plot and therefore include it in the survey, or if it is more than half outside of the plot, in which case they will ignore it (Terra Global Capital, LLC 2012:22). A second example is the way that the teams also measure the non-tree biomass of the other plants growing in the sample plot. Three random, one-meter diameter, circular sub-sample plots are marked within the plot. Within this circle, from the ground to a height of two meters, all the non-tree plants are cut down to the soil level. If a stick is on the ground, only the part of it 10 Toilet paper was chosen because it is locally available. For many Malawians it is an expensive luxury (one family friend requested toilet paper as a Christmas gift). Villagers with whom I spoke expressed varying degrees of concern and mistrust about the activities taking place during these biomass surveys, but several commented specifically on how odd it seemed to them that scientists were spending time wrapping expensive toilet paper around trees in a forest. 94 that falls inside of the sub-sample area is collected. Likewise, if a plant is growing inside of the sub-sample area but extends outside of the area, the parts outside of the area are cut off and discarded, and then the parts of the plant inside of the sub-sample plot is cut and collected. If the plant is dead, but still standing up, it is collected; dead plants that are lying down, small twigs, and leaf litter are not collected. The excess water is shaken off and this plant material is put into a gunny sack and then weighed. After the weight is recorded, one of the community workers cuts up the plant material in the sack into small, uniform pieces that are no larger than five square centimeters. A 100 gram sample of this material is taken, put in a plastic bag, labeled with the sample plot number and coordinates, and then sent to the lab to determine the dry mass and specific carbon content (Terra Global Capital, LLC 2012:19). The number of young trees in this sample plot is also recorded, but the saplings are not cut down (Terra Global Capital, LLC 2012:19). Next, the canopy cover is measured. The crew leader will select five trees which represent the average height of the canopy of the trees in the sample. Using basic trigonometry, the crew leader measures the height of each of these trees by positioning themselves far enough away from the tree that they can create a 45 degree angle from their eye level to the top of the tree. The tree’s height is then calculated by adding the distance from the crew leader to the tree plus their height at eye level, the level at which they were holding the clinometer. The canopy density is measured with a densitometer. The plot is divided into a grid of sixteen, three-by-three meter squares which are coded as full canopy, partial canopy, or no canopy/sky. Since many of these surveys take place during the dry season in June, July, and August when many deciduous trees have no leaves, field crews must estimate the growing season foliage. 95 Calculating the belowground biomass requires both soil sampling and sampling of the root systems of trees and plants. Soil biomass is calculated by taking soil samples from sample plots. The field team identifies sampling points on a grid-pattern within the sample plot, and a combination of surface samples and samples at specific depths are taken. The samples are taken back to the lab, dried, sifted, and then analyzed for carbon and nitrogen content (Ryan, Williams, and Grace 2011:424–426). In this way, the amount of carbon and other elements within the soil can be measured. The amounts of carbon in the different samples are then extrapolated to the entire sample plot based on the different soil types in the sampling area. These numbers are aggregated to calculate the total amount of carbon that is contained in the soil. This is an important part of the carbon accounting process since in some ecological zones, such as the miombo woodlands in Malawi, almost 60 percent of the carbon is stored in the soil (Walker and Desanker 2004:346). The belowground biomass for trees is estimated based on established calculations for a “root-to-shoot” ratio for different tree species (Terra Global Capital, LLC 2010:53–54). Once the biomass in each sample plot is measured it can be converted into carbon units. This is done by adding the above-ground, below-ground, and deadwood biomass. This number is then multiplied by a discount rate determined by the model to control for the margin of error and then finally multiplied by the carbon factor for that specific forest type. For all of the detail meant to guarantee precision of these measurements, the potential for massive cumulative error remains. The most fundamental measurements in a carbon project—the physical amount of carbon actually contained in the project area—can differ wildly. One study compared different data sets listing the carbon factor and root-to-shoot ratios which are used to estimate carbon stocks and found discrepancies of 51 percent to 149 percent between the highest 96 and lowest estimates. These discrepancies are not merely theoretical differences in methods, but translate to real gains or losses in the goals of the carbon project to sequester carbon, mitigate climate change, and alleviate poverty. As Gibbs et al. (2007) note, in Brazil this translates to a difference of 102.7 billion tCO2, equivalent to US$616.2 billion (at the price of US$6 per tonne) (Stephan 2012:631). 11 Furthermore, as meticulous as the procedures for measuring carbon may be, these procedures still have to be carried out by people in the field, and no amount of painstaking attention to detail is able to control all of the variable situations that arise during fieldwork. A year after they had started the field surveys, the field team still had only completed data collection in about half of the sample plots. Most of the remaining plots were in the remote areas on the eastern side of the Nyika Plateau. At least some of the areas had roads that were impassable during the rainy season, and so visits to those sites had to be postponed until the following dry season. 11 Even measurements as seemingly straightforward as the size of the protected areas where the project is to take place can vary wildly. For example, different project reports and official documents list different sizes for the protected areas. Nyika National Park is listed as occupying 3,134 square kilometers (1,210 square miles) (Cassells and Woodhouse 2010; Malawi Tourism 2013) or 3,200 square kilometers (Terra Global Capital, LLC and Total LandCare 2011; World Bank 2011). The size of Vwaza Marsh Wildlife Reserve is listed in different documents as 978 square kilometers (Terra Global Capital, LLC and Total LandCare 2011); 982 square kilometers (Anthony and Szabo 2011); 986 square kilometers (Malawi Tourism 2013); 1,000 square kilometers (Riley and Riley 2005:101); or 1,982 square kilometers (World Bank 2011). The size of Mkuwazi Forest Reserve demonstrated the most discrepancy, listed variously as six square kilometers (BirdLife International 2013; Dowsett-Lemaire, Dowsett, and Dyer 2001:546); 17.05 square kilometers (Department of Forestry 2009); 17.67 square kilometers (Chiotha and Kayambazinthu 2008); 17.7 square kilometers (Malawi Environment Endowment Trust 2009); 20.2 square kilometers (Nkhata Bay District Assembly 2009); and 27 square kilometers (Terra Global Capital, LLC and Total LandCare 2011). These discrepancies do not represent changes over time due to expansion or contraction of these areas, but instead reflect the range of official statistics which are cited in reports and policy documents. 97 In spite of the difficult roads and the chronic fuel shortages, the team had driven up to 120 kilometers every day to the sample plot sites, returning every night to stay in Rumphi boma. The lead researcher explained that the team did not want to camp in the bush and preferred to stay in town. This is understandable. Generally speaking, Malawians do not camp for fun or entertainment. There are wild animals in the bush. In and around the protected areas there are elephants, buffalo, lions, leopards, baboons and other primates as well as an array of large beetles, spiders (both poisonous and not), poisonous scorpions and centipedes, millipedes which are over one inch in diameter and a foot long, snakes (both poisonous and not), mosquitos, tsetse flies, and other biting insects. Although they had armed rangers to accompany them, it is not difficult to see why camping in these conditions would not be their first choice. The lead researcher also reported that the research team had experienced some trouble with the communities who they encountered while conducting the biomass surveys. In one case, several people had called the police when they saw the field team arrive in a truck with armed DNPW personnel and enter the forest with their GPS units, clip boards, and toilet paper. The carbon developer and the NGO partners expressed concern that the teams had not been fulfilling their obligations to meet with village leaders and explain to the communities what they were doing. The issues with the research team also raise the issue of who is considered local, and by whom. For the carbon developers, a research team lead by a Malawian researcher from the University of Malawi was a local researcher. To the villagers that they encountered, these researchers were viewed as outsiders. These researchers were educated Malawians from the middle or upper class who were used to living in town with (intermittent) electricity, cars, stoves, workers and other trappings of urban life. They had attended technical schools or universities, 98 and some had travelled to or lived in South Africa, the US, or the UK for study, work, or to attend conferences. Even though they were considered to be local researchers by the carbon developer and even some members of the NGO staff, to the villagers living near the protected areas the research team members were simply more outsiders from town, hired by donors to do research that would never really bring any positive impact to their lives. The research team was also accompanied by DNPW forest guards, whose job it is to enforce anti-poaching rules and arrest those who poach animals or trees from the national parks and reserves. That there were minimal interactions with the villagers in this situation is not surprising. In addition, mis-communications regarding standards and expectations for data reporting meant additional time delays and frustration for both project planners and the field team. TGC personnel did not understand many of the logistical constraints that are part of daily life in Malawi. The carbon developer’s forestry personnel expected that copies of the handwritten data sheets, the digital photos, and the GPS data would be sent electronically to the offices in San Francisco. This was almost impossible. In Malawi, it is difficult to send large files over email. Telecommunications are more expensive and less reliable than those in neighboring countries. Outside of the offices of foreign embassies or the large development and aid organizations in the largest cities, internet is only practical for sending emails and small Word or .pdf file attachments. Even in the commercial centers of large cities, internet connections are often too slow or too intermittent to routinely upload photographs or other large files. Although the Malawian research team had sent CDs and USB flash drives with the field survey data to the TGC offices, TGC was not used to dealing with the slow turnaround time which could jeopardize their schedule for getting the project market ready. 99 There had also been confusion about the proper data entry procedures. The TGC personnel estimated that it should take less than thirty minutes to enter the field data from each plot into templates on the computer. They did not understand why there were long delays between when the field team recorded the data in the field and when it was finally receive by the San Francisco offices. However, it took the lead researcher much longer than half an hour to complete the data entry for each sample plot. For one thing, the lead researcher had to enter the data twice, since the correct templates were not sent to her the first time, and she had to re-enter all of the same data into the correct template. She had also corrected some of the data based on her interpretation of the lengthy procedures that she was given by the carbon developer. She thought that she was being helpful by supplying these corrections to meet the written specifications in the operating procedures. Instead, she was reprimanded by the carbon developer’s forestry personnel for not supplying the raw data in unaltered form. In addition, the field team had lost the handwritten data sheets for nine plots—including the written field notes, sketches, and GPS coordinates. Moreover, GPS data from eleven sample plots was lost before the data it contained could be transferred to a computer. By the time I left Malawi in July 2012, project planners had both the GPS and hand-written data for less than half of the completed plot surveys, about a quarter of the total surveys planned for the project. These issues of mis-communication about expectations and logistical constraints can negatively impact the validity of the carbon estimates and put the entire carbon project at risk. In order to be certified to sell carbon, carbon developers create a rigorous, strict methodology to which all parties must adhere. This means that data collection and data reporting in the field in Malawi must meet the strict standards developed by American or European carbon developers; 100 standards that due to local context, infrastructure and circumstance may not be as feasible or reliable as they are in the US or Europe. Ironically, the more that TGC attempted to involve local research teams, the more likely they were to lose control of the strict enumerating practices needed to produce saleable carbon credits from the forests of Nyika and Vwaza. Losing this oversight meant compromising the validity and reliability of the certification process through which carbon is measured and converted into a saleable commodity. If this methodology is not strictly adhered to, the carbon credits generated from this project may not meet the standards to be sold on the carbon market, and the potential exchange value of the carbon storage potential in these forests may remain unrealized. Conclusion Forests have not always been identified as carbon sinks, nor were they historically valued as sources of carbon emissions which could be managed to maximize the production of carbon credits. The re-envisioning of forests as a key site of intervention vis-à-vis climate change is the result of specific histories of technology, policy, and practice. The act of accounting for carbon extends discursive practices of imagining forests as carbon sinks and translates these measurements into exchange value that transforms carbon into a commodity. Carbon credits must be imagined discursively before they can be produced materially, although it is the specific trajectories of technologies, policies, and practices—and networks of actors who operationalize them—that create the possibility of carbon commodities and carbon markets in the first place. The technical work performed by modelers, foresters, carbon developers, and field research teams to measure and enumerate carbon is an essential step in the production of carbon commodities. Carbon commodities come into being through this work, and cannot exist without 101 it. This work—the calculation of carbon factors, the creation of models, the detailed maps of forest and forest types generated by GIS experts, the field team’s creation of sample plots—is necessary to account for carbon and carbon storage in ways that translate the element carbon into individuated units and transforms the use value of carbon cycling into the exchange value of carbon offsets which can be exchanged on the market. Without this work, the carbon stored in trees and forests are worthless in terms of exchange value. The trees located outside of the project boundaries may have the same amount of carbon and potential for carbon storage as the trees within the project area, but the act of measuring and enumerating makes the project zone carbon available to market exchange in ways that carbon outside of the project zone is not. If forests and trees have not been measured and their carbon accounted for, they cannot be included in carbon projects. Even though they contain carbon in their biomass, the carbon in unmeasured trees and forests has no exchange value, and so they remain invisible to the market. The work of measurement and accounting is inseparable from the production of carbon commodities. 102 CHAPTER 5: “IT BECOMES SCIENTIFIC…” “We literally invent this stuff. It is not clean or pretty… A lot of this project document, timeline and work plan, it’s all guesswork…We generate these numbers. What we’re doing, it seems like a lot of guesswork, but then [the modelers] put it in their model and it becomes scientific.” (Carbon developer, February 15, 2012) This chapter describes how some of the most important numbers in a carbon project—the amount of carbon that the project is estimated to actually conserve and hence the number of saleable credits—are generated. The previous chapter described the way that current carbon stocks are measured and how the probable future rates of deforestation and degradation are estimated. This chapter describes the next step of this accounting process: how project planners estimate the amount of carbon emissions which will be avoided through a variety of livelihood and conservation activities which will take place within the project area with target communities. This is called the project scenario. This project scenario—represented by the lower line on the graph depicted in Figure 3 (page 89)—represents an important point of contact between the project developer, the modelers who produce the numbers, and local experts who provide information about the target communities. Most of the variables which go into creating the project scenario are based on social indicators and the projected future success of the livelihood activities associated with the project. The quote at the beginning of this chapter refers to this process as a site of production of both carbon credits and some of the very specialized knowledge that is necessary to produce them. The gap between the representation and the world it is supposed to represent creates spaces for the production of expert forms of knowledge and expertise (Mitchell 2002). On the one hand, guesswork and estimation “become scientific” as they are transformed through the model into 103 viable statistics and variables. The creation of the project scenario involves operationalizing the recursive nature of the model as it is used to make social and ecological life “fit” into the model and to craft prescriptive policies locally and internationally. On the other hand, the creation of the project scenario produces expert knowledge that lends legitimacy to an otherwise imprecise and emergent set of practices. One of the most specialized, technical and abstract processes in carbon projects is measuring the impact of human behavior on emissions reductions and quantifying those impacts in terms of units of carbon. The work necessary to make people’s activities equivalent to greenhouse gas emissions requires specialized knowledge, practices, and tools. One of these specialized tools is a project matrix which describes the related livelihood project activities, sub-activities, broken down by year over the life of the 30-year project. This matrix mediates the form that social data about livelihoods and community resource use can take, generating the necessary social indicators and translating them into a form that can be put into the model. In the same way that the grid-cell acts as the unit of measurement which equates physical forest spaces with carbon units and makes them interchangeable, the grid-cells of the project planning matrix make the activities of people over time equivalent to carbon emissions. The Model and the Matrix What is the connection between the graph depicting the project and baseline scenarios, the world which they are supposed to represent? How are social and ecological data generated and translated into points on this graph? And how do estimates, guesswork, and uncertainty “become scientific?” One of the ways that social and ecological life is fitted to the form of carbon projects is through the creation of project documents and methodologies. These 104 methodologies and project documents describe what data are going to be collected, how it will be collected, and how it will fit into the overall written carbon project. In this way, the production of social and ecological data is shaped by this prescriptive methodology. At the same time, the data that goes into this methodology is produced by local experts and project planners as they encounter this model. Similar to the prescriptive and recursive statistics which shaped forest management and practice described in the last chapter, the model is a form of representation which can remake social relations and the world in its own image, although it never does so completely. James Carrier and Paige West (2009) have argued that in order to understand this process, we need to examine the microprocesses of policy creation and decision-making to provide a nuanced understanding of how these virtualisms reorder the world in their image but are at the same time subject to an array of contingencies and compromises. One way that vision becomes execution is through the mobilization of specific forms—for example models and matrices—which are encountered and reproduced during project planning meetings. The form itself can be the primary mechanism through which encounters between the representation, the world it is supposed to represent, and the actors who engage with both are mediated (Riles 2000; 2006). Studying the way that actors interact with each other and with the form can expose one moment in which models are enacted as both descriptive and prescriptive; in other words, how depictions of the way the world is (or the way that we think it is) become a guide for how the world ought to look (MacDonald and Corson 2012). In this case, the data that is fed into the model must be in a specific form that is accessible to the form of the model, just as the data that is produced from the model must be in a specific form which is legible to carbon verifiers and investors. This translation makes different projects in different places across the globe legible to 105 investors, to policy makers, and project validators, enabling the vision to be operationalized in different ways. However, as actors encounter these forms, the forms themselves are subjected to the partial perspectives and interests of the actors. At the same time that the model is contouring the version of Nyika and Vwaza that will be presented in the project documents and official reports, the particular, situated knowledge of the actors involved in this process is in turn shaping the outcome of the project scenario by providing the estimated data that will be used to project the future carbon emissions scenarios and the amount of saleable carbon offsets that will be generated by the project. The Project Scenario The project scenario is calculated by combining the potential emissions reductions estimates from each of the individual project activities. There are a number of livelihood projects and related activities that are essential aspects of the actual carbon plan which will target the communities in order to reduce pressure on the natural resources within the project area in the adjacent protected areas. These additional projects include: projects to promote improved agricultural practices and irrigation; livestock (goat) projects for improved nutrition and income generation; planting community woodlots for fuel and building materials; building and distributing fuel-efficient woodstoves to decrease the need for wood fuel; and creating income generating opportunities through increased sale of locally grown agricultural products and honey from beekeeping as well as creating value-added natural products such as jam and juices made from wild fruits or dried mushrooms gathered by permit from the protected area (Terra Global Capital, LLC and Total LandCare 2011). There will also be increased patrols of the protected area by both the DNPW and by the community, a point to which I will return in Chapter 6. All of these activities were paid for from the carbon project budget, which was funded through 2013 106 with a grant from USAID and private investments. After the project completes the verification through the VCS and CCB in 2014, these activities will be funded by the sale of carbon credits. The project scenario is created by estimating how these activities will contribute to the conservation of forests and carbon stocks. This is done by filling out the work plan, a large Excel matrix which details the component parts or activities of each livelihood project, broken down by year for the thirty year duration of the project. The project scenario line on the graph includes the impacts that all of these related activities are predicted to have on the deforestation rate. Likewise, leakage is also included in calculations of making the project scenario. Leakage is the carbon emissions resulting when the project causes certain activities, such as cutting timber, to move from the project area to an area that is less patrolled, or when project activities themselves generate carbon emissions, for example when transporting value-added produce to regional markets. The leakage must be subtracted from any NERs generated by the project. Once this is done, the leakage is calculated and then subtracted from the project-related emissions reductions. The project scenario line will be revised throughout the project to reflect the implementation of the livelihood activities and their impact on the carbon stock. In this chapter, I focus on the project scenario for two reasons. First, the creation of this line represents the work that is necessary in order to translate social life into carbon equivalents. The project scenario is a representation of development projects and community development activities that are translated into emissions reductions. It is not that the project scenario is any less abstract than the baseline scenario. Both projections are representations. Both the project scenario and the baseline scenario are generated from a series of variables and equations which are part of a project methodology designed to make non-equivalent things equivalent and calculable in ways that make them available to market exchanges. Through this methodology, 107 trees and soils become carbon stocks and carbon credits while project activities and behavior changes become emissions reductions. However, while there is a certain amount of flattening which occurs to make the carbon in soils equivalent to the carbon in tree and plants, and to make future carbon equivalent to present carbon, extrapolating this equivalency to social indicators and development projects requires additional abstraction. To say that a microcredit project or a livestock breeding program will result in a certain amount of emissions reductions per unit— entrepreneurs trained or goats distributed—is more abstract than creating carbon equivalencies for methane and other greenhouse gases. At the same time, however, the model is designed to create these equivalencies, and to make social and ecological life—community meetings, development projects, forests, and trees—into carbon units that can be read on and against the graph projecting the project and baseline scenarios. Second, this is the line that requires the most feedback between the community organizer, the project developer, and the modelers who crunch the numbers. The project scenario line requires initial local input gleaned from rural social surveys and the meetings that I describe below between the community representative and the project planner. The numbers that are placed into the project’s work plan matrix are generated from conversations between the project planner and community rep. These numbers are then fed into the models and equations developed by modelers in the US. The baseline scenario is dependent upon experts’ interpretation of ecological data, GIS photos, and remote sensing data; however, the project scenario is an important point of contact between local knowledge, the project developer, and the modelers. In other words, this line represents a virtualizing moment because it demonstrates how the model is operationalized through the actors who fit social and ecological life into forms 108 amenable and legible to the model. At the same time, this is a moment in which the model itself is subjected to interpretation or translation by the actors who are engaging with it. Ethnographic Encounters – Carbon Project Meetings I arrived at TLC’s offices at 9:00 am. The offices are located near the center of Lilongwe in a dedicated building situated in a small group of similar, new buildings which house other international and faith-based NGOs. Like most offices and homes in Lilongwe, this building has a wall around it topped with barbed wire, sharp metal spikes, or large pieces of broken glass for security. Two guards were playing bawo in the gatehouse when I arrived. One escorted me across the small parking lot to the front door, and instructed me to go to the reception area. The reception area is a desk inside the front door across from a short row of padded armchairs against the wall where guests wait for appointments. I signed the visitor’s ledger at the reception desk, and the receptionist took me upstairs to the room where the meeting was going to take place. The office is typical of a well-funded, foreign NGO. The walls are painted a cool, greyblue with white trim and ceiling. There are two desks with laptop computers and a shared printer on one side of the room. Behind the desks, file cabinets and bookshelves stand on either side of a large white board covered with to-do lists. These include today’s meeting as well as administrative tasks for the carbon project and the larger biodiversity project of which it is a part. The community organizer and the carbon developer are already sitting down in the small meeting space set up between the desks and the window. The carbon developer remembered me from a previous meeting, and she hugged me hello. Duncan—the NVA chairperson and community organizer from Rumphi who had suggested that I attend these meetings—shook my hand. I greeted him in the Malawian custom by asking about his journey to Lilongwe, and inquiring after his family and after our mutual friends in the communities where he worked. The 109 three of us sat in low chairs surrounding a coffee table positioned in front of the window air conditioning unit. Other than upscale tourist hotels, the USAID offices and the US Embassy, this was the only place I visited in Malawi that had air conditioning. There was a small, portable projector on the table, projecting the images from the project developer's laptop onto the wall. They all agreed that I could attend the meetings. The project developer asked if I would be willing to take minutes for the meeting, since I was already taking field notes. 12 I agreed. Then we began. Generating Data At the start of the meeting, the carbon developer explained that the goal for the day was to generate the numbers needed to create the project scenario line by estimating how the different livelihood and conservation activities planned as part of the overall project will contribute to the 12 This chapter is based on participation observation over several days of planning and budget meetings that I attended at the invitation of Duncan, the NVA chairperson and the community organizer, and with the permission of the carbon developer from TGC. It is also based on conversations that I had both in-person and over email with the project consultant. At her request, I provided a shorter version of my field notes to the project consultant and to TGC as meeting minutes. These notes were also made available to the other project partners involved in the meetings, including the DNPW, TLC, and to the community organizer. The TGC consultant told me that these would serve as minutes for the meetings, but might also be used as supporting documents to illustrate the extent of the consultation process with local representatives. Ironically, while I read these field notes as a demonstration of the gaps in the model and accounting procedures, TCG used the same set of notes to illustrate the comprehensiveness of their consultation process and the thoroughness of the level of detail specified in the project. This discrepancy illustrates the extent to which the guesswork really does become scientific—at least for the purposes of the project creation—through the model, since TGC used these meeting minutes as a way to validate the method behind the estimation process in order to give it more reliability. I should also note here that this could be done without any visits by the carbon developer at all. Other projects omit this step altogether. TGC is making a concerted effort to visit the field site and consult “locals”. This was something that TGC’s carbon developer told me she was particularly proud of, since she had to convince the financial personnel that this was a necessary part of project development and deserved a place in their limited budget. 110 conservation of forests and carbon stores. The carbon developer and the community representative would be estimating how each of the different project-related activities might affect the carbon stock. This was done by filling out a large Excel-type matrix called the work plan, which details the component parts and sub-activities of each livelihood project, broken down by year. The numbers from the work plan would then be used to fill in a second matrix of project scale-up activities in which the percentage completion of each component of the different livelihood projects is entered for each year of the project. The carbon developer projected these matrices onto the wall of the office so that the community organizer and I could see it. These spread sheets became the focus of the meeting, as we all turned our attention to filling in the empty boxes of the matrices. The project ramp-up matrix was over one hundred columns wide and thirty rows long, and it had the activities identified in the work plan on the X-axis at the top, and years zero to thirty along with the corresponding calendar years from 2010 to 2040 on the Y-axis. The information contained in these two matrices translates the livelihood activities—and the changes in behavior that they are supposed to produce—into equivalent emissions reductions. This makes it possible for modelers to estimate the impact that each specific sub-project will have on lowering emissions rates for each year of the project. As an example, for the livestock production activity, TLC plans to start distributing goats to community members in the third year of the project; by year five they will have distributed thirty goats; by year seven, forty goats; and so on until the final year of the project in 2040. The introduction of the goats is supposed to provide an alternative livelihood to people involve cutting down trees or illegally taking resources from the reserves. The emissions reductions expected from this activity are adjusted to account for the additional methane emissions from the manure of the goats. A second example is 111 Table 2: Sample of project planning matrix based on one used by the carbon developer and the community organizer to estimate carbon equivalents of livelihood projects. This sample is adapted from the author's field notes. 1. Improved Governance Project Year 2. Collection of Non-Timber Forest Products 2.1. 1.1. 1.2. submacaCalendar strengthen strengthen project damia Year land village 1-3; 1- nut tenure NRMCs 4; etc. production 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 XX% XX% XX% XX% XX% XX% XX% XX% XX% XX% XX% 30 2040 XX% 2.2. bee keeping and honey processing 112 2.3. mushroom collection subprojects 2.4; 2.5; etc. 3. Creation of Enterprises sub3.1. projects small3.2.eco3.3; scale tourism 3.4; livestock etc. the creation of village woodlots to provide the community with wood for fuel and building purposes. Once the woodlots are established, people will be able to meet their needs with trees they planted rather than getting them from the protected areas. Once the project planners know how many trees can be planted each year and when those trees will be ready for use by community members, they can estimate how many trees inside of the protected area will be saved, and therefore estimate the amount of carbon which will not be emitted into the atmosphere. These numbers becomes variables in calculating and graphing the emissions expected under the project scenario. In contrast to the specificity and detail given in the methodology for the generation of the baseline scenario, there is much less detail given to the procedures to generate the data for the project scenario. Directions for conducting rural appraisals, social surveys, and consulting with “community authorities” or “local experts” are described on approximately forty pages of the methodology. Half of these forty pages are dedicated to the description of the procedures for translating social data into variables and the formulas in the model (Terra Global Capital, LLC 2010). The majority of the project scenario description concerns what types of numbers and narratives must be generated, the questions that they must answer, and the specific metrics to which these data points refer, but still lacks the specificity and precise detail of the procedures for generating the data for the baseline scenario. Therefore, while the methodology includes information about the sampling method for conducting the social surveys, it does not detail who counts as a “local expert,” or how many of these experts should be consulted to generate the numbers for the matrix. By comparison, the procedures for generating the baseline scenario take almost fifty pages of the methodology and are replete with narrative descriptions detailing how each step of the process should proceed (see Chapter 4). 113 One of the first project activities they discussed was income generating activities from small-scale beekeeping and macadamia nut production. The carbon developer said that this number was zero in 2010, meaning that beekeeping had not yet started. Then she reconsidered this, saying, “well, maybe not zero. It has already started, so maybe not.” Duncan agreed, saying “Yah, it is already started,” and he went on to describe the current actions of extension officers and the community groups. The project developer said that they have also started macadamia nut production, too, so maybe the number should be more like five percent of the goal in the first years. She typed this number in, and continued to type numbers down the column for each subsequent year, with gradual increases. Duncan agreed, saying that it should increase by ten percent yearly because as people use these new projects and programs, other people will see this opportunity, and they will rush to adopt it. He said that is his guess. These estimates were not based on the number of people or households currently involved in these activities in the target areas. Nor was there any discussion about the actual numbers of new people or households would have to participate in order to achieve an annual increase of ten percent. The project developer repeated that it is “total guess work.” The community organizer agreed that there had “not been a study,” but nevertheless responded, “But I live there, I work with the communities, I work with them every day. So I know a little bit.” The project developer said that this is just a “big picture,” that the developers are just trying to get everything in place so that they can sign the carbon agreement and have it certified by the time the initial project funding ends. She reiterated that this entire process is “kind of a guessing game, really.” The next item on the matrix was the strengthening of local institutions, referring to the community-based natural resource management groups and the umbrella organizations that represent the communities in dealings with the DNPW. The project developer started out by 114 asking the community organizer about the relative sizes of the NVA, the group he represented, and a similar group forming in Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve, a protected area in the Central Region. The carbon project was providing training and financial support to the DNPW and community organizers in Nkhotakota with the hope of expanding the carbon project to other protected areas in Malawi as well. Since both areas will eventually be incorporated into the carbon project, both had to be considered when filling out the spreadsheets. Although Duncan had only met the Nkhotakota organizer once, and despite the very real differences in culture, language, size, population density, and ecology between the Nyika-Vwaza and Nkhotakota, 13 as the community organizer for the NVA, Duncan was expected to act as the expert for all of the communities who will be included in the project. Duncan suggests they can say that this is 60 percent achieved in Year One, since the NVA was already formed but the association in Nkhotakota was still organizing. 14 The project developer accepts this and types this into the excel file. She also noted that they do not have the operating budget for Nkhotakota and suggested that they simply double the budget that they generate for the NVA. Throughout the meeting, there were moments of discontinuity in which the numbers generated make sense in terms of the model, but did not make sense in real life. For example, one planned activity included planting community woodlots to meet demand for firewood and building materials in order to reduce the pressure on the trees in the protected areas. The project 13 Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve is located in the forested hills near Lake Malawi in the Central Region. The people speak ChiChewa, are matrilineal, and a significant portion of the population identifies as Muslim. The ecosystem in Nkhotakota is different as well, since the altitude is much lower, hotter, and drier than Nyika-Vwaza. Its proximity to Lake Malawi means that there are different resource-use patterns and pressures which include felling hardwood trees to carve dugout canoes and to carve curios for the tourists visiting the lake. 14 For further discussion about the organizing activities of these groups and their role in the carbon project, please see Chapter 7. 115 developer noted that trees planted in small, individual woodlots near people's homes do not count for the offset project. To generate the project scenario they only counted the trees planted on community land, since this was the only tree planting sanctioned in the project’s carbon accounting methodology. When it was time to enter the percentage of the tree planting project which would be accomplished each year, the carbon developer and community organizer were unsure what values to insert. The carbon developer remarked that it was difficult to know how much they would complete each year, since the “woodlots could technically increase forever, unless there is an issue of land.” This is an odd statement considering that one of the primary motivations for planning the carbon project in these areas is increasing encroachment on protected areas as people search out additional agricultural land. Although this was an offhand remark, this example illustrates the distance between what is imaginable within the discursive space of the representational model but not at all possible in the world which it is supposed to represent. Even when “real” numbers or best estimates were available, they are tweaked so that they fit into the form of the matrix. For example, activities to increase community patrols and community understanding of the project’s conservation goals are planned as part of the effort to strengthen local institutions involved in natural resource management. When asked about this activity, the community organizer replied that for their organization they need to strengthen the NRCs by “building NRC capacity.” He said that they need trainings for the NRC members, although he did not specify the type of training needed. The project developer asked him about a timeframe, since the Excel file is broken down by year. The community organizer responded that the timeframe is ongoing, since capacity building is continual. He explained that the communities hold elections every two or three years and so there are always new members that 116 need to be trained. The project developer agreed with his point, but said that at some point they have to write that 100 percent of this activity has been achieved, even if the activities are still ongoing. She said they don't want to “sell ourselves short” by saying that they can’t reach the goal of capacitating people, since any number less than 100 percent will negatively impact the estimate of how much carbon will be offset by this specific activity. She reminds him that the percentage of completion for each project activity should be based on the indicators identified and listed in the project work plan, not on if 100 percent of the NRC members are actually trained or not. He asked her what she thinks the numbers should be. They agreed on a percentage and a timeframe and the project developer types it into the matrix. In this case, the community organizer was the best person to give the most accurate numbers to answer this question. He was explaining the way that the umbrella organization and the village-level NRCs work. The numbers that he initially provided are perhaps one of the most accurate and sophisticated estimates generated at any time during the meeting. Since he organizes the elections and conducts the trainings, he is the best person to provide this estimate. However, his version of community organizing does not fit into the model, so instead of an ongoing process, educating the community and building capacity become falsified benchmarks which need to be—and can be—achieved. However, in a different column concerning ongoing education for communities about conservation and comanagement, a number less than 100 percent completion rate was acceptable. The community organizer told the project developer that communities are educated about the comanagement agreements as the agreements are created and put in place. While this has already taken place in the Nyika and Vwaza areas, he added that there is a need to constantly remind community members that the agreement is still in force and to reiterate their 117 responsibilities as outlined in the agreement. The project developer asked if it would be better to leave the number at 90 percent for some years, to account for this constant need to revisit this topic. The community organizer agreed that this would be good. The project developer reiterated that it takes time to get to this point of understanding in the communities, so it may not reach 100 percent for many years, implying that education and outreach will continue to take place after the project has ended. “OK,” she said and she typed in a long column of 90 percents into the matrix. These numbers had more to do with what forms of information the model permitted than it did the veracity or accuracy of the information specified. Investors, Projects, and Communities The emphasis that this specific carbon developer places on the ex-ante estimations make these projects more legible to potential investors who prefer to have 30-year projections in-hand prior to the beginning of the project activities. Since these estimates will be iteratively refined over the lifetime of the project, the amount of NERs represented by the project scenario line may wildly fluctuate depending on the accuracy of these initial guesses. 15 According to her, the emphasis on ex-ante calculations is what makes TGC more market-based and investor-focused. TGC will refine and adjust the amount of carbon credits during the required monitoring of carbon stock throughout the life of the project, the same as competing carbon developers. However, it is the detail of the project scenario—of the estimates generated in the meetings described above—which results in better estimation of potential carbon stocks, and therefore it gives investors more confidence. This is in contrast to other carbon developers who may make 15 Even if all of the livelihood project targets are met, the actual amount of carbon sequestered could vary considerably from the estimates due to a host of factors including natural fires, ecological succession, and changes in ecology due to climate change. 118 initial estimates of potential carbon sequestration, but who generally wait until after the project activities have begun to measure their effects against a baseline. So from its very inception, the methodology is designed to provide long-term projections in order to reduce uncertainty and investor risk. This approach helps TGC out-compete their rivals in the carbon development sector. The ability to attract investors makes a real difference in the outcome of the projects as other carbon developers in Malawi—such as Plan Vivo in Mkuwazi Forest Reserve—have failed to locate buyers for carbon once their offsets are taken to market (see Chapter 8). Additionally, the drivers and project activities listed in the matrix implicitly reinforce the idea of the community as the site for interventions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For example, part of the creation of the project scenario includes a leakage assessment, so that any carbon emitted as the result of project activities is accounted for and deducted from the estimated net emissions reductions. In these model, there is no way to account for other agents or contingencies that would affect the carbon stock, such as policies which favor commercial farms, the history of tobacco farming, or the existence of rubber or sugar plantations in the area. Although there is a space in the thirty-year project activities matrix to account for the potential emissions of a bus to transport honey and juice products to regional market centers, there is no space to account for the carbon emissions generated by TGC developers and validators as they travel to and from Malawi to perform the required monitoring, reporting, and verification of the carbon stocks during the project planning phase and over the life of the project. 16 In this way, carbon offsets take attention away from the patterns of resource use and fossil fuel consumption in industrialized countries and shift the focus of intervention to rural, forest16 I should also add that it does not include the carbon emissions that I—or any of the other social scientists engaged in research about this carbon project—generated in travelling to this area. 119 dependent people in the global south who are destroying forests. This does little to address histories of colonization and resource extraction which have caused the carbon crisis in the first place, and reinforces existing narratives of local, poor people as the culprits of environmental degradation (Lohmann 2008). Creating Categories Since there is no single standard or template for voluntary carbon projects, projects which have been approved to sell carbon become important guideposts to the creation of additional projects as well as the policies which will regulate the carbon trade in the future. Carbon developers use the best practices and written reports from established projects as guides to create additional projects. For carbon developers, using existing project documents as an unofficial template helps reduce the amount of guesswork needed to generate the data and reports necessary to get a new project approved to sell carbon. However, it also means that the categories of land, people, and emissions-reducing project activities become enshrined in policy documents as they are used again and again. Policy-makers and the UN’s working groups look to established projects to craft recommended guidelines for REDD+ practices in the absence of any formal policies. As we started to fill out the project matrices during the meeting, the project developer told us that we would be using another project from South Asia as a template for the Malawi project. This other REDD+ project had already been approved and it had been written to address deforestations patterns similar to those in Malawi. The project developer and the community organizer consulted the South Asia work plan multiple times while they were filling in the matrices in the Malawi project documents. If they were unsure about something, the developer would switch the screen to the South Asia document and they would base their projection off of 120 the numbers they found there. For some items, she copied some numbers from the South Asia project into the Malawi project directly. While some of this information was modified to fit the Malawi project, many of the numbers from the “percentage effectiveness” and the timeline for “scaling up” project activities were literally cut and pasted from one project document matrix into another. This practice can lead to legibility problems when the contexts are so different. One issue that came up repeatedly was whether the term village forest areas or community forests was applicable in the Malawian project. The methodology which had been developed to promote the conservation of forests had used the village forest area as a key term which informed the creation of variables in the model. In the South Asia project, forests under community protection on community land, known as village forest areas, were the targets for the project; in the Malawian case, the carbon sinks were inside the protected areas, and the targeted communities outside of the protected area boundaries. The social surveys for both the South Asia project and the Malawi project posed questions about village forest areas, and the responses were to be quantified in specific ways in order to provide data for the model. In the South Asian case, the village forest areas were the forests being targeted for carbon development. Malawi’s village forest areas are communally held spaces on communal land; they are not being targeted for carbon development in the TGC project and will only be used to reduce the pressure on the forests inside of the protected area. This became problematic when those categories do not easily map onto other project areas. While this may seem like a simple linguistic issue easily remedied by changing a few words in the project documents, this points to the gaps which occur when the models and matrices created to represent a simplified version of the world are also used to shape 121 interventions in that world. When the representation and the world do not map onto each other exactly—which they never fully can—gaps in linguistic terminology point to these disjunctures. This example also points to the recursive nature of the model and the system that it is supposed to represent. As people like the carbon developer and Duncan sit in a room and fit the social and ecological surroundings of Nyika and Vwaza into matrices, they are helping to enact the representation in the world, since the project activities will be shaped by these initial estimates of their expected, future outcome. The numbers for the South Asia project were generated in a similar fashion to the numbers for the Malawi project, meaning that guesswork from one project is being used to temper the uncertainties of guesswork in another. This illustrates the effect of a model, in this case the project matrix, in translating guesswork into statistics that can be used to describe the project itself, but that is also (re-)used as a blue print for other projects, since the creation of carbon commodities requires not only the commensurability of greenhouse gas emissions, but of the social and ecological conditions as well. Even though the actions and livelihood projects are supposed to be crafted to meet the needs of the target populations and attend to the specifics of individual projects, the projects themselves become as commensurable as the commodities which they were supposed to produce. The Malawi project itself will likely be used as a similar template in the future development of TGC’s other carbon projects elsewhere in Africa, Asia, and Central and South America. This has repercussions for the creation of national and international REDD+ policies. The working groups that contribute to REDD+ policy negotiations base their recommendations on best practices and lessons learned in the field during the creation of REDD+ projects. There are no control REDD+ pilot projects that are crafted by the working groups. Any and all projects are 122 considered as sources of information to create international guidelines and standards for future REDD+ projects. These best practices are meant to be the initial steps towards crafting national and international REDD+ policies. As new carbon projects are being developed, the best practices from these are incorporated into international policy discourse through their circulation at regional and international meetings. The project developer had recently attended a meeting about REDD+ in Africa. She had been one of the keynote speakers and had highlighted the Malawi project during a well-attended plenary session on Agriculture and REDD+. She estimated that there were between 500 and 1000 people in the audience. These ideas are circulated amongst professionals, and may be incorporated piece-meal or wholesale into the creation of carbon projects and REDD+ policies as they are being written and implemented across the globe. The carbon consultants with whom I spoke were keenly aware of their role not only as developers of carbon commodities, but also as key players in the creation of carbon markets and the policies that would shape them. Within the small professional circle of carbon developers, those with whom I spoke understand the importance of self-policing and reporting improprieties and ethical violations. Often the carbon agreements are so complex, and the situations of each project so unique, only insiders would be able to discern any improprieties. During one meeting, the carbon developer continually pointed out nuances in a project that she was reviewing that created opportunities for corruption. She lamented that “we are the carbon developer, who everyone paints as the freakin’ bad guys, and I feel like I am the police” (personal communication, November 12, 2012). Another carbon developer told me that the success or failure of individual projects now could send negative signals to potential investors and policy makers and therefore negatively impact the expansion of the carbon market in the future. The 123 project developer told me that there is no “rule book for any of this” and that because REDD+ and the voluntary carbon were so new, “we can’t show them [policy makers] a guide book and say here, this is the case.” But she continued, “We want this to work. We want this to happen. Malawi is our most advanced project in Africa” (Interview, February 15, 2012). Currently, one of the biggest debates within the REDD+ sector from a project and policy standpoint is how the ongoing creation of national REDD+ policies and national carbon accounts will impact existing REDD+ projects. Carbon developers see the REDD+ projects that they are creating as part of an effort to influence the shape and development of the emerging carbon market and the policies and regulations that will guide this market in the future. As Malawi and other countries across the globe attempt to craft national climate change policies and REDD+ strategies, current carbon projects that are on the ground or under development serve as an important source of information. Often, this is because assemblages and networks of actors who are involved in creating these projects are also active in environmental policy creation. In Malawi, many of the same individuals who have been involved in bringing carbon projects into the country are also involved in creating REDD+ policy. For example, one individual who worked closely as a country representative for the UNEP was also involved in writing feasibility studies for payments for ecosystem services projects in Malawi and was the chairperson of an organization involved in bringing a pilot carbon project in a forest reserve in northern Malawi. In addition, this same individual coordinates a group that educates national leaders on environmental policy and decision-making, and is currently working with a group of researchers conducting the REDD-readiness study which will guide Malawi’s national carbon accounting policy. 124 As Malawi and other countries across the globe attempt to craft national climate change policies and REDD+ strategies, current carbon projects that are on the ground or under development serve as an important source of information. However, carbon estimates from established projects, like the one that TGC is developing, may be aggregated to create a national carbon account of forest carbon in Malawi. Some of the more established methods for mapping carbon stores used by TGC and other carbon developers will be considered when deciding the best way to measure and map national carbon resources. These numbers, which began as estimates during meetings between two individuals will end up as important statistics in the national carbon account which will in large part determine the amount and form of climate aid that Malawi can expect from the UN and World Bank. Thus, the numbers and categories generated during the meetings described above are already becoming part of ongoing policy discussions. Conclusion In discussing the making of these models and methodologies, I do not mean to discount the difficulty and hard work involved in creating them. Huge amounts of time, money, and knowledge are invested in creating the comprehensive and complicated methodologies which are required to be certified to sell carbon offsets. Nor are the carbon developers involved in creating the model indifferent to the complexities of the world that they are trying to represent through their efforts. In fact, the complexity of the methodology and the model themselves attest to the concern of those involved with trying to account for diverse social and ecological realities. But these models produce more than just information about the amount of carbon that this project is expected to keep in trees and forests. The matrices used to create the project scenario take the seemingly endless complexity of the real world and organize it into categories that can 125 be measured and compared. The matrices are used to produce equivalencies between nonequivalent things, such as forests and communities in Cambodia and those in Malawi, by creating similar categories which can be measured, compared, and contrasted. The form of the model—its categories, the types of data that need to be filled in, and the way in which that data is transformed into units, narratives, and numbers which fit within it—contours the way in which data collection is designed, the type of data which is sought, how that data is analyzed, and the way that it enters into scientific discourse. The model becomes not only a representation of the world but also the lens through which the world is viewed, questioned, measured, analyzed, understood, written about, and acted upon by different actors. But models do this only in-so-far as they are operationalized by people and institutions that create, use, and circulate them. So my point in this chapter is not to discount models entirely. Indeed, what I have created in the preceding pages is a sort of model, a simplified version of how carbon comes to be represented and modeled in science, stripped of its complexity to render it more readable to a particular audience. The irony is not lost on me. Rather, I have shown how models come to be: how they are created, and how even the most “scientific” processes are subject to the social contexts in which they are made, even as the model itself structures this process as it is made to “work” by those who use, make, and refer to it. The model is one virtual moment in which social and ecological life are categorized and translated into forms which make them more amenable to intervention by carbon developers, investors, and policy makers. The creation of carbon projects and carbon markets is an emergent process in which guesswork becomes scientific, and in which established projects become the blue prints for the creation of national and regional carbon policies. What the carbon developer taps into when she says the process “becomes scientific” is the encounter with the form which 126 generates the expert knowledge as well as the statistics needed in order to create a project that investors will believe is a sound risk; that project validators can read as comprehensive and reliable model which can and will work to sequester carbon; and that policy makers can access to build national carbon policies. 127 CHAPTER 6: PEOPLE, PROTECTED AREAS, AND PRODUCING CARBON In this chapter, I focus on the encounters between communities, the DNPW, and the environment in Vwaza Marsh Wildlife Reserve to understand the social relationships through which carbon commodities are expected to be produced. The production of carbon offsets requires that people conserve forests. In Vwaza, this means that communities must abide by the comanagement agreement and curtail their use of resources within the reserve. It also means that the DNPW must increase the enforcement of the comanagement agreement. The carbon credits will be produced through the interactions of the DNPW and the communities as they work together—or against each other. As different actors are expected to embrace market principles and conservation friendly practices to produce carbon commodities, they do so in the context of complex relationship with other actors and with the resources in question. The DNPW considers taking any resources out of the reserve without a permit to be poaching. This includes cutting trees and hunting animals, both of which are explicitly forbidden in the rules and regulations of the reserve and as codified in the comanagement agreement. Due to lack of capacity—primarily lack of funding, personnel and equipment—the DNPW is unable to totally enforce the rules sanctioning resource use and extraction from the protected areas. People who were evicted from these areas routinely enter the protected areas to gather a wide variety of timber and non-timber tree resources and to hunt. Sometimes the DNPW catches and arrests them; sometimes they do not. At times, this relationship has turned violent, as communities have on several occasions attacked or killed DNPW personnel, and DNPW guards sometimes use their authority to harass suspected hunters. However, individuals in both the DNPW and the communities illegally access resources within the reserves as they attempt to meet the needs of their families. Whatever the potential for the 128 new market incentives to reshape the future encounters between the state, rural citizens, and the environment, the project will be implemented in the current context of these relationships. In the recursive logic of this carbon project, the financial resources necessary to produce carbon commodities will be generated by the sale of those same commodities. Without the additional resources provided by the carbon sales from the REDD+ project, it will be nearly impossible to ensure that the carbon stocks are conserved and to provide the ongoing monitoring and enforcement necessary to selling carbon credits on the voluntary market. The sustained production of carbon commodities is contingent upon the profitable sale of carbon credits. The carbon sales will in part finance increased enforcement of protected area boundaries in order to increase the carbon stocks, thereby generating additional credits which can be sold. The future-potential of carbon commodity production and profit are projected onto and against the current patterns of resource use and existing social relationships. In this chapter, I juxtapose the future-orientated policy prescriptions of the REDD+ project with the current social reality which shapes resource use and access in Vwaza Marsh. Whether or not the state is able to increase enforcement enough to restrict de facto access to the resources within Vwaza in the future, the Kulera Project is currently providing funding in order to bring this about. The REDD+ projects planned for Mkuwazi and for the Nyika-Vwaza area expand the legal rights of communities to benefit from carbon sales in protected areas that are legally the purview of the state. However, the legal agreements necessary to sell carbon on the voluntary market reinscribe the contested authority of the state over these areas while circumscribing communities’ de facto access and use rights to the land and resources in question. Carbon tenure in protected areas of Malawi is a double-edged sword, legally expanding the rights of communities to access resources in the protected areas while simultaneously stripping 129 away the de facto access to forest resources that they currently enjoy. In what Sarah Milne describes as the “property paradox”, REDD+ agreements recognize certain rights of forestdependent communities while at the same time restricting other rights (Milne 2012:701). Formal carbon tenure expands the legal set of rights to which communities are entitled under the comanagement agreements to include benefitting financially from the sale of carbon. However, this legal arrangement strips them of de facto use rights to natural resources that many community members depend on—even though those rights are illicit—since increased enforcement of the comanagement agreement that will be necessary for the creation of REDD+ carbon credits and financed by the sale of those credits. Therefore, while the communities’ legal rights are expanded, in fact the range of benefits that villagers currently procure from the reserve will be threatened and, in all likelihood, significantly reduced. While some scholars have expressed concern that the future financial benefits from carbon sales might entice governments to reassert or expand their claims over the carbon sinks in forest areas (Chhatre and Agrawal 2009; Ribot, Agrawal, and Larson 2006), in protected areas where the government already legally controls the land, it is the distribution of benefits—not the (re-)formalization of juridical tenure—which will change the range of benefits that communities enjoy. In the case of Malawi increased financial incentives are not prompting the state to reassert rights to the land and forests that are already under its legal jurisdiction, nor are these potential benefits prompting the creation of new protected areas under government control. Instead, the increased financial flows are the primary mechanism through which the state will potentially be capacitated to operationalize its control over protected areas that are already legally under its control, a matter that is necessary to the ongoing protection of carbon stocks and 130 biodiversity conservation that REDD+ projects are designed to ensure. The resources which are expected to come from the carbon sales will pay for the increased law enforcement that will increase the states control over these areas. Even though the REDD+ project does not directly focus on biodiversity conservation, the funds used from carbon sales will increase policing of these areas overall, which will significantly cut down on hunting activities. This is an intended outcome of the project, since it is part of the project budget which will be paid for first by donor funding and later by carbon sales. It is also part of the overall goal of the primary conservation project, Kulera, of which the REDD+ project is just a part. On the one hand, the state is agreeing to share benefits with communities when it legally has no obligation to do so under state or international law. The state and its agencies could keep all of the money from any carbon sales, but they have agreed to share it with the communities. The director of the DNPW has pioneered financial benefits-sharing arrangements in Nyika and Vwaza as part of an effort to engage communities in the conservation of these areas, but also out of a sincere desire to improve the standards of living for people living on the borders of the protected areas. This narrative is reinforced during the meetings in which the project is introduced to target communities, as the DNPW is described as a benevolent partner which has chosen to share the benefits of the carbon sales from its land with the communities as a gesture of goodwill and cooperation to promote the ultimate goals of the DNPW: the conservation and protection of wildlife and forests within the protected areas. On the other hand, this gesture must be understood in light of the history of the area in which residents’ livelihood activities were gradually restricted, eventually declared illegal, and people were forced to abandon their villages and lands first by the colonial administration and later by the Malawian government. 131 Land Use and Evictions Mr. C (a pseudonym) is an employee of the DNPW and part of his job at Lake Kazuni is to take visitors on guided walking tours. He is very knowledgeable about the wildlife in the area, particularly the birds. He has several old, illustrated field guides describing the flora and fauna of the area. His favorite field guide is the one about the local snakes and reptiles, since these are the creatures that he knows the least about and he is actively studying to learn more. He has already mastered the other books. During a walking safari with Mr. C and an armed DNPW guard one morning, our group walked into a small clearing in the bush. He told us to look around and asked us what we thought had caused this area to be clear of trees and brush. One man in our group ventured that it might have been elephants. I guessed buffalo. Bending down to pick up a piece of broken pottery halfburied in the dirt, Mr. C told us with a mischievous grin that it was humans that had made this space. We were standing in the middle of an old village. The people who had lived here had been forced to move in 1978 in order to protect the wildlife inside of the reserve. He pointed out the areas where huts had stood and medicinal plants had been encouraged to grow. Although grass was now growing in the clearing and the bush was slowly advancing on this space, the trees and scrub that had been regularly cleared for decades by the people living here had not erased the history of human presence here. The path we would take back towards the lake and to the tourist campsite had been created by the countless footfalls of people and animals who had lived in this place and made the daily trek from the bush to the lakeshore and back again. From the abandoned village site where we stood, I could just make out the windsocks that marked the airstrip a half-mile behind us. Overgrown and seldom used, it cut a wide swath through the low, scrubby trees of the bush. Many times the size of the former village, the airstrip 132 had been built to cater to wealthy tourists who could charter flights to Nyika and Vwaza from the capital, Lilongwe, or from as far away as Lake Malawi or Tanzania. The government used to grant tourist concessions, but there hasn’t been an active tourist operation in Vwaza in years. The DNPW staff is now responsible for the upkeep of the five lakeside tourist cottages and offers walking safaris in addition to their other responsibilities. Like so many other attempts to bring in foreign capital, the highly anticipated tourist dollars never materialized. The village, the runway, and the tourist village all marked the different ways that people have lived in Vwaza over time. The small, mud brick homes in the village were torn down while the concrete DNPW buildings and the neat, thatch-roof chalets of the tourist village were being built. Each evening, while we watched the elephants, antelopes, and baboons come to drink at the lakeshore from the konde of our chalet, we could just make out the cooking fires, far across the lake and into the bush, of the people that used to live here. This complicated history of eviction, land alienation, and restricting access to resources has been the source of tension between people living in this area and the state. An earlier carbon project planned for Thazima, an area on the southern valleys of Nyika Plateau, was cancelled in 2009 due to high tensions between DNPW staff and community members in that area regarding ongoing disputes about rightful ownership of land and communities’ land claims in the protected area. Conflicts between park personnel and local populations have at times resulted in violence. In 1982, two officers were drowned in the South Rukuru River which runs through the valley (McCracken 2006), and another was shot near Vwaza in the 1990s (Interview, May 19, 2012, Kazuni area). Questions of carbon tenure can exacerbate the existing tensions over land and resources. The practices used to measure carbon stocks and map the project zones play on villagers’ fears 133 that the state will expand the protected areas or further compromise their access to land and forest resources. Duncan reported that some of the communities had expressed concern about the field crews’ mapping activities since similar demarcation and cadastral mapping activities were “how they [the DNPW] started chasing us from the reserve.” He said that many of the communities don’t really trust the DPNW and that they think that “the department is always tricky when coming to us” (Interview, May 1, 2012, Rumphi). Communities are often unaware that carbon developers are coming to conduct biomass surveys in their area, and unsure of what the field crews are doing when they are there. Armed DNPW scouts accompany the biomass survey team when they go into the protected areas, causing further confusion about whether it is the DNPW or some other entity conducting the mapping exercises. In one incident, villagers near Vwaza reported a field survey team to the police: First man: They came. Some, some people came in our village. So we are, uh, the way they are dressed, they frightened people. But thereafter to, to, to measure the air, to [noise] we have to control air. So people were afraid because they didn’t reach the headman so that he can allow them to enter that area. They just come. Heather: how were they dressed? First man: They dressed in their game uniforms. Heather: Oh First man: Yah, and even carry guns. So people were frightened to see them. The thing is as if they tried something. They tried something there. So they [the villagers] were afraid. So that is why we even ringed a report to the police, and the police did arrive. Yah. You see they escorted them. They are real friends of us, Kulera. Second man: They didn’t tell us, they didn’t inform the community about the planting of their machine there. It’s just nearby. After the church as you go down [the road]. That’s where they did that thing, yah. Heather: It’s a machine that they put there? Second man: Yah, they say it’s a machine which is to measure. They came in a car with hoes, guns. They are coming up. Just come up and start digging, and burying something there. Not telling the Village Headman or anybody. 134 Heather: how many were in the truck? Second man: Six or more. Third man: They were really rushing, heh! Second man: They were measuring about carbon. (Focus Group, May 24, 2012, Waliro) People were upset that no one informed the community or the headman about the presence of the field team or explained the biomass survey to them. Some people conjectured that maybe the teams were planting bombs to keep people out of the reserve. Others expressed fear that the teams were mapping the area in order to expand the reserve. One group of women reported that they assumed the biomass survey teams were going to “cheat us and just take over” the land (Focus Group, May 9, 2012, Ndiweri). Once villagers understood that the biomass survey was connected to the carbon project, they expressed additional fears concerning resource extraction (see discussion in Chapter 7). One man explained that “technology is growing so we never know what scientists are doing. Sometimes they might put something there that can take away the air” (Focus Group, May 24, 2012). People expressed a general anxiety about the potential for further loses of land and more restrictions on access to resources. Resource Use The vast majority of resources that people collect from the protected areas today are energy or food related. Community members listed firewood as the single most important resources they get from the protected areas. Food comprised one-third (eleven of thirty three) of the various resources listed by residents in the Vwaza area, while in Mkuwazi 25 percent of the resources listed were food-related. For the most part, different user groups were well aware of how other user groups accessed and used the resources in the protected areas. Men tended to 135 know the basic resources that women collected from the protected areas, and vice versa. The Forestry and DNPW extension officers, the NVA leadership, and the NGOs working to develop the REDD+ project were also well aware of the various ways that communities accessed resources in the protected areas, legally and not. However, there was widespread confusion in communities concerning the comanagement agreements. Some people did not even know that a comanagement agreement existed for the protected area, particularly in Mkuwazi. In Nyika and Vwaza, community members were generally aware that a comanagement agreement existed, but many were unclear as to which activities were allowed and which were considered illegal, as well as the procedures for procuring a permit to collect resources. The comanagement agreements in Nyika and Vwaza allow communities living in the border zone of the protected areas to collect certain resources with a permit. Permits are issued to Resource User Groups of three to ten adults. The groups are allowed to enter the reserve during daylight hours as long as they are with the group and accompanied by an armed DNPW extension worker or guard (Department of National Parks and Wildlife 2004a). This is both to ensure that resources not listed on the permit are not collected while in the reserve, but also to protect anyone going into the reserve from either getting lost or encountering potentially dangerous animals such as elephant or buffalo (Interview, May 19, 2012, Kazuni area). Fishing permits are also granted during certain times of the year so that men can fish within the reserve, upstream of their usual fishing spots just outside of the reserve boundaries. The DNPW also grants case-by-case permission for collecting large amounts of firewood or felling trees for funerals and special events. 136 The permit system, while not onerous, requires more effort than simply collecting resources from the reserve. The majority of residents reported that they do not get permits before they entered the protected areas. Not a single community member that I interviewed had received a permit for their most recent foray into the protected areas, and only a few reported that they had ever received a permit. Only 18 percent of Vwaza residents reported that their household earned any money from selling resources from the protected areas. However, one third of households (33.6 percent) self-reported that either they or someone in their household was involved in illegal resource extraction of trees or hunting in the reserve (Phiri, Mapemba, and Sopo 2011). Since this is the number that was self-reported by respondents, the actual numbers of people involved in illicit resource extraction is likely much higher. Many of the resources that people identified are collected opportunistically whenever people find them. For example, during a routine trip to collect firewood, women reported that they might also find caterpillars, termites, mushrooms, or wild fruits and leafy vegetables to gather. While permits are available for collecting these resources and people know where to find established stands of fruiting trees or termite mounds, there are many occasions where these food resources are found while in the reserve for an entirely different reason. Residents identified the following resources as gathered opportunistically: foodstuffs such as mushrooms, leafy vegetables, and several varieties of wild fruits; medicinal plants; birds, bush pigs, and other small game; wild honey; fibers for making ropes; eggs from guinea fowl and other birds; and smooth stones or large seeds used for smoothing and repairing walls and floors. It is unclear if, while in the reserve with a permit for a certain resource, people can gather extra items that they discover by accident; however, since few residents had actually obtained a permit and abided by the rules 137 in the comanagement agreement, no one interviewed was able to relate a time when this had occurred. There is a general awareness that if the resources aren’t conserved, then they won’t be there at all in the future. Community members often expressed concern that it was getting harder for them to find firewood and other resources they needed on a regular basis. They also expressed concern that their children might not have access to these resources in the future, either due to overuse or from increasingly strict conservation of the protected areas. However, most people admitted that their immediate needs often take priority over future needs. This is where many conservationists and officials in the DNPW and Forestry Department are hoping that REDD+ can help. One Forestry Department official explained that: “If everything goes and is implemented in the best principles of REDD+, the mechanism can really incentivize effective management of forest reserves, of forest resources, and at the same time, assist in improving the livelihoods of forest dependent communities. In Malawi, the challenges that we are facing in as far as fighting deforestation is concerned is the mismatch between the environmental services that forest resources offer and the demand by communities for immediate economic needs. It doesn’t make sense to say don’t cut a tree and yet that particular individual who is cutting the tree requires an immediate economic, you know, return. It doesn’t make sense. Alright. So with the REDD+, if it goes according to what REDD+ is all about, then I can foresee that the communities would say ‘Ok fine. I think the tree is more valuable standing than felled.’ It’s going to provide the immediate economic needs that communities have always wanted from forest resources. So that’s how I feel. The challenge is now accessing the market under the REDD+. I am not quite sure, as for Malawi we are not quite there yet. The process has commenced, uh, to prepare for REDDreadiness so that we can unlock the resources under the, the REDD+. But I guess the mechanism, for us, would be very, very, very necessary. For us in Malawi it would be very necessary.” (Interview, April 18, 2013) Community concerns about continued access to firewood and food resources in the protected areas are paramount. When I asked focus groups if they would support the carbon project if it brought in some money for development but increased restrictions on collecting 138 firewood, they emphatically said no. Women were the most emphatic on this point. They explained that they needed firewood and access to firewood more than they needed money. If the choice was between potentially receiving development funds in the future or maintaining access to the resources that they need today, the communities chose access every time. Creating Poachers, Catching Poachers Returning to Rumphi after attending a community meeting near Vwaza, Duncan spotted two men crossing the road from the reserve. They were carrying homemade firearms and had a large, canvas duffle bag slung between their shoulders. When they heard us, they melted into the thick brush on the opposite side of the road. Duncan came to a stop, got off of the motorcycle, and yelled at them, “We have seen you, you poachers! You are poaching!” He stood there for a few more minutes, looking into the bush and calling out, trying to find the two men. Eventually, he gave up and came back to the motorcycle. As he started it up and we pulled away, he shook his head, and said to me over his shoulder, “That is the problem. The real problem. The communities just take animals and don’t respect the reserve.” Hunting 17 is one of the main sources of tension between the DNPW staff and the people living near the reserve. The topic of extra-legal hunting dominated every community meeting 17 These are less pejorative descriptors of the way that communities routinely access protected area resources and they avoid the moral overtones of illegality. These activities do in fact violate statutory laws made by the state and the comanagement agreement that the communities are supposed to abide by. However, illegality flattens the complexity and history of resource use and access in this area, privileging a state-centric view of conservation in which the government is a neutral enforcer of laws and the communities are criminals. In fact, current community use of the resources within the protected areas is consistent with the way that they and their ancestors have used land and resources in the area since the mid-1800s, and prior. The major changes have come from the central government which has drawn increasingly restrictive lines which made established activities and ways of life illegal and circumscribed community rights to areas where they have lived for centuries. 139 that I attended. All hunting, fishing out of season, and cutting trees are illegal within the protected areas. The DNPW labels all of this illicit forest use as poaching. Although hunting of any kind is now illegal in Nyika National Park, Vwaza Marsh, and Mkuwazi Forest Reserve, local people have never stopped hunting in these areas. Particularly in the north, hunting was an important aspect of social life, and people hunted for food as well as to control the animal population and protect their crops (Morris 2001; Morris 2000a; Morris 2000b). Poaching in Vwaza is not the weaponized, militarized extermination of animals for ivory that this word conjures for many in the West. Extra-legal subsistence hunting is part of a diverse livelihood strategy for rural people who are almost without exception living in extreme poverty. Those who hunt in Vwaza are not the camouflage-clad men armed with automatic weapons and machine guns, driving around the country side mowing down elephants and rhinos for their tusks or other valuable body parts. In Vwaza, men hunt on foot, use wire snares or hand-made wooden traps to capture animals, and they shoot game with front-loading guns which are either very old or made at home. 18 When they do kill something it is eaten or sold or traded locally. Hunting provides food in an area where hunger and food insecurity are constant concerns. Over one-third of the people living in this area do not have enough food to eat on a daily basis. Thirty two percent of rural households in the Northern Region of Malawi suffer from chronic food insecurity (33 percent and 35 percent in Mzimba and Rumphi Districts, respectively), meaning that people routinely altered the quality of food they ate, ate fewer meals per day, or reduced the amount of food consumed during meal times for three or more days per week throughout the year. An additional 10 percent of households reported that this happened at least 18 One man arrested for killing an elephant had been hunting with an old, front-loading, 1844 Tower Musket, the type of gun used during the slave trade that disrupted and dominated the area in mid- to late-1800s. The antique rifle was confiscated and has since been put into a museum (Adams and McShane 1992). 140 once during the year (National Statistical Office and Inner City Fund Macro 2011). In another study, 82 percent of respondents in Rumphi District said that they did not have enough food to last until the next harvest and resorted to ganyu (short-term, informal work in exchange for low wages or food) or sought help from relatives to make up for the shortfall (Kerr 2005). In 2011, 52 percent of households in Malawi did not have enough food to last until the next harvest (National Statistical Office and Inner City Fund Macro 2011). Even when they have enough food, many Malawians don’t consume meat very often. Many people living in the Vwaza area are protein deficient. Individuals in poor households consume, on average, only 1,428 calories per person, per day; only 3.2 percent of these calories come from meat, dairy, or fish (Conroy et al. 2006). Some people only get the opportunity to eat meat a few times per year, compared with approximately 200 pounds of meat and fish consumed per person each year in the United States (Bittman 2008; USDA Economic Research Service 2012). This chronic and sustained struggle to grow and procure food is etched on the bodies of impoverished Malawians. Nearly half (47 percent) of children under the age of five are stunted because they are chronically malnourished or undernourished; 20 percent of them are severely stunted (National Statistical Office and Inner City Fund Macro 2011). At five-foot-three-inches, I was taller than almost every man and woman whom I met in Vwaza. That fact bears repeating: many Malawians are physically short because they do not get enough to eat. They are hungry, and there is plenty of meat available in the reserve. With the increased patrolling that will be paid for and necessitated by the REDD+ project, however, this food source will become much more difficult to procure. In 1992, conservationists Jonathan Adams and Thomas McShane wrote that the area near Vwaza Marsh was sparsely populated, a fact they attributed to the prevalence of tsetse fly and 141 the large animals living near the marsh’s wetlands during the dry season, both of which rendered the area unfit for keeping livestock or for agriculture (Adams and McShane 1992). During my time in Vwaza two decades later, there were many communities near the protected area and in some areas fields are cultivated to within feet of the fence demarcating the boundaries of the game reserve. Even a cursory examination of the aerial photos on Google maps shows the region around Vwaza is crisscrossed with small roads and dirt paths linking villages and small trading centers with the patchwork of fields and gardens that cover the area. The ANgoni and ATumbuka people who live here grow food and cash crops and raise cattle and goats. Young men are regularly seen hauling bags of dried tobacco to or driving cattle from as far away as Zambia on the dirt roads that traverse the area between Nyika and Vwaza and continue on towards the trading centers in Rumphi and Mzimba Districts. The large number of people living in close proximity to the reserve means that humananimal conflict is a fact of life near Vwaza. In many areas, villages and the reserve are separated only by a dirt road and a wire fence. The fence is supposed to be electrified, but the electricity rarely works. The DNPW erects fences not only to keep people out, but also to keep the animals inside of the park and away from villages and crops. Villagers cut the fence to enter the reserve. Elephants trample the fences and raid nearby fields. Even those living farther away are still subject to the predations of hungry elephants that routinely leave the reserve. One man explained the difficulties faced by people living near the reserve: “There is one problem that those people included within a protected area are faced with. Our government, in Malawi, they have got no policy to help the people. If a person is found in the Game Reserve illegally, they say we should pay a fine for it, or else we should be put in jail. But those animals from the Game Reserve come to our land and destroy our crops, they destroy our trees, even sometimes life [i.e. they kill people]. [noise]…They [the DNPW] don’t pay any account to that. So life is unbearable. (Switches to English) For example this year (returns to chiTumbuka) most of our crops have been destroyed by animals from the Game 142 Reserve. Elephants.” [echoes of “elephants” and “animals” from the other men]. “I don’t know how that [carbon] project, when it is coming, how it will affect them.” (Focus Group, April 25, 2012, Sijenheni village) People are not allowed to kill animals that come out of the reserve and eat their crops. They are supposed to report the animals, and then the DNPW staff can assess the situation and kill the animal if necessary. Some animals, like elephants and antelopes, can only be killed on orders from the national director of the DNPW in Lilongwe. For other animals, like hippos and bush pigs, the local DNPW staff can decide what to do. But villagers can be fined or jailed for killing a hippo eating their maize. The way that most community members encounter the DNPW is through interactions with patrols. Although the DNPW makes a concerted effort to provide extension services and community education as part of its outreach programs, the primary focus of the DNPW staff is law enforcement and guarding the protected areas. Particularly in very remote areas, the DNPW extension and education staff may only come to a group of villages once a year. By contrast, the villages may be visited by patrols several times in a year. During the DNPW and NVA community meetings, several community members complained about DNPW guards entering their homes to search for illegal guns. One day, coming back from a community meeting near the Zambian border in the DNPW truck, we learned that three poachers had been arrested during the previous night’s patrol. One of the arrested men was a VNRMC chairperson in a local village. For Mrs. Kataya, that fact was especially disheartening, since this man was someone that she had trained on the importance of conservation and the comanagement agreement, and he still poached. She expressed frustration, saying that when this type of thing happens, she felt like she had failed in her job. We had to go 143 to the bush camp to get the poachers so that they could be taken to the DNPW offices at Kazuni, and then onwards to town to stand before a judge. The sky had been gradually turning darker as the rain storm crept closer. It was milky white over the hills in the distance that faded into the reserve; ahead of us, the sky turned darker, into a deep grey blue. It began to sprinkle, and then to pour. The DNPW staff in the back of the truck tried to cover themselves with black plastic to try and stay dry. The driver’s window didn’t work properly, and every time we hit a bump, it would slide further and further open. He had to pull it up with his hand when he was able to take it off the steering wheel. Mrs. Kataya and I used my chitenje to block the window on the passenger side, which only goes up part of the way. The road to the bush camp was more bush than road. It disappeared altogether at times, and even at the best the two tire tracks resembled two parallel footpaths with chest high grass growing between them. The bush camp where the patrol personnel live with their families looks very much like the staff camp at Kazuni. It is comprised of eight medium sized brick houses with iron roofs located about an hour away on foot to the three small stores that make up the local trading center. There is maize being cultivated opposite the houses—not huge fields, but maize fields just the same. Communities living nearby aren’t allowed to cultivate anything within the reserve. The swept dirt yards bled into the road and the free-roaming chickens scattered as our truck pulled up. The houses do not have electricity or plumbing. All of the houses had buckets outside to collect the rain water running off of the tin roofs. The arrested men were sitting on the bare concrete floor of one of the houses. There were three of them: one handcuffed, one without handcuffs, and a third with a single hand cuffed and the other hand free. All three were barefoot, and all three were very thin. The oldest one was 144 wearing dark trousers and a white t-shirt with a black blazer over it; the youngest man was clad in jeans and a windbreaker; the third wore khaki pants and a t-shirt under a green, button-up nylon jacket. They looked defeated and uncomfortable since they had probably been cuffed since they were caught last night. One had a blackened eye and bloody lip. Mrs. Kataya came inside and began to speak with the men. She addressed the tall man with the black blazer as ATcheya, referring to the chair of the VNRC. 19 At first the men denied that they were hunting and said that they had bought the meat from someone else. Eventually the chairman admitted that he had killed an antelope, and the other two admitted to either helping him or buying the meat after he had killed it. The chairman was crouched on a very low stool, with his unbound hands hidden in his lap, and the man with the green nylon jacket leaned against the wall, holding his cuffed hands behind his bent up knees. The third one let his cuffed hand dangle at his side, the empty cuff hanging off like an awkward, heavy bracelet. Some time after Mrs. Kataya finished speaking, one of the male DNPW officers who had come with us in the truck moved the handcuffed man in the green jacket into the corner and started yelling at him, and hit him several times on the side of the head. After two or three minutes he left the man alone and went outside on the porch. One of the patrolmen came in carrying two plastic grocery bags containing the meat that had been confiscated from the men when they were arrested. He held it out to show to us. Inside were dark lumps of meat with fur on one side. In the dim light, it looked like someone had cut half a dozen squirrels in half. The patrolman also brought in several poles and wires which had been removed the boundary fence and which the arrested men had also been carrying. While we waited, a third guard came in from the kitchen, bringing a smoldering bunch of twigs. He offered 19 ATcheya is the localized version of the shortened form of the English word chairperson, Chair, with the honorific “A” added to it. 145 it to the arrested men so that they could light their cigarettes, holding it for the man with both of his hands in handcuffs. The Chairman offered a cigarette to the guard, who took it. Cutting through the silence, Mrs. Kataya explained that the villagers grow their own tobacco and used old scrap paper or newspaper to roll them. The head guard emerged from the bush, armed, and in full camouflage rain gear. It was his house that we were all crowded into. One of the other guards arrived with an accordion file of papers containing the arrest reports for the head guard to approve before they were given to give to Mrs. Kataya. After the paperwork was arranged, the three poachers were lead out, the Chairman and the youngest man handcuffed to each other. They managed to get into the truck and find places to sit in the rain while we loaded the truck with several large bundles of firewood, probably cut from trees in the reserve. The rain drizzled down on them in the back of the truck as we left the camp for the two-hour drive back to Kazuni. They spent the night in the DNPW staff offices at Kazuni where they waited to be taken to court to be fined or imprisoned for poaching. Participation in conservation activities such as the village natural resource committees or even employment with the DNPW does not necessarily translate into conservation-friendly practices. Hunters sometimes participate in conservation initiatives just as DNPW or Forestry officials sometimes participate in illegal hunting or cutting trees. Even individuals who have received training about the importance of conservation and who serve on the VNRMCs sometimes participate in illegal hunting activities. The leader of the three poachers arrested in my presence was the chairperson of a village NRC, ostensibly the person in charge of organizing conservation activities in his village. The NVA annual meeting minutes detail the numerous offenses committed by people who are active members of the VNRMCs. In 2009, an elected 146 member of the NVA executive committee was caught fishing without a permit and subsequently removed from office. Adams and McShane recount the tale of Mr. Nyirenda who, after his second arrest and imprisonment for poaching, was drafted by the DNPW to help them with their conservation and anti-poaching efforts (Adams and McShane 1992). While these activities may seem contradictory, participation in both conservation and illegal hunting is instead reflective of the creativity and adaptability of people attempting to provide for themselves and their families in the face of extreme poverty. State Capacity and Distributing Benefits The majority of those working in the DNPW and Forestry Departments, particularly in the District and local offices, are dedicated to the conservation of Malawi’s natural resources but have an appreciation of the difficulties facing people living near the protected areas. The education and extension officers in Nyika and Vwaza attempt to reach out the communities. Working with the NVA, the extension personnel try to inculcate an appreciation of aesthetic nature and a sense of environmental stewardship in the communities. They play games with the children, fund Wildlife Clubs for school children and youth, and sponsor programs where they buy wire snares from hunters, and bring a generator, TV/VCR, and National Geographic videos of African wildlife. These activities are designed to encourage people to see nyama (animals) as more than just nyama (meat). The DNPW staff in Nyika and Vwaza faces difficult living conditions and low wages. Although the staff housing is slightly better than the best houses in the villages, living conditions are similar to those of the surrounding communities. Staff housing was meant to be temporary, but these structures have housed DNPW personnel and their families for decades. Most of the homes and administrative buildings lack electricity and running water. An elephant had knocked 147 over the electrical wires and it had not been yet been repaired. Staff members are given housing, but not fields in which to farm, and so they must either buy most of their food—a very expensive option—or rent fields from local villagers. These narrow options can spur further deforestation, as villagers open up new fields in protected areas and rent the fields closer to the villages to the DNPW staff. Some staff members stationed in the more remote areas inside of the protected areas will open up illegal gardens close to their homes. The low pay that forest and park guards receive, and the fact that the government is often late paying their salaries, means that some guards participate in illegal extraction of resources from the protected areas. During focus groups with community members, DNPW and Forestry Department staff, illegal resource extraction by state employees was cited as a problem. Several villagers admitted to having been paid by patrol guards to saw timber or to make charcoal within the protected areas. One businessman complained that it was difficult for him to hire laborers to saw timbers that he acquired legally since many of the villagers who owned saws were already working for the forest guards. One informant explained that to cut down the biggest trees required the complicity of the park or forest guards since it took a significant amount of time and physical effort to cut the trees down, saw them into useable timbers, and transport them to the road for sale. While no guards admitted to this behavior themselves, when prompted all stated that they knew someone or had heard of cases in which guards had participated in illegal resource extraction and sales. 20 Many of the DNPW and Forestry Department employees 20 Illegal resource extraction is not just an issue in remote areas. There were also accusations that Chinese business owners and officials were bribing both local forest guards and the forestry officers at the national and regional offices to look the other way while they were illegally extracting timber. One informant reported that representatives of the Chinese government have “come to forestry before asking for things, like concessions, with money in their hands. They don’t even hide it” (Personal communication, December 4, 2011). In one case, an informant reported that they came with MK1 million to bribe the guards (about US $5550). While these 148 believe in the conservation goals of the protected area, but like the villagers whom they are supposed to police, they also need to pay school fees for their children and meet their family’s other needs with the resources are available to them. Ostensibly, the state is supposed to apprehend those who are entering the protected areas illegally and either fine the offenders or send them to jail. Legally, the only exceptions to these rules occur when the communities and the state—either through the DNPW in the case of National Parks and Reserves or the Forestry Department in the case of Forests—have entered into a mutually binding agreement to allow a limited amount of subsistence activities and collection of non-timber resources within the protected areas. The DNPW and Forestry Department both employ patrol men who serve as guards and who conduct patrols. In Mkuwazi, the patrols are conducted on foot; in Nyika and Vwaza, they are conducted on foot and by vehicle. Currently, the state lacks the means to enforce the restrictions on activities inside of National Parks, Wildlife Reserves, and Forest Reserves. Both the Forestry Department and the DNPW—like many government departments—are under-staffed, under-funded, and underresourced to perform all of the tasks for which they are responsible. In every staff office at the national, regional, district, and local level, officials complained of chronic financial problems, including difficulties getting their allotted funds from the central government, budget shortfalls, and of donor aid which often came and went “abruptly” (Interview, May 16, 2012, Nkhata Bay). reports must be considered in the current context of prejudice and resentment against the influx of Chinese immigrant workers in Malawi, this type of corruption and illegal timber extraction is increasingly common as civil servants see their salaries and benefits slashed and look to barter their access to decision-making and policy creation for additional income. This is not restricted to foreign interests. Another informant told me that powerful business interests are currently targeting Malawi Forest Reserve as the site for additional sugar plantations (Personal communication). Shortly after Joyce Banda became president, the owner of the company hoping to establish sugar cultivation arrived in Mkuwazi in a government vehicle to survey the site. 149 For example, the annual budget of the Nkhata Bay District Forestry Office is MK1.2 million (US$6741.57 at the official 2011 exchange rate of MK178/US$1). This must pay for the daily management of the offices, upkeep of the office buildings, fuel and repair for department vehicles, and office supplies. It does not include staff salaries which are paid by the central government; however, the central government was frequently up to three months late in transferring salary payments to its employees. This money also has to compensate the local police department for officers’ time whenever they are called by the forest patrols to arrest someone who has been caught illegally cutting timber. The rapid inflation and the financial crisis leading up the devaluation of the national currency in May 2012 compounded these financial problems. The price of fuel, food, and real goods skyrocketed. Fuel, when it was available—which was rare—consumed increasingly large amounts of the DNPW and Forestry Department’s budgets. For weeks at a time, the Nkhata Bay District Forest Office’s two trucks were stranded next to the department buildings. The general lack of fuel, and the lack of money to pay for it even when it was available, meant that mobile patrols were not going out. When foot patrols and forest guards apprehended men making charcoal or felling trees there was no way to arrest them, to confiscate the timber and charcoal, or to transport the offenders to court or jail. 21 The week before I visited the offices, the DFO had to borrow a truck from a local NGO to go and arrest the trespassers and bring back the confiscated timbers. The planks were logged in a book and then sold for MK350 (about US$2) per plank, the market rate for timbers of that size and quality. The money goes to the central government, not to the local forestry offices where the goods were confiscated, to discourage corruption. 21 Making charcoal and cutting down large trees to make timber are almost exclusively done by men (cf. Kambewa et al. 2007; Mawaya and Kalindekafe 2010; Moore and Vaughan 1994). 150 Finances are a major problem contributing to the lack of capacity to patrol and enforce the protected area rules. The District Forest Office for Nkhata Bay has four employees: the District Forest Officer and three forestry assistants who are responsible for extension efforts with the communities and who oversee law enforcement protecting the reserves. Since there are ten forest reserves covering almost 540 square miles (1,400 square kilometers), or 26 percent of the land area of the district (Nkhata Bay District Assembly 2009), each of these three forestry assistants is responsible for overseeing the protection of 180 square miles (about 467 square kilometers). In Mkuwazi Forest Reserve, the Forestry Department employs three forest guards who conduct patrols and apprehend those who are illegally cutting trees or making charcoal. Each guard is responsible for patrolling about 2.26 square miles (about 5.9 square kilometers). To be able to adequately enforce the comanagement agreements and protect the forest areas from encroachment by local populations, the District Forest Officer estimates that he needs one chief forester, three technical officers/foresters, three senior forest assistants, and five to eight forest assistants (Interview, May 16, 2012, Nkhata Bay area). This lack of personnel and equipment is true for the DNPW as well. There are not enough staff members or vehicles to conduct adequate patrols to ensure that no one is entering the protected areas illegally, and the lack of well-maintained roads makes patrolling some areas difficult or impossible. In Nyika National Park, DNPW staff have access to a total of four Land Cruiser pickup trucks, one 4x4, and eight motorcycles, of which only about half are operational at any one time due to maintenance issues (Department of National Parks and Wildlife 2004b: 207). In 2012, the DNPW staff at Vwaza has only one truck and a few working motorcycles to conduct patrols and to transport personnel and equipment for extension projects and educational programming in the communities. They only employ one driver, who frequently works 24-hour 151 shifts to deploy and retrieve guards, drive night patrols, and transport extension personnel to the community meetings in the villages. The poor roads and rough terrain lead to increased wear and tear on the field vehicles, exacerbating the lack of adequate equipment needed to patrol the area. These issues are compounded by the lack of personnel available to provide law enforcement. Small groups of three to six scouts are sent out on five-day patrol schedules, and it takes a full day to get them to the site and another to bring them back (Department of National Parks and Wildlife 2004a; 2004b). The management plan for Nyika National Park calls for one patrol person for every 15 square miles (39 square kilometers); however, only one third to one half of the all of the positions are filled at any one time due to lack of funding. In 2004, only eleven of the twenty four extension positions and only seven of the sixty four law enforcement positions are filled in Nyika. That means that each guard is responsible for patrolling 173 square miles (448 square kilometers). In Vwaza, only the necessary extension positions are filled, and less than two thirds of the thirty law enforcement and scout positions are filled (Department of National Parks and Wildlife 2004a: 17; 126-127). Furthermore, staff at Nyika only has six radios and seven GPS units to coordinate patrol efforts, creating additional difficulties in coordinating the patrols when they are in the field. As the patrols currently operate in Nyika and Vwaza, they are only 22 percent and 28 percent effective, respectively. These numbers have not seen significant improvement in recent years. The DNPW will receive funding from the REDD+ project to build community capacity in natural resource management to promote conservation, to conduct community forest patrols, and create village monitoring reports to record natural resource use. In collaboration with TLC and the NVA, the DNPW will be expected to expand their extension efforts and provide trainings 152 on microfinance and financial management to capacitate the communities to manage the funding they may receive from the project or the project-related activities. From the project description, enforcement seems like a relatively small part of the overall project. The Kulera Project, of which the REDD+ project is just one income-generating component, is a project ultimately aimed at increasing biodiversity conservation in the protected areas. The carbon project explicitly supports this goal both by protecting animal habitats within the reserve and by providing alternative income and livelihood activities to the communities who are engaged in illegal subsistence hunting. Increasing enforcement is only mentioned once in the list of 104 project activities and sub-activities. The rest of the activities seek to reduce deforestation inside of the protected areas through a combination of education and sensitization, development projects, livelihood and income generating activities, establishing tree lots in each village, and agricultural intensification on existing crop lands. However, enforcement is vital to the overall success of the REDD+ project. In order for any money to be made from the project, the carbon stock must be conserved. In order for the carbon stock to be conserved, the state and the communities have to mutually agree to recognize and honor the comanagement agreement which limits resource collection and activities within the reserve. This will take significant outreach and education efforts, along with development activities to replace lost livelihoods, both of which will require more funding for staff, training, and inputs for programs. It will also mean enforcing the comanagement agreement and dealing with those who are accessing resources from the protected areas illegally. None of this can happen without the infusions of cash and capital expected to come from the sale of carbon credits. No carbon credits can be generated unless the trees that are supposed to be absorbing the carbon stay in the project area. The carbon sales from the REDD+ project will finance anti- 153 poaching teams comprised of community members and DNPW staff. The carbon sales will also have to cover the necessary personnel and equipment to ensure that the communities are adhering to the comanagement agreement and not illicitly accessing resources from the protected areas. Conclusion The carbon project sales agreement paradoxically recognizes the community’s rights to specific resources while legitimizing the ultimate authority of the state over those resources. On the one hand, the carbon agreement expands the set of juridical rights that the community can exercise inside of the protected areas by extending the right to benefit from some of the money generated from the sale of carbon credits. On the other hand, part of the benefits will go the Malawian state via the DNPW to buy more trucks and fuel, and to hire additional park guards to enforce anti-poaching measures and increase surveillance. These activities are supposed to increase state control of the protected areas and ensure that that people are not taking trees or animals, or otherwise using resources illegally or illicitly. In actuality, violating the existing comanagement agreement is routine for many of the people who live adjacent to these areas, and many rely on wood from the protected areas or the income generated from hunting, logging, making charcoal, or collecting non-timber resources without a permit. Even though these activities are illegal, they are nevertheless an important source of food and income. The increased enforcement of the comanagement agreement will have a very real impact on community access to the resources in the protected areas. The fact that the villagers receive any compensation from carbon sales implies that there is at least some recognition of their rights to access to those resources, and to access benefits which come from the sale of those resources (Milne 2012). On the other hand, these rights are 154 only granted by a signed agreement with the DNPW (as representatives of the Malawian state). This privileges the state as the ultimate authority for decision-making about the resources in these areas and legitimizes the ability of the state to classify land, determine its appropriate uses, and to remove people and establish protected areas as it sees fit. The comanagement agreement can, in fact, be revoked by either the state or the communities; however if the communities refuse or revoke the agreement, the government retains the right to sell the carbon within the protected areas without the consent of the community and to keep the communities’ share of the income generated by the carbon sales. In effect, this would be complicated because the agreement is structured such that the community, state, and NGO are all part of a seller’s board that as a group must approve the contract. However the state could legally revoke the communities’ right to claim to their share of the project proceeds if their activities are not consistent with the project goal of increasing the carbon stock. There is an explicit threat embedded in the existing relationship between rural citizens and the state which is codified by the carbon agreements: if the communities are unwilling or unable to meet the conservation goals of the carbon project, the state can and will enforce the rules and statutes which limit communities’ access to these resources, returning to a model of “fortress conservation” (Brockington, Duffy, and Igoe 2008). Local people will not immediately begin to abide by the comanagement agreements and curtail their use of park resources when they agree to the REDD+ agreement, nor will the state immediately begin to enforce the agreement more stringently than at present. People in the community will find a way to meet their needs, whether it is through accessing development projects financed by the REDD+ project when and if they materialize, or by continuing to evade law enforcement efforts as they gather resources within the reserve, or by some combination of 155 thereof. However, the state and its representatives in the DNPW have the force of the law, investor priorities, and conservation and development NGOs on their side. This leverage can be applied in deciding who will benefit and how, and which activities are allowable in the protected areas. Rural Malawians have little access to these networks of power. While villagers can still push back against these rules and regulations, these efforts are punishable by the state in ways that community members have little hope of overcoming, particularly if these punishments are prescribed by statutory laws and backed up by donor and investor priorities for conservation and growth of the carbon stock. 156 CHAPTER 7: GOOD AIR, BAD AIR: COMMUNICATING “CARBON” AND REDD+ How is the creation of an entirely new commodity explained to people? How do carbon developers explain the creation of carbon credits to rural Malawians in target villages, and how do villagers understand their role in the production of these credits? The purpose of this chapter is to detail how the people who are expected to conserve the carbon sink understand what they are being asked to do as the concepts of carbon commodities and “selling air” are explained to non-experts. As experts attempt to explain this project to community organizers and state officials, and these new trainers then work to communicate this to the community, gaps and misunderstandings arise about what it means to sell carbon offsets. The slippage in understanding, as well as the uncertainties which come from these gaps and the inequalities which undergird them, are not a side effect of commodity production, but a constitutive part of the creation of new sites of profit and accumulation. The Politics of Carbon Knowledge Malawians with whom I spoke demonstrate a wide variety in their knowledge of the project. Some academic researchers and state and NGO personnel are well-integrated into the community of carbon and are fluent in the technical language and skills that come with their high level of engagement in this sector. Others, such as the community organizers who have had access to formal training or who are involved planning and implementing various carbon projects, are also very knowledgeable and demonstrate a high level of understanding about the technical aspects of the project, though they know less about the financial aspects of how carbon is sold or why investors might be interested in buying it. 157 The members of targeted communities with whom I spoke do not have a thorough understanding of the project itself. Most people know about some aspects of the project, but this knowledge is incomplete. Community members involved with the project understand the basic connection between forests, carbon sinks, and greenhouse gas emissions in the carbon cycle, although these are not the terms that they use to describe this process. Other people understand that there are foreigners who are willing to pay participating communities for conserving the trees in the project areas and that the money from these transactions will result in development of some type. However, there is general confusion about how carbon commodities are measured, bought, and sold, and widespread misunderstanding about what will be done with these commodities once the transaction has taken place. Even fewer people were aware of the exact plans for the distribution of financial benefits of the project. Not all of the differences in access to information are intentional. These gaps in knowledge are in part due to the difficulty of explaining technical jargon to any non-expert, and in part due to omissions and gaps which occur when project information is transferred from carbon developers to organizations and community organizers, and finally to the community. Some of these gaps in information occur due to an array of contextual, structural, and linguistic difficulties inherent in this type of organizing in this part of the world. Limited time, finances, and trained personnel make it difficult to distribute information about the carbon project to the target communities. However, other omissions help to move the project forward by facilitating community consent and circumventing some of the more difficult questions surrounding the creation of carbon markets and carbon commodities. The creation of carbon commodities may depend as much on what is not understood about them as what is understood. 158 Just as commodities traded on the market have been stripped of their social context, people engaged in market transactions have likewise been stripped of their social location and positionality. These rational actors are assumed to freely choose to engage in market transactions. In reality, however, there are real differences in social position which condition individual people’s decisions to engage in transactions and their ability to negotiate the terms of those transactions. These power asymmetries between actors can exacerbate existing socioeconomic inequalities between individuals and households in communities where these environmental commodities are produced as well as between groups of actors engaged in the transaction—between, for example, a community and international investors (Milne and Adams 2012). The success of market-based conservation actually depends on these social inequalities. Carbon markets are considered a viable climate change mitigation strategy because it is less expensive to conserve forests in the South than it is to change patterns of energy use and consumption in the North. Therefore, the reason that carbon markets are feasible at all is because of the lower opportunity costs for conserving forests in some parts of the world than others. This is directly related to the high rates of poverty and limited life choices experienced by people who live there (Paladino 2011). It is less expensive to produce carbon commodities from offset projects in the South for the same reasons that it is less expensive to produce any other commodity in the South. Production is cheaper in areas where there are fewer laws to protect people and the environment. The calculus of opportunity costs masks social and ecological difference even though it is these differences which allow the concept of opportunity costs to exist in the first place (McAfee 2012). As a market-based conservation project, carbon offset projects must first produce a profit for investors. The future success of carbon offsets—and the 159 profits that will be produced from their sales—are dependent upon the continued socio-economic disparities between investors and producers which keeps the price of carbon commodities low (Kosoy and Corbera 2010; McAfee 2012). These continued conditions of poverty will ensure that there are always those who are willing to conserve forests in exchange for cash because that is the best—or only—option that they have. In the case of Kulera, the creation of carbon projects is actually predicated on unequal access to information between the communities, project planners, and the carbon developer and its investors. The lack of information about the full range of costs and benefits that the REDD+ projects bring can put communities at a further disadvantage vis-à-vis other project partners and investors since this lack of knowledge impedes their ability to negotiate benefits sharing arrangements. This in turn compromises their plans for future development and leads to continued conditions of poverty in the area. Training the Trainers How can the idea of a carbon project and a carbon commodity be communicated without the jargon that appears so frequently in the world of carbon experts as described in the previous two chapters? Pretend for a moment that the buzz words about climate change which are so ubiquitous in the carbon sector—greenhouse gas emissions, carbon stocks, cap-and-trade—do not exist. How could the idea of ecosystem services and carbon offsets be explained? As experts explain the creation of carbon commodities and carbon projects to nonexperts, information is disseminated through different tiers of actors. Usually the carbon developer or partner NGO sponsors an intensive training workshop for state officials, NGO personnel, and key community representatives or leaders. These multi-day training sessions are 160 conducted in Lilongwe or Blantyre at international business hotels or in the offices of NGOs or government departments. These locations have meeting rooms equipped with projectors and screens and offer access to the internet, and printers, computers, and copy machines—the trappings of organizational power in a country where these items are expensive and rare. These offices and hotels are usually located in areas of town that suffer less from the frequent power outages and load shedding, and most have backup generators to keep things running smoothly if the power does fail. These meetings usually begin around 9:00am and include breaks for morning and afternoon tea as well as lunch. The trainers use PowerPoint presentations, infographics, and folders of handouts to help transmit information about the carbon cycle, the connection between emissions and climate change, and how the conservation of forests in the South can positively impact climate change. These trainings include explaining the technical processes through which carbon is measured, converted to credits, and eventually sold. Project planners usually include briefings on the proposed benefits-distribution scheme and the initial sales agreements, but do not generally expand on other financial aspects of the project. These meetings generally last two full business days and can run longer, depending on the depth and breadth of information covered. After these trainings, most organizations or carbon developers will also sponsor informational meetings for those living near the project zone. In some areas, like Mkuwazi, the carbon developer, donor, or the affiliated NGO will hold trainings or information meetings for the communities directly. In other cases, a more indirect approach is taken, and the initial training also serves as an opportunity to “train the trainers” as meetings attendees are then entrusted with the duty to disseminate the information to the target communities. This is the case in Nyika and Vwaza. Either way, these community-level meetings generally target specific 161 groups such as the Village Natural Resource Management Committees (VNRMCs), village headmen, religious leaders, teachers, or entrepreneurial groups such as beekeeping cooperatives, although they are open to other members of the community. The onus of disseminating this information is then passed onto local leaders and those community members who were present at this community-level meeting. In Nyika and Vwaza, additional community-level meetings are planned in the future to provide additional information on the project and to get the signatures of group-village headmen on the formal carbon sales contract/agreements. Duncan, the chairperson of the NVA, attended the Kulera Project training sponsored by TGC. It is his responsibility to introduce the communities in the NVA to the new carbon project, and provide a brief explanation of how the project will work. Duncan alone is responsible for introducing this project to 147 group villages which have VNRMCs in 25 different zones. Running the NVA I first met Duncan soon after I arrived in Rumphi boma. He roared up on his motorcycle in a dark leather jacket and pinstripe slacks. Standing over six feet, Duncan is tall even by American standards; in the villages, where many people suffer chronic malnutrition and stunting, he towers over people. He seemed enthusiastic about my research, and we agreed to meet the following week at the NVA’s office in town to discuss plans to work together. In rural Malawi, one way to capitalize on your social position and education is to work for NGOs. Duncan is very adept at marketing himself to these organizations and in the process gaining personal and professional advantages for himself and his family. This is not unlike networking in the US. He has done very well for himself, and in many ways, represents the type of elite capture of resources that is possible when development projects come to rural communities. Duncan is cosmopolitan in a way that many rural Malawians in Vwaza only guess 162 about. He travels to meetings in Mzuzu and Lilongwe. He has a motorcycle. He has travelled to Zambia and Tanzania. Duncan does not receive a salary for his work as the NVA chairperson. He does not currently receive any compensation from either TLC or TGC for the meetings that he conducts on their behalf to “sensitize the communities” to the project, although there are plans to compensate him for this type of organizing in the future. TLC did provide him with a motorcycle in order to make it possible to travel to the communities, and they will occasionally provide him with some money for fuel, although Duncan will have to return the motorcycle when the initial donor funding for the project ends. The project will eventually target nearly 120,000 individuals in over 25,000 households (Terra Global Capital, LLC and Total LandCare 2011). Together, Nyika and Vwaza cover approximately 1,613 square miles (a little over 4,178 square kilometers). It was not uncommon for Duncan to travel two hours each way on his motorcycle to reach villages relatively close to his home on his side of the protected areas. Longer journeys to the more distant communities often take several days. These distances mean that making regular visits to all of the village areas is difficult, and villagers sometimes request more meetings than he is able to accommodate. When the VNRMC members in one village asked Duncan for additional meetings, he responded that it would not be possible, since the NVA had held three meetings in as many years in that particular zone. This made them lucky. Villages in more remote areas had not had any meetings at all during that time. Duncan runs the NVA out of a small, one-room office rented from the local CCAP church for MK7000 per month (about US$24 at the 2011 exchange rate). It is painted in a dark blue on the bottom four feet of the walls, and a lighter blue to the ceiling, typical of the ways that 163 homes, shops, and offices are painted in Malawi. The sign on the door has the NVA’s name, PO Box address, and logo printed in color and protected in a plastic sleeve. There is a table on the far wall which houses an old, donated, non-functioning, computer. It is covered with a lacy tablecloth and another bright green cloth to keep the dust off of it. A red plastic table in the corner bearing the name of a popular phone company supports a stack of cardboard boxes. Some have papers protruding out of a split side. Others hold t-shirts with the NVA’s logo on them. There is a low bookshelf on the opposite wall which houses several black binders that hold the organization’s constitution and official charter documents, the financial statements, reports from the village NRCs, and proposals and funding requests from the village and zone NRCs for the development projects paid for through the DNPW-NVA benefits-sharing arrangement. There is one half-full ream of printer paper, and several notebooks. That is the extent of the organization’s office supplies. The office is lit by the large window that occupies most of the outside wall. They do have electricity, when it is on, which is used primarily to charge the old cell phone that Duncan relies on which was given to him by a visitor from a partner organization. Like so many cell phones here, the battery is held onto the back of the phone with a rubber band. I frequently run into him at the World Bank project’s internet point across town, where we both go to check our email. The NVA has one full-time administrative assistant whose job is to keep the files straight and type the minutes from the annual general assembly meetings that the organization holds. There has not been a general meeting in over two years, however, due to lack of adequate funding. Duncan lives in a village near a rural trading center about 40 kilometers from Rumphi boma. He is well known in his community and the surrounding areas. In 2000, he was elected to a seat on the local government council before those elections were suspended indefinitely in 164 2005. He has worked as a school teacher and police officer, and has used his connections to organize local support for national political candidates. In addition to his current position as the chairperson of the NVA, he also serves on several prominent committees, including the village development committee. He owns a small maize mill in town (which was not operational during my visit due to lack of fuel to run the generator) and makes additional money dealing in the illicit fuel trade. Duncan’s family is relatively well-off. In addition to his own wife and three sons, he also cares for his mother and his deceased brother’s two young children. His home is built on the side of a hill overlooking his maize fields, a small stream, and the road below. Although it was still incomplete when I visited, his home was noticeably one of the nicer and larger homes in the area, with whitewashed walls inside and out, a tin roof, and glass in all of the windows. Still, there is no electricity in his house, and no running water. The two hills behind his home are covered with trees, unlike the other hills nearby, which are green but treeless. He complained about the pesky baboons that come from this small patch of forest to raid his maize field and harass his goats, there is unmistakable pride in his voice when he tells me the story of how he has continued his father’s legacy of protecting this area from over-harvesting. During our first meeting, Duncan offered to take me along with him to the meetings that he facilitated along with the DNPW and TLC extension officers. He wanted me to see how he travelled to the villages to meet with the natural resource committees. He told me it was important for my research to go to the villages with him and to see how he was working to “civic educate” and “sensitize” his fellow rural Malawians. I accompanied Duncan to six of these meetings and to one community training for a newly-established natural resource committee conducted by the NVA, TLC, and the DNPW. 165 His explanations lack the savvy info graphics and well-developed PowerPoint presentations that are the centerpiece of the training that he attended in the capital city. The NVA’s meetings are usually held in the church or school buildings in target villages. The church or the school are the largest buildings in most of the villages, and often the only locations large enough to serve as a community meeting space. Sometimes, the school and church are the same building. These buildings are generally made of fired mud bricks with tin roofs and have open windows fitted with wooden shutters to allow for air circulation and lighting. There is no electricity in these villages, and Duncan has no access to a computer, a projector, or the generator that would be needed to run them. He was not given any printed materials by the carbon developers or the NGO to help him explain the carbon project to the communities. Nevertheless, Duncan has a very good understanding of the project. As we sat in the NVA office one day, Duncan pointed above the red table to a large white bulletin board. Pinned to the board are four 8x10” photographs. These posed group photos are taken during official meetings or trainings in Malawi and are proudly displayed in the offices of Malawians working in the civil service or for NGOs and community organizations. Duncan indicates one that is from the official TGC training on carbon projects that he attended in Lilongwe. Seated in front are the representatives from TGC, the Director of the DNPW, and important representatives from Kulera and TLC. Duncan stands in the back with two rows of extension workers from TLC and the DNPW and other attendees. This training has given him a good grasp of both the technical and social aspects of the project. Duncan explained the carbon project to me in his own words: “When we say carbon assets we mean the carbon itself. Because the tree would like to use carbon dioxide which is being thrown out by human beings. You know, we are throwing out carbon dioxide which we get the oxygen from. So, there is a tree there…its simple mathematics. Can you give me a sheet? [He begins to draw] This is a human being and this is a tree. The tree would like to use carbon dioxide. The human being would like to use oxygen. While the tree emits 166 oxygen, and the human being emits carbon dioxide. So the tree wants the carbon dioxide which is being produced by the human being. So it would like to use this carbon dioxide to survive. We also need oxygen to survive. Therefore, when we say carbon assets…it would depend upon the thickness of the tree. A big tree would like to use more carbon dioxide; a small tree would like to use little carbon dioxide. So there are some formulas, but they [TGC] were trying to tell us ah, we do A, B, C, D, et cetera but it is more technical, it would take us more time. They said there are more trainings coming to calculate carbon assets. So the tree itself, the size of the tree, after their mathematical calculations, will tell how much carbon dioxide it uses. So if you have many trees you have more assets of carbon dioxide. You have big trees, you have more assets of carbon dioxide …They will calculate the size of these trees that are already protected within four years and have not been destroyed. That means that the carbon that they [pointing to the trees that he has drawn] use, the carbon that they use, will be calculated according to the size of the tree, the age of the tree. So you can sell because you have protected them for four years without cutting them. Do you get me there? And after four years it is growing, it is growing. And after 30 years it will not be all the same size. That means it uses a lot of carbon dioxide. More carbon. Do you get me there? There is more carbon being used by the tree. Because what we want is we want fresh air. That is the whole idea. It’s not that we really want carbon, but we want to clear carbon that is in the air that destroys the environment. Isn’t it so? Because of that, what we want is let’s keep more trees. Let huge trees be there, so that they use a lot of carbon in the air, so that you have clear atmosphere. Do you get me there? [Heather: I do.] This is what I know. [Heather: Tili limodzi. (We are together.)] [Laughing] This is what I know. So when we say that we would like to sell some assets, we mean the carbon dioxide that the tree is going to use within four years. Maybe we will also agree and say ok, let’s sell some assets after nine years or eight years we will sell some assets. Because the same tree will not be all the same size. It will not use the same carbon dioxide, the amount of carbon dioxide, it uses more carbon dioxide. Those are what we call carbon assets. The assets. The goods…When I say carbon assets I mean those things. (Interview, January 13, 2012, Rumphi) Duncan has a good grasp of how the carbon credits will be generated (through the conservation of trees), measured (through complicated formulas), and then sold. During this phase of the project, his primary role is to translate this information to communities and 167 introduce the project to them. He is also supposed to procure the communities’ initial consent to sign on to this project on their behalf. Organizing in Rumphi Travelling to the villages with Duncan gave me a true appreciation of how difficult it is to do this type of work in Rumphi. One reason that organizing and disseminating information about the carbon project in this part of the world is so difficult is because of the sheer size and remoteness of Nyika and Vwaza. In addition to the distance, the condition of the roads in the area is also quite bad. One of the main roads in the Northern Region, the M14 runs northwest from Rumphi boma, between the borders of Nyika and Vwaza, and continues all the way to the Zambian border. Even though it is considered a major road, the asphalt ends just outside of Rumphi town. These “dusty roads” are not paved, and are only graded once every few years. All of these roads are in poor condition. In the rainy season, which lasts from November or December through April or May and sometimes into June, the rains which fall almost daily collect into large potholes, run off into small gullies, wash out or flood entire sections of the road, and turn large stretches into mud. At times, navigating the muddy conditions meant narrowly missing slipping off of the road entirely or the ability to simultaneously jump off of the bike as it started to pitch over in the mud. Even on a good day when the roads are dry, the large amount of wash boarding, potholes, and rocks embedded in the “dusty road” make travel uncomfortable and tedious at best. The road to Nyika, which leads to the closes communities living on the south and southwest side of Nyika, is a wild ride. Travel to some of the communities requires walking the motorcycle over hills and into valleys that are too steep to drive across or to maneuver across river channels and streams which had no bridges. As poor as the roads are, many of the communities targeted by the project 168 are not even located on roads. Reaching them requires navigating the motorcycle along footpaths hemmed in by people’s agricultural fields or bush. The fuel crisis exacerbated issues of distance and poor roads. For weeks at a time, the lone fuel station in Rumphi boma would be out of fuel altogether. Duncan’s efforts to “find some fuels” often kept him from his organizing activities. Several times, Duncan and I had to cancel plans to visit communities because of the lack of fuel. He occasionally received money from the regional TLC office to offset the cost of fuel. Duncan uses NVA money to pay for fuel sometimes, but any money spent on fuel takes away from money that could be used to fund development projects. In addition to the poor roads and vast distances, people and animals pose additional dangers. While I was living in Rumphi, an extension officer from TLC was shot and killed and his motorcycle stolen while he was returning from work near Hewe, prompting Duncan to cancel several meetings in that area. People blamed the attack on Zambian poachers, although the culprits were never caught. No less life-threatening are the large animals in the area. The close proximity of many of these communities to the protected areas means that numerous large animals—including elephant, buffalo, and hippo—routinely leave the protected area and cross into communities. Duncan reported that he is frequently delayed by groups of elephant or buffalo on the road, and several times he has had to return to Rumphi town or to his home because he cannot pass. I learned to appreciate the true gravity of this situation when we were leaving the DNPW offices in Vwaza Marsh and a group of elephants emerged from the bush terrifyingly close to us. We were forced to leave the motorcycle in the middle of the road and flee into the bush until they moved on. 169 All of this makes it more difficult to disseminate information about carbon projects to the target communities in a timely manner. Duncan is trying to organize communities across an area roughly the size of the state of Rhode Island, if Rhode Island had poorly maintained dirt roads, scarce fuel, and a huge, flat mountain and a marsh in the middle of it making travel difficult. It is important to understand the physical discomfort and sheer effort that this type of organizing in this part of Malawi–and in many other areas in the global South—requires on a day-to-day basis. None of it is debilitating, but neither is it convenient, quick, or comfortable. Nevertheless, by the time he arrives at the meetings, Duncan is in his element. He has an undeniably charismatic persona. He is an engaging public speaker. He loves an audience. He makes the audience laugh, includes jokes, and calls for audience participation. He makes full use of the space available to him, moving up and down the aisles into the audience, and commanding the space in the front of the room. His gesticulations exaggerate his physical size and his commanding voice, and he takes full advantage of this to capture and keep the audience’s attention while he explains the carbon project. Community Meetings One of the most difficult issues is providing enough information to the communities so that they have an adequate understanding of the project without overwhelming them with technical jargon. Even finding the words to explain the project is difficult. There is no direct translation in ChiTumbuka for the word “carbon,” nor is there terminology for many of the more technical terms used to talk about carbon projects (see Chapters 4 and 5). The closest equivalent word for carbon is mpepo, which is the word for both wind and air. Unlike the terms “atmosphere” or “air” in English, there is no single word in the vernacular which captures the 170 concept of the seemingly empty space around us or which describes the invisible gas particles of which that space is composed. This does not mean that ChiTumbuka speakers cannot understand the concept of carbon; it just means that there is no single word in their language which transmits the whole of this concept in the same way as in English. This means that during community meetings, which were always conducted in ChiTumbuka, the community organizer would use the terms mpepo vyiheni (bad air) and mpepo uwemi (good air) when describing the carbon cycle. During his explanations, there is slippage between which air is being construed as mpepo uwemi and which air is mpepo vyiheni. Conceptually, the idea of good air and bad air do not map directly onto categories that English-speakers would understand. During Duncan’s explanation of the carbon cycle, mpepo uwemi refers to the air in forests as it presently exists, the oxygen that trees and plants produce during respiration, as well as the ecosystem service of carbon cycling and the potential carbon offset. Mpepo vyiheni refers to carbon emissions, the carbon dioxide that humans breathe, and smoke or pollution. However, this lack of specificity is one source of confusion about how carbon commodities are being produced and sold. During community meetings, Duncan begins by presenting the communities with a basic outline of how the project is supposed to work. Since many people in these areas have limited access to formal schooling and most have never heard of a carbon project before, Duncan attempts to make this concept as accessible as possible to his audience. He prides himself on not going “too deep” in his explanation: “So that is what the communities, they need to understand that one. Selling the carbon assets. Because this needs people who went to school. But telling the communities you say, ah, ‘This is a tree, this is a human being. [He points to a drawing he has made of a person and a tree with arrows between them] This one [the tree] uses this [carbon dioxide], this one [the human] uses this [oxygen]. So what we want is we want to reduce this [carbon dioxide], because this [the tree] uses this [the carbon dioxide]. Simple mathematics. Then they understand. I think so. [B]y keeping trees you will be paid. Ahhh. Interested in that one. Simple. 171 Don’t come up with complicated mathematics or explanations. Simple mathematics. It’s much simpler. The way you tell communities it will motivate them. But if you force them to do, to keep trees, they won’t understand it. They won’t benefit from the trees. They may just cut those trees and come up with charcoal…” (Interview, January 13, 2012) He said that is the least complicated answer that he gives to people. At community meetings, he begins with a very simple version of the carbon cycle which emphasizes the linkages between the need for clean air and the conservation of trees. He explains that the air that we breathe out has bad air in it, and this is what the tree breathes in, and “in this way we exchange, people and trees”: Duncan: When we breathe out bad air the trees eat it! The tree is happy because it sees that as good air. Bad air for the trees is what people regard as good air. That means that a person cannot live without trees. Do you understand? Audience: Yes. (March 16, 2012, Chankhalamu village) Duncan: The air that a person breathes in comes from the trees and it is good. At the same time that air is also bad for the tree...I am going to show you. Come here (calling for someone to join him). This man is a tree, and this other man, Mr. K, is a person. This person Mr. K, when he breathes out, 'Whoooooo' (Duncan makes an exaggerated exhaling sound), the bad air that goes to this side, this tree says 'yes!' and eats. Are we together? Then this tree will also breathe out. Concentrate, I know these things, but you are learning it now…When we breathe out trees say ‘good.’ When trees breathe out, we say ‘good.’ So people produce bad air that is needed by trees but trees produce good air that is needed by people. Do you understand me? (March 6, 2012, Kazuni area) He then explains to the communities that there is an organization interested in “buying air” (akugula mpepo). He tells them that TLC and his own organization, the NVA— organizations with which the community is already familiar—are working with another partner organization, TGC, to start this new project: 172 Duncan: To reduce bad air, there needs to be more trees. We have to stop cutting down trees, not so?...The project wants us to protect trees in Nyika, that we should not go to the game reserve and the trees that are here we should also protect them. You should plant more trees to add on the ones that we have so that a lot of bad air should be taken up by the trees. Our partners from abroad, other organizations, they want you to protect those trees and not cut them down. You should leave them the way they are like in Nyika…They will come and count them and do their calculations and give you money just to stop you from cutting trees. [voice shift to indicate he is speaking for the partner organization] ‘Don’t cut trees! Don’t cut trees! In return here is money.’ [shift to normal voice] Is that bad? Audience: No (February 24, 2012, Thazima area, Rumphi) He then moves on to procure the community’s initial consent for the project. To do so, he generally asks people if they think that this is a positive project for the community, and if he, on their behalf as the NVA chairperson, should sign the initial agreement: Duncan: The thing is that some people want to buy that bad air and give you money. Can you refuse that? Audience: No Duncan: I want to know that, if people would be interested in buying this bad air, would you refuse? Audience: No Audience member: No, because we want money. Duncan: We are producing bad air that some people want to buy, is there any point on refusing that? Audience: No Duncan: I think that there is no issue there. We breathe bad air and some people want to buy it. Is there any issue there? Audience: No Duncan: Is there a person who keeps the bad air so that he can reuse it the next day? Audience: No. 173 Duncan: So our friends are saying that [voice shift to indicate he is speaking for the partner organization]'let us buy that bad air; how we are going to buy it? You have to take care of trees that take up the bad air.’ That project is called carbon trading owned by TGC. So because you have accepted it, it seems you have understood. Do I have to go and sign that you want [brief pause] you have agreed that it is important to you to have those development projects in exchange with preserving trees? Audience: Yes! (March 16, 2012, Chankalamu village) He ended every presentation by making a similar pitch and asking the community if he should sign the agreement on their behalf. He was able to secure community support at all of the meetings for which I was present. In general, this is what happens in every meeting: a brief introduction to the idea, a description of the organizations involved, and a request for the initial consent to continue working on this project. In half of the meetings that I attended, he also explained the linkage between the bad air that foreign investors were interested in buying, and the larger issue of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions: Duncan: There are a lot of machines in the world and they are making a lot of equipment. There is too much bad air going to the sky from people and machines. So because of that even when rains are coming they don’t come properly. They can come in July, if it pleases. It can come in December, it can come in February. It’s because of the bad air. So we should not cut down trees, they should be preserved. Don’t cut them down. They have to help us remove the bad air. If you cut down one tree, then the bad air which that tree could have consumed will remain in the sky. Let them stay the way they are. (February 24, Thazima area, Rumphi) Duncan: What we people say is bad for us the trees [noise] for this reason the organization that came forward and said, ‘Oh, since bad air is being produced not only by people but by machines, too, which are making equipment that is producing a lot of smoke. Not only here but in other countries where they are manufacturing a lot of things.’ Here in Malawi we are lucky. We have trees. But there they have a lot of bad air but they don’t have trees all. But we have trees, so 174 our partners have come here and said, ‘since you here have trees that’s a good thing. Don’t cut those trees down. They have to help us remove the bad air that has filled our land from machines. Don’t cut the trees down the trees in Vwaza, even those trees that are in your villages. If you stop each other from cutting down those trees we will give you money.’ (February 27, Chasamba village) Duncan prides himself on explaining the project in ways that the communities can understand. He tells me that understanding the carbon cycle and the technical aspects of the projects needs people who have been to school. He says that everyone in the community can understand the idea of being paid for air. He very rarely introduced the English word “carbon” or linked this word to his explanation of trees and people, of good and bad air. Nor did he explain to the communities how the money from the project would be shared between the project partners and the community. Duncan does not go into details about the way that the benefits will be distributed, or when, focusing only on the fact that azungu will pay for this air. Communities are promised money in return for their conservation activities, but from this brief explanation, it is unclear when this money will come or how it will be spent. Community Reactions In order to ascertain how community members understood carbon projects and the idea of buying and selling air, I asked them to explain to me, in their own words, how they understood this project. I was able to revisit four of the six communities in the Nyika-Vwaza area where I had attended meetings with Duncan. I compared these responses with those from people living in the seven communities near Mkuwazi Forest Reserve that had been targeted for the Plan Vivo project trainings in 2008-2009. There were remarkable similarities in what people in target communities understood about the projects in spite of the fact that the projects are in two 175 different geographic areas, sponsored by two different organizations, and separated by at least two years. Many people in both Mkuwazi and Nyika-Vwaza remember hearing that there was a new project coming to the area that had to do with carbon and involved people from outside Malawi coming to buy air (mpepo), but they did not recall being given information about the technical details of how the carbon would be bought, measured, and sold. In Mkuwazi, this was true of individuals who had not attended the Plan Vivo training as well as members of the Block Management Committee and Local Forestry Management Body who were present. Although some individuals in Mkuwazi had been trained to participate in measuring trees for monitoring and reporting activities, the majority of people interviewed did not know how carbon would be measured. Most respondents were not sure why anyone would want to buy carbon, how carbon relates to conservation, or how the carbon will actually be sold: Woman one: So with what they are saying, that they will buy us air, I don’t know how they will do it. But what I know that Mkuwazi is money on its own.” Woman two: I still remember that they are saying for sure that they will buy us carbon [i.e. buy carbon from us] here from Mkuwazi since we do have [it]. So they are trying to encourage us to conserve this forest so that we attract much carbon or we take in much carbon in our forest. And this carbon, it will make us capable to get some benefits from our well-wishers who want to buy it. (Focus group, April 25, 2012, Simoni village) There was a large discrepancy between individuals in their understanding of the linkages between carbon, conservation, and climate change. Many community members in Nyika, Vwaza, and Mkuwazi alike responded that they did not remember any one explaining the linkage. In Mkuwazi, some admitted that they may have forgotten, since the training had been conducted over two years prior to our conversations. In the Vwaza area, community members who had attended the informational meetings were unable to recall many of the details less than two 176 months after they had heard this information. At the very least, this points to the need for continual trainings and outreach to keep the community apprised of project activities. One individual recalled that the carbon project had to do with “global concern about the atmosphere” (Interview, April 25, 2012, Simoni village), while another said that the carbon project was related to a “global problem” (Interview, April 27, 2012, Ching’anya village). There were some individuals who were able to describe the link between the carbon project, climate change, and greenhouse gas emissions; however, this was true only of those who had attended Plan Vivo or COMPASS II meetings or trainings: Village headman: They were coming to buy carbon to clear the bad air, the emissions, from the atmosphere. (Interview, May 8, 2012, Kwerenji-Phetera area) Forest Guard: In developed countries, they have big industries, so they produce a lot of pollution. Those are getting into the air. They are affecting the ozone, so it is affecting the climate change. People in Africa are affected. So industrialized countries support these types of projects because there are reserves of forests in Malawi. (Interview, April 25, 2012, Simoni village) Some villagers linked emissions in other countries with climate change and the need to locate carbon sinks in other parts of the world, explaining that, “The climate (weather) is changing due to deforestation, and factory waste, like factory pollution in China.” (Focus group, May 21, 2012, Kazuni area). One forest guard explained that, “The trees breathe bad air, so that bad air is being used by these trees, so that is why people are coming in to buy this bad air.” (Interview, April 25, 2012, Simoni village). 177 When describing the project, many people spoke about what they understood to be the extractive nature of the exchange. The sale of carbon, as articulated by community members, is framed in terms of traditional resource use and extraction. People spend money to buy things that they do not have. This is a basic premise of the market, and one which the villagers understand quite well. Villagers in Malawi already engage in market transaction to acquire the things that they want or need: food that they do not grow; things that they do not make like clothes, soap, and electronics; or things that they like such as sugar, Coke, and alcohol. Azungu spend money to come to Malawi to see the beauty of Lake Malawi, which is different from lakes where the tourists come from, or to go on safari and see wild animals which do not live in their countries. As villagers understand it, azungu want to buy carbon because they do not have it. One forest guard explained that he had heard that “They [the investors] are coming to buy good air so that they can use it…They will buy it and then they will go with it outside of this area, of this country” (Interview, April 25, 2012, Simoni village). If the project is explained in terms of buying and selling air, then the logical explanation as to why that would happen is because there is something in the air in Malawi that people from outside of Malawi want or need. There is something in the air that azungu do not have and will spend money to acquire. Villagers are unsure as to what this is, or what that means for them and their forests. The theme of extraction continues when people speculated about what will happen after the carbon had been sold. Many people expressed concern about what would happen to local forest resources. One woman wanted to know “if the one who is coming to buy the air will take that air out or maybe it will be left there? Because the idea of buying, you see, if you buy then you give money then you take that commodity out,” (Focus Group, May 24, 2012, Waliro village). Another woman interjected, and with the nervous laughter that is so typically used by 178 Malawians to soften the tone of disagreement, she asked: “Is it not dangerous, trading carbon?” [Heather: Why do you think it might be dangerous? (the woman laughs nervously) Heather: No, that’s a good question.] There was mumbling in the group, and several people gave short answers. I asked the translator what they were saying, and he explained that “They are worried because we breathe out carbon dioxide which is taken by the trees. So if we have sold the carbon dioxide, will it not be that the trees will suffer, because they will not have enough carbon dioxide?” (Focus Group, May 24, 2012, Waliro village). It was a common misunderstanding that “air” would be removed from the area once it was sold. These quotes demonstrate a critical communication gap which leads to fundamental misunderstanding of what is actually being exchanged in this carbon project. Even when the word carbon enters into the explanation, it is sometimes conflated with the “good air” that is produced by trees, the “bad air” produced by pollution, cars, and factories, or the “good air” that is able to clean the bad elements from the atmosphere: Uh, outside this country maybe in the European countries there, they do have these factories and industry. Companies. These industries, they are putting things into the air. They are not complying with this carbon, or they cannot have carbon because of this puffing in of fumes from the heavy industry. So they are looking for carbon. That is why they are looking to buy it from Mkuwazi. So [pause] they do not have carbon in their countries, so they are coming to buy it from Mkuwazi. (Focus Group, April 25, 2012, Simoni village) They told us that it was important to protect the forest and conserve the forest. Where the donors are coming from, there is no carbon (carbon kulige kwawo), so they want to buy carbon from the areas where there is a lot of it. (Focus Group, May 8, Kwerenji-Phetera area) In Scotland there are lots of cars which produce a bad smell. This also destroys the air there. So they need fresh air from somewhere else. If the community keeps 179 the trees, the well-wishers will buy the carbon based on how many trees are in the portion or block that they are measuring. The well-wishers are coming to Malawi to buy carbon because in their own countries there are no trees, only cars and factories which produce bad air. They want to buy it because it is able to filter the bad air. (Interview, May 8, Kwerenji-Phetera area) During these focus groups, I decided that it would be unethical to withhold information that I knew about the technical aspects of the project, so I tried to explain the connections between climate change, the carbon cycle, and the basic concept of carbon offsets: The reason that the climate is changing is because there is too much carbon in the atmosphere. / So what is carbon? / Carbon is a part of air, just like oxygen. Some carbon dioxide comes from when we breathe, and that is normal and good. / And some carbon in the air is good and normal, too. / But if there is too much, then that can make the, uh, weather patterns change. / And so the carbon, well, let’s see, carbon comes from when we breathe, but also when we burn petrol or diesel in cars, or from factories that make smoke. / It can also enter the air when trees are cut down or when we make fires. / So all of those things put carbon into the air. / So one idea to help stop the climate from changing is to, um, plant more trees or keeping, conserving the forest. / Because trees breathe in carbon dioxide just like people breathe in oxygen. So the more trees there are, the more the extra carbon can be taken out of the air. / And so when we say that people are buying carbon or buying air, what is actually happening, what they are actually paying for, is to keep that tree there so that it can take more carbon from the air. / They are not coming with a machine and capturing air to take back to Europe or America. Nuh-uh. / They are giving the money to the communities for their hard work in conservation so that those trees should stay and keep taking carbon from the air. / Does that make a little more sense? Even after I explain the basics of the carbon project, and tell them that the air will not be taken anywhere, some people remain skeptical. One man reported that he had been told that, “when they come they will be having some equipment, some machinery. They will pump into the machinery air from this place, Mkuwazi. That is carbon. They will take it to their countries. The same carbon which they use in Coca-cola manufacturing. That is what they use carbon [for]” (Focus Group, April 25, 2013, Simoni village). In a different village, another man insisted that 180 “that air which they are going to buy, if you buy something you have to get the commodity which you have bought.” I tried to explain that the buyers would not be taking the carbon away. He did not believe me and asks how they can be sure that the buyers won’t take the air. I tell him that it is impossible to “carry air,” repeating a phrase I had heard several times in different focus groups. He just looked at me and stated, “Astronauts carry extra oxygen when they are going to the moon” (Focus Group, May 24, 2012, Waliro village). One of his neighbors seconded this man’s claims, adding that when he worked on Lake Malawi, he often saw tourists who were scuba diving with air tanks on their backs. They had a point: it is possible to contain and carry air. Even though the air in their examples was oxygen and not carbon dioxide, the project had been initially explained to them in terms of air that people and trees needed to breathe, and so if air that people could breathe could be captured, then the air that trees needed to breathe could be captured as well. Once it was captured, what was to keep the people who had paid for this air from taking it away? The slippage in translation meant that this was a logical understanding of what might happen to air that had been sold. The idea of ecosystem services and the removal of carbon had not figured in their initial encounters with the project; instead, the idea of buying and selling air is what stuck with them. The community members know that air can be contained and transported, and so the fear that their air will eventually be taken away remains a concern. The respondents’ repeated emphasis on extraction and removal of the resource illustrates that without a comprehensive explanation of the carbon project which includes the technical aspects, the linkage to climate change, and the financial transactions of the carbon sales, it is impossible to gain a full understanding of what exactly a carbon commodity is. Since the value of carbon commodities can only be realized when they are exchanged, to leave out any explanation of what the exchange entails is to invite misunderstanding. This is evident in the 181 confusion that people express about the nature of carbon commodities and the dynamics of the market exchanges at the center of this project. During the focus groups, one individual explained: It is like you are buying a shirt from me. That shirt still remains with me. You have given me some money. In that case, I spend it. But I will start to meditate, what is going to happen upon this shirt, and me, and the buyer? Since the buyer left it to me, I have eaten the money, I have spent it all. And this shirt, is he or she going to take it back? So there will be some questions. So I can’t understand it very much. (Focus Group, May 7, 2012, Chakuluma village) Upon hearing this, another participant added: Maybe these people will give us money. What will they do in the future? We are worried about the future. Maybe some time they will come again to us. We don’t know what they will do…Maybe they will demand their funds because they haven’t collected their carbon? But the funds were spent. So what is going to happen? (Focus Group, May 7, 2012, Chakuluma village) Underlying these concerns is the common theme of extraction. The community members are convinced that something will be exchanged during the process of buying and selling air, and whatever is exchanged will be transferred to the buyer. They are just unsure what that something is. During our focus groups, people reported that they wanted to know more about the benefits-sharing scheme, when money would come and how it would be used, and how their access to resources would change. These questions are both remarkably prescient and common sense: if this is supposed to be a development project, then why aren’t there explanations about the benefits sharing mechanisms and plans for their distribution? The simple explanations offered to communities have prompted them to ask some important and focused questions about this carbon project: who will buy the carbon? What will they do with it? What will happen to the forests? In the absence of full information, people use their previous experience with the market 182 exchange of natural resources to piece together an idea of how the exchange process will work, and what will actually be exchanged. This raises serious questions about the ability of communities to consent to the project when they do not fully understand the project, the commodity to be exchanged, or their roles and responsibilities in these market transactions. Terra Global and Carbon Finances What different stakeholders will be told, and at what point in the project, are at the discretion of the individual carbon developer. One of the most difficult issues is providing enough information to the communities so that they have an adequate understanding of the project without overwhelming them with technical jargon. During the trainings that TGC held in Lilongwe for state officials, NGO personnel, extension workers, and community organizers, TGC gave no clear indication of what information needed to be passed on to the community. Furthermore, there was no time scheduled for discussing what communities should be told, or to create a timeline in which to accomplish this. This was left to the discretion of the community organizer. It was not until a subsequent meeting almost a year after this initial training—after Duncan had already conducted numerous community meetings—that the subject of what communities were being told about the project came up. Even then, this was an informal conversation during a lunch break; it was not on the official meeting schedule. The carbon developer approves of, and prefers, Duncan’s basic explanation of the project. After hearing his synopsis, the carbon developer responded that she liked the idea of explaining, “in the simplest terms that people need trees to breathe.” She said that such a sentiment captured the fundamental idea of the project and that everyone could probably understand that. She explained to him that she didn’t think that it was necessary to explain details like the linkage to climate change and the carbon cycle, but that he should stick to “the idea of 183 breathing…because it is simple and understandable. Everyone has to breathe to live. We need trees to breathe. We need trees to live, so they should conserve them. End of story,” (May 3, 2012). The carbon developer considered the dynamics of the project on the ground were important for the communities to understand; however, the technical and financial aspects of the project were a different matter. During a subsequent conversation, however, the carbon developer reiterated how difficult it was to gauge if community members understand their roles and responsibilities in the project. She expressed concern that communities might not understand “what they are agreeing to when they sign a contract: that they are selling carbon for the life of the thirty-year project. It doesn’t matter if in ten years another investor comes along and offers to buy it from them for ten times the price. It is no longer theirs to sell” (Interview, May 3, 2012). Her concern focused on if communities understood the terms of the contractual agreement and did not extend to whether or not the communities could actually be said to understand the nature of what they were agreeing to sell. There is an inherent contradiction here, since the carbon developers are openly hesitant to fully explain the details of financing and sales of the carbon credits to communities, state officials, or community organizers, but still want to claim that the community is involved and participating in the project. One carbon developer told the community organizer directly that it was not necessary to explain everything to the communities, particularly the financial mechanisms. This was both because TGC considered the financial transactions to be needlessly complicated and also because they considered understanding of the financial mechanisms to be different from understanding the carbon cycle and the link between conservation of forests, reducing emissions, and the creation of saleable carbon credits. In fact, TGC is openly hesitant 184 about sharing the details of the financial transactions involved in the carbon sales with the other project partners or the communities. Not only would explaining all of the details of the financial transactions be difficult and time consuming, but it could potentially undermine the success of the project. When communities sign a contract to sell their carbon, they are locked in at the price designated in that contract. No matter the market price, the community will get what is designated in the sales agreement. This means that any increase in prices of carbon credits will not accrue to the community. After the initial sale, the carbon credits may be sold, resold, bundled, optioned, and otherwise financialized, and the value of the credit may increase (or decrease) many times over the price that the community agreed to in the sales agreement (Bracking 2012; Descheneau 2012; Spash 2010). Even if the carbon project is successful at storing carbon and conserving forests, the community will never see these returns. This additional value is pocketed by the investors, hedge fund managers, and traders who will bundle carbon credits, resell them, and turn them into options in the world of high finance. It is investors, not the community, who will reap the benefits of the financialization of carbon. It is arguably very difficult to explain high finance to non-experts. Understanding financial market is difficult for English-speaking Americans who hear daily about stock markets and for whom the rise and fall of the Dow is a quotidian blip on the news. Project planners themselves do not always fully understand the financial aspects of the carbon market. Within TGC there are people who work on project design and development, people who focus on remote sensing analysis and modeling, and people who work in investment and finance. The jargon that the developers use on a daily basis to talk about the REDD+ project in fact hides varying degrees of understanding about the technical, social, and financial aspects of the project. To explain the 185 complexities of this to Malawians living near forests would be very abstract and take a great deal of time. It would as complex as teaching an urban, American researcher how to farm in the fields adjacent to those carbon-producing forest reserves—not impossible, but it would take a significant amount of time and energy. However, rural Malawians already understand the role of speculation and price fluctuations in the market and the variability of commodity prices. Every year, people who can afford it purchase maize, soy, rice, and other commodities at the end of growing season when prices are low. They sell when the prices begin to climb at the beginning of the next growing season when crops are not ready and people have run out of the food supplies saved over from the previous season. Malawians are keenly aware of this type of supply-and-demand and the relationship between prices and scarcity. Moreover, many have been involved in growing cash crops like tobacco or selling fuel on the black market, both of which require some understanding of global markets and the fluctuating prices of different commodities over time. At least some people in every community would likely understand the idea that the value of carbon credits might change in the future due to fluctuations in global demand. However, the way that many contracts for REDD+ carbon projects are written means that the community would not get any additional funds if the price of carbon credits increases. This can make a project less desirable to communities. For this reason carbon developers with whom I spoke openly admitted that they kept these details from communities. Market-based conservation is predicated on the idea that people will be willing to conserve their environment in return for payment. REDD+ projects combine this assumption with the idea from integrated conservation and development projects which postulate that people will reduce their use of forest resources if they have other opportunities to purchase what they 186 need through the market. REDD+ policy prescriptions therefore assume that rural people are rational actors who, given the chance to engage in market transactions, will do so. If conservation will provide economic returns higher than the gains received by exploiting natural resources, then people will chose to conserve. But the limited explanations given in the carbon project depend on the construction of rural Malawians as unable to understand the complexities of the carbon market. They are imagined simultaneously as (1) market-rational subjects who are able to understand the benefits of market exchanges and enter into them as consensual, rational actors and (2) as actors who are not able to fully engage in the market due to limited education and financial intelligence and therefore require simplistic—and partial—explanations of the carbon market. This dissonance generates a cognitive blind which obscures the inequalities built into the transaction itself, and which undergirds both the market and the commodities produced for it. The other project partners—the government, the NGO, and the community organizer— are also hesitant to share the details of the benefits sharing schemes with communities. The community is entitled to a share of the profits, not a share of all of the sales. Carbon projects require constant monitoring, reporting, and verification to ensure that the carbon that is supposed to be stored is actually there. The partner NGO, the government agency, and the community organization will all receive benefits in the form of salaries, equipment, and capacity building before any money goes to the communities in the form of development funding (see Chapter 6). The costs of the livelihood and development activities are also considered part of the project costs. The money to finance these activities will come from the carbon sales and is considered to be part of the costs of maintaining the project. All of this will take enormous financial and 187 human resources which will be paid for out of the money from the carbon sales, since the project is supposed to be self-sustaining. During the budget and planning meetings, the community organizer, the director of the partner NGO, and the director of the DNPW were all asked to create detailed budgets itemizing the additional resources that they would need in order to implement the carbon project and meet the ongoing monitoring, reporting, and verification requirements. Over its thirty-year duration, the project is expected to generate a total of US$15,746,250 in carbon sales. 22 However, the revenue will first be used to pay for the additional personnel time and equipment that will be needed to support the project’s livelihood activities—such as purchasing bee hives, livestock, and tree seedlings. There are also plans to: pay the NVA for its work with the project; to pay individuals in communities for day labor to help clear fence lines; to provide trainings for increasing coffee and macadamia nut production and teach financial accountability to microcredit programs; to teach improved farming techniques; to establish woodlots; to build and install improved woodstoves; to train community members to participate in monitoring and carbon measuring activities; to buy bikes for NVA zone personnel to support their organizing activities; and meet the needs of all the other planned activities. Project revenues will also be used to increase monitoring and enforcement through hiring additional forest guards and purchasing radios, fuel, and vehicles which will be necessary to sustain the project and conserve the carbon stock. 22 Terra Global will take a fee of five percent of the total credits generated from the project, which it can buy or sell however it sees fit. This five percent comes from the total credits generated before any of the credits are sold, and as such do not figure into the estimated total carbon sales. 188 Once these costs are figured in, the project is expected to cost US$15,198,544. That means that only a little over US$500,000 will actually be available as net income from the project. This is then split between the stakeholders, including the DNPW and the NVA. The NVA gets 66 percent of this amount, a little over US$360,000, which will then be divided amongst the villages which met their conservation targets and increased their carbon stocks. This means that over the thirty-year life of the project, each of the 147 target group villages can expect to receive a total of US$2,459. That equates to about US$81 per year, the price of five bags of cement. While this figure does not include income generated from the livelihood activities planned for the carbon project, or income from other activities such as keeping bees or selling non-timber forest products, it is still a very small amount. A resource-use study from 2003 concluded that the average household near Vwaza Marsh Wildlife Reserve could earn up to MK9,215 (US$30.75 at the 2011 exchange rate) annually from cultivating honey and collecting and selling other non-timber forest resources from the reserve, activities allowed under the comanagement agreement (Wolf 2003). This is equivalent to 46 days of work paid at the minimum wage for formal labor which was MK200 per day in 2003. By comparison, the charcoal industry employs approximately 60,000 rural producers and transporters who can each make an average of MK39,186 to MK56,820 per year (US$218 to US$316) for cutting down trees and making charcoal (Kambewa et al. 2007). This is in addition to the increase in household nutrition and living standards enjoyed by households that access food and other resources—illegally or in compliance with the comanagement agreement—from the reserve. Moreover, the state will have additional capacity to enforce existing restrictions on resource extraction from the protected areas. Although technically illegal, all of these activities currently take place within the reserve due to the lack of enforcement. The project funds which 189 will come to the state are expected to be used to increase the carbon stock by enforcing the rules on resource access and use with the protected areas. Communities, if provided with the full details about the way that money from the project will be spent, and the full range of potential costs they might incur, may make a rational decision to reject the project because the expected payout for them would be too low. The omission of financial information serves to facilitate procuring the initial consent of the community without asking too many questions about where the money will go, or who will be entitled to a cut of the financial benefits when, and if, money begins to accumulate. This issue is a common concern for planners of carbon projects elsewhere in Africa, as well. I met a professor from the UK who had just finished working with the government of Ethiopia to start a Plan Vivo carbon project in the highlands there. The requisite land use and biomass surveys had been completed, the technical aspects done, and the benefits-sharing arrangement proposed. However, once it was time to introduce the communities to the project for approval, the project completely stalled. State officials in Ethiopia did not present the project to communities. They expected that the communities would reject the plan since the potential income-generating potential was so low. Once the calculations were complete, and the cost of running the project subtracted from the potential earnings, these state officials judged the amount of money too low to incentivize the community to conserve the forest. This discussion is not meant to vilify TGC. Many of the issues that I present in this chapter occur because the organization is attempting to work with communities, organizers, NGOs, and the government in Malawi. These issues would look very different if TGC were not so committed to trying to adhere to ethical standards for creating carbon projects. Whatever might be said about the shortcomings of this project and the informational meetings that I discuss 190 above, it should not be forgotten that it is possible to create carbon projects without involving the community, and without creating a benefits structure that provides the communities with financial resources. In some areas of the world, there are organizations that come to communities and convince them to “trade their carbon rights for cell phone credits and phones” (Interview, May 3, 2012, Lilongwe). In the race to establish carbon projects, following the ethical guidelines in place takes significantly more time and money, potentially putting the companies which follow these rules at a disadvantage in this fast-paced sector. One of the ironies of this situation is that the more the developer wants to involve the community, the higher the chances of the project taking much longer than expected or of even failing all together (see discussion of Mkuwazi in Chapter 8). One carbon developer described the difficulty of finding herself in the position of needing to convince the community and partner organizations to participate in a project while recognizing the majority of the value of these carbon credits would go to investors, not to the community. She lamented, “What is the level of informed consent? They have no frickin’ idea. They only know what they’ve been told…I am not going to explain the intricacies of a transaction [to villagers], we’d never get anything done. But where does the accountability to the community come in?” (Interview, May 3, 2012, Lilongwe). Conclusion This project, then, is based on fundamental miscommunications and omissions. The carbon developer does not want to divulge details about how much money the project will make, and to whom that money will go. The communities, on the other hand, do not want to openly discuss the range of activities which take place in the protected areas since some of these 191 activities—which are vital to the community—are disallowed under the comanagement agreements. Thus, each side is actually misrepresenting certain points of information that would impact the willingness or ability of the other to commit to the project. The communities are most interested in accessing more development opportunities and funds for their communities, which they desperately need. The project planners want to achieve measurable targets in increasing carbon stocks as well as in “development”—the outcomes of which are more difficult to measure. However, for this project, none of this can be obtained without the creation and sale of carbon credits, which depends on the community’s participation in conservation, and their success in slowing local rates of deforestation and degradation. Their commitment to conserve is based on the promise of future development in return for those conservation activities. There are benefits that come with this selective sharing of information. While the project planners ostensibly withhold information that they deem to be needlessly complicated (such as the technical processes used to measure carbon or the financial transactions involved in selling carbon commodities), this is at least partially because villagers would be able to grasp the potential disadvantages of the project, and may choose to reject it all together. So the limited information that is given to the communities actually enables the creation of the project, and therefore creation of the carbon credits. Market exchanges for carbon projects are facilitated by these disparities in knowledge. Withholding vital information that is portrayed as inconvenient or overly complicated is actually a critical step in the creation of carbon commodities without which they might never come into being. Communities also withhold information from project planners and carbon developers. They routinely downplay the extent of their activities within the reserves and protected areas to government officials and conservation organizations (see Chapter 6). In this case, withholding 192 this information might facilitate the creation of a project that promises desperately needed development projects. However, TGC has a range of options for controlling for these gaps in information, including consulting existing resource use studies or remote sensing maps of deforestation patterns, and they can make adjustments to the estimates of carbon stocks in order to control for these unknowns. The community has no similar recourse to gain information from TGC or other project planners. The ability to control the flow of information—and the unequal relationships which enable some actors to withhold information to a greater extent than other actors—becomes a critical leverage point in the creation of carbon commodities. Carbon credits in Malawi could not be produced without this significant gap in understanding about the nature of the carbon commodity itself and what is actually being exchanged in these market transactions. This process is illustrative of how uncertainty and inequality between agents are not side effects of market transactions, but necessary preconditions for the creation of new commodities. Actors leverage power asymmetries and uncertainty to facilitate the creation of these commodities; in turn these inequalities and uncertainties and are further entrenched through this process. These inequalities create the conditions for the sale of these commodities on the voluntary carbon market. The communities will be unable to capture the full value of the credits that they are producing. Their inability to benefit fully from the conservation work that they may do to create these credits will lead to further lack of development as the money for carbon credits goes primarily to investors, hedge fund managers, and others who will repackage and resell these credits instead of building roads, bridges, clinics, and schools that the community was promised. 193 CHAPTER 8: MKUWAZI AND THE INVISIBLE HAND The previous chapters in this dissertation have focused mainly on the process of producing carbon commodities and a market for them; this chapter, however, addresses the case of a carbon project in the Mkuwazi Forest Reserve in which project planners and community members have been unable to tap into the carbon market. Sites where markets fail to materialize can expose the complexities of the carbon value chain and the liminal nature of commodity production. Mkuwazi also highlights the multiple spaces and scales involved in carbon commodity production and so demonstrates the difficulty of locating production in a particular space. Carbon commodities cannot be produced without the work of the biomass survey teams in the field, the modeling and technical work performed in offices and labs, and the activities undertaken by local communities and state actors working in specific forest spaces. However, their production ultimately depends on investors—whether publically-funded international aid, private organizations, or for-profit investment—who provide the financial backing for carbon projects and who purchase carbon products. Without someone to buy the credits, the project cannot be realized. The entanglements of these public-private partnerships needed to create carbon products generate new forms of value, even when these projects fail. This chapter examines the interface of conservation and development as mediated through and by the market and the consequences that investor actions and preferences have on the success or failure of individual carbon projects. Mkuwazi A few weeks after I started working with the seven communities targeted by the Plan Vivo carbon project, Elton, my research assistant, and I decided to hike into Mkuwazi Forest 194 Reserve and to the top of Mkuwazi Hill. Really, I decided that it would be fun to hike around inside of the reserve, and I enlisted Elton as my guide. I took a minibus to meet Elton near the Vizara Rubber Plantation where we would continue on together towards Mkuwazi. The minibus makes a sharp left turn at the police roadblock that leads to Nkhata Bay boma. The young men who make their living carving chess boards, bowls, statues, and other wooden curios have set up a row of wood and thatch lean-to’s to display their wares to the foreign tourists travelling to Nkhata Bay or going south towards the beach-side hotels located further down the Lakeshore Road. Made from teak, mahogany, and other indigenous hardwood trees, these curios (viboli) are an important source of income for many people. In this area, much of the wood used to make viboli comes from Mkuwazi. The viboli stands are quiet compared to the bustling market stalls which occupy the small hill across from the roadblock. Music blares from a stand selling CDs and DVDs, and smoke rises up from stands where vendors sell roasted goat meat and fried cassava. Next to the bustling market, people stand under the shade of a large tree and wait to board the minivans, minibuses, and trucks heading south on the Lakeshore Road. Some people have baskets and bags full of produce, clothing, or other goods purchased in Mzuzu and are on their way to the smaller trading centers and markets in other villages. Others have baskets or plastic bags full of fish from the lake below which will be taken to inland areas and sold. When a vehicle stops, people crowd on with their goods. If you are lucky, the small vans called minibuses will only have eighteen or nineteen people—the legal limit—crowded into the four rows of seats in the converted vans. Even though we are still in sight of the police road block twenty yards behind us, the minibus conductors usually try to illegally pack in a few more passengers and people jostle to find space, sometimes crouching over the people in the seats, 195 other times sitting on the engine block cover behind the driver’s seat. The big, open trucks are usually just as crowded with women perching on top of Coke crates or bags of clothes and cassava, and men balancing on the sides of the truck bed. I prefer the open trucks so that I can see the villages and fields as we speed past. As we continue on the Lakeshore Road, it veers inland across the low rolling hills and the flat pans found at the bottom of the rift valley. We speed by more villages clustered along the side of the road. We even pass a two-story red brick building which looks like it was plucked out of an English country village and which is completely out of place surrounded by single-story, mud brick and thatch-roofed homes. The maize fields and villages give way to the Vizara Rubber Plantation, with rows upon rows of perfectly spaced, uniform trees. Most of the trees have plastic sheeting secured around cuts in the bark which spiral downward into the small black plastic cups that collect the rubbery sap. These are the older trees. The newer trees are terraced onto the hillsides with nitrogen-fixing, non-edible legumes covering the ground around their slender trunks. A new group of rubber tree saplings is planted every year, while an old stand of trees is cleared and turned into pressure-treated lumber in the bright green and white EcoTimbers sawmill. The minibus pulls off the side of the road in the shadow of the sawmill. This is where Elton and I usually meet to travel to the villages together. Elton’s wife works for Vizara as a rubber tapper. They live with her two young children, and their new baby girl in employee housing on the estate in a small, two-room house. The long rows of employee houses are identical to one another. Most of them have fashioned small porches and out-door kitchens, and there are both decorative and edible plants in pots placed around outside. Otherwise, though, it is a world of red mud paths and no room to farm. At first I thought Elton’s desire to move his 196 family back to the village to farm was odd; why give up stable, wage employment and free housing? But after visiting both here and Ching’anya, I can understand why he would want his baby girl to grow up on in his land in the village instead. Elton’s parents live in Ching’anya, one of the villages targeted for the Plan Vivo carbon project. Elton was raised and educated in Zimbabwe after his parents moved there to work in the administrative offices for the gold mines. Elton speaks fluent English, Shona, ChiTonga (the language spoken in Nkhata Bay), ChiChewa, and ChiTumbuka, and can get by in a few other languages. He worked for the mines in Zimbabwe until he and his parents moved back to their home village. Elton has served on the village and area development committees, serves as a lead farmer for WorldVisions’ Miracle Project growing new types of soy beans, and is active in his church. He is the vice chairperson of the Local Forestry Management Body for Mkuwazi and was present during the Plan Vivo trainings in 2008. He also prepared a report on REDD+ and community-based conservation that he was supposed to present at a meeting in Nairobi, but the money to fund the trip never materialized. Today when Elton and I meet, he is dressed in golf clothes instead of his usual smart, grey slacks and button down shirt. Today we are going to hike. People waiting for a ride flank either side of the road. When the vehicle stops to load and unload passengers, young boys run up, thrusting white balls made of strands of rubber through the windows and into the hands and faces of potential customers. Girls arrive with blue and orange plastic Poly-Pak bowls—ubiquitous in Malawi now—filled with oranges or tangerines or guava. The fruit is all greenish-yellow, not the export-quality, uniformly-colored fruit found in American supermarkets. It tastes better. Above all of this organized chaos, the tall, tree-covered hill called Mkuwazi rises in the distance above Vizara. It is a parabolic hill, with a second, smaller rise joining it half way up one 197 side which makes it look more like an actual mountain than the egg that the tourist books describe. In the middle of the rainy season it is covered with deep green trees and looks much darker than the lower, denuded hills around it. The only other hills in the immediate area that are similarly forested are the protected hills of the rubber plantation. The road, at one point, cuts through a corner of the forest, and the thick, green, living walls grow right up to the road, spilling over onto the black top. Compared to the neat, parallel rows of the rubber plantation, the forest looks like it is overflowing with vines and underbrush. Just as suddenly, we emerge again, near the foot of the hill and its huge, rocky, tree-covered form looms overhead as you continue to speed past small settlements, schools, and the area’s main trading center. Elton, signals the minibus operator to stop. Elton and I walked from the tar road on a sandy dirt path past a few homesteads. He has attended several of Living Waters’ all night prayer vigils which take place on top of Mkuwazi Hill, so he knows the path very well. Soon we were walking between walls of grass higher than our heads. At some point, something with two wheels had carved out the parallel trenches of the small road. Now it is mostly a path for people and animals, the small and large footprints of adults and children imprinted in the soft ground, and the grass in the middle half as high as the grass on the sides. Within feet of the road, the grass gave way to a mix of grass and scrub, and soon the narrow, arm-sized trees gave way to more substantial ones. The grass became shorter. The trees themselves grew closer, and the path turned sharply next to a vine covered scrub bush, and Elton and I stepped into the shade of the forest. Having grown up in the mountains and plains of the American West, Mkuwazi is like no forest I have ever seen. The forest surrounding the bottom of the hill is thick, dense with large trees. It would take more than three people to encircle some of the trunks. Some of the trees are 198 over a hundred feet tall. Somewhere in this tangle of trees there is a particular species of very rare tree. The mkuwazi tree is a sacred tree used for divining rituals, and this is the tree from which the forest reserve and hill derive their names. Mkuwazi comes from the ChiTonga word uhavi (mwabvi in ChiChewa) which refers to the poison ordeal. Those accused of practicing witchcraft are taken into the forest by the sing’anga—traditional healers and those who intervene and interpret interactions between the living and the ancestors. The sing’anga mixes parts of this tree with water and other substances to make a poisonous drink. The accused person will drink it and if they are innocent, they will vomit up the poison. A guilty person will die. Mkuwazi Forest Reserve is one of the only places that these trees can still be found, and there are only two or three of them left in this forest. People from all over the district come to collect the medicinal bark from this tree. Knowledge of their location is zealously guarded by sing’anga and elders in the villages. There are butterflies everywhere on the paths. The forest floor and the pathways through it are covered with leaf litter and sticks. In many parts, tiny termites no bigger than grains of rice have built entire colonies connected by covered highways. When you step on them or disturb them in any way, they all take up a rhythmic wing vibration which crescendos and dies again and again until the threat is no longer detected. You can hear, feel, and see these vibrations as thousands of tiny creatures beat their wings in perfect time. Farther up the hill, large, thick, broadleaf trees give way to slimmer, more sparsely canopied varieties. Towards the very top, thicket, scrub bushes, and shorter trees interspersed with open patches of tall grasses dominate. The burnt-out fires from Living Waters and other Christian church groups who hold all-night vigils and prayer meetings at the summit stand close to the concrete marker erected by the Forestry Department. The shrieks of blue monkeys and the 199 frog-like croak of bar-tailed trogons—a rare bird species—echo through the trees below. There is an endemic species of butterfly here. Elton has seen the scientists come to collect them. This is one of the only areas in Malawi known to have bush babies, the small, furry, large-eyed primate. The top provides a clear view of the blue waters of Lake Malawi to the east and the sugar and rubber plantations that border the forest. From this birds’ eye view of the forest reserve, we can see the seven villages targeted by the now-defunct Plan Vivo carbon project. We can also see the two deep cuts which cross the otherwise unbroken tree-cover: the dark line of the main road we used to get here; and the lighter green scar where ESCOM, the national electric company, has made a cut to install huge steel towers to carry electricity to the Limphasa Sugar Plantation, the Vizara Rubber Plantation, and the EcoTimbers Mill. None of the seven villages targeted for the carbon project have electricity. Mkuwazi was, and still technically is, the site of the first carbon offset project in a protected area in Malawi. It was meant to be a pilot project to explore the possibility of opening up other protected areas to similar carbon sales agreements. In 2008, the Government of Malawi joined with international donors and environmental NGOs to start a pilot carbon sequestration project in Mkuwazi Forest Reserve in the Northern Province. This project was supposed to determine how and to what extent the other protected areas in Malawi would be considered for future REDD+ projects. The Mkuwazi forest reserve is co-managed by the Department of Forestry and communities living nearby. The Plan Vivo project was expected to generate US$181,668 annually, of which 60 percent would fund community development projects and the remaining 40 percent would go to the NGO consortium and Forestry Department to cover administrative costs (Malawi Environment Endowment Trust 2009). When I first met with the project planners in 2009, researchers from FRIM had received feedback from Plan Vivo and 200 were making minor adjustments to the Project Design Document before resubmitting it. As of August, 2010, Plan Vivo coordinators reported that the Mkuwazi project was in the final stages of certification and only needed an initial buyer for the first 5,000 tCO2 in order to formally enter the carbon market (email communication, August 12, 2010). By the time I returned to Malawi in October 2011, however, the project in Mkuwazi had completely stalled. People from the Department of Forestry, LEAD, MEET, and FRIM who had worked on the project all expressed frustration that it was not moving forward. While everyone I spoke with conjectured on the project’s fate, no one knew exactly what had happened. In the end, it turned out to be a combination of factors, including confusion after the end of the USAID COMPASSII project and subsequent project hand off and typical development project malaise which sets in when funding runs dry. The biggest factor in the project’s failure, however, was the 2009-2012 aid embargo which prevented the initial donor investment necessary to finalize project validation through Plan Vivo. From 2009 until the death of Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika in April 2012, bilateral aid agreements were suspended in response to a number of concerns regarding civil and political rights as well as the government’s policies on financial liberalization and foreign relations. In 2009, the arrest and imprisonment of a man and his transgendered fiancé sparked international outrage over the rights of homosexuals in Malawi (McKenzie 2012). Since Mutharika’s Democratic People’s Party gained a majority of seats in Parliament in 2009, the president mounted an escalating campaign against any form of political dissent. This included the arrest and detention of opposition party leaders and political organizers including Atupele Muluzi, a political rival and son of Malawi’s first democratically elected president, Bakilli Muluzi, and prominent human rights lawyer Ralph Kasambara (BBC News 2012; Smith 2012). 201 Mutharika also refused to devalue the Kwacha, the national currency, by over 50 percent after repeated proposals by the IMF (Agence France Press 2011). He further angered the United States and other UN member-states over his continued friendship with Omar al-Bashir, the President of Sudan who had been indicted by the International Criminal Court for atrocities committed in Darfur. In 2011, Mutharika welcomed al-Bashir during the international trade summit held in Malawi and refused to arrest or extradite him (Zulu 2011). All of these factors lead the US and European donors to suspend foreign aid to Malawi’s government, resulting in the lack of foreign exchange, the subsequent fuel crisis, and a rapid inflation of food and other consumer goods. This aid embargo included any money that would go to the central government or government departments, including the emerging carbon project in Mkuwazi. Plan Vivo requires that an initial percentage of the carbon credits be sold as part of the final project verification process before the credits would be available on the voluntary market. The Scottish government had initially agreed to purchase the first 5,000 tonnes of carbon from the Mkuwazi project to meet this requirement, but pulled out when other UK donors such as DFID withheld their aid to Malawi. The aid embargo coupled with the economic crises which began in 2008 and the ensuing contraction of global demand for carbon credits left the Mkuwazi project unable to attract a buyer for those 5,000 initial carbon units required to complete the Plan Vivo certification. Without completing certification, none of the carbon sequestered in Mkuwazi under the Plan Vivo agreement can be sold. Development Funding and Carbon There is a significant gap between the market price for carbon and the costs associated with creating a carbon project. Proponents of REDD+ argue that reducing forest emissions by conserving forests is one of the most cost effective ways to reduce emissions. The 202 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated that one quarter of the emissions from deforestation could be abated for less than US$20 per tCO2 (IPCC 2007). Reducing the emissions from the other 75 percent will cost significantly more. However, the average price per tonne of voluntary carbon credits was only about US$5.60 in 2010, US$6.20 in 2011, and US$5.90 in 2012 (Peters-Stanley and Hamilton 2012; Peters-Stanley and Yin 2013). Moreover, the IPCC estimate does not include the costs associated with the initial mapping and biomass measurements, community education efforts, capacity building for development projects and for enforcement, or the ongoing monitoring, reporting, and verification costs which are entailed in the production of carbon credits (Myers 2008; Ostrom 2012). The additional time and effort that it takes to map small parcels of land and to get multiple stakeholders to agree to a project means that projects which target small-scale farmers and the poorest communities have higher initial costs than larger projects targeting large land owners or the government. The more development and capacity-building activities that are part of a project, the more expensive these transaction costs become. The private, for-profit sector relies on the public sector—international donors and nonprofit organizations—to make up the cost difference. Carbon developers expect that most projects will be “cash negative” during the first few years due to the high start-up costs entailed in creating these projects. Infusions of cash from donors and NGOs help offset these costs, even though they do not do so completely. A carbon developer from TGC said that the initial investment by USAID through the Kulera Project is what gives their project a competitive edge since the donor money subsidizes the substantial initial investment to create the project. According to her, “the availability of grant funding is vital to the financial viability of these projects” (Interview, May 1, 2012). She cited an offset project in a protected area in 203 Mozambique as a counter-example. The government of Mozambique granted a private company a concession to develop carbon in the protected area. A South African company invested US$1 million in the project, but they did so expecting a return, not as donors providing an influx of grant money. As a result, the project is “sitting on millions of dollars’ worth of carbon they can’t sell” (Interview, May 1, 2012, Lilongwe). Without grant money, the initial start-up costs were much higher and so the project will not become “cash positive” as quickly as competing projects that did benefit from public donor funds. This meant that other potential investors, put off by the longer wait for a return on their investment, were less likely to invest in the Mozambique project than in other projects which could turn a profit more quickly due to lower costs. The failure of the project in Mozambique was a result of two related funding issues: first, an extended time horizon of operating the project at a loss due to lack of “free” aid money upfront; and second, the lack of investor capital, in part due to the extended time horizons for turning a profit. In this case, the more the project needed private capital to continue, the less attractive it became to potential investors. Like Mkuwazi, the lack of investment meant that the project was essentially stalled. Since “donors tend to redirect aid from government to NGOs or to such partnerships rather than bring in new aid” (Zulu 2012:199), this means that money that might have ostensibly gone towards the creation of infrastructure projects will instead be channeled towards the creation of market-based projects which may or may not be able to generate sustainable carbon sales—and development income—in the future. Carbon, Development, and Conservation In 2008 and 2009, when project planners first introduced the carbon project to the community, there were high hopes that the carbon project would bring development to this area. 204 Villagers remembered the development projects that had been promised in exchange for participating in the project. They had been told the funds from the carbon sales would be used for building schools, clinics, bridges, roads, and boreholes; to finance feeding programs at nursery schools; to create a revolving fund to support micro-enterprises; and provide financial support to community-based organizations working with orphans, people who are HIV-positive, and other vulnerable groups. Some of the money would go towards the maintenance of the eco-tourism committee and the beekeeping groups, some of the small enterprises supported by the Plan Vivo and COMPASS II project. Some money would also go to the village NRCs to compensate community forest patrols and provide conservation education. In 2012, when I asked residents about the project, they will shrug and respond, “Palibe,” (it is not here). For them, the carbon project never came. One man explained that “We heard that they are going to buy air, but up to this time it was long back. Up ‘til now we are still waiting. When are they going to come and buy us this air?” (Interview, May 9 2012, Ndiweri village). Another commiserated that, “They haven’t come, these people [the buyers]…we are still waiting for them. These people promised us that they will bring us carbon funds…They don’t come to us, they don’t communicate” (Interview, May 8, 2012, Pethera village). A third simply stated that “The project has been keeping us waiting for a long time.” (Interview, May 7, 2012, Chakuluma village) People in the seven targeted villages remembered the trainings that Plan Vivo and MEET had held in 2008 and 2009 and the activities that these organizations had asked communities to do in order to facilitate measuring carbon stocks. One man explained that he was part of a group that had been “told to make some pathways to the top of the mountain, of the hill, to pave way for the coming in of these personnel for the carbon project to enter the forest so that they could 205 measure these trees and find out if there is good air or bad air in this forest” (Focus Group, April 25, 2012, Simoni village). Another man added that he had been trained to help measure the growth of trees in the area as part of the carbon surveys. MEET and Plan Vivo had taught him to measure a tree, record the circumference, and “then come back, and if the circumference is bigger, then you will know that the tree is growing and that there is more carbon in it than there was before” (Focus Group, March 12, 2012, Ching’anya village). He complained that although he had participating in recorded these measurements, Plan Vivo and MEET had not held up their end of the bargain and returned with the project. The promised trainings about how the carbon was stored in trees and how it would actually be sold never took place: “They promised that they would come back and train all the institutions in according to, in line with the carbon project so that we would be empowered. The knowledge…empowered us, communities, with the carbon sequestration. But up to today we haven’t heard from them” (Focus Group, April 25, 2012, Simoni village). For them, the lack of communication, coupled with a general lack of understanding about how the project would actually work, when or if it would come, and how it would impact the community were continued sources of frustration. In addition to work directly related to carbon accounting, several people had been involved in meetings to create the comanagement agreement or were on the committees that had been formed to help the communities manage the forest. One man explained, “During that time, they formulated some institutions, structures were set, the comanagement agreement was signed. And from that time, we haven’t heard from them” (Focus Group, April 25, 2012, Simoni village). 206 One woman complained that it seemed like they had to continually attend meetings and recreate committees, sometimes replicating efforts: “Just a few months ago, we were being called to the Village Headman to form another committee. Why are they creating a new committee if there is already a committee? We are confused. We have already done scouting to the top of the mountain and made the trails. The committees are formed, why do they need more?” (Focus Group, May 8, 2012, Kwerenji-Phetera area). Other people had been part of the newly created VNRMCs or Forestry Management Body which had worked with the VNRMCs and the Forestry Department. The Forestry Management Body had been told by MEET to draft a proposal for the funding that they and the VNRMCs would need to provide the basic necessities for their organizations—paper, pens, a stamp booklet for the permit system, and bicycles to for the educators to travel to the different villages. That was the last that anyone in Mkuwazi ever heard from MEET. People in the villages expressed frustration with the project planners. One man was upset that nothing had come from the initial work that he had done for the project, and that, despite the continued presence of researchers, the communities still had no information about when they might start to see some benefits: “Since 2009, there haven’t been any results. No communication with the Plan Vivo. Last year in 2011, there were some researchers in Bunda College who promised us that this project would start soon. And we are surprised again to see you coming now” (Focus Group, April 25, 2012, Simoni village). Their experience with development projects had taught them that donor projects come and go. The Area Development Chair explained that “To us, it is not a surprise to see something starting and later on stopping here in Malawi. Because there are some programs, they come to people. They say we have this to come in. And after some months later we see these people 207 coming from the government then they just stop. And then we say ok, that is the normal system.” (Interview, May 7, 2012, Chakuluma village) They didn’t blame COMPASS II, the USAIDfunded program, but many villagers expressed a sense of disappointment with MEET and the Department of Forestry. Those institutions are Malawian organizations, staffed and run by Malawians, and there was a sense that they should have more responsibility and commitment to those in the villages than donors. The delay of the carbon project—and the promised development funds it was to bring— actually made the implementation of the comanagement agreement more difficult. Many people in Mkuwazi do not separate the comanagement agreement from the carbon project. They were both created at the same time, and often involved the same groups of villagers. For many people, the comanagement agreement was part of the carbon project and the rules set forth in the agreement only had to be adhered to as long as the carbon project was successful. Without the carbon project, the rules of the comanagement agreement were void. Community members viewed the comanagement agreement as one of the products of the carbon project, not as a prerequisite to the success of the carbon project. The work that communities were required to do for the comanagement agreement and the carbon project became too burdensome to maintain when the promised financial incentives and development projects did not appear. The local institutions created during COMPASS II to operationalize the comanagement agreement had stopped meeting regularly. One woman on a village NRC explained that “we have been having meetings before, but we stopped [the NRC] meetings because we expected that something would come up. But no benefits have come. We were leaving our duties at home to do these things. But we had no encouragement, no communication, so now we are leaving those committees. People are tired” (Focus Group, May 208 8, 2012, Kwerenji-Phetera area). Another man explained how time consuming serving on these committees and participating in development projects can be. He was frustrated that instead of taking time to build his own business or work in his fields, he was “doing development”: “Instead of working in your own garden, you go to chitukuko [a development project]. Wasting time. It’s for the community. Instead of doing my own job, I go there. If we have money, we just to pay for people to do that job. Because we don’t have money, that’s why we go there. You know here we are very poor people here” (Focus Group, May 8, 2012, Kwerenji-Phetera area). One woman summarized their feelings, saying, “We are totally confused and now we are worried…There is nothing going on up to this day, and we are now tired of it” (Focus Group, May 8, 2012, Kwerenji-Phetera area). The former RFO, Mr. Chipokosa, says he is not surprised that the communities are not taking the comanagement agreement seriously: I think most of these comanagement plans that we have formulated in the country are project-based. Now if the project is not propelling the implementation of the comanagement plan, then there is nothing. So, like, in regard to Mkuwazi, I think that the general understanding was that there is going to be the REDD+ part of the project which has not been forthcoming. So I can foresee that there are, could be, some problems. I am not surprised that they are not implementing the comanagement plan…the basis really was for the REDD+. And that is what the communities were told. That is what they are waiting for. Yah. So I am not surprised…and generally that is how things are in Malawi. Formulate the comanagement plans here, because it is project based, the project is not propelling that, there is no implementation. It’s business as usual. It is unfortunate. (Interview, April 18, 2012, Nkhata Bay) In this case, the failure of the carbon project—and the concomitant failure to deliver the promised development funds—has led to a breakdown in the management structure that it was supposed to engender. If comanagement agreements continue to be tied to the carbon projects in 209 other protected areas, then it is very likely that they will begin to break down if there is ever a disruption in funding. Conclusion The case of Mkuwazi is a stark reminder that for all the rhetoric surrounding “win-winwin” solutions that accompany the creation of carbon projects, they are first and foremost market-based projects that require significant influxes of cash and sustained investment by both the public and private sector to succeed. Investors expect profits, so profits must be made from these projects in order for them to succeed at all. There is no guarantee that investment will come simply because the community has met its obligations to form local forestry management institutions, or that the project planners have created the documents necessary for verification and validation of the carbon project. Likewise, there is no guarantee that donor investments to promote these projects will lead to development. In spite of the failure of the first attempt to sell the carbon stocks in Mkuwazi, there are other carbon developers waiting for their turn to tap into the potentially lucrative carbon opportunities found there. TGC had hoped to include Mkuwazi and two other forest reserves along with Nyika and Vwaza in their original proposal. They found it easier to work with the DNPW given the short timeline and budgetary constraints, and so the national parks and wildlife reserves would serve as their test case, while the forest reserves under the purview of the Forestry Department would be incorporated at a later date. Mkuwazi, and other spaces like it which have been targeted for carbon development, can be ignored, dropped, and picked up again by different developers and investors. Much like an oil field, a rubber plantation, or any other natural resource, the carbon sector is being developed and expanded, and that means that when 210 one scheme or firm fails to profitably exploit potential carbon commodities, then another can come in to take its place. 211 CHAPTER 9: RECONSIDERING CARBON PRODUCTION (CONCLUSIONS) Carbon projects are future-oriented projects. They require a tremendous amount of work upfront to produce carbon offsets which might be sold as commodities in the future. Enormous effort goes into calculating the amount of carbon which will be sequestered during the life of a carbon project, and these projections are extended out thirty years or more into the future. If the credits are sold, the profits can be used to finance future development projects. Government agencies and donor organizations invest valuable time and financial resources to jump-start projects which might be self-sustaining—and potentially profitable—at some point in the future. Some investors purchase these carbon offsets to insulate themselves from the potential emissions regulations which might become policy in the near future. All of this future-orientation requires work and practices in the present which have material effects on the lives of people and the ecologies involved with or targeted for these interventions. The early stages of planning and implementation of REDD+ and other carbon offset projects provide an opportune moment to gauge how environmental markets and carbon commodities are produced. This particular moment presents an opportunity to reframe questions about what it means for capitalism to expand into environmental markets or how nature is being commodified and ask instead how different actors harness and embody different aspects of 21st century capitalism through their roles in producing carbon commodities. Studying these projects during the planning phases makes it possible use scale as a methodological tool. Institutional, geographic, and temporal scales come together in board rooms, budget meetings, and community trainings and provide different points of view from which to examine questions about the making of environmental markets and the production of carbon commodities. 212 REDD+ projects, carbon markets, and production of carbon commodities are a complex process which involves people and institutions at multiple levels. An analysis that is multi-scalar and moves between temporal, geographic, and institutional scales makes explicit the linkages between these different sites, organizations, and actors in the production of carbon commodities. Moving between scales highlights the connection between the politics involved in creating national and international legal mechanisms to deal with climate change and poverty alleviation and the tensions which come from trying to create and implement these projects on the ground. It sheds light on the processes through which international REDD+ policy and individual projects are mutually constituted as policy makers and project planners draw on existing policy and projects to guide the future of the carbon economy. The development of the technologies and expert knowledge necessary to create carbon commodities itself becomes a leverage point which tempers the negotiations and interactions between the carbon developers, the state and NGO partners, and the communities. Focusing on the micro- and meso-scales of carbon commodity productions connects political and technological creation with the politics of power and knowledge as they are negotiated between the various actors engaged in carbon commodity production. Connecting these scales and presenting a single narrative ethnography about the production of carbon is one way to bridge a gap in the literature on neoliberalization of nature between empirical case studies and more abstract studies at different scales. Thick descriptions and ethnographies of production decenter and trouble totalizing narratives about the market by exposing the multiple, non-market processes and relationships which are necessary to create carbon commodities and markets in the first place. This approach recenters the focus onto the different actors involved in the production of the commodities. This shifts questions away from 213 what capitalism is doing to conservation and instead examines how different actors are working through (or against) capitalist systems to create new incentive mechanisms to promote conservation. This focus on actors examines how they are embodying and operationalizing the market. When this happens, we see that the expansion of markets into environmental services and conservation actually relies on a host of non-market activities and relationships that have very little to do with ostensibly market-based things. For example, the production of carbon markets is facilitated by the use of protected areas, the financial subsidies and policing mechanisms that make carbon credits more profitable for the private sector and access to knowledge about how carbon projects work and how carbon offsets are produced and exchanged in the carbon economy. Producing the Carbon Economy People, Parks, and Policing States provide multiple forms of subsidies to the expanding carbon market. The Malawian state subsidizes the creation of carbon projects by opening protected areas—which are protected from local people—to carbon development and investment. These are areas where people used to live, farm, and hunt, and from which they were forcibly removed by the colonial administration or the independent Malawian government. The activities of the communities living near the reserves have been made illegal by national wildlife and forest conservation policies. The Malawian state, with support from international aid and public donors, has created comanagement agreements in Nyika and Vwaza. The state, as the legal administrator of these areas, has the right to sign carbon sales agreements, and has granted the community access to a share of the benefits through the comanagement agreement. 214 Comanagement agreements between the state and communities—along with the villagelevel NRCs and institutions like the NVA—provide a local institutional structure which can be utilized by carbon developers to aid in project implementation. This lowers initial costs for the carbon developer in these areas since they do not have to spend the time and money to create new forms of local management that can effectively and legally transfer the carbon rights from state-administered protected areas to the adjacent communities. Likewise, the ultimate legal authority of the state to police and enforce legal restrictions on resource use within the protected area also protects investors’ and consumers’ right to the carbon offsets for which they have paid. The carbon project depends on the behavior changes of the community to conserve forests in exchange for livelihood and development projects. Many of these activities are already planned as part of the carbon project, and include sub-projects such as breeding goats, keeping bees and selling honey, and planting wood lots which can be used for fuel and building materials. The communities have had very little input into the choice or design of these projects. If the carbon sales generate a profit, other projects can be introduced through the existing NVA structure in which the participating communities will be able to apply for funding to finance small infrastructure projects such as building additional teachers’ houses or putting metal sheeting on the roofs of school buildings. The target communities are expected to change existing resource use patterns and get permits for the resources that they are legally allowed to collect under the comanagement agreement and to stop illegal cutting of trees, making charcoal, and hunting altogether. The basis of the project requires that the community will take the pro-offered projects and incomegenerating opportunities and substitute their use of forest products for this increased income potential. However, as one project planner lamented, what is to keep the community members 215 from participating in legal income-generating activities such as beekeeping and juice production while continuing to participate in illegal charcoal or timber production? And what if the communities are unwilling or unable to curb their use of resources in the protected areas and therefore continue to deplete the carbon stocks? If the communities do not adopt a market rationality that prompts them to change their behavior in ways which will conserve the carbon stock, then the state will be able to step in and enforce the comanagement agreement. The state has the legal authority to enforce property rights and protect the investments made in the carbon stocks in the protected areas. The carbon project will provide funding to increase educational and extension outreach conducted by TLC, the NVA, and the DNPW; however, some of the revenues generated from the sale of the carbon credits will be used to enhance state capacity to enforce these property rights through the increased policing of the protected areas. Project money will be used to hire additional forest guards and game scouts as well as purchase equipment such as radios and vehicles to increase the ability of the state to enforce the comanagement agreement. If the communities fail to become the market-rational participants prescribed by the project, then the state will be able to back up the property rights of the investors by protecting the carbon which has been bought and paid for by increasing the surveillance of the protected areas. This enforcement mechanism supports the central goal of the project—conserving carbon stocks and producing profits from selling the carbon stocks as offsets—as a fall back measure to insulate investors from the risks associated with community non-participation or non-compliance with the project. In this way, the state decreases the potential risk for investors in carbon projects and protects carbon property rights. 216 Labor and the Production of Value As the case of Mkuwazi demonstrates, donor countries provide public money to subsidize the costs of the initial work that is needed to create a carbon project in the first place. This money goes to carbon developers as they are subcontracted by NGOs, government agencies, or other organizations hoping to enter the carbon market. The money from USAID comes from US tax payers and is being used to subsidize the creation of carbon projects which will create additional value for investors if the projects are successful and potentially finance development projects in the future—if they are able to generate a profit. Furthermore, many of the researchers studying carbon markets, REDD+, and PES—even those who critique market-based conservation—come from public universities which are supported by government grants and research funding. In addition to subsidies of public money, the unpaid or low-paying work that community members and organizers do to bring carbon projects to their areas provides an important source of underpaid or free labor which further subsidizes the cost of producing carbon commodities. REDD+ projects require substantial investments of time from communities. Creating the necessary local management structures and committees, attending trainings and other informational meetings, and clearing paths through the forest to facilitate ecotourism and carbon stock monitoring all takes time and effort from community members. In Mkuwazi, farmers complained that the time that they spent working on the carbon project, in addition to all of the other development projects in which they were already involved, was taking time away from working in their fields or developing their own small businesses (Focus Group, May 8, 2012, Kwerenji-Phetera village). When the carbon project stalled, the people who had been part of the comanagement and ecotourism committees felt doubly cheated since they had already invested energy into the carbon project while the promised development projects which they had worked 217 to bring to the area still did not arrive. The people who perform this work are either volunteers or only receive minimal financial or in-kind returns for the work that they do. Much of the work by the community, and the community organizers are unpaid, albeit with the understanding that they will be compensated when the project begins through the development and livelihood projects as well as the financial incentives that the project is expected to support. Community members who work for the VNRMCs might reap small financial or social benefits for their work on these committees. For example, some of them had received training on specialized skills like guiding tourists or measuring trees, were compensated for travelling to attend training meetings, or received t-shirts and cards which identified them as members of the ecotourism committee or the Forestry Management Body. Others have been paid through the DNPW or Forestry Department to work clearing the protected area boundaries near the existing fences. By and large, though, the positions are voluntary and this work is unpaid. Similarly, the work that community organizers do to create awareness about these projects is considered part of their volunteer duties. Duncan’s organizing activities are largely unremunerated by the carbon developer or the NGO. While he had received a motorcycle and some money for fuel and travel to meetings with the carbon developer in Lilongwe, he was not paid for the work he does on TGC’s behalf as the representative of the community and as the primary trainer providing introductions to the carbon projects. This work was added to the volunteer organizing that he was already doing as the chairperson of the NVA to promote the comanagement agreement in the communities and to administer the benefits-sharing agreement with the DNPW. He was able to procure additional benefits from this organizing work, including capitalizing on his access to transportation. In addition, Duncan’s specialized knowledge about the carbon project and his ability to build broader social networks which include state officials 218 and foreigners working for the project partners may also lead to formal employment for Duncan with an NGO or carbon developer in the future. However, the organizing work that he does to introduce communities to the carbon project and the consulting work he does as a local expert to help TGC build budgets and projects plans are uncompensated. This unpaid work supports activities which facilitate the production of carbon commodities for the market. Any work that community members perform as members of VNRMCs to participate in the comanagement agreement and help monitor resource use within the protected areas is currently unpaid. In the future, some community members may be paid for work they perform to measure carbon stocks, and additional organizers will be trained and provided with bicycles to increase education and community outreach efforts associated with the carbon project. Similarly, there are plans to compensate Duncan and other NVA officials in the future, once the project begins to generate profits from carbon sales. Currently, though, these unremunerated activities provide important administrative functions for the carbon project which may contribute significantly towards the growth of carbon stocks in the future. As such, these activities are vital to the production of carbon commodities and increasing their exchange value. Furthermore, this type of community participation is directly related to the ability of the carbon developer to create credits that are attractive to investors and therefore more competitive on the voluntary market. The organizing and educational outreach which introduces the carbon credits to the communities is an important step in creating REDD+ projects since it fulfills part of the free and prior informed consent guidelines (cf. UN-REDD Programme 2013). Even limited participation of community members in VNRMCs can be used as a proxy to demonstrate community support for the project to potential investors. The consent of the community is a requirement for any REDD+ project while the perceived participation and support of the 219 community also makes these projects more attractive to investors who prefer projects that have additional social and environmental benefits over and above carbon offsetting. In this way, the unpaid work of community organizers and community members facilitates the production of carbon credits under REDD+ and makes these credits more competitive on the voluntary market. The Emerging Carbon Knowledge Economy Access to the carbon knowledge economy is crucial to the production of carbon commodities as well as being able to access the benefits of their sale. Unequal access to the burgeoning knowledge economy differentially positions people and institutions to benefit from the carbon project and the production of carbon commodities. Those who have greater access to information about technologies of measurement and policy-creation, how the project will be structured, or what the exchange of carbon credits actually entails are able to position themselves to maximally benefit from any potential future income or development project revenues that these projects might bring. In this growing sector, carbon developers become knowledge brokers who selectively channel certain information to other actors in the carbon commodity production chain. Both consumers and producers of carbon commodities have little information about how the productive processes work. As discussed in Chapter 7, community members are not told about the financial aspects of selling carbon offsets, and so they do not know that the price that they receive may not be enough to compensate them for the opportunity costs of reducing their use of certain forest products. The politics of knowledge production and exchange involved in the production of these commodities undermines the PES rhetoric surrounding the concept of willing-buyers and willing-sellers engaging in mutually beneficial transactions for environmental services. 220 The production of carbon commodities—as they are constructed in this project and as they are currently constructed for the carbon market—require knowledge disparities between the parties engaging in the transaction. If the Malawians in target villages did understand the full costs, they might decide not to accept the project, in which case the Malawian state could either revoke the community’s claims on any benefits generated from the carbon project. However, this might compromise the competitiveness of the project and its ability to attract investors, since investors prefer to put their money into projects that have social and biological components which can add additional social marketing benefits for the company. Rural people living in target villages do not have access to specialized knowledge about the production of carbon commodities or the policies and practices which structure them. The differential social position of Malawians means that they cannot correct this disparity in knowledge. Interestingly, neither do investors have a full picture of the way that the carbon projects are produced. The procedures for measuring existing carbon stocks and projecting future growth are remarkably complex; however, the measurement practices which underlie this complexity are made to appear more scientific and more precise than they actually are. The technologies to measure carbon through biomass field tests and remote sensing analysis are being refined but there is still the possibility of massive cumulative error and, depending on which established measurements are used, the carbon stock estimates could vary wildly. Furthermore, investors do not know the extent of the guesswork involved as people’s behavior “becomes scientific” and is converted into carbon emissions reductions through the use of complex project matrices and models. Numbers that are provided to potential investors as reliable statistics in fact obscure the complex process through which these estimates are turned into numerical forms that will increase investor confidence in the project. The jargon in project 221 reports is one way to obscure the uncertainties involved in measuring and accounting for carbon, couching the process of estimating and knowledge production in the language of science, statistics, and advanced models which make it difficult for the uninitiated—either investors or community members—to understand. How investors understand what they are buying, and how they chose which projects to invest in is one area which needs further research. In addition, investors also remain unaware of the social and ecological complexity which exists in places like Mkuwazi, Nyika, and Vwaza. Investors are sold a particular narrative about the place and the people incorporated into carbon offset projects. For REDD+ projects, these narratives include the particular ways in which the carbon project will help reduce poverty in forest-dependent communities, finance much-needed development projects, and protect forests and the rare plants and animals living there. These narratives might include images of women in brightly-colored clothes with babies secured to their backs with chitenje, smiling groups of school children, panoramic photos of forested landscapes, or exotic (and sometimes endangered) animals. Neither the investors, consumers, nor the producers of carbon commodities need to know any of this information in order to generate carbon credits. Quite the opposite: the (potential) success of these projects may depend on limited access to and control of expert knowledge about these commodities in order to facilitate their entrance into the market. Carbon development firms holds a privileged position in the knowledge economy and therefore in the carbon commodity production value chain. These private-sector firms generate knowledge about the best practices of carbon project planning; however, they combine this emergent expertise with knowledge of the complex international financial system. Carbon development firms have access to investors and the world of high finance as well as the technobureaucratic knowledge necessary to create carbon projects which can produce marketable 222 products. As the primary producers of carbon projects, carbon developers play an important role in the creation of national and international policies concerning the carbon market and carbon offsetting. Additionally, their role as the primary trainers of state officials, natural resource managers, and community representatives means that they have much more control over the way that carbon projects are understood and are in a better position to influence the shape of carbon projects than their project partners. Finally, carbon developers serve an important function linking the people and places involved in carbon commodity production through conservation activities with investors and buyers who wish to purchase carbon credits. This is a key moment in the making of markets, since connecting production to consumption is a crucial step in the process of creating value and then being able to realize that value through exchange. In this way, carbon developers embody and actualize markets through their role as knowledge brokers in the burgeoning carbon knowledge economy. Additional research is needed on the role of for-profit carbon development firms in the financialization of carbon commodities, particularly how they identify potential investors and link consumers of carbon commodities with specific projects. A study of the interactions between investors, consumers, and carbon developers would yield rich data concerning the demand-side of the carbon value chain and the role that expertise and knowledge play in the circulation of carbon commodities. REDD+ Futures? The future of REDD+ and other carbon projects is still unclear. During the 2013 conference of parties in Warsaw there was very little forward movement on REDD+ or on binding targets for emissions reductions. In this light, it is unclear what the long term future of 223 REDD+ will be. But Malawi, along with many other countries in the global south, is actively pursuing market-based conservation projects as a way to achieve conservation, development, and climate change mitigation. At the time of this writing, the government of Malawi was undertaking a REDD-readiness study, which included creating a national carbon account that would identify all of the carbon stocks across the entire country. As of October 2013, TGC was finalizing the certification documents for the projects in Nyika and Vwaza for submission to the VCS and the CCB. New projects continue to be developed. What these projects will mean for the forests in these protected areas and the people who live near them and depend on them remains to be seen. Longitudinal studies are needed to elucidate the longer-term effects of the carbon project on the community, on relationships between citizens, the state, and investors, and on the management of the protected areas. How are the relationships between citizens and the state affected when markets become the mediating factor? How will community members living near protected areas experience and encounter the state as it becomes involved in market-based conservation projects? Furthermore, additional studies on how benefit sharing mechanisms and changes in forest management impact different target communities—as well as groups and individuals within those communities—would shed light on how the risks and benefits from carbon projects are distributed within and across communities. It is unclear how projects that are expected to last three decades or more will impact the control of resources within and amongst target communities and other project partners. For example, how will carbon projects impact access to forest resources and benefits-sharing mechanisms across generations as the people who originally agreed to the carbon project grow older and people who may not even have been born when the project began become adult members of their communities? 224 Additional research with investors and those on the consumer side of carbon production and carbon economies would increase understanding of how investor priorities and preferences shape the creation of carbon projects, how investors make decisions about which carbon offsets they prefer, and their motivations for investing in the carbon sector. Additionally, studies that pose questions about the distribution of risk and access to benefits to the investors and private sector carbon development companies could provide a clearer picture of how value is produced across additional scales, particularly in the financial sector. Social and Environmental Justice: The Politics of REDD+ The production of REDD+ commodities is more than just a technical process: the decisions and actions which make the production of carbon commodities possible are political. Instead of being about reducing emissions, the focus on climate change mitigation has turned into a debate over how many trees should be planted or conserved, how to measure the carbon in them, how much that carbon should cost, and how and by whom any costs and benefits should be shared. Politics pervade each moment of the creation of carbon commodities as particular actions and modes of interventions are followed while others are foreclosed. These actions prioritize certain outcomes over others and privilege courses of action and management that are intelligible within a system of market capitalism. Politics are clearly at play during the UN negotiation process during which representatives from UN-member states debate and craft climate and REDD+ policy. However, the politics of budget-making and project planning are no less political as they prioritize the conservation of trees and planting woodlots instead of considering the historical context of poverty and land use which have shaped the communities’ use of forest resources. 225 It is hard to know what to think about these projects. On the one hand, if they are successful at sequestering carbon, if project planners can find buyers for those offsets, and if the benefits come to communities, then the people living in these areas might benefit—even if only marginally—from the sale of carbon commodities through this project. On the other hand, the projects currently planned for Malawi’s protected areas pose new questions about environmental and social justice, equity, and the political response to climate change. What will happen to the target communities and the forests they are supposed to conserve as the carbon project is implemented? How will access to forest resources change and how will different members of the community be impacted by these changes? Many people working for the government of Malawi, for the non-profit sector, or for donor agencies were skeptical about the carbon market as the latest win-win-win solution to climate change, poverty, and conservation. Every person with whom I spoke with had different opinions of, and hopes for, REDD+. Some thought it would provide the missing incentive structure to help people conserve forests; others thought it was just the latest donor fad and would soon be replaced by some other, equally unsustainable, trend. Whatever their opinion of REDD+, however, many state and NGO personnel were fully aware that, as recipients of foreign aid, their programming had to attract grants and donor money. One forestry official told me that she found the idea of selling carbon “a little funny.” In her opinion, offering to pay people for conservation and tree planting was one thing, but to ask them to keep trees so that they can earn money for the carbon is a bit obtuse and difficult for people in the villages to understand. She then added, “But we are going to do it [REDD+] because it’s an opportunity for funding and we will go along with it. If that is where the money is, then let’s go” (Interview, December 4, 2011, Lilongwe). She saw no reason that Malawi should not benefit from this new form of donor aid, 226 even if she and her colleagues were skeptical about the extent to which REDD+ would meet development and conservation goals. “And the next time,” she continued, “When the donors change again, then we will go that way, too.” The structural changes needed to address climate change and alleviate poverty will not be fixed primarily through carbon markets and REDD+. Addressing these social issues will require much more radical solutions. Many of the people I interviewed or who participated in the focus groups moved beyond a cost-benefit analysis of a particular REDD+ project and expressed concern about the growing number of carbon projects across the globe. I was repeatedly asked what Americans thought about REDD+, and if people in the US were also planting trees and creating these REDD+ projects. I told them that we weren’t. REDD+, I explained, was designed for rich countries to pay poor countries to plant trees and conserve their forests to offset greenhouse gas emissions from wealthy nations. Upon learning this, reactions were mixed. Some people thought that it was only right that wealthier countries that created more pollution should extend aid to poorer countries whose citizens pollute much less but who will disproportionately bear the hardships of adapting to a changing climate. Others questioned whether these projects would result in additional hardships or increased poverty for the people in Malawi as a whole. A few people expressed frustration that there was so much attention on the forests in Malawi instead of on the actions of people and industries in the U.S. and other wealthy countries that produce the majority of carbon and greenhouse gas emissions. They linked the potential for reduced forest access due to a single REDD+ project with the possibility that a proliferation of these projects across the country might prevent Malawi from attaining higher standards of living commonly associated with development. One DNPW employee explained his opinion and concerns about the carbon projects in Malawi in terms of much larger, structural concerns about 227 climate change and equity between nations. I close with his poignant and politically astute statement: Ok, I will say maybe it [REDD+] is a good idea. But we are talking of highly industrialized countries. It’s like we have all realized that pollution is not good, and it cannot take us anywhere. So instead of saying ‘Let’s be reducing,’ then I hear it like they are saying, ‘We want to continue polluting, but as we continue polluting, those countries that are not highly industrialized should be planting the trees.’ So I think that it [REDD+] is good, but it needs to go along with changing those highly industrialized countries. They need to portray a good picture. They need to say, ‘O.K., we are at this level [of greenhouse gas emissions]. We are projecting that during this period, during fifty years, twenty years, we want to be reducing to this level.’ They should not just say, ‘we are continuing’ and then continue [polluting]. Because now, there is this world of development, and development means deforestating [sic]. Because if your country is developed, it means you have fivestar hotels, ah, airfields, places like those. Meaning that for us to have those, we have to deforestate [sic]. African countries, we are also aiming at being developed. So having that ambition, it means these countries also want to deforestate [sic]. So it will come a time when maybe they will be competing with those industrialized countries, and these carbon projects will have no space. So if those countries need to continue with this [REDD+], they should also be reducing. But they also need to be reducing so that they should give good examples to these countries that will be planting those trees. There will come a time when African countries will say, ‘Oh, they want us to be planting trees so that we will be living in forests and they will be living in towns. Don’t we want towns ourselves?’ That will be something which will be counterproductive to all those efforts. So those [industrialized] countries, my message to them is that they need to be setting good examples. For example, America is maybe one of the highest polluters, but is not yet a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol. So it means that the bigger message America is sending is that hypocrisy, something like that. So I think REDD+ is good, but it needs to go along with good examples. That is maybe how I will say it. For me, they need to portray a good picture. Because no matter what you say, what you do is what people get a lot. You can say something; it’s just 20 percent of what people understand. You have got to practice what you preach. For me, that is what I say. (Interview, May 19, 2012, Kazuni) 228 APPENDICES 229 APPENDIX A List of Interviews  Acting Head of Research, Department of National Parks and Wildlife, Lilongwe  Assistant Director, Environmental Affairs Department, Lilongwe  Chairman, Nyika-Vwaza Association, Rumphi  Clean Development Mechanism Desk Officer, Department of Environmental Affairs, Lilongwe  Climate Change Coordinator, Coordination Unit for the Rehabilitation of the Environment, Blantyre  Climate Change Desk Officer, Department of Environmental Affairs, Lilongwe  Coordinator, Trees of Hope Project, Clinton Development Initiative, Lilongwe  Director, Ripple Africa, Chintheche  District Forest Officer—Nkhata Bay District, Department of Forestry, Nkhata Bay  Director, Department of National Parks and Wildlife, Lilongwe  Director, Malawi Environment and Endowment Trust, Blantyre  Director, Terra Global Capital, Lilongwe  Ecotourism Guide from Ching’anya Village, Nkhata Bay District  Ecotourism Guide from Kwerenji-Phetera Village, Nkhata Bay District  Executive Director, Center for Environmental Policy and Advocacy, Blantyre  Executive Director, Malawi Environment and Endowment Trust, Blantyre  Executive Director, Wildlife and Environment Society of Malawi, Blantyre  Extension Officer, Department of Forestry, Lilongwe 230  Extension Worker, Department of National Parks and Wildlife, Kazuni  Forest Guard, Kwerenji-Phetera Village, Nkhata Bay District  Forestry Officer—Rumphi District, Rumphi  Forest Guard, Mateyu Village, Nkhata Bay District  Forest Guard, Simoni Village, Nkhata Bay District  Former Regional Forest Officer—Northern Region, Department of Forestry, Nkhata Bay  Group Village Headman, Ching’anya Village, Nkhata Bay District  Local Forestry Management Board Member, Ndiweri Village, Nkhata Bay District  Natural Resource Management Specialist, USAID, Lilongwe  Principle Forestry Officer, Department of Forestry, Lilongwe  Project Director, Kulera Biodiversity, Total LandCare, Lilongwe  Program Director, Malawi Environment and Endowment Trust, Blantyre  Researcher, Forestry Research Institute of Malawi, Zomba  Rumphi Zone Manager, Total LandCare, Rumphi  Social Forestry Officer, Department of Forestry, Lilongwe  Treasurer, Ecotourism Committee, Mateyu Village, Nkhata Bay District  UN Climate Change Desk Officer, Ministry of Economic Planning and Development, Lilongwe  Village Headman Chakuluma Village, Nkhata Bay District  Village Headman Kwerenji Village, Nkhata Bay District  Village Headman Ndiweri Village, Nkhata Bay District  Village Headman Petera Village, Nkhata Bay District  Village Headman, Mateyu Village, Nkhata Bay District 231 APPENDIX B List of Focus Groups  Beekeeping Group, Ching’anya, Nkhata Bay District  Chakuluma Men, Chakuluma Village, Nkhata Bay District  Chakuluma Women, Chakuluma Village, Nkhata Bay District  Kamphenda Men, Kamphenda Village, Rumphi District  Kamphenda Women, Kamphenda Village, Rumphi District  Kamphenda Natural Resource Management Committee and Youth Club Members, Kamphenda Village, Rumphi District  Kazuni Men, Kazuni Village, Rumphi District  Kazuni Women, Kazuni Village, Rumphi District  Kwerenji-Phetera Men, Kwerenji-Phetera, Nkhata Bay District  Kwerenji-Phetera Women, Kwerenji-Phetera, Nkhata Bay District  Mateyu Villagers, Mateyu Village, Nkhata Bay District  Natural Resource Committee and Village Development Committee Members, Waliro Village, Rumphi District  Ndiweri Women, Ndiweri Village, Nkhata Bay District  Sijenheni Men, Sijenheni Village, Rumphi District  Sijenheni Women, Sijenheni Village, Rumphi District  Simoni Men, Simoni Village, Nkhata Bay District  Simoni Women, Simoni Village, Nkhata Bay District  Staff Members, Department of National Parks and Wildlife 232  Waliro Men , Waliro Village, Rumphi District  Waliro Women, Waliro Village, Rumphi District  Village Natural Resource Management Committee, Ching’anya, Nkhata Bay District 233 APPENDIX C Detailed Methods for the Focus Groups The questions for the focus groups concerned the carbon projects that were planned for the areas. I would begin by asking the group if they had ever heard about the carbon project, even if they had not been at the initial training(s), and if so, if they could tell me what they had heard. I then asked those who had been present at the trainings offered by the NVA or Plan Vivo if they could tell me what they remembered about the training. Next, I asked questions to ascertain if the group was able to identify the linkages between climate change, development activities, and the proposed carbon project. Follow-up questions concerned their understanding of who would buy carbon, how, and why. I assured the groups that these questions were not to test the group, but were meant to help me understand how effective the project planners had been in explaining the nature of the project to the community. At this point, in almost every focus group, there were individuals who either had not attended the meeting, never heard of the project, or there were points that needed clarification about the basic mechanism of the program. I decided that it would be unethical for me to withhold information about the basic facts of the program and leave people more confused than when I had arrived, so I briefly described the carbon cycle, explained that the trees would not be cut down and that carbon would not be extracted or taken elsewhere, and that project planners are hopeful that if the community was successful at conserving the trees and forest in the protected areas, they would be eligible for financial benefits which could be used for development projects. I also asked what their expectations of such a project might be, for example how they thought any benefits from the sale of carbon credits should be used or distributed. 234 In Mkuwazi, I would also ask if people knew what happened to the proposed carbon project, and if they had heard anything about when the project would start. After their responses, I shared with them what I had been told by my contacts in LEAD, FRIM, and the Forestry Department. To these brief explanations, I always added reminders that I did not work for these organizations or the governments, and that I was sharing with the community what I had learned from those who did work in these sectors. In the follow-up focus groups with the people living near Vwaza Marsh Wildlife Reserve, I also asked participants to rank the ways that any benefits from the sale of carbon might be distributed. I wrote down the six ways that the project planners had proposed to use the benefits on cards. The translator and I would explain what was written on these cards, and in each group there were at least two individuals who were able to read the cards. We then asked participants either to vote on which of the proposed benefits they considered most important (for groups of seven individuals or more), or had them put the cards in order of importance to them (for smaller groups). This enabled me to quantify and compare expectations and priorities for the project as expressed by project planners, communities, and donors. Finally, we would wrap up the focus groups by asking participants about their concerns regarding the project, other points of clarification, and questions that they would like to ask the project planners. This was not originally part of the focus group design; however, it occurred organically in almost every group that we held, and so I made time to allow people to voice these questions, even if I was unable to answer them. These questions and concerns were aggregated to preserve confidentiality and passed on to the project planners with the permission of the group. I reiterated that I was not affiliated with those organizations, and that I could not guarantee that 235 those organizations would listen to what I would say, but that I would pass along their questions and concerns nonetheless. 236 APPENDIX D List of Foreign Words boma Referring to the administrative town of a region chitenje Cloth wrap chitukuko Development project or community work project ganyu Short-term, informal work in exchange for low wages or food kwathu Our place, referring to the home or the village matolas Private vehicles that carry passengers for money Minibuses Vans which carry passengers for money mnsangu A type of tree commonly known as winter thorn (Faidherbia albida) mpepo Wind and/or air mpepo uwemi Good air mpepo vyiheni Bad air mudzi/midzi Village/villages mwabvi (ChiChewa) the poison ordeal mzungu/azungu Foreigner/foreigners, European; often synonymous with any white person nkhondaole Flour made from cassava nyama Meat or animals sing’anga Traditional healer uhavi The poison ordeal viboli Wooden statues, bowls, and other souvenirs marketed to tourists 237 REFERENCES 238 REFERENCES Adams, Jonathan S., and Thomas O. 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