Conflict and Cooperation over REDD+ in Mexico, Nepal and Vietnam (CoCooR)

Description

The Conflict and cooperation over REDD+ in Mexico, Nepal and Vietnam project, funded by The Netherlands Scientific Organisation NWO, and the UK's Department for International Development was an interdisciplinary cross-country project with a focus on analysis of conflicts and co-operation. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation, and the enhancement and sustainable use of forest carbon stocks (REDD+) is an international policy framework promoted to align forest governance in developing countries with climate change mitigation objectives and to contribute towards poverty reduction and biodiversity conservation, through both national policies and concrete projects. 

We found that REDD+ policy design and early implementation have resulted in increased conflict, and we have identified divergent claims about REDD+ across the three studied countries at both policy and project levels, resulting in grievances around how much focus should the government put on carbon accounting and monitoring as a means to generate economic incentives for participant communities, and who should control such revenues. We also found that the necessary level of participation and informed consent that is required for REDD+ to be legitimate has been uneven, with more related conflict observed in Vietnam and less so in Mexico and Nepal. Overall, the research has unearthed diverse instances of conflict related to either historical struggles over land and forest rights (Vietnam) or unsettled debates about procedural fairness in forest policy and rural development design that REDD+ has not yet contributed to resolve. 

For more details on these findings, please look at the publications below, as well as these two videos: 

• REDD+ in the spotlight - a documentary video about the project's main findings, with contributions from academic and non-academic collaborators.
• Conflict and cooperation over REDD+ in Mexico, Nepal and Vietnam - REDD+ needs to become conflict sensitive in order to be effective in its environmental and social-economic goals. Dr Esteve Corbera discusses this statement in the context of the impacts REDD+ has had on developing countries at the policy and social levels.

Publications