Niina Pietarinen, Niak Sian Koh, Alizee Ville, Maria Brockhaus, Grace Wong
Key Messages
- We examine whether REDD+ finance can lead to transformative forest and land-use decisions in a complex political landscape of competing land uses, interests and financial flows in Mai-Ndombe, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
- We use a telecoupling framing – which looks at socioeconomic and environmental interactions over distances – delving into open-source information and databases on company ownership and structures, and combining these with search strategies that capture flows of finance and commodities into the Mai-Ndombe region.
- REDD+ aims to bring transformational change through incentivizing a shift in the political and economic value of forests, when compared to other land uses. Our study demonstrates that, in Mai-Ndombe, these incentives have limited influence in the presence of dominant interests and investments in extractive activities; particularly when mining, livestock, timber and carbon concessions overlap, and oil exploration permits are in use by state and private sector actors.
- REDD+ strategies in the DRC inadvertently reinforce historical inequalities by focusing on local interventions; this overlooks the persistent power relations that are visible in discursive practices, financial flows and incentive structures centring around extractive land uses.
- We encourage funders, policymakers and researchers at the intersection of climate and forests to avoid oversimplified narratives of who is to blame for deforestation, and instead trace the financial flows, asking who benefits from forest exploitation and land-use change in the Global South.
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