Torsten Krause
Senior Lecturer, Director of PhD Studies
The legitimacy of incentive-based conservation and a critical account of social safeguards.
Author
Summary, in English
Incentive-based conservation has become a significant part of how tropical forests are being governed. Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) is a mechanism to mitigate climate change that many countries have started to implement. REDD+, however, is criticized for its potential negative impacts on local populations and Indigenous people. To prevent and mitigate the negative impacts, safeguards are increasingly being used to prevent and shift the focus toward 'non-carbon' elements of forest conservation. We discuss the legitimacy of these types of projects from a stakeholder perspective. Using a normative framework, we assess the Ecuadorian Socio Bosque conservation program, concentrating more specifically on the level of input and output legitimacy. Results show that Socio Bosque in its current form has shortcomings in both input and output legitimacy. We argue that an encompassing conception of legitimacy, including input and output criteria, particularly from a local stakeholder perspective, is essential for the future success of incentive-based conservation and particularly for REDD+ projects. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Department/s
- LUCSUS (Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies)
- Department of Political Science
- BECC: Biodiversity and Ecosystem services in a Changing Climate
Publishing year
2014
Language
English
Pages
44-51
Publication/Series
Environmental Science and Policy
Volume
41
Document type
Journal article
Publisher
Elsevier
Topic
- Social Sciences Interdisciplinary
- Political Science
Keywords
- Global Environmental Governance
- Legitimacy
- Local stakeholder
- Ecuador
- Socio Bosque program
- REDD
Status
Published
Project
- Words Matter in the Woods: Discourses on Deforestation in Global Climate Politics
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISSN: 1462-9011