Climate change mitigation, politics of deforestation and democratic regression
Book Launch Roundtable at Bergen Exchanges 2023.
The Politics of Deforestation and REDD+ in Indonesia: Global Climate Change Mitigation reflects on Indonesia's recent experience with REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), set within a broader discussion of neoliberal environmentalism, hyper-capitalism, forest rights, and Indonesian carbon politics.
The book questions the win-win presumptions underlying REDD+: that foreign state and private financing can be used to protect tropical forests, the carbon stored within them, and people who depend upon them, resulting in local economic development and global climate benefits. It finds that neoliberal approaches to climate change increase the severity of political contestations that must be overcome to reach climate change mitigation goals, and notes that early scholarly advice to couple anti-deforestation approaches with policies that reduce industrial carbon emissions have been ignored.
The book also links the discussion of deforestation to Indonesia's recent democratic regression, highlighting how the country's environmental performance is inextricably linked to the timbre of its political governance. Following an introduction by the author, the roundtable discussed neoliberal approaches to climate change in a broader perspective.
