Suchergebnisse

Maladaptation to climate change is often portrayed as arising from the unjust exclusion of vulnerable people. In turn, analysts have proposed knowledge co-production with marginalized groups as a form of transformative climate justice. This paper argues instead that maladaptation arises from a much deeper exclusion based upon the projection of inappropriate understandings of risk and social identity that are treated as unquestioned circumstances of justice. Drawing on social studies of science, the paper argues that the focus on co-production as an intentional act of inclusion needs to be considered alongside "deep" or "reflexive" co-production, which instead refers to the non-cognitive and unavoidable simultaneous generation of knowledge and social order. These processes have linked visions of planetary justice with an understanding of climate risk based on global atmospheric change, and an assumption that community forms an antidote to individualism. The paper uses a discussion of adaptation in western Nepal to illustrate how such deep forms of co-production have significantly reduced understandings of "what" adaptation is for, and "who" is included. Maladaptation, therefore, is not simply unjust implementations of an essentially fair model of adaptation, but also the allocation of exclusionary visions of what and for whom adaptation is for. Debates about transformative climate justice therefore need to understand how their critiques of classical liberal justice generate exclusions of their own, and to engage vulnerable people in reframing, rather than just receiving, circumstances of justice. There is also a need to examine how these circumstances remain unchallenged within environmental science and policy.

This article investigates how land users perceive laws restricting deforestation and forest degradation, notably Brazil's National Forest Code, and how legal meaning emerges as place specific to influence their legal compliance. Interviews were held with land users in Acre state, a municipality with high rates of deforestation located in the forest frontier of the Brazilian Amazon. Critical legal geography was applied as a theoretical framework to investigate the ways in which legal meaning emerges in and through that social context. This research finds that non-compliance is associated with pervasive conditions of social stress combined with lived experiences of contradictory legal processes, including shifting legal discourses and inconsistent local law enforcement. In such social contexts, local legal meaning associates forest conservation laws with socio-economic and legal inequality and the reinforcement of structures of social exclusion.

For those championing an international institutional solution to climate change, the forest-climate linkage through reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and forest enhancement (REDD+) may be one of the most promising strategic linkages to date. Following a series of forest-focused interventions that did not live up to their promise, global forest politics have now, through REDD+ deliberations, been institutionally subsumed into the climate regime. We argue that to realize its potential, REDD+ policy mechanisms must be careful to move away from the commodification of forest stewardship that reinforces short-term strategic positions of powerful producing and consuming interests whose current activities are the culprits of global forest decline. To achieve such an outcome, we argue that institutions must develop on the basis of a "logic of problem amelioration" in which the rationale for achieving clearly defined environmental and social goals is rendered transparent. This could be achieved through the formalization of a "dual effectiveness test" in which interventions are evaluated for their potential to simultaneously ameliorate both global climate change and forest degradation.