![]() ![]() Central governments are the legal parties to international agreements such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD), but changes in land use to support climate change mitigation need to happen in forest regions far from national capitals ( Hickmann et al., 2017). ![]() Understanding the relations among different levels of governance, and government specifically, is essential to finding practical land use solutions ( Larson and Petkova, 2011 Nagendra and Ostrom, 2012). It asks, how do the relations between national and subnational governments support or inhibit the changes needed to address climate change? This article is not based on a study of jurisdictional approaches per se, but it contributes to this special issue with data on government from comparative research on multilevel governance and landscape change 2. Jurisdictional approaches refer to integrated landscape initiatives that are led or overseen by government in the geographical area of a political jurisdiction ( Boyd et al., 2018 Stickler et al., 2018a). ![]() With the current interest in “landscape” or jurisdictional approaches to mitigate emissions from land use change and support sustainable alternatives ( Hsu et al., 2017 Reed et al., 2019), it is important to understand how carbon forestry 1 has engaged with and/or (re)shaped decentralization and the role of subnational governments (SNGs). ![]() Yet decentralization is still highly relevant. Discussions on who participates in decision making nowadays focus more commonly on the concepts of multilevel governance ( Di Gregorio et al., 2019) or polycentricity ( Ostrom, 2010 Sunderlin et al., 2015). Decentralization was also confusing, and certainly not unidimensional, with tendencies to decentralize on paper but not in practice ( Koch, 2017) or to recentralize while decentralizing ( Ribot et al., 2006). As is common with such initiatives, decentralization in policy and practice has continued but with much less explicit attention. Jurisdictional approaches will need to negotiate with this context to be able to push forward sustainable pathways.ĭecentralization-and forestry decentralization in particular-was a hot topic in research and discourse in the 1990s and 2000s ( Agrawal and Ribot, 1999 Colfer and Capistrano, 2005 Larson and Soto, 2008). We find that carbon forestry, with both centralizing and decentralizing tendencies, operates within the spaces left by existing power dynamics that mold the way transfers of power are put into practice. The implementation of carbon forestry projects is molded by pre-existing power relations that shape the impacts of forestry decentralization on livelihoods and forest ecosystems. Decentralization initiatives in recent decades have provided SNGs with new mandates to manage forests, but new attributions do not always imply meaningful powers. We draw on current trends in the forestry decentralization literature to ask: (i) has carbon forestry opened new opportunities for SNGs to support the sustainable governance of forest landscapes? (ii) have meaningful powers been assigned to SNGs in support of democratic processes of decision-making over forest landscapes? and (iii) is carbon forestry influencing the relationships between levels of government in a way that challenges unequal power relations? By examining carbon forestry projects and forestry decentralization processes across five countries (Indonesia, Mexico, Peru, Tanzania and Vietnam) with carbon forestry initiatives, we demonstrate how the role of SNGs is circumscribed by existing forestry decentralization trends. Understanding the relations among different levels of governance, and government specifically, is essential to understand how carbon forestry has engaged with decentralization and the role of subnational governments (SNGs) in developing practical land use solutions. Different levels of government, as well as private and civil society actors (companies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), indigenous peoples, and local communities), compete over the rights of ownership, administration, and management of forest landscapes-decisions with a crucial impact on land use, land use change and the future of forests. Discussions on multilevel governance, polycentricity, and nested approaches to governance surround the central question, ever more pertinent considering global environmental change, of who holds the mandate over forests. The recent emphasis on the role of tropical forests in facing climate change has made forest decentralization debates more relevant than ever. Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), Bogor, Indonesia. ![]()
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