INTIMACY-GEOPOLITICS OF REDD+ EXPLORING ACCESS & EXCLUSION IN THE FORESTS OF SUNGAI LAMANDAU, INDONESIA BY PETER JAMES HOWSON A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Victoria University of Wellington 2016 To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing. – Raymond Williams, Sources of Hope, 1989 ABSTRACT Indonesia remains the largest contributor of greenhouse gases from primary forest loss in the world. To reverse the trend, the Government of Indonesia is banking on carbon market mechanisms like the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) programme. Geographers have made significant progress in detailing the relationships between private and public interests that enable REDD+. Less understood are the materialities of everyday life that constitute the substantive nodes – the bodies, the subjectivities, the practices and discourses – of political tensions and conflicts within Indonesia’s nascent REDD+ implementation framework. Concerns for ‘equity’ rooted within an economistic frame of ‘benefit sharing’ seem to be high on political agendas. Yet, relatively few studies have investigated the basic principles and intimate processes underlying benefit sharing approaches within sites of project implementation. Focussing on Sungai Lamandau, Central Kalimantan as a case study, I consider the powers local actors mobilise to access, and exclude others from the diverse and, at times, elusive set of ‘benefits’ within one ‘community-based’ REDD+ project. Reflecting on over 150 interviews and ten months of ethnographic observations, the exploration provides a timely alternative to overly reductive REDD+ research, which remains focused on links between benefit sharing, safeguards, additionality, monitoring and verification. Instead it addresses the need to ‘bring people back in’, centring human agency within studies of REDD+. The sometimes violent processes of access and exclusion, which occur within the Sungai Lamandau project, cut across conventional bounds of places and scales and are i connected by political relations that traverse realms of intimate and transnational geopolitics. The thesis therefore proposes a feminist-inspired ‘intimacy-geopolitics’ as an analytical approach that connects seemingly close-knit and disparate people, places, and events orbiting issues of REDD+ implementation. I draw attention to the outwardly ‘apolitical’ (or ‘a-geopolitical’) realms of the body, the home, and intimate relationships as key sites where geopolitical power is (re)produced and challenged. The thesis helps demonstrate the importance of dissolving the boundaries between the global and the local; the market and state; and the personal and political, within critical investigations of REDD+. Intimacy-geopolitics is used to articulate the inseparability of politics from economic, environmental and emotional geographies. Through such a framing this thesis uncovers the nuanced multi-local livelihoods of people as they adapt to violent upheavals, or make REDD+ part of a mix of options to clear paths towards more secure futures. While some farmers are able to counter their exclusion from benefits, others start to lose their precarious foothold on the land and must diversify their income sources as a result, with many bidding farewell to farming and forest- based livelihoods. The complex survival strategies, which this thesis helps make sense of, can be seen as both a cause of, and a reaction to, imposed social and environmental protections – a kind of ‘everyday’ counter-movement. I suggest that REDD+ rooted in market logic, competition and individualism instills in people a nessesity for exclusionary practices. Masculinist models of REDD+ will therefore not only continue to fail in addressing the root-causes of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, but will continue to be highly exclusive – disproportionately impacting women and those already marginalised. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I had heard that, for many people, the road towards submitting a PhD thesis is a lonely one. I however have been blessed with a truly inspirational team of fellow researchers. Without the support of Rini Astuti and Rowan Dixon, the last several years would have been all the more laborious. I hope this is just the start of our long collaborative futures together. I would like to thank all the research participants for their time, energy and patience, and for being so hospitable to me during my time in Sungai Lamandau. I would also like to thank all the staff and volunteers at Yayorin and the Clinton Climate Initiative. Trims banyak to all my new friends in Pangkalanbuun for your support and assistance, from helping me move into my beautiful barakan house to finding my moped. I want to extend these thanks far beyond Sungai Lamandau, down the river to the villages of Rimba Raya. It filled my heart with renewed hope for humanity when I arrived to such a hospitable and friendly bunch in the village of Baung. Thanks for teaching me how to tap rubber trees, catch fish and fix footballs with tree sap. I would also like to thank the sponsors. The project was principally funded through a Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Grant. I also received funding through two Victoria University Strategic Research Grants and a Doctoral Submission Scholarship. I am grateful to all the staff in the Geography department at Victoria University for supporting me over the past three-years or so. I have been very lucky to have such enthusiastic and compassionate people around me. Special thanks to Dr Bethany iii Haalboom and Dr Marcela Palomino-Schalscha for your encouragement and support. Despite the significant spatial separations, Dr Suraya Afiff; Dr Sophie Bond; and Dr Ed Challies were also critically important in bringing this thesis together. My supervisory team had a few substitutions along the way to submission. I am incredibly greatful to Dr Mike Gavin at Colorado State University for preparing me for life in the forests of Sungai Lamandau. I also appreciate the supervision, guidance and friendship of Dr Andrew McGregor. Thank you for putting so much trust in me to complete the most difficult (and the most interesting) part of the project. Enormous thanks are reserved for my excellent primary supervisor and friend Dr Sara Kindon. You have always made me feel capable and motivated from day-one. I will miss our philosophical chats more than any other part of this experience. I hope we can continue them from wherever we end up. I would like to thank Dr Derek Hall for sharing in a number of my ideas and giving some really valuable feedback. I would also like to thank all the anonynmous reviewers of various journal articles for their feedback and suggestions for improving things. My family have been unfailing in their encouragement. My brother, Stephen particularly has been incredibly dependable. HUGEST thanks of all to my ‘wife’ and Dr Who companion, Sarah. You turn each and every challenging moment into fun and excitement, and every moment of joy into something unforgettable. If it was not for you I would definitely be lost in the figurative (and literal) woods of Central Kalimantan. iv CONTENTS ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................................... I ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................................................................................... III FIGURES & TABLES ............................................................................................................................... IX ACRONYMS ............................................................................................................................................... XI INDONESIAN TERMS ........................................................................................................................ XIII 1 | INTRODUCTION 1.1 THESIS RATIONALE & RESEARCH QUESTIONS .................................................................. 1 1.2 THESIS APPROACH & CONTRIBUTIONS ................................................................................ 7 1.3 THESIS STRUCTURE ..................................................................................................................... 17 2 | SEEING REDD IN A GREEN ECONOMY 2.1 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................. 21 2.2 MAKING REDD+: CONTESTING THE VALUE OF FORESTS IN INDONESIA ............. 23 2.3 CONTEXTUALISING REDD+ IN SUNGAI LAMANDAU ...................................................... 39 2.4 CONCLUSIONS ................................................................................................................................. 49 3 | TOWARDS AN INTIMACY-GEOPOLITICS OF REDD+ 3.1 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................. 51 3.2 SELLING NATURE TO SAVE IT?................................................................................................ 54 3.3 THE GREAT CARBON TRANSFORMATION .......................................................................... 56 3.4 AN INTIMACY-GEOPOLITICS OF REDD+ .............................................................................. 66 3.5 CONCLUSIONS ................................................................................................................................