Calculation, Technology, and Discourse in the Production of Carbon Forestry Offsets in Costa Rica

The Spaces of Carbon: Calculation, Technology, and Discourse in the Production of Carbon Forestry Offsets in Costa Rica

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

David Matthew Lansing, M.A.

Graduate Program in Geography

The Ohio State University

2009

Dissertation Committee:

Kendra McSweeney, Advisor

Kevin R. Cox

Becky Mansfield

Joel D. Wainwright

David Matthew Lansing

2009

Abstract

In this dissertation I present an analysis of the practices of calculation needed to create carbon forestry offsets in Costa Rica, with special attention to the spaces that are produced through such practices. Carbon forestry offsets are a mechanism by which a person, nation, or corporation can offset the climactic impact of their greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing a credit, which funds a forestry project that sequesters an equivalent amount of carbon. To produce such an offset, a significant amount of scientific and technical work is required to render the spaces of a forest as a carbon equivalent, and I explore the function and effects of this work in a variety of ways. First, I examine the relation between calculation and space in the production of offsets, where I argue that the calculations needed to bring a carbon forestry offset into being as a commodity is a process that results in the co-constitution of relational space, absolute

Cartesian spaces, and the bounded territory of the nation-state. I develop this argument by drawing on Martin Heidegger’s writings on calculation, technology, and the question of being, and examine the spaces that result from an example of the state’s efforts to develop carbon offset calculations in Costa Rica. Central to my argument is the idea that the practices of calculation are productive of a technological metaphysics, where the ii world becomes disclosed to us as an object of orderability. This ontological orientation allows for the objects and subjects of the world, in this case carbon commodities as well as producers and consumers of carbon offsets, to become relationally embedded in the world through the production of bounded Cartesian space.

Second, through an investigation of the bodily performances needed to maintain such spaces as spaces of carbon sequestration. I do so by examining the transitive movement between the abstract and the material that ultimately produces the spaces of the forest as a commodified forestry offset. I argue that this oscillation is the part of the performance of the space of an offset. Through this performative oscillation between the abstract and the material, the commodity-object and the “carbon market” itself, are mutually emergent and sustained. An analytic approach that focuses on the performative emergence of the economic and its objects highlights the often hidden points of instability and precariousness of neoliberal projects more generally.

In addition to focusing on the performative materiality of carbon offsets, I also examine the discursive practices that are necessary for the spaces of commodified carbon storage to emerge. Through a historical-discursive analysis of the spaces of the indigenous body in the 19th and early 20th century, I argue that carbon offsets in indigenous communities in Costa Rica today occur within a spatial and territorial frame that is an effect of the transitive position of the indigenous body – where it is at once part

iii of the Costa Rican nation yet outside of its normalized spaces of accumulation – a position that became hegemonic in the early 20th century. Practices of calculating carbon do not play out on an aspatial tabula rasa, but rather, are embedded within previous discursive and material emergences of space, territory, and the body. Thus, a carbon offset’s geographic positioning in the Talamanca Indigenous Reserve is reflective of a historically embedded process of territorialization that itself is grounded in a history of discursive and material placements of indigenous bodies in space.

Finally, I explore how the discursive conception of the indigenous body, and its spaces of agriculture has changed in the late 20th century, and how its new discursive emergence as a rational user of land and labor has allowed for carbon offsets to emerge as a solution to a specific socio-spatial development problematic: the ecologically unsustainable landscapes that are produced by economically rational actors. The use of cost-benefit calculations in the implementation of carbon offsets, however, results in new representations of agricultural space, which has contributed to the “opening up” of some spaces for receiving commodified carbon, while foreclosing on others. I argue that these calculations are reflective of the process of value generally, and specifically, the need for the spaces of carbon to acquire a use value.

Dedicated to Stephanie

Acknowledgments

The process of researching and writing this dissertation was made possible by the support of a number of people and institutions. Pre-dissertation research trips were funded through a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy and Ohio State University’s

Office of International Affairs. Primary fieldwork for this project, undertaken from

March 2007 to September 2008, was supported by a Fulbright Fellowship from the

Institute of International Education as well as an International Dissertation Research

Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council. In addition, funding from the

Department of Energy and Ohio State’s Climate, Water, and Carbon Program allowed for an extended fieldwork stay.

I especially want to thank everyone in Costa Rica who gave of their time to hang out with me, listen to my questions, and answer them in good faith. In the Talamanca region I especially want to thank those who gave me a place to stay, companionship, and drink: Maricela Fernández, Felicia and Gerardo Villanueva, Hemias Zúñiga, Arnulfo

Zúñiga, Marvin Uva, Nicolas Uva, Julia Reyes, Victor Reyes, Eusebio Morales, and all of the staff at the Finca Educativa. I also thank Felipe Carazo and Sandra Candela for their research assistance.

I owe a great deal of intellectual debt and gratitude to the faculty and graduate students at OSU’s Department of Geography. My committee members – Kevin Cox, vi

Becky Mansfield, and Joel Wainwright – have each had an important role in shaping my intellectual development, and I am lucky to have had all three on my committee. A special thanks to my adviser, Kendra McSweeney, for all of her efforts over the years, which I believe has made me a better fieldworker, scholar, and writer. Most importantly,

I thank her for making this process a sane and enjoyable one. In addition, I also thank

Timothy Choy. Many of the ideas that eventually formed this dissertation had their start in his “Complex Ethnographies” seminar at Ohio State. In addition, a number of ideas for this dissertation came from my participation in the “Performing Markets” workshop put on by the University of Frankfurt. Thanks to Peter Lindner, Christian Brannstrom, and Marc Boeckler for putting on, and inviting me to, such a great workshop. I have been lucky to study at Ohio State with an intellectually stimulating, and all around great group of fellow graduate students. Special thanks to Kevin Grove, Rohit Negi, Theresa Wong,

Michael Ewers, Veronica Crossa, Michael Niedzielski, Jeff Olson, Suzanna Klaf,

Delphine Ancien, Alistair Fraser, Trevor Birkenholtz, Eveily Freeman, Amanda Nahlik, and Blanca Bernal for various forms of intellectual support and friendship.

I am also in debt to David Hansen, whose early support of my work in Costa Rica made this dissertation possible. In addition, I am grateful for institutional support from

OSU’s International Programs in Agriculture, and the College of Natural Resources and the Environment, especially the efforts of Pat Rigby. In addition, Jay Martin deserves

vii special acknowledgment for stepping in at timely moments to help me secure funding, and for getting me to join the initial OSU-EARTH collaboration that provided the initial seed for this project. At EARTH University I thank Jane Yeomans, Pedro Bidegaray, and

Bert Kohlmann for their friendship and support. The folks at CATIE - especially Eduardo

Somarriba, Marilyn Villalobos, Hernán Andrade, Milena Segura, and Zenia Salinas - were especially open, welcoming, and helpful.

I am also in debt to an extended network of family members and in-laws who have always supported me, and often pitched in to give me the gift of time. I am especially grateful for my parents, Ray and Dorothy Lansing, for everything they have done over the years. I also thank Larry and Nina Lipe, who have been a wonderful set of second parents. As I write this, I can hear the sounds of my three-year-old daughter,

Quinn, and my baby son, Gavin, getting ready to start their day. Such a scene, with me writing at the computer and someone else watching my children, has been essential for getting this dissertation done. My research and writing would not have been possible without the help of a number of people. Sameena Hussein, Heicel Quiros, Dayana

Hernández, Ninoska DeBleeker, and Antonia Carrasco, have all, at one time or another, served as caregivers for my children. Your work was essential for my own. Thank you.

Finally, Stephanie Lansing has meant so much to me, and has done more for me than I can possibly begin to acknowledge here. So I won’t.

viii

Ha. Just kidding. I could not have done this without you Steph. The last six years have been wonderful, and with your companionship and love, I know the next six, and beyond, will be as well.

Vita

August 6, 1976 ...... Born – Cheyenne, Wyoming, USA

1999 ...... B.A. Philosophy, University of Wyoming

2005 ...... M.A. Geography The Ohio State University

2000 – 2002 ...... United States Peace Corps Volunteer

2003 – 2004 ...... Ohio State University Fellow

2004 – 2007 ...... Graduate Teaching Associate Department of Geography Ohio State University

2007 – 2008 ...... Fulbright Fellow Institute of International Education

2007 – 2008 ...... IDRF Fellow Social Science Research Council

Publications

Research Publications

1. Lansing D M, 2009, “The spaces of social capital: livelihood geographies and marine conservation in the Cayos Cochinos Marine Protected Area, Honduras”. Journal of Latin American Geography 8 1 29-54.

2. Lansing D, Bidegaray P, Hansen D O, McSweeney K, 2008, “Placing the plantation in smallholder agriculture: evidence from Costa Rica” Ecological Engineering 34 4 358-372. x

Fields of Study

Major Field: Geography

Table of Contents

Page Abstract ...... ii Dedication ...... v Acknowledgements ...... vi Vita ...... x

List of Tables ...... xv List of Figures...... xvi List of Abbreviations ...... xvii

Chapters:

1. The New Geography of Our Climate Sins ...... 1

1.1 Understanding Carbon Equivalence ...... 1 1.2 A Brief History of Carbon Offsets ...... 3 1.3 Producing Offsets: Calculation, Measurement, and Monitoring ...... 6 1.4 Offsets and the Neoliberalization of Nature ...... 9 1.4.1 Theoretical Concepts ...... 12 1.4.2 Contributions of the Dissertation ...... 18 1.5 Summary and Plan of the Dissertation ...... 21 1.6 Multiple Selves, Multiple Sites: Methods and Study Site ...... 24 1.6.1 Semi-structured Interviews and Participant Observation ...... 24 1.6.2 Household Survey ...... 31 1.6.3 Archival Work...... 33 1.7 Flows of Information; OR Where is my Study Site Again? ...... 34

2. Carbon’s Calculatory Spaces: The Emergence of Carbon Offset Credits in Costa Rica...... 39

2.1 Introduction ...... 39 2.2 Space, Nature, and Calculation...... 41 2.3 Heidegger, Calculation, and the Metaphysics of Technology ...... 44 2.4 Carbon, Calculation, and the State ...... 49 2.4.1 Relational and Absolute Calculations and Spaces ...... 52 2.5 Enframing Carbon: Space as Standing Reserve ...... 54 xii

2.6 The Technological Spaces of Ordering: Territory, the Global, and Relational Space ...... 60 2.7 Conclusion ...... 64

3. Performing Carbon’s Materiality: The (Re)-Production of Carbon Offsets and the Framing of Exchange ...... 66

3.1 Introduction ...... 66 3.2 Mapping the Materiality of Offsets ...... 74 3.3 Technologies of Space ...... 77 3.4 Performing the Global ...... 79 3.4.1 Abject Spaces ...... 82 3.5 Reflexive Performances ...... 85 3.6 The Materiality of Nature and the Performance of Neoliberalism ...... 89 3.7 Conclusion ...... 91

4. Territorializing the Indigenous Body: Discourse, the State, and the Spaces of Accumulation ...... 93

4.1 Introduction ...... 93 4.2 Territorialization and Discourse ...... 99 4.3 The Struggle for Talamanca: The Key Players...... 103 4.3.1 Caciques and Other Liasons: Antonio Saldana and Guillermo Gabb ...... 106 4.3.2 The United Fruit Company ...... 108 4.4 Gabb and Pittier: The Emergence of the Indigenous Body as Discursive Object ...... 112 4.4.1 Pittier’s Bodily Calculations ...... 117 4.5 Denuncios, Baldios, and the UFC: Territory and Primitive Accumulation ... 121 4.5.1 Denuncios as capitalist territorialization ...... 123 4.6 Territorialization Threatened: The UFC Expands ...... 125 4.6.1 Territorial Hegemony and Transgressive Bodies ...... 128 4.7 Conclusion ...... 130

5. Local Neoliberalisms and Global Valuations: Carbon Calculations as Discursive Statements of Value ...... 132 xiii

5.1 Introduction ...... 132 5.2 The Value of Additionality and the Discourse of Value ...... 138 5.3 Development Discourse: The Proglems of Development and the Solution of Carbon...... 143 5.3.1 Cacao and Carbon ...... 150 5.4 Enter Carbon Offsets: The Cost-Benefit Calculations ...... 153 5.5 Discourse and Value...... 158 5.6 Conclusion ...... 161

6. Chapter Six: Conclusion...... 164

6.1 Placing Carbon’s Space...... 164 6.2 Objections, Lacunae, and the Future ...... 169

Bibliography ...... 173

Appendix A: List of Semi-Structured Interviews ...... 200

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List of Tables

Table Page

5.1 Cacao development and conservation projects in Talamanca ...... 145

A.1 List of semi-structured interviews ...... 201

List of Figures

Figure Page

1.1 Geographic divisions of the CDM ...... 4

1.2 Primary sites of data collection ...... 36

2.1 Simplified principle of the baseline ...... 51

3.1 Screen-shot from Lifegate’s website ...... 67

3.2 “Carbon territory” signs ...... 69

3.3 Scenes from a carbon verification trip...... 70

4.1 UFC property maps...... 94

4.2 Map of the carbon project area ...... 96

4.3 Map from the final carbon project document...... 97

4.4 Map showing the area of eventual UFC occupation, railroad lines, and areas of indigenous “migration” ...... 111

4.5 Hand and foot measurement of indigenous bodies taken by Henri Pittier...... 120

5.1 Location of the Bribri and Cabécar indigenous reserves ...... 133

5.2 The indigenous agricultural system ...... 148

5.3 Annotated graph from the final project design document of the Talamanca Carbon Project ...... 155

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List of Abbreviations

ADITIBRI ...... Asociación de Desarrollo Integral Indígena Bribri de Talamanca (Bribri Indigenous Development Association)

ADITICA ...... Asociación de Desarrollo Intrgral Indígena Cabécar de Talamanca (Cabécar Indigenous Development Association)

AIJ ...... Activities Implemented Jointly

ANCR ...... Archivos Nacionales de Costa Rica (Costa Rican National Archives)

CATIE ...... Centro Agronónomo Tropical de Investigación y enseñanza (Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center)

CDM...... Clean Development Mechanism

EARTH ...... Escuela Agricultura de la Región Tropical Húmeda (Agricultural School for the Humid Tropics)

FONAFIFO ...... Fondo Nacional de Financiamiento Forestal (National Forestry Financing Fund)

PES ...... Payments for Environmental Services

UFC ...... United Fruit Company

UNFCCC ...... United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

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Chapter 1: The New Geography of Our Climate Sins

1.1 Understanding Carbon Equivalence In July 2009, an exhibition hall in Berlin, Germany called Station-Berlin was the site of “Premium Exhibitions,” a fashion trade show that was intended to showcase the creative energies of fashion designers from around the world (Premium Exhibitions 2009). It was also an event that required electrical energy to produce, resulting in carbon- dioxide emissions that will remain circulating in the atmosphere for up to one hundred years (IPCC 2001). Today, however, the atmosphere is no longer the only type of circulation that concerns the carbon-dioxide molecule. Event organizers, determined to produce a “green” fashion show, purchased a carbon forestry offset through the Italian company Lifegate. This means that the greenhouse gas emissions from this show are, in theory, no longer contributing to global climate change. Instead, the climactic impact of these emissions have been neutralized through the sequestration of an equivalent level of carbon that is now being stored in 25,200 square meters of secondary forest over the next five years in the Cabécar Indigenous Reserve in Costa Rica (Lifegate 2009). This forest was recently pasture-land for a non-indigenous cattle rancher, but today, it now exists as a well-defined space of carbon storage – one that is now a site of value production, not in the form of raising meat, but instead, by storing the carbon-equivalent of the greenhouse gas emissions of consumers on the other side of the planet. This act of adequation, where the actions of people in Germany are rendered commensurate to a space in Costa Rica, is an event that is also grounded in inequality. While carbon-dioxide emissions are literally produced by every living human being, the geographic unevenness of the responsibility for these emissions is vast. In 2008, the average German citizen had a carbon footprint of 15.1 tons of CO2 while the average

1 citizen of Costa Rica had a footprint of 2.6 tons of CO2 that same year (Hertwich and Peters 2009; NTNU 2009).1 This inequality in carbon-dioxide emissions maps inequalities of wealth throughout the world. The per capita gross domestic product (measured in terms of purchasing power parity) of Germany, for example, is $36,800 USD while in Costa Rica it is $11,500 USD (CIA 2009). Since carbon offsets were included in the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, a great deal of effort has been spent – both within and outside the regulatory structure of Kyoto – in establishing offsets that are designed specifically to take advantage of this inequality. Here, the purchase of an offset allows people, companies, and nations in the global North to reduce their carbon impact in a cost effective manner by investing in forestry and alternative energy projects in the global South. Such a move is less expensive than reducing emissions in developed countries (Sedjo et al. 1995). In this way, the Premium Exhibitions fashion show is able to continue as it always has, only this time its sartorial performances have become linked to the emergence of new spaces of commodification in Costa Rica – the carbon forestry offset. This dissertation investigates how such an act of equivalence is possible. I ask: what practices are required for a space to be rendered equivalent to someone’s actions elsewhere in the world? What do such practices say about our current approach to climate change? What are the effects of such practices on the actors, spaces, and territories that are ultimately rendered as carbon-equivalences? Through an investigation into the practices of calculation necessary to bring a carbon forestry offset credit into being, this dissertation opens a horizon for addressing these questions. In the chapters that follow, each one written as a stand-alone piece, I use different theoretical concepts to analyze the practices of calculation that are constitutive of carbon’s materialization as a commodity. In this introduction, I intend to link these different arguments under a common problematic. First, however, let us look at carbon offsets a bit more closely.

1 As will become clear in this dissertation, such calculations are always problematic. Here they are meant simply to convey the difference between the location of the consumers of offsets and where the offset actually exists. The website that reported these calculations can be found at NTNU 2009 and the methodology for such calculations in explained in Hertwich and Peters 2009. 2

1.2 A Brief History of Carbon Offsets Carbon offsets are a mechanism by which a person, nation, or corporation can compensate for the climactic damage of their greenhouse gas emissions by funding either an alternative energy project, whose energy production results in fewer greenhouse gases than status quo technologies, or in a forestry project that results in the sequestration of carbon in the biomass of trees, plants, and soils. The idea of altering the atmospheric circulation of carbon by planting trees was first proposed by the British physicist Freeman Dyson in 1976 (Dyson 1976). In the 1970s, the idea that forests can serve as an atmospheric “carbon sink” began to be investigated by a handful of scientists (Hampicke 1979; Brown and Lugo 1980). The idea of turning the forest-as-carbon-sink into a mechanism for offsetting GHG emissions, however, was not put into practice until 1989 when the U.S power company, Applied Energy Services (AES), created an offset project in Guatemala as a way to help achieve regulatory approval for a coal-fired power plant in Connecticut. AES teamed up with the U.S. Agency for International Development to plant 50 million pine and eucalyptus trees on the land of smallholders in Guatemala’s Western highlands (Ma’anit 2006). A few years later, in 1995, carbon forestry offsets began to be institutionalized as a mechanism for reducing greenhouse gases worldwide in 1995 with the first Conference of Parties meeting (COP1) under the United Nations Framework for the Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (Arpels 2008). These talks were the forerunner to the Kyoto Protocol, and they led to the creation of Activities Implemented Jointly (AIJ) under the UNFCCC. AIJ was conceived as a “learning by doing” phase where Annex I signatories (generally “developed” countries) to the UNFCCC would voluntarily fund reforestation projects in non-Annex I countries (Michaelowa and Dutschke 2000; see figure 1.1). Costa Rica became one of the first countries to design and implement an AIJ project, with a reforestation project financed by Norway in the country’s central highlands (a project known as CARFIX, de Vos 2003; Deutschke 2000).

Figure 1.1: Geographic divisions of the CDM. Annex I countries (red) are able to invest in forestry or alternative energy projects in non-Annex I countries.

Carbon offsets were further institutionalized in the Kyoto Protocol by the creation of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which was similar to the AIJ phase, only now Annex I countries were allowed to fund forestry and alternative energy projects in non-Annex I countries as a way to specifically meet their emissions reduction requirements. The CDM has been portrayed by its promoters as a win-win situation (e.g. Swingland 2002). In theory, it allows Annex I countries to meet their emissions reduction goals in a more cost-effective manner because, for example, it is more economical to fund a bioenergy project in the developing world than to upgrade a coal plant in the developed world (Jepma and Munasinghe 1998; Lecocq and Ambrosi 2007). In theory, such a system of offsetting allows for technology transfer to developing countries, and in the case of forestry offsets, promotes reforestation in developing countries (Smith and Scherr 2003; Swingland 2002).2

2 For a comprehensive, and insightful, account of how forests came to be included in the CDM, and the role of science in bringing about this inclusion, please see Fogel 2002. 4 The creation of the CDM also has had its share of critics. Major conservation organizations were opposed to the inclusion of carbon offsets at the outset of the Kyoto Protocol, although they eventually compromised and supported their inclusion (Fogel 2004). Indigenous rights groups have denounced carbon offsets as being incompatible with cultural diversity, and as posing a threat to culturally and ecologically complex landscapes (SIIFCC 2000). A number of Western environmental activist groups, such as SinksWatch and The Corner House, have criticized offsets as enabling continued carbon- based consumption at best, and at worse actually creating the conditions for increased carbon emissions in the future (Lohmann 2005; SinksWatch 2004). There is also an emerging, yet still small, academic critique of carbon offsets as well. Critical academic work has argued that offsets are predicated on a techno-scientific “global gaze” (Litfin 1997) that enable further rounds of capital accumulation without addressing the ecological contradictions of capitalism (Bachram 2004; Bumpus and Liverman 2008; Glover 1999). Research on specific offset projects has shown that offset payments in smallholding communities have the potential to exacerbate local wealth inequality, where payments that are based on reductive understandings of carbon content are more likely to benefit relatively wealthy households with extensive land assets (Tschkert 2004; Tschkert et al. 2006; see also Sierra and Russman 2006). A number of academic writings, however, have been largely supportive of the benefits of offsets, arguing that they are win-win situations for the climate and for underdeveloped countries (Swingland 2002). Nevertheless, even sympathetic academic researchers have pointed out that offsets have potential for abuse (Corbrera, Brown, and Adger 2007; Smith and Scherr 2003), while others have argued that the regulatory requirements of the CDM, and the current prices for carbon, mean that small-scale community-based projects are not feasible (Locatelli and Pedroni 2004). Others have pointed out that offsets have limited utility and that, even if forestry offsets work as intended, they cannot replace greenhouse gas reductions, but rather, provide a modest number of years of “breathing room” before the economically difficult choices of actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions can begin (Smith et al. 2000).

5 1.3 Producing Offsets: Calculation, Measurement, and Monitoring For all of the concern about the potential negative effects of carbon forestry offsets, it is not entirely clear that this represents a land-use policy that is viable even on its own terms. Despite numerous projects in the development pipeline, and thousands of hours of labor devoted to developing guidelines for creating forestry offsets, there are very few functional forestry offsets in existence today. As of this writing, there are only two approved Clean Development Mechanism forestry offsets (Carbon Offsets Daily 2009). There are a number of forestry offsets that exist as unregulated “voluntary” offsets, however, among all voluntary offsets, only 15% are forestry offsets while the rest are alternative energy projects (Bumpus and Liverman 2008). The slow development for carbon forestry offsets can be explained, in part, by a number of difficult technical hurdles that a project must overcome to become a tradable forestry offset. In general, the process of calculating a forest’s carbon sequestration potential is considerably more complex and labor-intensive than calculating carbon reductions for an energy project (Salinas and Hernandez 2008). The spatial extent of the land, the variability of tree species within a project area, and the susceptibility of trees to disease, fire, and logging requires not only labor-intensive field measurements at the outset of an offset project, but also continual monitoring throughout the life of a forestry project. In addition, carbon is only sequestered in forests on a temporary basis while the carbon reductions for energy projects are permanent. This has led to different accounting rules for forestry projects in the CDM, where one’s credit for emissions reduction expire after a set time (ranging from 5 to 60 years). Within Costa Rica, offsets have held a great deal of promise for state planners, but have, to date, failed to live up to their high expectations. Among the country’s technocratic elite, offsets represented a great potential for the country, where Costa Rica’s chief negotiator for Kyoto declared that carbon offsets will one day amount to “the equivalent of an additional export” (Tattenbach 1997, cited in de Vos 2003). Costa Rica’s early experience with environmental service payments were even held up as a model during the negotiations over the CDM under the Kyoto Protocol (de Vos 2003). These

6 difficulties in measurement and calculation, however, have contributed to the stalled emergence of carbon offsets as the exportable commodities that was once envisioned for this country. Despite being one of the first countries to experiment with creating offset projects (Castro et al. 2000), and despite the presence of considerable state resources devoted to promoting and developing carbon offset credits, Costa Rica has yet to have a CDM-forestry project approved, and has seen the development of only a small handful of voluntary projects.3 Despite the difficulties that calculations and measurements pose for the development of forestry offsets, these practices are unavoidable in establishing an offset. In order to create a forestry offset one must determine how much carbon will be sequestered by the project’s biomass – its trees, plants, and soils. This requires extensive scientific work: cutting and weighing trees, applying alometric equations that estimate a biomass-to-carbon ratio for individual trees, measuring the breast-height diameter of trees, using GIS programs to synoptically estimate the levels of carbon storage for a particular project and so on (Salinas and Hernández 2008). These calculations, while important, are not analyzed in this dissertation. Instead, my interest is in another set of calculations that accompany carbon offset projects. These calculations are broadly labeled “additionality” calculations. Additionality is the idea that a carbon project should be producing additional forms of carbon storage and not subsidizing status quo forms of land use. In other words, the additionality criterion of the CDM is meant to ensure that carbon financing is producing new trees, not compensating land owners for trees already planted, or trees that landowners were planning to plant without carbon financing (Michaelowa 2005). All CDM projects must demonstrate additionality. One of the steps to doing so is to calculate what is known as a “carbon baseline.” Carbon baselines are the business-as-usual level of carbon that landscapes would sequester in the absence of carbon payments. The amount of carbon payments for land-use changes are then based on the levels of carbon that will be sequestered over and

3 I discuss the details of this stalled emergence of offsets in Costa Rica, and speculate why this is so in Chapter Two. 7 above this baseline. For example, payments to a land-owner are based on the estimated carbon that newly planted trees will sequester in the future. A small baseline results in more “credit” for sequestered carbon due to these new trees, while a larger baseline results in lower payments. The estimation of a carbon baseline requires assumptions about not only the trajectory of existing plant growth but, more controversially, the nature and extent of future land-use decisions by farmers (Chomitz 1998; Tipper and de Jong 1998). The methods and assumptions involved in these calculations are highly variable and have been the source of a great deal of debate and discussion among carbon scientists and policy makers (Brown 1998; Kaimowitz and Angelsen 1998). One particularly contentious issue is the methodology that is used to predict the future trajectory of land-use and livelihoods over time and space (Brown et al. 2000; Deutschke 2002). For example, carbon baselines are often based on assumptions of static, predictable land-use decisions, so that a steadily-increasing linear baseline of future carbon sequestration can be calculated (van Kooten et al. 1997). There has been disagreement in the academic literature over the proper way to construct such baselines, especially with regard to carbon offset projects in Costa Rica. Chomitz et al. (1999), for example, have argued that the static models of land-use that have informed past baselines in Costa Rica are not necessarily reflective of the dynamic reality of rural land-use patterns, in which farmers respond idiosyncratically to different economic, social, and environmental signals. In addition, Deutschke (2000) demonstrates how a carbon credit project in Costa Rica’s Virilla watershed failed to adequately account for spatial variation in land-use, resulting in baselines that were significantly underestimated. These types of problems have led a number of analysts to argue that determining a methodology for carbon baselines is currently the most difficult task in establishing carbon credits under the Kyoto Protocol (e.g. Chomitz 1998; de Jong et al. 2005). A second issue that this dissertation takes up is the issue of permanence. Trees will eventually die, sometimes sooner than expected. This means that, in theory, forestry offset projects are only temporarily sequestering carbon while the carbon savings from an energy project are permanent. The temporary nature of a forest has meant that carbon

8 projects are usually conceived in 20 to 25 year timelines (Salinas and Hernandez 2008). Nevertheless, trees may catch fire, or be illegally logged before a credit expires. This danger of non-permanence means that forestry offset projects require periodic monitoring of forestry stands, to ensure that the same trees remain in place, sequestering carbon. This is a practice that adds to the cost of establishing and maintaining a forestry project (Marland et al. 2001; van Kooten et al. 2002). In addition, the practices themselves can be problematic, and it can be difficult to assess if a particular space of carbon storage has achieved the level of permanence that it should. As I show in Chapter Three, these monitoring exercises are often group efforts involving disparate types of actors – scientists, GIS experts, government bureaucrats, and indigenous farmers – raising the potential for internal conflicts over whether a particular space still exists as a space of carbon storage. The resolution of these conflicts is often nominally based on an appeal to “objective truth,” however, a closer look at how the spaces of carbon storage are monitored reveal that such conflicts are often negotiated settlements that emerge through unequal relations of power. In Chapter Three, I provide an ethnographic investigation into this process and inquire into the effects that these iterative practices of representing the spaces of carbon storage have for the constitution of the carbon commodity itself, the coalition of actors maintain a carbon offset project, and the carbon markets within which offsets circulate.

1.4 Offsets and the Neoliberalization of Nature On one register, the calculatory problems that have stalled the development of forestry offsets can be seen as another example of the difficulties that arise when one attempts to turn part of “nature” into a commodity. In this dissertation I treat the production of a carbon forestry offset as an example of the commodification of nature – where particular non-human entities become materially and discursively transformed so that they may be sold for the purpose of realizing value. This is a process that is being increasingly examined by geographers (Castree 2003). Recent writings have explored the process and outcomes of commodifying diverse natures such as water (Bakker 2003;

9 Haughton 2002), minerals (Bridge 2000), biodiversity (Hayden 2003; McAfee 1999) and wetland ecosystems (Robertson 2000; Robertson 2006). Carbon offsets have also begun to be analyzed by geographers as part of the commodification process (Bumpus and Liverman 2008; Klooster and Masera 2000). Many of these works have examined the difficulties that the materiality of nature presents when confronted with the process of its commodification. Karen Bakker (2003), in her study of water privatization in England and Wales, argues that the biophysical qualities water - its density and fluidity - have stalled its complete commodification. Similarly, Scott Prudham (2003) argues that industrial forestry must contend with the slow grow rates of tress, a biophysical process that slows down the rapid turnover time that capital demands. This results in the emergence of various state and private institutional mechanisms, as well as an altering of the materiality of the tree itself, in order to overcome this problem. The challenges that nature poses for capital have a long history within the political economy tradition. Writers such as Karl Kautsky (1899) and Susan Mann (1990, see also Mann and Dickinson 1978) have argued that the spatial and temporal conditions of plant and animal growth present barriers to capitalist accumulation in the agriculture sector, resulting in an incomplete articulation between capitalist logics and agricultural production. Karl Polanyi (1944) identified nature as one of capital’s fictitious commodities - entities whose cultural, biological, or physical function precludes their full marketization, but nevertheless are treated ‘as if’ they are fully manageable through price signals, resulting in market development that is accompanied by forms of market protection for particular social groups. This idea has received further theoretical flesh by Marxists with an ecological focus such as James O’Connor (1988) and Ted Benton (1989), who have argued that the natural conditions of production that are functional to capital ultimately pose long-term barriers to continued patterns of accumulation. O’Connor (1988), for example, argues that capitalist firms simultaneously rely on, and degrade, the necessary natural conditions of production, a contradictory process that is untenable in the long-run and ultimately produce crises that open the door for various forms of regulation at a variety of spatial-temporal scales. Benton (1989) has drawn on a

10 similar conception of the capital-nature dialectic to argue that capitalist production results in the degradation of its own conditions of production, but in a way that is mediated by the materiality of nature, where capital’s transformative powers of production become altered, or even stopped, by certain intransigent qualities of nature. While each of these writers have differing commitments to nature’s materiality, underscoring all of their arguments is the understanding that the materiality of the non-human (e.g. its biophysical qualities) pre-exists, and in turn affects, its encounter with capital. This dissertation seeks to unsettle these claims about nature’s materiality. To do so, I offer a theoretically-informed, empirical investigation into the practices of calculation and measure that are required for the production of carbon forestry offsets, and the ways in which these practices have shaped the development of forestry offsets in Costa Rica. This approach shares affinities with a group of writers who have placed the social construction of nature’s materiality at the center of their analysis, where “nature” emerges through its representations, and its materiality is a hybrid of social, textual, technological, and cultural processes (Braun and Castree 1998; Whatmore 2002). A number of geographers have taken these post-structural accounts to examine nature’s material-semiotic production as it relates to capital accumulation. Erik Swyngedouw (1999; 2004), for example, combines Latour’s understanding of quasi-objects as networked associations of the social and natural with Lefebvre’s understanding of the production of space in order to write about urbanization and water provisioning as a process of hybridization (Swyngedouw 1999; 447). This approach allows him to concentrate on a production process, that results in hybrid socio-natural objects, that is nevertheless grounded in the power dynamics of capital (Swyngedouw 2004). Here, nature’s materiality and its spaces are produced by capital, but such productions always involve networked articulations of social, natural, and technological actors. Morgan Robertson has more explicitly explored the relation between practices of calculation and the needs of capital in his studies on the emergence of wetland ecosystem service markets (Robertson 2000; Robertson 2004; Robertson 2006). Robertson argues that practices of calculation that occur in order to delineate the existence of a wetland are in tension with

11 the epistemic requirements for such ecosystems to enter into circuits of exchange. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s ideas about specialized knowledge systems, Robertson’s analysis points not to the material qualities of wetlands themselves, but rather, the incongruence between of different systems of knowledge production – such as ecosystem science and capital – as the source of this tension (Robertson 2006). In this dissertation I wish to extend this approach. That is, I begin with the notion that nature’s materiality and agency is not a quality that exists prior to its encounter with capital, but rather, is emergent from a networked articulation of actors, who are operating within capitalist social relations. In this dissertation, however, I am not arguing that nature is socially constructed per se. Instead, my focus is on the problematic of space and territory, and the ways in which they are constituted by practices of calculation for the purpose of creating value.4 I also recognize that such spaces and territories are ephemeral and need to be continually reasserted. Thus, in Chapter 3, for example, I do not write about the construction, or even the production, of space, but rather, the performance of space, where the spaces of carbon offsets are often asserted through performative practices. Below I briefly touch on some of the key theoretical concepts that inform my analysis in the chapters that follow.

1.4.1 Theoretical Concepts In this dissertation, I contend that carbon calculations are an event that connects producers, consumers, and trees together in ways that materialize the forest as a carbon commodity. In this way, calculations can be thought of as discursive statements that perform value. This is an event of value production, and the dynamic assemblages of scientists, bureaucrats, trees, measuring devices, farmers, and online consumers that are necessary for this event to occur, are ultimately productive of particular spaces: absolute Cartesian spaces, relational spaces, and the singular space of “the global”. These are the

4 As Neil Smith (2008) argues, the production, or construction, of nature and space are intimately related, with no easy conceptual division between the two. 12 spaces of the carbon commodity’s being. This dissertation is an examination into the historically embedded practices that allow for these spaces to emerge. Below are some of the theoretical ideas that inform this approach toward understanding carbon offsets.

The Commodity Form and Use Value –Marx begins his analysis in Capital: Volume 1 with the commodity. As David Harvey (1999) points out, this is no accident, for it is commodity form, and the mystery of value that it embodies, that is the fundamental building block of Marx’s analysis of Capital. Here, understanding the commodity form, and the categories of use-value and exchange-value that each commodity embodies is the key to understanding Marx’s theory of value (Harvey 1999; Karatani 2003). Here I draw on Marx’s investigation into the commodity in understanding the calculatory imperatives of carbon offsets. I take his basic definition of the commodity: a use value produced by labor for exchange. Marx’s investigation into the commodity revealed its apparent mystery—which is how an exchange of equivalents renders a surplus. While Marx locates the source of surplus value in labor-power, the capacity to labor, he also recognizes that labor alone does not give a commodity value. For value to be realized it must placed into relation to other commodities through the mechanism of money. In other words, a commodity cannot realize value until it is sold (Karatani 2003). Here, use value is a critical component of the commodity. For value to be realized, a commodity must be useful to someone. In this dissertation, therefore, I ask what is needed for a carbon offset to acquire a use value? What practices are necessary for the spaces of carbon to become useful. I take up this question explicitly in Chapter Five, and elaborate more on the importance of use value for the commodity form. Here, I point out that the ultimate point of a carbon offset is to neutralize someone’s greenhouse gas emissions. To do this, there must be some kind of quantitative equivalence between, for example, a forest in Costa Rica and the actions of convention attendees in Berlin. Otherwise, the offset consumer would have no way of knowing their purchase is contributing to this worldwide choreography of carbon. In other words, quantification is essential not only for the carbon offset commodity to acquire a price, but also in order to

13 assure a particular space “really is” going to neutralize someone’s greenhouse gas emissions somewhere else. This is the point of additionality calculations – to ensure that an offset purchase is producing new forms of carbon storage so as to mitigate climate change. In this way, additionality calculations play a critical role in establishing an offset’s use value, where an offset’s usefulness is grounded in the quantitative demonstration of additionality.

Space – The importance of calculations for use value also have particular consequences for the emergence of particular spaces of carbon. Not only must an offset be additional, the specific location of the carbon in the ground needs to be determined as well. As I discuss in Chapters Two and Three, this involves the delineation of specific Cartesian spaces that serve to “materialize” a carbon offset. Such calculations are also productive of another kind of space as well – the conception of a singular “graspable” space of the global that underpins ideas about a global circulation of atmospheric carbon-dioxide. This process of commodifying carbon—where the actions of a consumer is Germany are rendered as equivalent to a tree in Costa Rica—is predicated on the existence of a global space where carbon’s presence in one location is no different from its presence somewhere else. Thus, carbon calculations not only establish absolute Cartesian spaces, but are also simultaneously productive of relational, topographic spaces that connect a consumer to a producer, and tie both to an undifferentiated, singular space of “the global.”

Territory – While it is my contention that practices of calculation are constitutive of space in particular ways, I argue that they are also part of a process of territoriality—the using and commanding of space—for particular ends. A number of post-colonial writings as well as scholarship on critical geopolitics have argued that the process of producing territory occurs, in part, through discourse. While territory is surely material, these writings argue that it is also an object produced by discourse, a process that is simultaneously productive of the “subject” of territory. This approach to territory has led

14 to a host of works that explore the power relations imbued in the concomitant formation of territory and the colonial subject (Bhabha 1990; Said 1979; Sparke 2005). A similar relation between territory and subject formation has extended into recent work in critical geopolitics as well, where writers have explored how subjectivity is constituted through practices of territorialization (Dalby 1991; O Tuathail and Dalby 1998). Here, territorialization can be understood as a practice of defining inclusions and exclusions with regard to particular objects and conditions, discursively and materially marking a constitutive “inside” and oppositional “outside.” Through this process of securing a stable “inside,” one’s subjectivity becomes constituted through an attachment to particular objects, spaces, and conditions (Grove 2009; O Tuathail 1996; Wainwright 2008). A number of critical scholars have demonstrated how forms of territorialization are materialized through various discursive strategies and practices of representation (Braun 2000; Mitchell 1988; Wainwright and Robertson 2003). Timothy Mitchell (1991), for example, has argued that the state can be viewed as an effect of the mundane activities of statecraft—passports, fencing, currency control—where such practices produce the effect of the state as an entity external to society and simultaneously enframe the space over which the state has control as part of the state itself. This produces the effect of territory, where the state’s territory is not a pre-given ontological object, but something that must be materialized (see also Sparke 2005: 113-170; Wainwright 2008: 19-23). The result is a territorialization of the state where the state’s being as a territorial entity is hegemonic. The practices of calculating carbon offsets can be considered to produce territorialization, where specific “carbon territories” emerge as manifestations of particular political and economic ways of “grasping” space (Elden 2005b).

Discourse – While specific calculations are critical for carbon offsets to acquire value, I do not analyze calculations in terms of their correspondence with reality, but rather, in terms of why such particular ways of speaking are intelligible, and what effects these speech acts produce. Here, I draw on Foucault’s archaeological approach to discourse (Foucault 1972). In its most basic formulation, an “archaeology” asks what “serious”

15 statements can be made and the conditions that allow such statements to form. Applied to carbon offsets, Foucault’s archaeological method provides a way to understand the conditions that have allowed their statements to become intelligible amid the network of government officials, capitalists, and other scientists within which these statements circulate. Instead of evaluating their writings in terms of an empirical truth or falsity, an archaeology identifies the types of statements about the indigenous body and space that can be understood as statements that are true or false, and inquire about the conditions that allow such statements to emerge. The term “statements” occupies a specific meaning. It does not refer to any utterance (or “speech act” in Austin’s (1962) formulation), but rather, to utterances that can be taken seriously by a community of experts. Thus, when I look out the window and say “It is raining today” this is an everyday utterance. However, when such a speech act is made by the national weather service, this is a statement that has meaning within a specific network of other statements and actors related to the field of meteorology. As Foucault puts it: …there is no statement in general, no free, neutral, independent statement; but a statement always belongs to a series or a whole, always plays a role among other statements, deriving support from them an distinguishing itself from them: it is always part of a network of statements, in which it has a role, however minimal it may be, to play” (Foucault 1972, p. 99).

Here, a statement is more than just verbal utterances or written lines, but may also be photographs, maps, charts, and graphs. The meaning of each of these statements is determined by its context—i.e. the network of actors and other statements within which it is embedded. Thus, carbon calculations that demonstrate the “additionality” of a particular forestry project can be understand as statements that fit within a wider assemblage of experts, regulators, and other statements that constitute the terrain of knowledge production upon which carbon offsets come to be. This archaeological approach toward calculation opens up a range of different questions than if I were to

16 evaluate calculations on their own terms, such as: How did such ways of evaluating nature and space come to be? What are the effects of speaking this way? Who has the authority to speak in this way? Who is silenced?

Performativity –In addition to understanding calculations as discursive statements, I understand practices of calculation and measure as more than descriptions of a space’s carbon content, but also as active interventions into the materialization of these spaces as commodities. Here, I draw on a literature within economic sociology and geography that understand such calculations as performances (Barnes 2008; Callon 1998; MacKenzie, Muniesa and Siu 2007). These writings have analyzed economic models, for example, not as representations that describe a market, but rather, active interventions into markets. Thus, the work of economists does not occur one step removed from the economy that they describe, but rather, their theories and models actively intervene into how markets are constituted (Callon 1998; Mitchell 2002). Drawing on the analytical toolkit from actor-network theory, Michel Callon (1998a; 1998b; 1998c) has argued that in order to understand how economic transactions come about, we need to pay attention to the artifacts of calculation, and the role that they play in constituting the frames of exchange that allow for such transactions to occur (Callon 1998a). Under this purview, computers, ledgers, GPS devices, and maps all play a role in shaping how networked assemblages of actors are able to coalesce and form around particular economic transactions. With regard to carbon offsets, various technologies help to materialize the forest as a space of carbon storage: the maps that delineate carbon spaces, the GPS devices that locate the globally- mediated spaces of carbon calculations, and the cameras that produce photographic evidence that the trees are still there. In the production of carbon offsets these artifacts of calculation and measure become joined with diverse coalitions of human and other non- human actors to produce reports, graphs, and more maps that demonstrate that a particular forest in Costa Rica is sequestering carbon. These types of representations allow for the spaces of a forest to be rendered as equivalent to greenhouse gas emissions

17 that originate somewhere else. In other words, the joining together of these ensembles of actors help to perform an offset, and through such a performance the spaces of a forest are materialized as commodities.

1.4.2 Contributions of the Dissertation

My focus in this dissertation is on the emergences of space and territory in the mutual production of commodified natures and the markets within which they are articulated. In general, my approach toward carbon offsets makes three broad contributions toward literatures on neoliberalism, nature, globalization, and space. First, my approach toward calculation examines them as performances. In this dissertation I understand the work of experts needed to bring carbon offsets into being (e.g. scientists and bureaucrats) not as describing the natures and spaces to be commodified, but rather, engaging in active interventions into what these spaces and natures become, a process that that simultaneously brings about the commodified object and the capitalist markets within which they circulate. Past approaches toward understanding the intersection of neoliberalism and nature have sought to unsettle claims that neoliberal policies make on nature by invoking its materiality, nature’s intransigent qualities that confound the austere theories that guide neoliberalism (see for example Bakker 2004; Castree 2008a and 2008b for reviews). Instead, my investigation into carbon credits works to unsettle claims about the materiality of nature in order to make claims about how and why neoliberalism emerges at specific sites. I show that, rather than an encounter between a pre-existing nature and a colonizing process like neoliberalism, that rather, the two – object and process – are co-emergent at specific sites. And by showing that through the co-emergence of neoliberalism and its objects, the project of neoliberalism itself is necessarily precarious. I do this in two ways. In Chapter Three I describe neoliberalism as a performance. Understanding the neoliberalization of nature in terms of performativity theory has not been undertaken in the geographic literature. This literature has generally hewed to either a Polanyian vision of the economy, or an eco-Marxist understanding of capital’s “encounter” with nature

18 (see Castree 2008a). By understanding the measurement and calculation of the spaces of the forest as a performance, this chapter demonstrates that capital does not necessarily encounter nature, but rather, both nature-as-commodity-object and neoliberal markets themselves are co-emergent manifestation of the practices of a diverse group of actors. I ultimately show how this project is precarious, though not due to the complexity of “nature”, but rather, the precariousness of neoliberal projects are embedded in the forms of practice needed to bring these projects into being. In other words, the potential for a neoliberal project to “fall apart” is encoded in its own moments of becoming. In Chapter Five I explore the ways in which particular places become “opened up”, both discursively and materially, as a “problem” for neoliberalism to solve. In short, I ask why and how neoliberalism occurs at a specific place in time. Most of the recent literature on neoliberal natures has addressed the question “why neoliberalism?” in terms of universal processes grounded in the drive of capital and the state. Noel Castree (2008a) categorizes much of the recent literature on neoliberalism and nature in terms of the various “fixes” that neoliberalsim performs, where neoliberal policies solve long standing accumulation problems encountered by the capital and the state. This body of literature then turns to particulars in order to ask the question “how does neoliberalism function?” In these writings, a broad range of case studies have shown the multi-faceted and variable outcomes of many different forms of neoliberalism’s intersection with nature. In Chapter Five, I contribute to this literature by reversing the scale of analyses, where I frame the question “why neoliberalism?” as one of locally specific contingencies by showing how a particular neoliberal project became a desirable, and possibly only option, in a specific place. In addition, I frame the question of “how does neoliberalism function?” by grounding my analysis of carbon offsets in understanding how the global imperatives of value condition the final trajectory of this project. By focusing on local particulars in understanding why a neoliberal policy came to be in a specific situation, and by examining how it unfolded with relation to more universal properties, I am adding to the literature on neoliberal natures by showing that the spread of free-market ideology is not necessarily one of the pure theory of Hayek and Friedman emanating from Chicago to all

19 four corners of the globe, only to be confounded and altered by the messy reality, and materiality, of nature and society. Instead, I show that the “spread” of neoliberalism can be seen the opposite way too, where local situations frame socio-natural problems in ways that call forth neoliberal solutions, solutions that have their universal properties that ultimately alter how these local situations become understood. In this dissertation I make a second broad contribution to the literature on neoliberalism by demonstrating how a neoliberal project, and the spaces and sites it engages with are grounded in a sedimented spatial history, where the places in which projects become located draw on an embedded territorial history that has emerged from past relations between the state, capital, and populations, where particular forms of territoriality have become established historically and inform the terrain upon which contemporary projects unfold today. In Chapter Four I analyze this history, where I show how particular conceptions of the indigenous body – where it is posited as being part of the Costa Rican nation, yet outside of it – has led to forms of territorial enclosure that inform the indigenous reserves where the carbon projects under study today occur. Few investigations into neoliberal projects have situated the geography of these projects within an embedded discursive-historical framework that shows how a project comes to be geographically framed in a particular way. Chapter Four contributes to the literature in this way. Finally, I contribute to the literature on globalization and space through an analysis of the ontological grounding of the practices of calculations, and the comportment towards the world it produces. A number of geographic writers on globalization, such as Ash Amin (2002), have argued that globalization represents a new era, where notions of absolute space and scale should be replaced with geographic imaginaries of flows, folds, and topographic relations. In short, absolute spaces have been replaced by globalization’s relational spaces. Other writers have pushed back on this idea, and have shown that absolute spaces and territories still have salience in today’s globalized world (Agnew 1999; Harvey 2000), both through their effects as social constructs (Agnew 1999; Allen 2004; MacLeod and Jones 2007), and their actual

20 existence (Brenner 1998; Jessop 2000). I argue that a globalized process like carbon offsets are grounded in an ontological orientation that is simultaneously productive of absolute and relational spaces as well as the bounded territory of the nation-state. In short, my theoretical inquiry into the calculatory “grasping” of carbon offsets that I explore in Chapter Two shows that, rather than eliding Cartesian notions of space in place of topographic, relational spaces, the calculatory logic of carbon offsets is functional to a co-constitution of both relational and absolute spaces and territories. I contribute to debates on space and globalization by showing that both relational and absolute spaces (along with the bounded territory of the nation-state) are not opposed to each other, but rather, are both grounded in a metaphysical orientation toward the world that has been with us since the Enlightenment (see also Elden 2005b).

1.5 Summary and Plan of the Dissertation If this reads like an awkwardly woven theoretical tapestry – ANT inspired performativity theory, Marxian value theory, Foucauldian discourse analysis – that is because the form of this dissertation has precluded a stronger suturing. This dissertation is presented here as a loosely related collection of self-contained articles rather than as a singular set of tightly knit arguments. What I offer in this introduction is the general terrain upon which the following chapters unfold, and the ways in which they are tied together around a critical analysis of calculation in the context of producing carbon offset commodities. Each of these chapters contain their own specific theses concerning the practices of calculating offsets and their relation to space, territory, and the materiality of carbon. Throughout this dissertation, calculation can be understood as a performative practice, carried out by assemblages of heterogeneous actors for the purpose of creating a commodity. As a whole, this dissertation can be read as an investigation into the discursive and ontological grounds upon which such performances occur, and the effects that they have. In the chapters that follow, I make the following arguments:

21 • Chapter Two: I argue that carbon calculations are grounded in an instrumental orientation toward the world. This is an ontological orientation that can be understood, in a Heideggerian sense, as grounded in a technological metaphysics. This ontological grounding of calculation reveals “the world” as a singular, orderable, calculable space, and the objects therein as calculable, and orderable, entities. Here, the commodification process can be understood as more than the non-human (and the human) becoming understood in economically reductive terms (McAfee 2003). Instead, this ontological grounding is also a phenomenological concealment, where the world and all that it contains is understood in terms of stocks of carbon, waiting to be ordered. This “concealment” has implications for the production of space and territory. The process of producing a carbon offset is simultaneously one that occurs on a local-molecular scale (the isolating of a tree’s carbon content for example) and the global scale, where a tree’s carbon content is understood in relation to a worldwide carbon cycle. This simultaneous relation towards the local and the global results in the production of particular forms of space and territory. Here, a carbon offset’s production results from practices that are simultaneously productive of localized Cartesian spaces alongside relational, topographic spaces where the specific spaces of a forest become quantitatively related to the undifferentiated space of “the global”. I demonstrate empirically that the Costa Rican state’s involvement in this process has contradictory effects for its own territoriality – where its territory as a political space of carbon storage is simultaneously reinforced and undermined. • Chapter Three: I argue that the materiality of a carbon forestry offset does not pre- exist the economic practices with which it is articulated, but rather, is co-produced with the economic frames within which it circulates. This happens through repeated, iterative performances where the space of the forest is measured and demarcated. These calculatory performances are done self-reflexively by heterogeneous assemblages of actors, where during such performances, the

22 commodity-object – “the forest-as-carbon-sink” – oscillates between the abstract and the material; and it is through such reflexive, performative oscillations that both the carbon commodity, and the field of economic exchange through which it circulates, are mutually emergent. • Chapter Four: I consider the history of the territories in which the specific carbon offset projects under study occur. The practices of calculation and measurement associated with carbon offsets occur in site-specific, historically contingent contexts. In other words, the there where carbon is located, has a history. Specifically, these calculatory practices are reflective of wider, historically embedded processes of territorialization. In the case of carbon offset projects studied in this dissertation, they are explicitly located within the Bribri and Cabécar Indigenous Reserves. These reserves, which serve as the juridical- political space for these offsets, have their own discursive and material history, where indigenous bodies were displaced, and then ultimately settled. In this chapter, I review this history and argue that 19th century discourse about the indigenous body, and its relation to space, was part of a broader process of state territorialization, which was productive of the material process of primitive accumulation, and ultimately, the carving out of separate, specific spaces for indigenous bodies. • Chapter Five: I examine one specific additionality calculation and ask how such a calculation came to be applied to the context of agriculture in the Talamanca region, why these calculations were carried out, and what spaces it allows to open up as sites of carbon storage. I consider the relation between discourse and value in the production of a carbon offset, where this calculation can be understood as a discursive statement of value. I argue that additionality calculations are necessary for an offset to acquire a use value, where these calculations function in order to make particular spaces useful as spaces of carbon storage. Such calculations, however, are also grounded in particular discursive formations that allow them to be intelligible. This discursive formation is emergent, in part, from a local history

23 of agricultural development projects in the region, where particular ways of speaking and thinking about the relationship between indigenous bodies and agriculture have emerged in the last thirty years. This local discursive context allowed for such calculations to emerge as intelligible statements, where their function in creating a use value for the spaces of carbon ultimately opened up particular spaces for receiving carbon while foreclosing on others.

1.6 Multiple Selves, Multiple Sites: Methods and Study Site These arguments are grounded in empirical research that I largely conducted during an 18 month period in Costa Rica, from March 2007 to August 2008 (in addition to a three week period of pre-dissertation work in August 2006). During my time in Costa Rica I was affiliated with EARTH University, an undergraduate agricultural school where I had conducted separate research in 2005 (see Lansing et al. 2008). I lived on the EARTH campus for one year, where I was provided office space. For the last six months I lived closer to the Cabécar Indigenous Reserve, in the coastal town of Puerto Viejo. During my time in the field I employed a multi-method strategy using interviews, participant observation, a household survey, and archival work.

1.6.1 Semi-Structured Interviews and Participant Observation I conducted 42 semi-structured, in-person, interviews with state bureaucrats, carbon offset project managers, scientific advisors, member and heads of environmental NGOs, environmental activists, indigenous leaders, and indigenous workers who were employed in the process of producing carbon offsets (please see Appendix A for a list). In short, I tried to interview everyone I could that was involved in producing carbon offsets in Costa Rica, especially those involved in implementing offsets in Bribri and Cabécar indigenous reserves. Interviews were generally held in people’s offices. I would usually make an appointment by phone a week or more in advance, and then drive to the office of person I was interviewing. My questions depended on the person I was interviewing. In general, they involved a mix of specific questions concerning the specific projects my

24 subjects were working on, and topics concerning the trajectory of carbon offset development in Costa Rica more generally. Broadly following a “grounded theory” approach (Glaser and Strauss 1977), my interviews were generally guided by previous ones, where I would usually inquire into a problem or an issue that would arise in earlier interviews. In addition, I had some questions that I always tried to ask everyone, mostly concerning their personal views on carbon offsets, and their effectiveness for achieving their stated goals of climate change mitigation and sustainable development. In addition, I engaged in participant observation by accompanying a number of NGOs in verifying carbon offset projects throughout Costa Rica (the trip I detail in Chapter 3 is one of a number of different trips I participated in throughout the country). I also attended two different week-long workshops on how to design and implement a CDM offset from the ground up. These workshops were put on by the Tropical Agricultural and Research Center (Spanish acronym: CATIE), at their headquarters in Turrialba and were attended by professionals – people who worked for small business, trans-national mining corporations, small NGOs, and government – from throughout Latin America. CATIE was the same organization that carried out one of the carbon offset projects I studied in Talamanca. Workshop activities included learning how to cut, weigh, and measure trees in order to determine their carbon content, and how to use GIS, statistical, and other software in relation to implementing an offset project. Most importantly, these workshops provided a step-by-step guide through the maze of bureaucratic and reporting requirements of the UNFCCC needed to get a CDM forestry offset approved. We worked on practice projects, listened to numerous power point presentations, and were given computer programs, binders and books full of information, and a CD-ROM with the presentations we listened to, as well as numerous other guides and papers concerning the CDM. Despite my participation in these workshops (or perhaps because of it), I was often overwhelmed by the dizzying number of procedures and regulations that are required for a CDM offset as well as information about the rapidly proliferating, and highly variable, number of non-CDM “voluntary” offset programs worldwide. I was not

25 alone in these feelings. I had numerous conversations with workshop participants who only had a vague idea of how they were going to use this information upon their return to their home countries. It was not uncommon to hear participants express frustration over lunch and drinks that their time learning about the CDM procedures were a waste of their time. Many people were there to start small, community based forestry projects, and the complex technicalities of CDM projects, and the relatively low prices for carbon, meant that receiving CDM credits for such projects was unviable for them. At the end of these workshops we were presented with certificates that documented all of the hours we spent learning about the CDM. Then, we had a barbecue, complete with dancing and karaoke. These documents were supposed to indicate we had a minimal level of expertise about creating offsets, however, I hardly felt like an expert myself. Nevertheless, during my time at EARTH University, I gradually became interpellated as just such an expert (without anyone even seeing those certificates). Once, one of the American trustees of the University was staying in the house next to me. I told him what I was doing at EARTH, and he immediately began to ask me questions about how the University could “add value” to its forests by turning them into offsets. Another time, early in my stay, one of the professors at EARTH explained to me his theory of how offsets are a way for the United States to subsidize its forestry companies, and then wanted to know if we could co-author a paper on this and submit it to Nature. In addition, I was invited to give talks on the subject for classes (which I happily did). And toward the end of my stay a retired American banker, working for an Episcopal church, was visiting the campus where he offered to hire me as a consultant for a bamboo project they were carrying out in Haiti (an offer that I declined). I describe these incidents here in order to give a sense of how quickly and easily I moved from offset neophyte in one context to an “expert” in another, merely by my affiliation with an American University and a dissertation topic that deals with offsets. My actual interview subjects, however, were not so easily impressed. Interviews with NGO leaders and government workers often resulted in what sounded like routine, and ultimately for my purposes, uninformative answers. After a few of these interviews I

26 went to the University of Costa Rica’s library and read a number of past Master’s theses on the topics of forestry and offsets. Reading through these theses I discovered that many of my interview subjects had been interviewed by students on similar topics many different times. To these people I imagine I appeared as just one more student (which was true), only one who could not speak and understand Spanish nearly as well as the others. Similarly, my initial interviews at CATIE had the same feel, as if I was an uninformed student asking basic and obvious questions. It was at this point that I attended the first of the above-mentioned workshops. This allowed me to approach my interviews armed with more specific and technical information about the carbon offset projects being implemented in Costa Rica. Subsequent interviews with officials, project managers, and technical advisers were more productive, however, this time a different sort of problem arose. On a number of occasions, I found that the people developing these projects were applying the CDM-required calculations incorrectly. The following is an excerpt from one of my conversations with a project developer. Here, I ask how he arrived at a particular baseline figure. I was curious because their justification is never spelled out in the project documents.5

DL: You wrote that in order to build the baseline, you said that the conversion of (one crop) to (a different crop) was going to continue at X% per year. But I don’t understand how you arrived at this number, X%?

SC: This is a good question. There are no references for this.

DL: What?

SC: There are no references about this (figure). What you have to do then is…perhaps…the judgment of some experts that have seen how this land use change has evolved, but right now there are no studies that indicate with scientific certainty what the real change is. There is a study by a Master’s student from (another country) she used some (numbers), but they are not really quantified, it was more like in relative terms, and not absolute (numbers) then.

5 Some details from the conversation have been omitted in an effort to protect the identity of the interviewee. Original conversation was in Spanish (my translation).

DL: OK

SC: She says the tendencies, how land-use changes, but not in quantifiable terms…Then precisely when we were looking for this number, we didn’t have it, which means that we didn’t have a solid base to justify them because, simply, it was something more like a consensus of experts that know the area.

DL: I understand that at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter though, because if you sell the credit eventually you are going to have to do an ex post analysis, and you can adjust it (the baseline), right?

SC: The thing was, that we were being conservative, not only in that land- use change, but also in the projected accumulation of carbon in the system that we were going to change, precisely therefore, we were taking precautions against having to do a later adjustment (Interview, December 2007).

This was a somewhat uncomfortable exchange (at least for me) because it became apparent that this particular project did not apply the UNFCCC approved guidelines for calculating the project’s baseline, but instead, they just made up the numbers. As someone researching this process, I was not happy to hear this. My interest was not to somehow expose the mistakes that were committed in instituting carbon offsets, but rather, to analyze these projects when they are executed correctly. Instead of pushing my interview subject on this issue, I tried to give him an out by suggesting that their lack of numbers could be made up for later, through an ex post analysis. My interlocutor did not take this opportunity though, and instead insisted that their estimations were conservative – even while earlier admitting that no real data on this issue exist – and such ex post adjustments would not be necessary. Such exchanges were not uncommon during my interviews, and made for uncomfortable interview moments. I relate these experiences here to highlight how the notion of expertise is often unclear. Many of my research subjects were considered experts, but the divide between them and myself – the researched and researcher – was often porous. Carbon offset projects are highly dependent upon a certain level of expertise to design, implement, and carry out. Yet as my fieldwork experiences show, its not always clear what constitutes

28 this expertise. Many of my interlocutors held PhDs in soil science, agronomy, or economics, but with a few exceptions, no one seemed to be a real expert in “carbon offsets” specifically. Nevertheless, these very people were the principal consultants and technical advisors that oversaw the formation of offset projects across the country. At a time when I only had a vague idea how offset projects work, I was asked to consult on an offset forestry project in Haiti. Later, when I was interviewing the top technical advisors in the country on these projects, my questions were inadvertently exposing basic flaws in their work. A number of scholars have written on the problematic distinctions related to expertise (Forsyth 2003; Jasanoff 1990; Mitchell 2002), and the issues that arise when a researcher engages with a community of “experts” (Herod 1999; Mauer 2005; Oinas 1999). My intention here is not necessarily to contribute to this literature, but rather, to flag these issues as a way of noting the multiple positions in which I found myself. At times, I was just another student; other times, I was an “expert” on carbon offsets, and in other moments I was a particularly pesky student who asked uncomfortable questions. While my interactions with the community of experts on carbon in Costa Rica often placed me in an ambiguous position with regard to my own professional identity, my research in the Talamanca region was much less ambiguous. To the high level leadership in the indigenous reserves I was one of a long line of “foreign” researchers who frequently come through the area. This was mostly due to CATIE’s history of conducting research in this region. Residents of this area have seen numerous students working on their dissertation, usually in the natural sciences, conducting field experiments, and asking lots of questions of residents. This history posed potential problems for me. Just as I was about to begin conducting fieldwork in the Cabécar Indigenous Reserve, the residents of this reserve had apparently had enough of this, and banned CATIE from conducting further research.6 A number of dissertation students who had begun their work in this area were forced to restrict their work to the adjacent Bribri

6 I want to stress that, as far as I can tell, there was no controversial incident, or anything malicious that CATIE did to provoke this reaction. I have had a number of conversations with both members of CATIE and the indigenous leadership that instituted this (probably temporary) ban. As far as I can tell, the residents basically were tired of CATIE’s projects. They often 29 Reserve (which instituted no such ban). This development obviously posed a potential problem for me since I had made the decision to restrict my work to the Cabécar Reserve only. In order to receive permission, I needed to write a short proposal that needed to be approved by the Cabécar Development Council (ADITICA). In this proposal I laid out what I was planning on doing and how such knowledge would benefit people in the reserve. I had begun my research on the heels of CATIE’s carbon project, a project that ultimately never resulted in a functioning carbon credit. After talking with the leadership and a number of other residents, it was clear that I would be unlikely to get permission to conduct research that was framed solely in terms of carbon offsets. Both the leadership and residents alike had grown tired of this project that never materialized. Instead, I had to reframe my project so that it could be deemed “useful”. In keeping with my dissertation proposal, and in order to produce information that the indigenous leadership would find appropriate, my proposal to the Cabécar Development Council revolved around conducting a socio-economic household survey. In my proposal I emphasized that this survey could be used to measure the socio-economic impacts of a major land redistribution in the area. Fortunately, collecting this data dovetailed with my interest in carbon offsets since part of the land that was redistributed was set aside as a carbon offset, with the money going to individual farmers (I discuss this offset more in Chapter 3). Perhaps because I was able to distance myself from CATIE, or perhaps because the Cabécar leadership found such a project to be worthwhile, I was approved to conduct my research within the reserve without complications.7

required the cooperation of residents, but were perceived to offer little in the way of concrete benefits. 7 On the last day of my fieldwork in the Cabécar reserve, after I held a community meeting where I explained my initial results, one of the members of the Development Council told me that the leadership was interested in my survey because they were keen to get some “hard data” on the results of this land re-distribution because they themselves had to compile a report about this for a regional indigenous meeting that they were going to attend. 30 1.6.2 Household Survey Conducting a household survey, then, was a major component of my fieldwork. I hired a full-time research assistant, a Colombian woman who recently received her Master’s from CATIE for work she had done in Talamanca, and several other local part- time assistants to help me with the design and execution of the survey. Over a period of one month we field-tested questions, and over a period of four months we conducted a household survey where we interviewed 98 households, with separate surveys for the male and female head of household. We asked questions about household demographics, land-use history, land acquisition history, sources of income, and uses of the redistributed land. We also made sure to survey all of the participants who received carbon payments for not farming this land. The survey work was time-consuming and difficult. Most of the households lived far apart from each other over rough, hilly terrain with no roads, electricity or running water. My research assistant and I divided our labor by gender, she interviewed women while I interviewed men. This was because some women (though not all) respondents were reluctant to speak with a “foreign” man. My research assistant, a 42 year old woman from Colombia, was no less foreign than I, however, she had been working in this area for some time, and was well-known in the villages we surveyed. Survey information was recorded on mimeographed sheets of paper, which were then entered verbatim into an excel spreadsheet. These answers were then coded into SPSS, a statistical software package. This dissertation contains no data from this survey. In my grant proposals, this household survey was framed as a way of evaluating the impacts, or the potential impacts, of carbon offsets. I believe that presenting a statistics-based analysis of how carbon offsets might impact indigenous communities can be valuable for the following reasons. First, it allows me to tell a story that is understandable by those who need to hear it most – development professionals and government employees that implement projects like this. Second, by using tools widely understood across social and natural sciences, I would be able to effectively make the case that participation in offset markets (potentially) exacerbates inequality (which results from my data appear to

31 demonstrate; see also Tschkert et al. 2007). I make these points here because I intend to eventually publish my preliminary results of these statistics, both as academic publications and “white papers” to be disseminated in Costa Rica. This analysis, however, is not in this dissertation. My analysis of the role that calculation plays in creation of carbon offsets is predicated on an understanding that calculations do not unproblematically describe a pre-existing external world, but instead, are productive of a conceptualization of the world that conceals as much as it reveals. To put it baldly, calculations do not so much describe reality, but in many ways, produce their own reality. Similarly, I treat these calculations as discursive statements in chapter five where I evaluate statements not in terms of their claims to truth, but rather, the truth- effects that they have. While I elaborate on these ideas later in the dissertation (see especially Chapters Two and Four) I will say here that such a view of calculation that underpins my arguments here is implicitly grounded in a theory of truth that denies that the “truth” of a calculation is solely a function of a statement’s correspondence with reality. To examine the contingencies involved in calculating carbon, and the problematic effects that such practices have, and then to provide statistical results from a survey in order to show how these offsets “really work” would be a contradictory move to say the least. In other words, in this dissertation I theorize the effects that calculations within the power-laden context in which they are formed – in short, I discuss the problematic of how “what is” comes to be conceived within the context of commodification. Including the results from a household survey that unproblematically assumes that my statistically representations show how it “really is” stands in a deep tension with this approach. I attempt to avoid this tension by omitting the “results” from this part of my research, however, I recognize that I cannot elide this tension entirely because I plan to one day publish the results from this survey. In other words, through my completion of this dissertation, I will become closer to an “expert” on carbon offsets than I was during fieldwork. By eventually publishing an article that makes use of statistical summaries of “indigenous livelihoods” I am employing the same forms of representation and claims to authority that the subjects of my analysis in this dissertation do. In addition, I will occupy

32 a position in a research university in the United State while publishing data from this dissertation and the survey. Such a position will confer a status of legitimacy that similar knowledge gained and produced inside Costa Rica (i.e. knowledge held by my fieldwork interlocutors) might otherwise not have. This is the great irony of critical geographic research. My desire to challenge the often-times unjust practices of a social process, and to allow for other voices and views be heard, involves a process of research that replicates the very same process of knowledge production that my research tries to destabilize (see Spivak 1988). I do not claim to have a neat and clear way out of this irony, only to recognize its presence.

1.6.3 Archival Work I engaged in archival work as well. The majority of archival sources were found at the Archivos Nacionales de Costa Rica (Costa Rican National Archives) in San José. The archives themselves were well-organized, and well run, with all of the materials digitally catalogued. Finding pertinent documents, however, was still a challenge, and I soon came to appreciate the difficulties of archival work, even when the actual archival site is clean and professionally run. The way in which the archives were digitally organized was confusing to me at times, and searching for keywords on the database did not always return the results I anticipated. For example, I found the original report that the American geologist William Gabb wrote for the Costa Rican government entirely by chance. Previously, I had done a number of keyword searches involving his name, however, this did not lead me to this report. It was only when I started “browsing” (on the computer) the various sections that seemed to have a lot of material on Talamanca (for example, the cajas pertaining to the border with Panama contained a wealth of information that was not available through keyword searches, including the report written by Gabb). In short, even though the archives were clean, catalogued, and well organized electronically, many of the materials I found were the result of laborious digital hunting, a process that was not much different than if I had encountered stacks of

33 documents with no discernable organization. The result is that there are inevitably documents, letter, and maps that I was not able to “find” in the archives that could help inform this dissertation.

1.7 Flows of Information, or Where is my Study Site Again? In Chapter Two of this dissertation I consider efforts by the Costa Rican state to develop carbon offsets as a country-wide development/conservation strategy. The other chapters, however, are centered around an analysis of two specific projects that occurred in the Bribri and Cabécar indigenous reserves in what is commonly referred to as the Talamanca region of Costa Rica. One was an unsuccessful CDM forestry offset (see Chapters 4 and 5) while another was a functioning “voluntary” offset that occurs in the Cabécar Indigenous Reserve (the offset that I describe at the beginning of this chapter). While in many ways the Talamanca area could be considered my specific field “site,” the empirical data presented in this dissertation indicate otherwise. In this section, I wish to dwell for a moment on the actual physical locations I visited to in order to gather the information presented in this dissertation (Figure 1.2). Chapter Two is a theoretically informed, empirical analysis of the Costa Rican state’s efforts to develop a Clean Development Mechanism methodology. Data gathered for this chapter came from interviews with officials at the National Financing Forestry Fund (Spanish acronym: FONAFIFO) in San José and with various consulting scientists, with interviews conducted in San José, Turrialba, Cartago, and EARTH University. Data also come from an analysis of various documents, such as the proposed methodology as well as the multiple decisions by the UNFCCC. All of these documents were available at the UNFCCC’s website (www.unfccc.int), which I downloaded from my office at EARTH University. Chapter Three is an ethnographic reflection based primarily on a three-day experience in the Cabécar Indigenous Reserve, where I participated in a carbon offset verification trip. My observations are further informed by interviews carried out among indigenous leaders in the Cabécar Indigenous Reserve as well as participating employees at FONAFIFO, where I interviewed them in their offices in San José. Chapter

34 Four takes the site of Talamanca itself as a focus of historical inquiry. Data for this chapter is archival, with almost all of my sources coming from the Archivos Nacionales (National Archives), the libraries at the Museo Nacional (National Museum) and the Universidad de Costa Rica (University of Costa Rica), three archival sources that are all located in San José. In addition, a key source of information for this chapter, an address to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia that was given by William Gabb, was available through Ohio State University’s online journals catalogue. Again, I downloaded this document from my office at EARTH. Finally, Chapter Five considers additionality calculations that were carried out for a CDM offset project in the Talamanca Indigenous Reserves, as well as from a number of previous development projects conducted in this area. For this chapter I conducted interviews with project scientists and managers from CATIE who were involved in these projects. These interviews were conducted in their offices in Turrialba. In addition, I rely heavily on documents from this project, as well as previous development efforts. These documents were acquired from the Museo National, CATIE’s library, and the world wide web.

Figure 1.2: Primary sites of data collection.

36 While this dissertation is concerned with the production of carbon offsets in indigenous communities of Talamanca, the documents and people who were chiefly responsible for these projects were, and are, located at sites that exist mainly outside of these communities. This is pattern that has a long history, grounded in colonialism, where knowledge about peoples and resources – the subjects and objects of empire - is gathered, produced, mobilized, and ultimately stored elsewhere, in what Latour (1987) refers to as “centers of calculation” (Braun 2000; Miller and Reil 1996). This is a theme that has received a great deal of attention from scholars of colonialism and the post-colonial condition (e.g. Cohen 1996; Richards 1993; Said 1979). This production and movement of information is a process that is integral to the production of carbon offsets. This point is highlighted in Chapter Three, where the maintenance of one particular offset revolves around a written report that must find its way back to investors in Italy. Similarly, for a CDM offset to come into being, methodologies for calculating carbon and the calculations themselves must eventually end up in the hands of UNFCCC-approved experts so such information can be evaluated, approved, and stored. As both Chapters Two and Three demonstrate, without such flows of information, a carbon offset can never materialize. The generation and transposition of knowledge for producing carbon offsets is a process that has been, and still is, productive of the territoriality of the Talamanca Indigenous Reserve itself – my ostensible study site. I explore the historical grounds of this process in Chapter Four, where I show how the writings of an American geologist and a Swiss geographer in the 19th century were productive of the eventual territorialization of the Talamanca region as a space a primitive accumulation, and eventually a circumscribed space for indigenous bodies. I also explore this dynamic in Chapter Three, where I provide an ethnographic reflection of the maintenance of carbon territories within the reserve itself, and how the reiteration of these territories are emergent from the socialized practices of calculation among a diverse group of actors.

37 Finally, Chapter Two considers this dynamic in relation to the territory of the Costa Rican state as a whole, where through the calculatory processes of commodifying carbon, the territory of the state emerges as simultaneously strengthened and undermined. Thus, while on one register, my site of investigation can be regarded as the Talamanca region of Costa Rica, it is the very existence of “Talamanca” as a graspable space that is closer to this dissertation’s problematic. Here, the practices of calculation and measure that are needed to bring a carbon forestry offset into being are productive of particular spaces and territories. How these spaces are produced through practices of calculation and measure, and the discursive, ontological, material, and historical grounds of these practices is the object of study in this dissertation.

38 Chapter 2: Carbon’s Calculatory Spaces: The Emergence of Carbon Credits in Costa Rica

2.1 Introduction Carbon forestry offsets are a mechanism by which a person, nation, or corporation can mitigate the climactic effects of their greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing a credit that helps to fund a forestry project that sequesters an equivalent amount of carbon in the biomass of trees and soils. When forestry offsets were included as a provision in the Kyoto Protocol as part of a broader Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), these provisions were denounced by a number of conservation organizations and indigenous groups as being incompatible with ecological and cultural diversity (Fogel 2004; SIIFCC 2000). Since this time, activists have documented a number of perverse outcomes of carbon forestry offsets (Sinks Watch, 2004; The Corner House 2009). These writings have expressed concern over the often arbitrary standards of measurement and calculation that accompany the development of CDM projects (Lohmann, 2005) and the epistemic ‘global gaze’ (Litfin, 1997) on which such projects are predicated (Fogel, 2004). These factors threaten to erase the diversity and complexity of landscapes and cultures in favor of a homogenized conception of forests as standardized stocks of carbon and re-making parts of the earth physically in the form of fast-growing, monoculture tree plantations (Lohmann 2006; Ma’anit 2006; Stave 2000). Many of these criticisms of carbon offsets can be traced to the practices of calculation and abstraction that are needed for commodifying nature more generally. This is a theme that has received increasing attention by a number of social scientists in recent years as increasing parts of the world’s “free” resources – such as air, water, or biodiversity – are becoming incorporated into circuits of capital, with results that often erase or re-make the complex biological, cultural, and social fabric in which these objects are embedded (Bakker 2004; Bumpus and Liverman 2008; Hayden 2003; Robertson 2006; McAfee 2003). In the case of carbon forestry offsets, the necessary 39 disentangling of carbon from its surroundings also requires such practices. This includes measuring and weighing the existing biomass in potential areas of carbon sequestration, along with a number of abstract calculations that are required to estimate the additional carbon that will be fixed in these spaces over time (Andersson and Richards 2001; Pearson et al. 2006). These practices are needed to create abstract values out of complex ecosystems so that a level of carbon-value can be “read” by capital; and they are part of a process that is both extraordinary and banal. The abstractions themselves are required to discursively separate the element on which virtually all life depends, carbon, from its surroundings so that an ordering of the global atmosphere can occur through the exchange of the commodified form of this abstraction.8 This somewhat grandiose project, where the worldwide atmospheric balance of greenhouse gases become linked, through exchange, to the levels of carbon on an individual farmer’s land, is ultimately accomplished by fairly quotidian practices of calculation and measure that are done, in large part, to answer the geographical question of precisely where carbon will be stored. How is it that these practices are able to accomplish such a dramatic potential re- ordering of the world? What effects do these practices of ordering, which encompass both “the global” as an orderable object along with a multitude of locally specific spaces for receiving carbon, have for our understanding of space? In this chapter I attempt to address these questions by examining the ontological conditions that allow for such a calculatory “grasping” of carbon to occur, and I examine empirically the effects that such a comportment toward the world has for the emergence of the spaces and natures that accompany carbon offsets. Drawing on the writings of Martin Heidegger, I show that these practices produce a particular ontological orientation toward the world where the objects of the world—its places, natures, and spaces—become disclosed to us as objects waiting to be ordered. I demonstrate empirically, through an example of the failure of the

8 While it is arguably the molecule carbon-dioxide and its equivalents (methane, cloroflorocarbons etc) that are being commodified, and it are certainly these gases that come under regulation in the Kyoto Protocol, I reference the more basic element carbon here because the creation of a sequestration offset requires the measurement of the element carbon in the biomass of trees and soils. This figure is then converted to a carbon-dioxide equivalent for the purposes of establishing an offset credit ( Penman 2003). 40 Costa Rican state to establish CDM forestry offsets, how this orientation, and its constitutive calculatory practices, result in the production of particular spaces, natures, and territories that allow for carbon to be remade as a commodity. The chapter proceeds as follows. The next section briefly situates this chapter’s analysis of carbon offsets within recent writings on calculation, nature, and space, where I posit carbon offset credits as productive of both relational and absolute spaces. The subsequent section provides a sketch of how Heidegger’s writings on calculation and technology can help us understand the development of carbon forestry offsets as a mode of being in the world. I then offer evidence from an example of the calculatory requirements for creating CDM offsets in Costa Rica, where a CDM reforestation methodology is currently being developed by the Costa Rican state, which has, to date, failed to emerge because of the state’s inability to calculate its own carbon-relation with the world. This is followed by two sections where I discuss how this example can be understood in relation to Heidegger’s concepts of “enframing” and “the gigantic,” where I argue that the calculations needed to bring a carbon offset credit into being as a commodity result in the co-constitution of relational space, absolute Cartesian spaces, and the bounded territory of the nation-state. Empirical details in this chapter are culled from my interviews with state bureaucrats, scientists, and other project participants as well as technical and planning documents from these efforts.

2.2 Space, Nature, and Calculation While there exists a voluminous literature, both inside and out of the Marxian tradition, that examines the role of calculation and measurement in producing the abstractions needed for commodities to be traded (Brush, 1999; Castree, 1995; Castree, 2003; Cronon, 1991; Frow, 1996; Harvey, 1996; Marx, 1976; O’Connor, 1994), post- structural accounts of nature remind us that these abstractions are not based on a pre- given division between the materiality of the thing and its representations (Demeritt, 2001; Fitzsimmons, 1989; Haraway, 1997). Instead, the work of abstraction is grounded in a particular a way of framing the world, where the objects in the world—hybrids

41 (Whatmore, 2002), quasi-objects (Latour, 1993), cyborgs (Haraway, 2004), and socio- natures (Swyngedouw, 1999)—are temporarily constituted manifestations of the enmeshment of material, cultural, textual, and technological processes that take on material effects through their representations, where the representations themselves are a social achievement of ordering (Braun and Castree, 1998; Haraway, 1997; Latour, 1987). Closely related to these writings on the social construction of nature are empirical and theoretical projects that seek to de-center the easy division of the abstract and material, are relational approaches to space (Amin, 2002; Massey, 2005; Thrift, 1996). These writers have sought to challenge the view of space as a “container” of social, political, and economic action, as well as disrupt our notion of fixed, spatial scales and territories as pre-given ontological entities (Harvey, 2000; Law, 2002; Massey, 2005; Paasi, 2002). This is an understanding where space “…is no longer seen as a nested hierarchy moving from ‘global’ to ‘local’” (Thrift, 2004, pg. 59). Instead, space and its objects are mutually constituted in their own stabilized moments of becoming, where objects and space can only be understood in relation to each other (Massey, 2005; Mol and Law, 1994; Marston, 2000). In these writings, space as a bounded object is replaced by geographic imaginaries of flows (Castells, 1996), folds (Doel, 1999), and networks (Amin, 2002; Thrift, 1996; Whatmore, 2002). Under this purview, the practices of calculating space that result in a Cartesian understanding of fixed, bounded space ultimately work to obscure the relations and flows between objects and things, where space is not a bounded, static object, with a place being a thing or point within it. Instead, space and place are better understood as mutually constituted, fluid and performed (Callon and Law, 2004). As the world becomes more inter-connected, some writers such as Ash Amin, have argued that these flows and networks are re-constituting spaces so radically that: “the very ontology of place and territoriality itself is becoming altered by the rise of world-scale processes and transnational connectivity” (Amin, 2002, pg. 385); further “processes associated with globalization mark a new ontology of place/space relations that need to be theorized” (Amin 2002, pg. 387).

42 While some have cast the notion of pre-fixed spaces, territories, and scales as anachronistic and being radically transformed through processes of globalization, a number of other writers offer a more tempered view of the spaces of globalization in which a bounded understanding of space still has analytic and material purchase. For them, globalization is understood as a process of a re-configuring and nesting of local, national, and transnational scales (Jessop 2000), where the expansion of global capital occurs on a terrain where historicized territorial relationships clash with trans-territorial developments (Agnew 1999). This results in processes of globalization where capital is still dependent on fixed territories and spaces, even while working to annihilate differences between space and time (Brenner 1998; Harvey 2000; Harvey 1989). Globalization then, is not so much a process of de-territorialization, or an altering of an ontology of territoriality, but one that results in, as Neil Brenner puts it: “…new configurations of territoriality on both sub- and supra-national geographical scales” (Brenner 1999, page 41). Leaving debates about the ontology of space and territory aside, a number of other writers have added to the literature on relational space by pointing out that, despite the many advantages of understanding the world in terms of relational space, there continue to be a persistent salience to the idea of space as an object of enclosure, where the territorial imaginary of space still holds sway, shaping our politics (Agnew 1999; Schlottman 2008; MacLeod and Jones 2007) and economic relations (Allen 2004; Yeung 2005). In short, the absolute spaces that relational theorists have worked to rhetorically undermine still have effects in the world, and ultimately condition the manner in which relational spaces unfold (Jones 2009). As John Agnew (1999) puts it: “There are objects to which humans react but they also have ideas about those objects to which they also react. Human behavior, therefore, cannot be reduced to one or the other but is constituted by both” (pages 92-93). In this chapter, I offer an empirical investigation into how the development of carbon credits is not an either/or proposition of the unfolding of relational spaces or the re-configuring of absolute spatial and scalar containers. Instead, I argue that the

43 emergence of carbon credits is a process where relational space, Cartesian “containers,” and the bounded territory of the nation-state are co-constituted through the practices of calculation needed to bring carbon credits into being as a commodity. Central to my argument is the idea that practices of calculation are productive of a technological metaphysics, where the world becomes disclosed to us as an object of orderability. This is an orientation toward the world that allows for the objects and subjects of this world (i.e. carbon-as-commodity and carbon consumers and producers) to become relationally embedded in the world through the production of bounded Cartesian space. Under this purview, relational space and absolute spaces and territories are not in opposition nor do they act to undermine each other, but instead, are productive of the same ontological orientation toward the world, and are thus co-constitutive of each other. I develop this argument by interpreting the practices of calculation required for the production of carbon credits through an explicitly Heideggerian reading of calculation, technology, and being.

2.3 Heidegger, Calculation, and the Metaphysics of Technology Recently, Mikko Joronen (2008) argued that the current age of globalization can be understood as a result of our conception of planetary space, where the modern technological metaphysics of being allows the world-itself to become disclosed to us as a single orderable object. In other words, the era of globalization in which we live rests on a particular ontological orientation where the world becomes disclosed to us in a way that allows “the global” to be understood as an object of calculable planetary space. This line of thinking builds on arguments made by Stuart Elden (2005b), who posits that by investigating how “what is” comes to be, we can see how our modern understanding of territory is emergent from a political way of grasping calculatory space. In this chapter, I would like to extend these arguments by positing that our modern ontological casting of space is also productive of Cartesian, bounded spaces which are simultaneously co- constituted by the networks, flows, and folds between actors that constitute the relational spaces of this world, ultimately allowing for the production of carbon commodities. In

44 other words, both the relational and absolute spaces of carbon are co-produced effects of a particular ontological orientation toward the world. I contend that Heidegger’s writings on calculation, technology, and the question of being have much to offer concerning how this process unfolds. While his work on these topics is rich and complex, in this section I focus on the components of Heidegger’s thought on calculation and technology that will help us understand how the spaces of carbon offset credits come to be. For Heidegger, our modern understanding of calculation reflects a Western metaphysics that is concerned with beings—the subjects and objects of this world—but not with the subject of being (e.g. Heidegger 1996; Heidegger 1973). For Heidegger, the world is not something that stands opposed to us, but rather, the world is that which is constitutive of our own being. This is a phenomenological understanding of being where the space of the world is fundamentally woven with our existence, and a true ontological space cannot be abstracted from being itself. Instead, the world is a space that is constitutive of us. This understanding of our being in the world, however, has been replaced by a modern theoretical-scientific perspective, in which the world is no longer constitutive of our existence, but rather, stands against us as an object, a thing to be investigated and known (de Beistegui 2006; Elden 2005a; Heidegger 1996). For Heidegger, this perspective ultimately transforms our orientation and attitude towards the world, where the way in which the world becomes represented scientifically—as a collection of points on a Cartesian spatial grid and composed objects to be weighed and measured—comes to be identified with our own place in the world, as subjects that encounter the world as a collection of pre-formed objects. While Heidegger did not see this scientific view of the world as somehow “incorrect,” he did argue that this all-encompassing perspective concealed a richer reality and was ultimately unsatisfactory for knowing the true phenomenology of the world, where the abstract representations that have come to define calculation and measurement are productive of a rationality where the measurement of the world is not merely a way to think about the world, but is the way in which the world really is (de Beistegui 2005). In this separation of the world as objectively present from our being in it, calculation has

45 become a concealment of our true being-in-the-world, where the world and ourselves come to be seen solely in terms of quantifiable extension and placement (Elden 2006). Here objects become separated from subjects; a grounded notion of the earth as an environment – whose presence is constitutive of our own – becomes replaced by the notion of the world-as-object, something to be known only through measurement, calculation, and experiment (Elden 2003; Elden 2006; de Beistegui 2005; Heidegger 1996, pgs. 42-49; Heidegger 1977b). This rationality of calculation is closely related to another concealment of being, which is that of massiveness, or the gigantic (Heidegger 1999; Elden 2003; Elden 2005a; Joronen 2008). Here “gigantic” is not merely something big, but Heidegger’s way of expressing a fundamental metaphysical shift, where the calculable is understood as an inherent quality of something, where Descartes’ conception of the world-as-extension means that geometric measures of continual space is the space that constitutes the world. In other words, giganticism is the folding of calculation into being, where “what is” is what can be calculated, and the uncalculated is merely that which has not yet been calculated (Elden 2005, pg. 824; Heidegger 1999, pp. 88-96). This understanding of calculation – where calculation is constitutive of a metaphysical rationality of concealment – animates Heidegger’s questioning of technology, where he argues that the essence of modern technology is a manifestation of this ontological orientation, where the world is conceived as a grid of objects to be measured, ordered, manipulated, and stored. Rather than being a neutral instrument, Heidegger posits technology as a process of bringing into being, and producing an understanding of, the objects of this world in a way that ultimately produces a particular being-in-the-world for ourselves, one where the unfolding of the world as constitutive of our own being, is ultimately hidden. Heidegger argues that the essence of modern technology is constitutive of an instrumental orientation toward the world, where the world becomes disclosed to us as objects to be ordered and made available. It is a way of knowing the world in which the world is “set-upon” to be made available to us, and “challenged forth” as a stock of standing reserve, to be summoned at will:

The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such…Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example; uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy, which can be released either for destruction or for peaceful use (Heidegger 1977a, pp. 14-15).

Heidegger calls this setting-upon the world ge-stell, or “enframing.” The term enframing is not meant to connote the static idea of a “framework,” but rather, is meant as a verb, an unfolding metaphysical event where everything becomes objects that are subject to ordering and regulation for the purposes of being ready at hand, subject to further ordering. In other words, the essence of technology today is the culmination of a metaphysical orientation of being, where the world is seen as separate from us, and made available to us for ordering, regulation, and control. Heidegger also writes that enframing is productive of a conception of the world as a singular ball, or whole picture (Heidegger 1977b). This conception of the world-as- picture is not one in which the “real” world has somehow been concealed from us through a false representation, but rather, where the world has become conceived as a controllable, orderable object, an orientation in which both the objects and subjects of the world have become ensnared in a system of enframing, or system of ordering, in which all beings are “ready-at-hand” for use (Heidegger 1977b; Heidegger 1977c; Joronen 2008). In this case, objects and subjects do not necessarily stand opposed to each other, as in the world-as-ball as an object in opposition to humans, but rather the relational character between objects and subjects – the world and us – becomes forged through their incorporation into a global standing reserve, where both humanity and the objects of the world itself are made ready-at-hand within a worldwide system of calculable ordering (Heidegger 1977c; Joronen 2008, page 605). For Heidegger, the enframing that is the essence of technology means that our relation with the world is thoroughly transformed and has the effect of producing a new understanding of ourselves, where even humanity itself becomes subject to calculation and measure in terms of productivity, power,

47 resources and energy, resulting in a thorough transformation of our being-in-the-world as well. Here, even humanity itself becomes set-upon in this very way, where we become objects that are subject to ordering and manipulation. Long before sequestering carbon in trees was even a theoretical idea, Heidegger made a connection between the modern technological orientation toward the world, the demands it would place on forests, and those who do their ordering:

The forester who, in the wood, measures the felled timber and to all appearances walks the same forest path in the same way as did his grandfather is today…made subordinate to the orderability of cellulose, which for its part is challenged forth by the need for paper, which is then delivered to newspapers and illustrated magazines” (Heidegger 1977a, pp. 18).

While this passage shares a striking similarity to James Scott’s (1998) example of 19th century German forestry, as well as a host of other researchers who have investigated the consequences of abstracting the complexities of forests for the purposes of state planning, capital accumulation, and territorial control (Demmeritt, 2001; Prudham, 2003; Willems- Braun, 1997), Heidegger’s phenomenological questioning of the way in which the world becomes disclosed to us offers something more. Notice that Heidegger’s focus in this passage is not on the transformation of the forest, but of the forester, where the forester’s own subjectivity becomes transformed through a technological disclosure of the world, and the orderability of the cellulose of trees is constitutive of his own being as someone who orders. While works like Seeing Like a State show how the state’s synoptic epistemology informs how it acts on the world, there is little discussion by Scott how the state itself becomes constituted under this purview, or more precisely, what happens when the state must consider itself as an object under its own calculatory logic. This is no small point with regard to carbon offsets since, under the Clean Development Mechanism, nation-states play a key role in developing carbon offset commodities, and in some instances must calculate their own relationship to carbon in the production of these

48 commodities. Understanding how this is done, and what allows for it to occur, offers us a way to explore why particular spaces become constituted in the way they do in the production of a carbon forestry offset.

2.4 Carbon, Calculation, and the State In 1997, the recently created National Forestry Financing Fund (Spanish acronym: FONAFIFO), a division of Costa Rica’s Ministry of the Environment and Mines, began providing payments for environmental services (PES) to land owners for either maintaining existing forest on their land, or for planting new trees. This system of environmental service payments, and FONAFIFO itself, emerged out of Forestry Law 7575, passed in 1996, which created the juridical, institutional and financial mechanisms needed for environmental service payments to take place (Castro et al. 2000). In making these payments, FONAFIFO purchased the rights to a land-owner’s carbon storage, which allows the agency to re-sell them to a third party later (Miranda et al. 2006). From 1997 to 2007, FONAFIFO made over 6,000 payments that cover over 500,000 hectares of land (FONFIFO 2008). Despite these efforts at creating a supply of carbon sequestration for the global market, very few of these payments have resulted in international carbon transactions, and have, in fact, actually hindered FONAFIFO’s current efforts at establishing CDM forestry offsets. In this section, I focus on how the previous development of these PES policies confounded efforts by the Costa Rican state to carry out the calculations necessary to produce a CDM credit today. Specifically, I will discuss the so-far failed attempt of the state to develop a methodology for calculating a carbon baseline, and how these previous PES policies were the central sticking point in this failure. What is a carbon baseline? Carbon baselines are the business-as-usual level of carbon that will be sequestered in the absence of carbon financing. Carbon offset credits under the CDM are based on the level of carbon that is sequestered over-and-above this baseline (Chomitz 1998, see Figure 2.1). Calculating the baseline requires not only estimating existing levels of plant growth, but also predicting future patterns of land-use

49 change. This requires making a number of assumptions about the future land-use decisions by land owners in a given area (Chomitz et al. 1999; Dutsche 2002). While there are a variety of already-approved baseline methodologies that cover various land- use scenarios, FONAFIFO chose to develop a new methodology that contained procedures for calculating the impact that previously-established state PES policies will have on baseline calculations. This meant that FONAFIFO had to develop a way to quantify the future extent to which state PES policies will be implemented in areas receiving CDM financing, with future PES reforestation policies in a CDM area contributing to a larger baseline (FONAFIFO 2007a; Interview 2008). For example, if state reforestation payments to farmers under these policies are expected to increase over time within a CDM project area, then so would the baseline, as the new trees from these policies would result in more carbon sequestered in the future. The new methodology that FONAFIFO developed was a detailed document that contained the calculatory procedures needed to quantify these potential baseline scenarios (FONFIFO 2007a). In this way, this methodology sought a way to calculate how the implementation of a particular CDM project will relate to the future ‘carbon impact’ of future patterns of state actions. To date, this new methodology has been rejected twice by the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework for the Convention on Climate Change) oversight board (UNFCCC 2007a; UNFCCC 2007b). Both times it was rejected, in part, because the UNFCCC reviewers found a fundamental incongruence between the specific Cartesian spaces that define the boundaries of CDM projects and the more vaguely defined geography of state- led environmental service payments, and determined that this geographic incongruence means that the baseline calculations cannot be made objectively (UNFCCC, 2007b, pg. 3). One of the requirements of CDM forestry projects is that they occur within a precisely delineated project boundary. This boundary consists of the exact, GPS-measured polygons where reforestation activities will take place (Pearson et al. 2006; Vallejo et al. 2008). If, for example, a project includes reforestation that takes place in a patchwork of separate, discrete parcels, the resulting project area is an amalgam of many different, geo-

50 referenced polygons. These polygons constitute the project area, and it is with reference to this Cartesian space that baseline calculations are made (Dutschke 2003; Vallejo et al. 2008).

Carbon removals after implementation of project

Carbon Net carbon removals r e mo v a l s

Business-as-usual baseline

tp = Project Start Time (t)

Figure 2.1: Simplified principle of the baseline (adapted from Bumpus and Liverman 2008). The Net carbon removals that comprise the value of a forestry offset is the difference between the baseline levels of carbon removals and carbon sequestered as a result of project activities.

In contrast, the geography of state-led forestry payments is considerably more nebulous. The implementation of these payments were guided by general geographic directives, where priority was given, for example, to areas close to national parks (Interview 2007; Imbach Bartol 2005). These were only guidelines, however, and not spatially quantified quotas. The actual geography of PES implementation was further modified by the welter of legal and bureaucratic hurdles that potential PES applicants encountered. These requirements included having registered land title, an official property survey and identical geographic data points on both documents (Baltodano

2000; Castro et al. 2000). The cost and time associated with obtaining these often exclude potential PES recipients, whether their land falls within the geographic guidelines or not, and has the tendency to encourage PES participation by members of agricultural and forestry cooperates that have experience in taking the necessary bureaucratic and technical steps needed to enroll land owners in PES programs (Interview 2007; Imbach Bartol 2005). In sum, environmental service payments are made country-wide, without specific, quantified targets for geographic areas. The UNFCCC Executive Board concluded that this lack of specific, spatially defined quotas for state PES payments will ultimately result in ‘subjective’ calculations (UNFCCC, 2007b, p. 3). While the proposed methodology uses historical data to determine the future PES patterns in CDM project areas, this rationale was rejected by the UNFCCC reviewers. They argued that the lack of specific, spatially delimited quotas for PES policies means that one cannot say with certainty that historical trends will continue into the future (UNFCCC 2007b). For the UNFCCC executive board, it was ultimately an untenable project to make baseline calculations that are predicated on well- defined Cartesian boundaries in a way that incorporates the undefined geography of state PES payments. These, however, continually unfold on a shifting and complex political and ecological terrain across the entire country. This calculatory failure has resulted is the stalled emergence of one particular form of a carbon commodity due to the inability of the Costa Rican state to calculate its own future carbon relationship to the abstract Cartesian spaces that define CDM projects.

2.4.1 Relational and Absolute Calculations and Spaces Let me summarize this rather dense story. In 1997 the Costa Rican state initiated a policy of giving land owners a payment for reforesting their land. Ten years later, in 2007, the state began a separate initiative of creating Clean Development Mechanism projects, where they developed a methodology for performing the baseline calculations needed to establish projects in this country. Such projects require the delineation of specific Cartesian spaces that indicate exactly where carbon-sequestering trees will be

planted. They also require that one calculate status quo baseline levels of future carbon storage within these spaces. To date, the Costa Rican state has been unable to get their methodology for doing this approved because it has been unable to find a way to satisfactorily calculate the extent to which its previously established reforestation policies will contribute to this baseline. This is because these previously-established reforestation policies are not geographically determined the way that the spaces of CDM projects are. The UNFCCC Executive Board has rejected the state’s methodology because, without spatially-defined quotas for the state’s previous PES policies, it says that it is essentially impossible to objectively quantify how many trees will be planted in the spaces of the CDM projects due to these previous policies. Thus, the Costa Rican state’s methodology for carbon baseline calculations cannot accurately include the future impact of the state’s reforestation policies on the carbon baseline of CDM project areas. At this point, I wish to call attention to the interplay between the Cartesian spaces that define CDM offset projects, and the relational calculations that are needed to determine the baseline, in which the future counterfactual carbon impact of actors within a specific Cartesian space are calculated. These CDM baseline calculations are ultimately done to ensure that carbon offsets produce a particular global ordering of carbon, where greenhouse gas emissions in one area are allowed to continue so long as an equivalent level of carbon is sequestered somewhere else. Under these assumptions of carbon trading, baseline calculations are required to assure that the sale of carbon credits produce additional carbon sequestering biomass, and not subsidize the growth of already existing patterns of land use (Chomitz 1998; Michelowa 2005). This provision is critical in order to assure equivalence between the carbon fixed in the ground and the carbon-dioxide being emitted by the purchaser of this credit. In other words, the global ordering of carbon on which CDM offsets are predicated can only be assured if each carbon offset is understood in its relation to a spatially well-defined baseline. In this way, baseline calculations quantify the ordering of one actor to another (producer to consumer), as a way of ordering a global conception of atmospheric carbon balance. For these calculations to occur, however, these counterfactual levels of carbon

storage have to be understood as occurring in a prescribed area over a specific time horizon. It is through these calculations that the Cartesian spaces of carbon offsets “open up” as a way of grasping the relational ordering of carbon, where those involved in producing a forestry offset (e.g. farmers, the state) must calculate their future actions in relation to a demarcated “container” of carbon. In this case, the development of CDM credits in Costa Rica has stalled because the Costa Rican state has failed to find a satisfactory way to calculate its future relation to carbon within the abstract, Cartesian spaces of this project.

2.5 Enframing Carbon: Space as Standing Reserve In this example, a territorially bounded nation-state was unable to enter into a mechanism for regulating the global climate (i.e. the Clean Development Mechanism) because of the state’s inability to quantify the carbon-impact of its own policies in relation to specific, abstract Cartesian spaces. These are local spaces that are ultimately demanded by a conception of a planetary-wide orderable space that underpins the logic of carbon trading. Here I ask: why was it necessary to link the spaces of the state’s territory, specific GPS polygons and the singular space of “the global” in this way? What does this failure to relate these spaces to each other through baseline calculations say about our modern notions of space, territory, and the global? In order to address these questions, in this section I examine further how this example – the Costa Rican state’s efforts to calculate its own carbon-relation to the world – can be understood in terms of Heidegger’s conceptions of standing reserve and technology. My discussion in this section sets up the following section, where I link the technological metaphysics of calculating carbon, and the concealment of the gigantic, with the persistence of the bounded territoriality of the nation-state, the containerized spaces of “the global,” and the relational spaces of calculation that underpin the current carbon trading regime.

Heidegger argues that the enframing that is the essence of technology is no longer a revealing of the world, but rather, a “challenging forth” of the world that sets upon beings in the world as objects to be ordered. In an oft-quoted passage in his essay on technology, Heidegger writes:

The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely a water power supplier, derives from out of the essence of the power station….But, it will be replied, the Rhine is still a river in the landscape, is it not? Perhaps. But how? In no other way than as an object on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the vacation industry (Heidegger 1977a, p. 16).

Here, the enframing of technology reduces the Rhine, once a potent symbol of the nation, to a stock of power, no different from the energy generated by a windmill or a coal-fired power plant. The challenging-forth of electricity production has transfo rmed this river into standing reserve - a resource to be ordered. As the last line in this quote shows, Heidegger is careful to not just limit his conception of technology to science and machines. He also notes that such an orientation toward the world can extend to other realms, where even the beauty of the river becomes standing reserve to be summoned for the “vacation industry.” For Heidegger, the reduction of beings to standing reserve is an ordering with no fixed ends, but rather, is an ordering that sets aside beings for further ordering: “Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing-reserve” (Heidegger 1977a, p. 17). For Heidegger, our orientation toward the world has become such that all that is knowable by modern science becomes understood reductively as standing reserve, where the value of a thing is never found in the thing-itself, but rather, lay in a reductively understood notion of usefulness. Speaking about an airplane, Heidegger writes: “…it stands on the taxi strip only as standing-reserve, inasmuch as it is ordered to ensure the

possibility of transportation…Seen in terms of the standing-reserve, the machine is completely unautonomous, for it has its standing only from the ordering of the orderable” (Heidegger 1977a, p. 17). Under this understanding of technology, where its essence is as an enframing of the world, the world is set-upon in a way that challenges it forth as standing reserve – objects to be ordered. We can see how, through climate management regimes like the CDM, objects in the world come to be seen in terms of standing reserve. Much like the value of an airplane is understood instrumentally, the value of trees comes to be understood in terms of their ability to contribute to a worldwide ordering of carbon. This relation can be seen as a consequence of a technological metaphysics, where locally specific spaces and objects (like trees) are understood in relation to a global system of climate management, and is an approach that is predicated on a conceptual understanding of the entire world as a singular, orderable space. While Heidegger posits the reduction of the Rhine to electricity potential as one of the ontic consequences of this comportment, here I contend that carbon trading, and the position in which the Costa Rican state has found itself, can be understood from this perspective of technological metaphysics. The CDM, and the Kyoto Protocol of which it is a part, is predicated on a conception of a global atmospheric balance of carbon-dioxide that can be known, modeled, and managed to some degree. With the rise of forestry offsets within Kyoto, this is a conception that has come to include not only the atmosphere, but also the soils and biomass of the earth, including people and animals. Here, with the baseline requirements of the CDM, this conception of managing the carbon balance of the earth extends to a calculatory understanding of the participants of the CDM itself, where the people who plant the trees and even the political entities in charge of the spaces of these trees (i.e. the state of Costa Rica) must account for their future carbon impact within the prescribed spaces of a project. In this way, our technological comportment toward the world as one that puts primacy on the makeability of beings has led to a conception of ordering that is ostensibly about the atmosphere, but

has come to include a planet-wide encompassing of everything9. In Heideggerian terms, under the purview of carbon trading, all beings have become revealed as standing reserve—everything is an object subject to further ordering. The self-strengthening reduction of beings to orderable objects is a process that has come to encompass the entire planet, and is ultimately transformative of our own being-in-the-world. To understand how our understanding of entities in the world impinges on our being-in-the-world, it is useful to clarify Heidegger’s distinction between Being and being. For Heidegger, Being is our fundamental ontology, where there is no distinction between ourselves and the world in which we exist. This is in stark contrast to the modern metaphysical understanding of our place in the world since Descartes, who posited that the world is separated into res extensa and res cogitans—the separation of mind and body. Heidegger regarded this conceptual separation to be a fundamental philosophical mistake that has prevented us from discovering the true phenomenology of the world, and our place in it (Heidegger 1996, pp. 83-102). For Heidegger, there is no separation of our mind (not to be confused with the physical organ of our brain) from the physical world. Our physical body, the surrounding environment in which it is placed, and human consciousness are not separate from each other, but rather, fundamentally constitutive of each other. Rather than existing in the world, Heidegger saw humanity in terms of Being – our existence as our own thrownness into the world – where Being is the event of our worlding of the world, where the world is inextricably interwoven with our existence.10 This is a fundamental ontological understanding of existence, in other words—Being. In contrast, a being is an entity, a thing or object in the world—the entities with which we come in contact through our Being. A critical aspect

9 For example, in the original United Nations Framework for the Convention of Climate Change, the climate system is defined as: “the totality of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and geosphere and their interactions” (UNFCCC 1992; p. 3 ).

10 This understanding of Being is reflected in Heidegger’s vocabulary for speaking about Being, where in Being and Time, Heidegger speaks not of “humans,” a word that has become too loaded with the subject-centeredness of modern metaphysics, but rather, “Da-sein,” a German neologism often translated as being-there, but is perhaps better understood as being-the-there (see Elden 2005a), where the separation between being and the world collapses and Da-sein’s being is constituted by, and constitutive of, the world. 57

of Heidegger’s thought is in understanding, and ultimately overcoming, the conceptual distinctions between Being and being(s). Our understanding of, and comportment towards beings fundamentally constitutes our Being, where the way in which the world is revealed to us is productive of how we are—our being-in-the-world. Technology, as a mode of revealing, a way of understanding the world where beings are challenged forth as orderable objects is constitutive of an instrumental orientation where our being-in-the world is such where we are also challenged forth as beings that order and are to be made orderable. The essence of technology can be understood in a context where the relation of beings to Being is such that how we see the world is inseparable from how we are in it. This, however, is more than a matter of our epistemology affecting our ontological being. Instead, under a Heideggerian purview, the distinction between epistemology and ontology collapses. To understand what this means, it helps to clarify Heidegger’s conception of truth. For Heidegger, truth holds a special meaning, distinct from the analytic understanding of truth as embodying a correspondence with reality. Instead, Heidegger draws on the ancient Greek meaning of truth, aletheia – an unconcealment of the world – where truth is understood not in terms of a correspondence between a representation and the “real world”, but instead, truth is the unconcealment of the world to us, where our reality is that which is revealed to be as such (e.g. Heidegger 1977a; see also de Beistegui 2005; Pattison 2000). Thus, truth is collapsed into ontology: how the world is revealed is how we are in the world. While truth is an unconcealment, for Heidegger, this unconcealment is always and necessarily accompanied by a concealment that stands in a conflictual relationship with a revealing. For example, when we encounter a work of art such as a stained glass window, the way in which the light – its particular angle and intensity - hits the window, its beauty as a work of art becomes unconcealed to us, but this unconcealment also forecloses on other ways of seeing the window, as different ways in which the light might hit the window are, for the moment, not possible (Pattison 2000). Here, unconcealment can be understood as part of a larger enframing of beings that necessarily invokes a concealment, where the world is presented in a singular and particular way, that necessarily is exclusive of other ways of knowing

and being. A technological unconcealment of the world – where truth is revealed through a technological orientation – however, is a challenging forth that conceals other ways of being, and that ultimately results in a particular being-in-the-world that forecloses on other possibilities: “The question concerning technology is the question concerning the constellation in which revealing and concealing, in which the coming to presence of truth, comes to pass” (Heidegger 1977a, pg. 33). The challenging forth of beings into standing reserve that is the essence of technology is ultimately a challenging forth of ourselves, where our being-in-the-world is as standing reserve waiting to be ordered. In short, the essence of technology is a way of understanding the world, where the world is such that it is set-upon to be known in a particular way, and is ultimately transformative of entities in the world, and ourselves, to standing reserve—objects laying in wait to be ordered. This is an ontic orientation that is ultimately concealing of a richer reality of our place in the world. The current managerial approach to climate change can be understood as derivative of a technological metaphysics, where the world is revealed as a flow of carbon-dioxide to be ordered. This understanding of, and comportment towards, the world as a global space to be ordered can be understood as a self- strengthening circle of manipulative unfolding – where intrumental ordering begets more ordering. Here, calculation is derivative of this comportment, a recursive and self- strengthening unfolding of ordering, where beings are revealed as information – units of carbon that are ready for more ordering. Under this orientation toward the world, not only is the atmosphere and biosphere set upon for ordering, but we, as humans, are as well. Under this purview, we are carbon. And through calculation, we are revealed to be as such—carbon to be ordered. This can be seen in the baseline calculations of the CDM— where the future unfolding of a place is understood in terms of a measured Cartesian space, and it is revealed quantitatively in terms of status quo levels of carbon sequestration. This is a quantitative understanding of a place that is productive of a technological orientation that is ultimately manifest in the global ordering of carbon, and results in an opening-up of particular Cartesian spaces as a way of grasping this relational

ordering of global carbon. Here, this is also an ordering that extends to those living in these spaces, such as farmers, but has also extended to even the state itself, which in this case, had to account for its actions in relation to these spaces. This is a calculatory imperative that is underpinned by a conception of the global climate as an undifferentiated, orderable grid, where dealing with carbon-dioxide pollution becomes understood reductively as an ordering of carbon. Understood under the purview of technology, this extension of the space of carbon to the entire planet is reflective of the self-strengething, expanding, circular nature of technological enframing, where beings are disclosed as orderable and subject to further ordering. This is a metaphysical orientation where such ordering has extended to not just the global climate, but rather—everything.

2.6 The Technological Spaces of Ordering: Territory, the Global, and Relational Space Under the regime of the Kyoto Protocol this undifferentiated grid of planetary carbon-ordering intersects with nation-states that are defined by their own calculatory spaces—their territory. In order to understand the effects of bringing the territorial purview of the nation-state within the global ordering-space of carbon trading, I discuss in this section how the territory of the nation-state is derivative of the same technological metaphysics from which the global space of the climate has emerged. Heidegger’s conception of the gigantic can help us understand the implications of a technological metaphysics in the challenging forth of a territorially bounded entity like the nation-state under the purview of carbon trading. As I discussed above, the gigantic, or massiveness, refers not to size, but rather, a conflation of the quantitative with being, where “what is” is what is understood solely through calculation and measurement. Here, the contemporary moment of globalization can be seen as a symptom of the gigantic, where a calculative understanding of space becomes extended to everything, and “the world” has come to be understood as a single global, planetary space (Joronen 2008). Stuart Elden (2005) explores this notion in his argument that modern notions of territory

are underpinned by an ontological comportment in which place is understood as calculable space, and territory is a political manifestation of this ontological grasping of space. Elden posits that globalization is a process that is neither the obliteration of this modern understanding of territory nor simply its unproblematic extension to the global scale. Instead, globalization can be understood as the product of the same ontological determination of space from which our modern notion of territory has emerged. Making a similar critique of the globalization literature, Neil Brenner (1999) argues against what he calls “state-centric epistemologies” which posit global space as an enlarged version of the territorial containers of the nation-state. Brenner argues that under such a view: “…state- centric conceptions of global space mask the territorial state’s own crucial role as a site and agent of the globalization process” (Brenner 1999, p. 59). While I largely agree with this point, I posit here that through an understanding of the ontological grounding of calculative space we can see how this relation runs the other way too—where global space can be a site and agent of the territorial state’s own becoming. If we consider “global space” to be an unfolding of the gigantic—where our understanding of the world is as a singular, global, measurable space—then global space itself is constitutive of the unfolding of the nation-state as a calculable, ontically graspable space. In other words, both the unfolding of “the global” as a singular space and the territory of the nation-state are grounded in the same technological orientation towards the world, where both planetary space, and territory, act on each other in mutually constitutive ways. This dialectical relation between “the global” and the territory of the nation-state can be seen in the Costa Rican state’s difficulties in developing a CDM methodology. The process is one in which the state, as a territorially bounded space, is put into a calculative relation with the global space of carbon that has come to define the CDM trading regime. Put in Heidegerrian terms, the global ordering of beings that carbon trading demands, challenges forth the territory of the Costa Rican nation-state itself as a stock of standing reserve—ready to be ordered. Here, both the territory of Costa Rica and “the global” itself are enframed as carbon to be ordered. This is an enframing that derives

from efforts at managing the atmospheric commons, an effort that has extended the purview of its ordering to not just the atmosphere, but to living biomass, humans, and in this case, the Costa Rican state itself. In this example, this calculatory ordering had its limits. The state’s previous efforts at ordering its own territory through environmental service payments ultimately undermined the process of creating a CDM carbon offset. This demonstrates the difficulties that the territorial state runs into when the specific carbon-spaces become disclosed to us through the calculatory requirements of producing commodified carbon forestry offsets. Here, the state’s ability to turn its forests into a carbon offset under the regulatory structure of the CDM was dependent upon calculating the future carbon impact of its previous policies within the Cartesian spaces of the project. The PES policies that ultimately confounded these efforts were the result of state efforts at ordering its own territory, where payments were given to general areas of environmental priority.11 This territorial ordering came into conflict with the space of “the global” when the state tried to enter into a larger effort of ordering a worldwide balance of carbon through its commodification. This effort ironically required the delineation of smaller, Cartesian spaces that were ultimately incompatible with the state’s previous efforts at environmental management. While this was a process that ultimately “failed”, it was also one that unfolded within an ontology that was simultaneously productive of the territorial space of the nation-state and the global space of carbon trading. Here, the Costa Rican state’s previous policies, designed to manage its territory through its PES payments ultimately undermined the development of a baseline methodology, and called into question the ability of the state-as-territory to put itself in a calculative relation to a global space of carbon trading. Nevertheless, the state itself as a political unit for managing carbon remains in tact, not only as a critical actor in producing carbon credits under the CDM, but one whose very territoriality as a space of ordering remains fundamentally

11 In fact, these priority-areas, and the reforestation policies themselves are part of a larger comprehensive state environmental plan entitled Ordenamiento Territorial, typically translated as “territorial zoning”, but literally translated as “territorial ordering” (Cotera et al. 1998) 62

unchallenged. The current climate regime of the Kyoto Protocol and the UNFCCC is a process of managing the global climate, where “the world” is imagined as a singular planetary space of the atmosphere. This is a political framework whose primary actors are composed of the territorially in tact spaces of nation-states, where all carbon-emissions and points of carbon sequestration are ultimately posited as occuring somewhere within the territory of a particular nation-state.12 Here, the calculatory grasping of planetary space that underpins carbon trading is grounded in the same ontological comportment towards the world that is productive of the “political grasping of space,” as Stuart Elden puts it, that results in our modern notions of territory (Elden 2005b). While the territory of the Costa Rican state became a sticking point in its development of CDM offsets in this instance, the state’s very territoriality is grounded in the same technological orientation towards the world that allows for planetary wide managerial efforts like the CDM to come into being. While some researchers have speculated about the future of transnational governance under an emergent carbon trading regime (Bulkeley 2005; Bumpus and Liverman 2008), the example of Costa Rica points to the contradictory effects that these new regulatory configurations have. In this case, the calculatory demands of CDM carbon offsets, where not only the carbon “in the ground” be accounted for, but the future carbon responsibility of all related actors be calculated as well. Here, Costa Rica emerges as an assumed territory of ordering in a way that simultaneously undermines its ability to incorporate itself within these newly emergent spaces of carbon calculation. This same process that results in the contradictory position of the state’s territory – where it is productive of, yet undermined by, the necessary Cartesian spaces of carbon offset calculations – is also productive of relational space. Remember that the absolute Cartesian spaces needed for a carbon offset project are an effect of the need to establish that the credits are producing “additional” carbon storage. This demonstration of

12 For example, Kyoto’s primary goal was for each nation-state to reduce their emissions to 5% below 1990 levels, and the CDM was a mechanism within Kyoto that allows for one particular group of nation-states (Annex I countries) to meet these targets through displacing their reductions to non-Annex I countries (i.e. developing countries). 63

additionality through the construction of the baseline produces a relational connection between the producers of a carbon project and the consumers of a carbon offset—and ultimately connects both actors to the undifferentiated space of “the global” (in the form of the worldwide carbon cycle). In this way, the site where carbon sequestration occurs is both emergent from and sustained by the relations and connections between disparate actors and processes. Without a relational spacing between producers and consumers, the Cartesian spaces of a carbon forestry offset would never emerge. This relational spacing is also dependent on multiple processes: the scientific process of measuring carbon in the ground, the capitalist process of giving this storage a price, the political process of establishing a regulatory framework under which carbon trading can occur. The emergence of the relational spaces of commodified carbon – spaces that lash together offset consumers, producers, and “the global” – is an effect of a technological metaphysics that views the world as a single orderable space, which ultimately opens up an ontology of calculation that produces specific absolute spaces of carbon measurement ultimately allowing for a global, relational ordering of carbon. In this case, an understanding of the relational or absolute spaces of carbon is not an either/or proposition. Instead, the absolute Cartesian spaces are necessarily productive of this relational spacing, where the becoming-spaces of a carbon offset, the very spaces that allow a relational ordering between objects of carbon fixation, the subjects of carbon consumption, and the space of the global, ultimately emerge through calculations that result in the measured absolute spaces of an agricultural field. This allows for its carbon content to become related to the actions of a carbon emitter someplace else. It is through this co-constitution of relational space, and absolute space-making that both the objects and subjects of this process emerge - landscapes as carbon objects and offset consumers as carbon subjects - as an ordered part of a “global” circulation model of carbon dioxide.

2.7 Conclusion In this chapter I have demonstrated empirically how the practices of calculation that are productive of a carbon commodity – or at least the Clean Development

Mechanism version of it – are also productive of particular spaces and territories. In the process, I point to the ontological conditions that allow for these practices to occur. In these examples the commodification of carbon is predicated upon a conception of the world as a single calculable, orderable space, which is simultaneously productive of material and discursive Cartesian “containers” for receiving carbon. There have been a number of debates over what globalization means for our understanding of space, place, scale, and territory, whether it means that space is better understood in relational terms, producing a new ontology of space that needs to be theorized anew (Amin 2002; Jones et al. 2007; Marston et al. 2005); or whether space, territory, and scale are indeed objects being reconstituted through the processes of globalization (Brenner 1999; Cox 1998). An analysis of the calculations of carbon offsets from a Heidegerian perspective of being, shows that the global flows and networks that constitute carbon-space are not productive of a new ontology of being, but rather, the spaces that result from this commodity are an effect of a modern technological metaphysics of being. As Heidegger has argued, this is an ontological orientation that has been with us for quite some time. Viewing the spaces of carbon in this way shows us that carbon credits are indeed productive of relational spaces, but these also come about through an ontology of calculation and a metaphysics of ordering that is also productive of bounded, Cartesian spaces and territories. Recognizing the technological metaphysics that allows for these calculations to occur is a first step toward a more effective understanding of how the process of commodifying carbon unfolds, and for examining the potential of this form of commodification for our own being in this world.

Chapter 3: Performing Carbon’s Materiality: The (Re)production of Carbon Offsets and the Framing of Exchange

3.1 Introduction In 2002, the Cabécar Development Council, the local governing body of the Cabécar Indigenous Reserve in southeast Costa Rica, acquired 1000 hectares of land from a non-indigenous cattle rancher. This land was redistributed in two-hectare parcels to indigenous households, most of whom were able to use the land as they saw fit. Some of these households, however, were given land within a 92 hectare block, which was set aside as a carbon forestry offset. Farmers were given an upfront payment in exchange for agreeing to not use this land for a period of five years. Today, the carbon sequestered in this area is for sale on the internet. By visiting the website of the Italian company Lifegate (see Figure 3.1), a consumer may offset the climactic impact of their greenhouse gas emissions by calculating the level of emissions from a particular action – a plane flight, car ride, or home electricity use – and purchase a credit. In theory, this credit funds the payment these farmers received for keeping this land in conservation, and ultimately helps to sequester an equivalent level of carbon in the biomass of this landscape, a process that “offsets” the climactic impact of the consumer’s greenhouse gas emissions. In practice, this economic transaction requires considerable work by a diverse group of actors in order to transform this 92 hectare block of land into a space of carbon storage. Government bureaucrats, members of NGOs, employees of Lifegate, and indigenous political leaders came together to carve physical markers onto the landscape. Some of them cut trails that marked the borders of this space, while others posted signs on this territory’s edge to signify that this space is dedicated to conservation and is

Figure 3.1: Screen-shot from Lifegate’s website. After calculating the carbon impact of a plane trip, one has the option of offsetting the carbon impact of this flight by purchasing carbon stored in 1,769 square meters of forest in Costa Rica for 71 Euros, or 2,747 square meters of forest in Italy for 212 Euros.

“off-limits” to hunting, farming, or fishing (Figure 3.2). In addition to these physical markers, this group also produced a number of abstract representations of this territory. They carefully measured and calculated the boundaries of this space using GPS systems, and used these data to produce maps that represented this area as a Cartesian space of carbon storage. These maps were then circulated among the network of producers, certifiers, regulators, and consumers that brought this space into being as a site of carbon storage. These efforts, however, are not enough. The spatial extent of the forest, and its ephemerality means that this offset is in constant danger of becoming undone: trees might be illegally removed from the site; farmers might cut and plant a clandestine field of plantains; a fire might break out; consumers might suspect that this offset is a “fraud.” Therefore, once a year, the same group of actors gets together in order to reiterate this carbon territory anew. Guided by GPS devices, they inspect the space’s physical boundaries; they repair signs; re-cut trails; and take photographs of the site (Figure 3.3). GPS devices, maps, signs, trails, and cameras: these artifacts of calculation, measurement, and inscription join the human actors of scientists, bureaucrats, politicians, farmers, businessmen, and consumers in the ongoing and iterative process of maintaining this precarious object of exchange – the carbon offset commodity. How are we to understand the agency of “the forest” amid the efforts of these actors who are trying to stabilize it as a commodity? What is the relation between the forests’ materiality and the economic processes with which it is joined? One group of recent geographic writings have argued that the materiality of “non-human” objects like forests directly constrain and shape how a process like commodification unfolds (e.g. Bakker 2003; Prudham 2003). Such writers have argued that the encounter between neoliberalizing processes like commodification and the biophysical qualities of nature is often unstable and contradictory, leading to efforts at neoliberalizing parts of nature that often do not follow the neo-classical predictions and models that underpin these efforts. Here, nature’s biophysical qualities often pose a barrier to their incorporation into neoliberal modes of governance and management (Bakker 2004; St. Martin 2002).

Figure 3.2: “Carbon territory” sign. Example of signs that were posted along the border of Lifegate’s “carbon territory” in the Cabécar Indigenous Reserve. The sign reads: “Property under private conservation; program of environmental service payments; hunting, logging and plant and animal extraction from the forest is prohibited; help us conserve the natural resources of Talamanca by enjoying them today and leaving them for the next generation”. Photo by author, March 2008.

Figure 3.3: Scenes from a carbon verification trip. Top: a representative from the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor checks her GPS device before crossing a stream. Bottom: single-file hiking along pre-determined trails was the primary formation during the transect walk. Photos by author, March 2008.

Other writers, however, have approached this question by drawing on actor-network theory (ANT), and have more explicitly placed the issue of constructed nature-society dualisms at the center of their analysis (Castree 1995; Swyngedouw 1999). These writers have focused on the practices of representation that allow for “nature” to emerge as a bounded, separate object for exchange (Robertson 2004; Robertson 2006; Swyngedouw 2004), and how networks of production and consumption often define what counts as “nature” (Mansfield 2003). Under this theoretical purview, nature’s materiality is not pre- given; nor is the agency of the non-human an inherent property contained within itself. Instead, both the materiality and agency of the non-human are emergent properties of a networked articulation of actors (see Whatmore 2002). In this chapter, I suggest that a different mode of engagement with the materiality and agency of nature is needed in order to understand its encounters with neoliberalism. I argue that both of these approaches tend to posit the non-human, and its properties, as objects that exist outside of, or in opposition to, the economic processes through which they are articulated. By focusing on the ways that the properties of the non-human confound capital (see Boyd, Prudham, Schurmann 2001), or are emergent from economic relations (Swyngedouw 2004) I contend that many geographic critiques of “neoliberal natures” often elide how “the economic” itself as a sphere of communication and action becomes emergent as a particular framing of the world. I argue that our current uses of the concepts of “the material,” “the abstract,” and “the economic” are insufficient when confronted with the production of objects such as carbon offsets, whose emergence as a semiotic-material object of exchange cannot be separated from the ongoing framing of the field of exchange itself. I contend that an unproblematic deployment of these terms of analysis are insufficient because these same concepts are reflexively produced, articulated, and utilized by the very actors who produce and consume this commodity. This is dramatically illustrated in the on-the-ground work that is needed to produce and verify a carbon offset, where the mutually constitutive connection between an object’s material-semiotic form and the emergence of “the market” for carbon is self-evident to the actors who bring about this articulation. In other words, concepts like “abstraction,”

“the material,” and “the economy” are not just restricted to the domain of social science analysis, but are also self-consciously deployed in the production of this space as a carbon commodity, where this reflexive deployment is, in fact, integral to the emergence of these spaces as material, tradable objects of exchange. I suggest that previous approaches to the materiality of “neoliberal natures” have often been too one-sided, and have focused on the emergence of different natures and the problematic ways in which they become incorporated within the free-market logics of neoliberalism. Instead, I argue that it is more productive to develop an analysis of the mutual emergence of objects of exchange and the economic frames that allow them to be. To do this, I focus empirically on the oscillation between the abstract and the material during the practices of verifying the carbon offset I described above. My main concern in studying the intertwining of these two forms is a question of their emergence, deployment, and effects among the broad group of actors who, through their actions, simultaneously bring this carbon offset into being as an economic object, as well as the frame of economic exchange itself. My argument proceeds in three parts. First, I note the complexity of actors and the transitive position between the abstract and the material that some of them occupy in the production of the offset described above. I then develop an account of performativity that situates the practices of abstraction among these actors as having material effects on both the object in question and the field of exchange within which such an object becomes intelligible. I do this in order to shed light on how both the form of the object in question –the spatiality of the carbon offset—and the constitution of its field of intelligibility— economic exchange—are co-produced. In other words, I aim to demonstrate that, with regard to objects of exchange and the sphere of exchange itself, the emergence of one is not determined by the other, but rather, they are mutually constitutive of each other. Such an understanding leads me to argue that “the economic” as a field of intelligibility and action is produced through, rather than preceding, the materiality of this offset and its abstractions. Finally, I consider a moment where the performance of this offset failed, and the conditions where the material and the abstract could not be articulated within the

frame of exchange. This failure emanates not from the biophysical qualities of the non- human, but rather, through the self-reflexive stance of the actors charged with bringing this object into being as an object of exchange. This chapter is based on ethnographic observations made in March 2008, when I joined the group of actors described above during one of their verification trips. I spent two days with this group tracing the perimeters of various parcels of land. Our ostensible goal was to produce a report that assures the owner of the carbon being stored at this site (Lifegate, the Italian company that sells these credits on the internet) that these spaces are in tact and still sequestering carbon. If my focus in this chapter is on the performative effects of this group’s self-conscious deployment of the abstract and the material in the ongoing framing of objects of exchange, then similarly, the performance of this chapter is itself a self-conscious one. Instead of identifying an object of study, and investigating it through a clear sequence of analysis – theory, empirics, and discussion – this chapter proceeds with descriptions and arguments that build on each other. Ethnographic moments in which the abstract and material become articulated within a frame of exchange, for example, are followed by theoretical reflections on the nature and effects of such imbrications, which in turn leads to other questions, reflections, descriptions, and so on. I seek to avoid employing the usual tricks of perspective, scale, and analytic distance that are often employed by the researcher—especially the ethnographer. I try to elide this mode of analysis because the subjects of my research—the actors who bring this carbon offset into being - employ many of these very same tools in their performance of this offset.13 Instead, in the form of this chapter I seek to perform my argument in a way similar to those subjects whom I analyze.

13 There is an emergent literature in anthropology that explicitly addresses this question, and that has motivated my approach in this chapter. A special issue of American Anthropologist in 2005 was dedicated to ethnographies that explicitly take up the issue of writing ethnographies about processes with actors who employ the same claims to knowledge that the ethnographer does ( Choy 2005; Rajan 2005 and especially Maurer 2005a, also Maurer 2005b). Bill Maurer (Maurer 2005a) argues that an ethnography should focus on emergence, but also to simultaneously use ethnographic description as a means to unsettle anthropological claims to knowledge. 73

3.2 Mapping the Materiality of Offsets

Sitting around a long table in the middle of the open-air dining room were ten people eating rice, chicken and plantains. White faces, hiking boots and well-cut, stylish, “outdoor” clothing tell me the group is from Europe – “Los Italianos” I kept hearing so much about. I sat down at one end of the table and introduced myself to two of the diners, one was an Italian graduate student who was in Costa Rica conducting research on carbon credits for her Master’s thesis, the other wa s here as part of an ecological vacation with the Italian NGO that sponsors the trip. After explaining who I am and what I am doing in Costa Rica, an older man walking towards us said:

“I have met two geographers from the United States here in Costa Rica. This was sixteen years ago. It turned out later that they were CIA agents.”

This was the head of the NGO, Mario Clementoni14, who was in charge of the group. He had been working on conservation projects in Costa Rica since about the time he ran into those CIA agents. After dinner he called everyone around the table where they discussed the plan for the next day. A series of color maps with superimposed aerial photographs, and boundaries that marked the border of the blocks of land in conservation, were passed around. The NGO leader began giving a history of this project, in Italian, and the issues they have encountered in the past (field notes, March 9, 2008).

When it came time for our group to discuss what we were going to do the next day, the first thing Mario did was pass around maps of the site we would be verifying. Here I pose the question: why did he pass around maps? If we were there to verify a carbon offset project, why weren’t we examining tables, charts, and graphs that demonstrate the levels of carbon being fixed? After all, that is what Lifegate is selling: carbon that is being fixed in the ground. To answer my own question, and invoke the language of Latour (Latour and Woolgar 1986; Latour 1987), the information that such charts contain has already shed most of its qualifying modalities, and is well on its way to being accepted as an unquestioned fact: “this forest sequesters X amount carbon.” One ontological modality remains, however, that cannot be shed: “this forest sequesters carbon, so long as the forest remains in tact.” It is this remaining modality that renders this commodity unstable. While the fact that the forest sequesters carbon has been

14 A pseudonym. 74

stabilized, the space of the forest itself has not. In other words, we were passing around maps because it is the reiteration of the space of carbon that our group was there to do. Here, I wish to suggest that the maps upon which the Cartesian boundaries of this project are inscribed are one of several actors among many in the framings of this space. I argue that it is from this framing of space that not only the socio-nature of “the forest-as- carbon-sink” is stabilized, but also that “the economic” as a sphere of action and intelligibility is simultaneously produced. This argument closely tracks those made by Michel Callon (1998a; 1998b; 2007) and colleagues (MacKenzie 2006; Miller 1998), who have argued that the production of markets is a performative process in which actors enter into a calculatory frame, one that allows for both an object of exchange, and the field of exchange itself, to emerge (Callon 1998b; Fligstein and Dauter 2007). Here, a field of exchange is made possible through the emergence of calculatory agencies that define a clear, if temporary and unstable, subject position for each actor involved in the frame. Callon describes framing as a process where simplified, uncontroversial owners, products and modes of ownership, knowing who is accountable, what to count, and what not to count are all emergent properties of networked articulations of actors (Callon 1998a; Mitchell 2002; see Lohmann 2005 for more on this argument applied to carbon trading). Through this framing, actors become temporarily cleaved from their previous webs of relationships and entanglements, and enter into this frame in their role of simplified calculatory actors. Consider, for a moment, some of the actors involved in this forestry offset: land- owners who have consented to leave this land out of production in exchange for a payment; a designated state authority who certifies and sells the credit; trees which are measured and weighed by scientists, who themselves use tape measures and scales; third party verifiers who inspect the landscapes in question; GPS devices that are used to demarcate the precise Cartesian space where the project occurs; and a consumer who has calculated their carbon footprint. All of these actors must disentangle themselves from their previous relationships and enter into a frame of calculation and measurement that allows for the carbon stored in this territory to be exchanged. The land owner is a father

of four, the scientists are experts in the world of cacao research, and trees are organisms susceptible to fire and disease. These previous webs of relationships, which define these actors to some degree, must be temporarily cleaved through the practices of measurement and calculation – practices that result in a frame where the agencies of these actors as consumers, certifiers, producers, and sellers are temporarily stabilized, along with the object for exchange itself. Through this process, the indigenous farmer becomes a carbon manager, trees become stocks of carbon, scientists become carbon evaluators, and the land itself becomes a precisely delineated carbon territory. Finally, through the emergence of these agencies, “the carbon market” itself emerges, where this object becomes one offset among many to be bought and sold. As Callon has argued (1998b), and a number of writers have demonstrated (Beunza and Garud 2007; Lohmann 2005; Mitchell 2005), this disentangling is necessarily an incomplete process, and connections outside the frame continually reassert themselves. The land-owner remains a father of four, and may use his carbon payment to purchase a forest elsewhere so his son may clear it—a process known as “negative leakage” in the world of offsets. The scientists who evaluate the carbon content of the landscape may use this knowledge for research papers to advance their careers—a “positive externality” in the language of neo-classical economics. The trees themselves may become invaded by beetles and die off. In the production and maintenance of this frame, the non-human devices of measurement that help perform these calculations also occupy an unstable agency. Callon has argued that the materiality of calculation itself helps to bring this frame into being, where the artifacts of measurement, calculation, and inscription produce abstractions, which themselves are also material objects, with material effects (Callon 1998b; Beunza and Stark 2008). In addition, I suggest that these devices occupy a transitive space of oscillation between the abstract and the material, and through this transitive movement between the two forms, the calculative agencies of these objects, and the frame of exchange itself, become mutually constituted.

This oscillation can be seen with regard to the maps that our group passed around. These maps represent the abstract spaces of the material forest. As they are circulated, however, they also become material bearers of an abstraction (the carbon commodity) that we are there to verify. The materiality, and mobility, of these maps allow our group to orient ourselves as verifiers of a carbon territory, and help us to understand that this carbon exists in a contained area, one with borders that separate the carbon-friendly “inside” of the territory from the unpredictable and unmeasured “outside” (Dalby 1991; O Tuathail and Dalby 1998). During our actual work, these maps provided the basis for our actions—guiding our transect and directing where we take photos. In this way, these maps do not just describe a territory, but they actively shape and intervene in how this territory is understood and brought into being as a space of commodified carbon (Pickles 2004; Wainwright and Bryan 2008). In short, their circulation around our table and beyond have performative effects on the way in which this carbon offset comes to be. They act as signifiers of territory, but also, in their materiality and circulation, they provide a context through which our group becomes interpellated as agents of this space’s territorialization. In this context, these maps are one actor among many in a verification process that is itself performative, in which the calculatory frame of the carbon offset is reasserted through the material and abstract reiteration of this space as a territory of commodified carbon. In a moment, I will offer a closer reading of what it means to say that these actors are performing this offset. But first, let us briefly return to the field.

3.3 Technologies of Space

We drove to the site and stopped at the first GPS waypoint by a large Ceiba tree. The engineer from FONAFIFO explained to the representative from the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (MBC) that everything to our left is the project. One of the volunteers took a photo of the Ceiba tree. We drove a little more, stopped and got out. There were some guys waiting there under a tree with their plantains to sell to a passing truck. On the tree above their heads was a red sign that explained that this area is part of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor and that the land is in conservation. Someone else took a photo of this tree and the landscape behind it.

We started walking along the path. Mario wa s shouting descriptions of each waypoint to some of the women volunteers, who were dutifully writing them down on a clipboard with paper. Two different men took photos of the landscape at each waypoint. The Italian volunteers would frequently ask the government ecologist the names of particular trees, sometimes wanting both the Spanish and the scientific names – this too was written down.

At one point, I was looking at a field that looked like a pasture that had been abandoned for at least a couple of years, but with some medium-sized trees as well. I asked the engineer from FONAFIFO if this growth was regeneration from the project. He said that most of the regeneration was due to the project, but the trees were there from before when the land was owned by the cattle rancher. At that point, Mario came over and told me that this field isn’t part of the carbon project, he then held up his GPS device, pointed to the screen, and said:

“See, this is where we are, so this land over there isn’t part of the project” (fieldnotes, March 10, 2008).

Mario’s use of the GPS device to locate ourselves in relation to this territory foreshadowed a coming conflict that occupied our group for the rest of the morning. The conflict began when we came upon a large field of plantains. Upon encountering this field, the government technicians and NGO volunteers closely examined their GPS devices. The government employees then held a brief, private conference, and within a few minutes, everyone with a device concluded that we were standing in an unauthorized plantain field. The president of the Cabécar Development Council disputed this consensus. A long, and tense, conversation between him, the head of the Italian NGO, and the government employees began over where the border of the project area really was. The indigenous president pointed to a nearby tree and made a sweeping motion with his arm, saying: “The border goes from that tree there over to the river over there. These plantains are outside of the area.” The NGO leader, however, offered his GPS system as evidence to the contrary. Standing next to the Cabécar president, hunched over the device, he pointed to the map displayed on its screen, saying: “Look at this, this is where we are, inside the area, and we are standing in a plantain field.” At first, the president held his ground, insisting that his border, defined by the imaginary line running

between the tree and the river in front of us, rendered the plantain field outside of the territory. Other NGO volunteers soon returned from a reconnaissance with their own GPS devices. Tracing his finger over the GPS screen, one of the volunteers said to a government employee: “The plantains continue until here. All of this is in plantain.” Outnumbered, the president gave in and agreed to cut down the plantains at his expense. Later that evening, one of the government technicians discovered that he downloaded the digital maps onto the GPS devices using the wrong projection, and that many of those plantains were outside the carbon reserve after all. The next day, I asked him how he discovered his mistake. He responded: “When (the indigenous president) pointed out that tree, I remembered it from years past and something about its placement didn’t seem right, so I checked the maps when we got back, and that’s when I saw we had the wrong projection.”

3.4 Performing the Global

Instead of being something said once and for all…the statement, as it emerges in its materiality, appears with a status, enters various networks and various fields of use, is subjected to transferences or modifications, is integrated into operations and strategies in which its identity is maintained or effaced. Thus the statement circulates, is used, disappears, allows or prevents the realization of a desire, serves or resists various interests, participates in challenge and struggle, and becomes a theme of appropriation or rivalry. Michel Foucault (1972), The Archaeology of Knowledge, pp. 105

I have to write a report for the investor, showing that the land hasn’t changed . I need to show him photos of boundary markers with numbers, signs, and trails in the areas where the investor wants to see conservation. Technical advisor, Lifegate Carbon Project (field notes, 2008)

This story could be read as an example of the superiority of local knowledge, grounded in “real” things like trees and rivers, over the sophisticated, yet highly contingent technologies of global positioning systems. Advancing this argument, however, is not my goal in relating this story here. Instead, I wish to highlight the shifting boundary between the abstract and the material during this process, where the oscillation between the material and the abstract is the result of a performance through which the object of exchange, and the frame of exchange itself, are simultaneously emergent.

I do so by offering three observations. First, specific Cartesian spaces are necessary for this forestry offset to function as a commodity. As a result, we needed to rely on GPS devices to determine where we were, and where we were going. This commodity’s ultimate function – its use value – is for consumers to reduce the climactic impact of their carbon footprint. This is done by sequestering an equivalent level of carbon in the biomass of this forest. For this equivalence to hold, however, carbon must be stored in a specific place – one with a degree of permanence. Otherwise, the consumer’s contribution to mitigating global climate change, and the ultimate point of purchasing this commodity, will be in doubt. Thus, the seller of this commodity, Lifegate, must assure its customers that it is storing carbon within a prescribed, and permanent, absolute space. This was the motivation behind our group’s transect – to produce a credible report and to make sure that what is represented by the maps of this space coheres with a material reality on the ground. Second, the production of the report, and the assurance that it brings, emerges through a series of material practices that bring the abstract space of the forest into being as a space that is at once circumscribed and local, but also continually defined in relation to a global space. In other words, in order for our observations to be credible, our transect needed to be guided by the GPS, a device that uses the geosynchronous orbit of satellites to produce waypoints that help us orient our bodies in relation to this abstract space. This orientation then provided guidance for the placement of the signs and trails; material artifacts that reiterate this territory onto the landscape. Finally, through the production, use, and circulation of these artifacts of calculation and measurement, this space’s status as a carbon commodity becomes reiterated both on the ground, and within the network of actors who are producing, buying, and selling this commodity; and through this circulation, the network itself is maintained. With the production of the report, Lifegate knows it is selling a “real” space of carbon sequestration, consumers are assured that their product is legitimate, and local residents can see that the territory is still “off-limits” to logging and farming. In short, the circulation of the report, along with the on-the-ground practices of its production, served

to re-enroll the actors as the simplified agents that are needed for this particular frame to hold together. In other words, this verification trip, and the technologies that allowed it to occur, was part of an ongoing performance that brought into being this space as an object of exchange while simultaneously allowing for this particular market transaction to hold together. Through this performance, and the calculative framing it enables, the actors have become constituted as calculative agents, while simultaneously maintaining the object of exchange. This analytical approach to performativity has been employed by a number of scholars studying the performance of markets, as well as the role that economic models play in producing economies, in which economic models do not just describe markets, but are also interventions that shape markets (Beunza and Stark 2008; Garcia-Parpet 2007; MacKenzie 2006; MacKenzie and Muniesa 2007). Under this view, measuring instruments and economic models are devices for abstraction that also have material, performative effects that actively shape and intervene in the contours of market exchange. In other words, the process of abstraction involves material artifacts that simultaneously intervene in the constitution of objects of exchange as well as in the social field in which exchange occurs—what Callon refers to as “the economic” (Callon 1998b; Callon 2007). In short, the economic and its objects are mutually emergent through the effects of this performative framing. In this same vein, the work of our group can be seen as more than describing the spaces of commodified carbon. Instead, it is a performance that intervenes in the constitution of the space as a space of commodified carbon, as well as the frame of exchange itself. It is through our performance, and later through the performance of the consumers’ calculations, that this space can be considered an exchangeable commodity. And it is through these very same practices of producing the object of exchange that the network of exchange itself, and its constitutive calculatory agencies, is formed and maintained. The consumer, through their calculations on the internet, now sees their actions in terms of carbon equivalencies, carbon that can be stored elsewhere for a price. The producer, through the on-the-ground spatial demarcation of the offset (as well as the

original carbon content calculations), allows for this space to be linked to a consumer’s actions. Through these sets of calculations, not only is the offset commodity formed, but so are the agencies of “consumer, “producer,” and “seller” of carbon, as well as the linkages between these actors. In this way, one cannot separate the emergence of the field of exchange from the emergence of the object of exchange itself—the two are co- produced.

3.4.1 Abject Spaces In the mutual becomings of the economic and its objects, however, there were moments where the constitution of this frame was in doubt. Our debate over where the boundaries of the carbon offset were located was one of these moments. In other words, our framing was hardly harmonious, and ultimately resulted in the “silencing” of the indigenous president and his depiction of this space. What, then, are we to make of the calculative agency of the indigenous president? Why was the performative effect of his sweeping hand so facile? Why didn’t the space that he was performing “count”? As my re-telling of this encounter suggests, the process of framing, and the calculatory agencies they enable is a process laden with unequal power relations and silences. This is an aspect of economic performativity rarely addressed by Callon, and has become a point of criticism. Marxist writers, for example, have critiqued the apolitical nature of this approach (e.g. Fine 2003). Actor-network theory approaches in general have been criticized by feminists and post-colonial scholars over the years for eliding such issues of power and exploitation (see Heatherington and Law 2000). Here, I wish to draw on the insights that Callon’s project gives to the co-production of carbon forestry offsets and their networks of exchange while simultaneously accounting for the silences that I witnessed during this performance. For this, I wish to ground Callon’s arguments in Judith Butler’s account of the abject. Butler offers a more explicitly normative approach to performativity that nevertheless shares many of the same features of Callon’s. While the intellectual lineage of both these approaches is similar – drawing on Derrida’s (1988) interpretation of

Austin’s speech act theory, as well as Foucault’s approach to the discursive and material in constituting subjects (see also Mahmoud 2005), Butler offers a more radical approach to performativity, centering her analysis around a Heideggerian questioning of being, one that destabilizes our inherited “modern” notions of a pre-existing ontological status of the body. For Butler, the materiality of the body has no a priori ontology, but rather, is emergent as an effect of power. Thus “gender” is not a construct that is imposed on the pre-existing materiality of “sex.” Instead, the body’s sex is a normative ideal through which the body becomes materialized as legible. This materialization of the body is the result of practices that circumscribe the domain of intelligibility, where the body becomes viable through continual performances. For Butler, entities like “the body” or “nature” are not “socially constructed”—a term that implies that someone is doing the constructing—but rather, they become materialized through iterative, bodily practices, where particular forms emerge, and are reiterated, so they can become legible. Butler argues that this performative materialization necessarily entails a relation to that which cannot fall within this domain of intelligibility: the abject. Here, the abject is not merely the “opposite” of the material norms that a discursive-material performance opens, but is the excluded and unintelligible “outside” to the regulatory norms that are continually materialized. Here, the abject plays a duel role. First, the abject is the normative “other” that serves as a reminder of how precarious bodily norms, and their materializations, are. In this way, the abject performs what Butler describes as a “haunting” of bodily norms that serves a second role: its very “otherness” allows these norms to have the force that they do. Butler argues that the power-effects of bodily norms derive, in part, from the possibility of their destabilization, where the abject represents such possibilities, ultimately allowing for the normative effects of bodily materializations to emerge (Butler 1993, p. 3). I argue that it is useful to think of the indigenous president’s spatial performance as, in this context, an abject one. The ability of his sweeping hand to conjure an intelligible space was ineffectual, and unviable, so long as it remained unarticulated with the spatial abstractions of the GPS technology. Here, the only viable spaces are those that

are performed within a duel movement between the abstract and the material – the bodily movement of the human and the representations of space by the GPS system. The joining together of these two forms is what brings this space into being as a site of carbon storage - a permanent, absolute space that is understood in relation to the global space of the climate; a space that allows for a consumer to equate the actions of their own body to a patch of land in southeast Costa Rica through the purchase of a commodity. This was the space we were performing – a use value for exchange. Seen this way, the concrete directionality of the indigenous president’s hand gesture failed to have an effect among our group not because it was imprecise or inaccurate, but rather, his boundary was untenable within the context of our group’s performance. Without the measuring devices that contextualized his body’s actions within a globally defined, abstract, Cartesian space, his actions had no meaning. The performance of the indigenous president, however, had effects in other ways. Its very abjectness enabled the technology-mediated space of the group to emerge as the fulfillment of a norm. The president’s space—its emergence in relation to trees and rivers, but without a global reference—is just what a carbon offset can never be. It was accurate but not precise; easily understandable, but outside of a globally-mediated spatial frame. The president’s performance of space, as it occurred alongside that of others with their GPS devices, served to reinforce the global, absolute space as the norm that was necessary for this commodity to come into being—an object that requires a frame of exchange through which it can circulate. This frame, and the commodity object itself, is dependent upon placing “local” boundaries in relation to the “global.” While the president knew where the border was, his failure to relate his border to a global context reinforced the need for our transect walk’s performance, which served to materialize this particular relation between local and global space. Without such a relation, neither the commodity itself, nor the field of its exchange, can have meaning. The president’s border, the one that ran between the tree and the river, ultimately did find expression, but not until later that evening, when the GIS technician cross- checked the tree in question to the maps on his computer. Here, the accuracy of the

president’s space did not undermine the technology-mediated understanding of this commodified space. Instead, it was quite the opposite. His space finally became acceptable once it was articulated with the technologies of the group’s GPS maps. In the end, his spacing did not undermine the performance of our walk, but instead, further reiterated its power.

3.5 Reflexive Performances

Day two…we set out to verify a newly incorporated territory…We ran into problems when we crossed a river bed and the trail ended in an abandoned banana field. We were trying to make our way to a GPS waypoint, but without a path, Mario refused to go on. Here, in the middle of an overgrown banana plot, M ari o and the government employees began an extended discussion about the “lack of coordination” with the project. Mario had fully expected to already see a trail with signs for the group to follow. The government employees explained, in detail, the bureaucratic process that has to occur before money is put into the hands of local leaders, who can then pay someone to cut a path.

M ari o was clearly not happy with this state of affairs, although he was very good about keeping his cool. His displeasure was expressed through his very detailed, and repetitive, explanations of why this is not acceptable. Mario’s main concern was that, in his words, he is there as “the eyes and ears of Lifegate,” which signed a contract with FONAFIFO. As far as Lifegate is concerned, it bought the rights to a land’s carbon storage, and the long process of what has to happen between the Costa Rican government, ADITICA, and the land-owners is not Lifegate’s problem. As Mario put it:

“I have to write a report for the investor but the land here isn’t changing.”

The change he was referring to here wasn’t the conversion of an agricultural plot to a forest. It was clear that this plot really was reverting back to secondary forest. The change M ari o wanted to see was the implementation of all of the physical, on-the-ground markers that identify this plot as a space of carbon storage. As he put it, “markers with numbers, signs, and trails.” (field notes, March 11, 2008).

When confronted with the lack of trails and signs, our group’s performance fell apart. We re-crossed the river, took one more photo of a waypoint, and headed to the nearest village where our caravan of trucks was parked. While Mario’s reasons for refusing to continue could be read as pragmatic—leading a team of fifteen through dense growth would be too time consuming—the conversation he had with the government

employees indicates a different reason for quitting. Without the placement of physical markers of the space’s borders, our group’s performance no longer served its purpose. We could have used our GPS devices to aid us in ‘carving-out’ the material boundaries of this space by making trails and posting signs. This, however, was not the point of our group’s transect walk. All of us were there, with our GPS devices, cameras, and clipboards - to reiterate this space as a space of carbon through the performative effects of walking the transect. Without pre-existing trails and signs, the maps on the GPS device and the images in the camera were only capable of describing this space. For this space to be performed, for it to be brought into being as a commodity, our practices of abstraction needed to occur in a context where the material boundaries of the territory were already present. This very issue was expressed by one of the members of our group. During the long conversation between Mario and the government employees, when Mario was trying to explain the importance of having a trail, one of the Italian volunteers interjected:

In Italy, it is a problem to find money for carbon projects. It is always difficult. Investors want to work on projects that are social projects too, and so they look toward Africa for this. There it is cheaper. Without a credible report that shows this place is in conservation, no one will work with us. To be credible, we need to show evidence that this place is in conservation (field notes, March 11, 2008).

The dense vegetation of secondary forest that we were standing in was not the credible evidence they needed. Here, the materiality that counts are the physical markers that signify the borders of this territory. These markers, however, are not enough by themselves. Only through the performative joining of these material signs with their representations can the object of the carbon commodity emerge within a frame of exchange. Without the red signs, and a landscape of forest-like trees behind them, the cameras could not serve their purpose. And without a material trail to follow, the GPS devices were unable to take on the performative effects that it did the day before. Similar to ineffectual spaces formed by the indigenous president’s tree and river from the day before, the GPS device alone is not enough to perform the space. This performance served to territorialize the space, where the local materiality and the global abstractions of

the space become joined, producing an “inside” and an “outside” to the space that is meaningful not only to the residents of this area, but also those far-away investors who are always “looking toward Africa” for projects. Without the pre-existing material boundaries, this joining could not proceed, and our performance on this day had to end prematurely. I contend that this performance – walking the transect, the production of the report, the arguments and discussions, and the effects they produce – is done self- reflexively, where the actors involved in the verification trip are well aware of the performative effects of their actions, and it is through this reflexive stance that our efforts on that morning failed. The Italian volunteer’s concern over how the project fits in with carbon markets more generally, and his argument that the project needs to be credible to a group of investors and consumers, reflects this self-awareness. During these transects, such openness about the purpose of the report was common. It was no great secret that the report they were producing served a purpose beyond being a description, but rather, was an artifact whose circulation among investors, consumers, producers, and “middle- men” would maintain the network of exchange for at least one more year, thereby assuring the space will remain an offset commodity. In other words, the process of producing, and maintaining, this particular carbon credit is an autodocumentary one (Riles 2000), an indigenous sociology of science, where the participants in this process are active agents in its documentation (Maurer 2005a). During the transect walk I was just one of many in the group with a camera, notebook, and pen, because the very point of the trip was to document it. This documentation was done with full knowledge of the participants about the practical effects of their work. As the conversation that occurred in that overgrown banana field demonstrated, these actors were also well aware of the limits of this process. They know that their photos have no meaning if not situated within a material context of trails and signs. They know that they are producing a report that, in its circulation, helps to maintain the credibility of the space among the network of investors, producers, and consumers that are needed for the forest

to become an object to be exchanged. In short, these actors are well aware of the performative effects of this transect, even if they lack the social science jargon to describe it as such. This self-awareness was most apparent when, during our conversation in that banana field, the report’s broader context itself – its conditions of production and circulation - was frequently brought up by members of the group in order to demand a more timely placement of the signs and trails. As the NGO volunteers were quick to point out, the descriptions of the transect walk had a number of critical effects on the future of the space’s status as an attractive commodity, therefore, the description needed to look a certain way. The end result was a performance undertaken not by the modest, objective witnesses found in a laboratory (Haraway 1997; Shapin and Schaffer 1989), but rather, reflexive ones who recognize that their understanding of the space is inseparable with their framing of what the space is supposed to be (Choy 2005). This autodocumentary process results in a performance that reflexively oscillates between the particular and the general as well as the abstract and the concrete. Much in the same way that the maps that we passed around the table on our first night moved from “abstract representation” to “material artifact” and back again, our Italian volunteer, with his interjection, was one of many actors on this trip that made the discursive move between “this project” and “carbon markets” and “this evidence” versus “types of evidence.” Mario himself indicated that the change he needs to document is not the change in the landscape itself, but the change in how the landscape is presented on-the- ground—otherwise the report—his abstraction—cannot circulate as a credible, material artifact. As we see in the above example, the actors involved in the transect rhetorically marshaled this very oscillation as grounds for the material changes they want to see – where the Italian volunteer reminded us that the forest-itself is not good enough, but rather, a credible report about the forest is what keeps this offset as an attractive commodity. Through the actions of our group, both the space of carbon and the frame of

exchange through which the object circulates, emerge as effects of a reflexive performance. In this case, however, the self-awareness of the actors on that day prevented the emergence of the space as a commodified space of carbon storage.

3.6 The Materiality of Nature and the Performance of Neoliberalism Because of this self-conscious movement between the abstract and the material, and the role it plays in (re)-constituting the spaces of the carbon commodity, I propose a re-thinking of the relation between the materiality of the non-human and processes of neoliberalism. I suggest that much recent work on neoliberalism and nature has dealt with the non-human’s materiality by positioning the non-human as a pre-exisiting entity that is incorporated and transformed by a neoliberal process like commodification (or another of neoliberalism’s variants such as privatization). I argue that the performance of our group demonstrates that the materiality of “the forest” does not pre-exist its engagement with the process of commodification, but instead, its materiality is an effect of the constitution of the frame of exchange that allows for the forest to have meaning as a commodity, where the framing of exchange itself occurs through an unstable, recursive, and reflexive articulation between the material and the abstract. The forest exists, yes, but the material qualities that are of concern to us in the context of its commodification – the ephemerality of its carbon-accumulating biomass, its spatial extent, and its rich alluvial soils that are so attractive to farmers – in short, its entanglements that continually threaten to interrupt the frame of exchange emerge as such through the process of framing itself. At this point, I posit that it is worth reconsidering the idea that “neoliberalism” is a process that acts on the world in a way that is productive of natural, cultural, and social hybrids: socio-natures, cyborgs or quasi-objects. Instead, I suggest that we should consider the actions of the actors that performed these transects in a slightly different light. My focus in this chapter has been on the moment-by-moment reiteration of the offset; how the presence of the offset is re-produced through the bodily actions of the group assessing it. It is through these iterative performances that the commodity-object is produced while simultaneously strengthening the network of investors, consumers, and

producers that comprise “the market” through which the offset is circulated. In the same way that it is problematic to speak of nature and society in binary terms, I argue that understanding neoliberalism and the non-human from an analytic that separates the two poses similar challenges. Instead of thinking of commodification as a process that acts on “the forest,” or positing that the properties of the forest confounds its commodification. I propose that, instead, the commodification of carbon should be thought of as a performance where both the forest and the circuits of exchange through which it circulates as a commodity are co-emergent as temporarily stabilized, mutually imbricated, moments of being. This idea – that the objects of economic exchange as well as the frame of exchange itself are co-produced through the performative effects of practices of measure, calculation and description – has implications for recent scholarship on the neoliberalization of nature, especially for writings that have attended to nature’s materiality, whether pre-existing or constructed. In short, this body of work has broadly argued that nature, or the non-human, is too complex, intransigent, and context- dependent to become fully incorporated within processes that are guided by the austere theoretical models of economists (see Castree 2008a for a summary). This argumentative framework has led to a variety of writings that have persuasively documented myriad ways in which neoliberal rationality has “failed” to fully incorporate socio-natures within neo-liberal logics of privatization, de-regulation, and commodification (e.g. Bakker 2004; St. Martin 2002). To invoke the language of Callon, these writings have largely focused on the “overflows” that nature’s qualities produce in the process of neoliberalization. While cognizant of the diversity and utility of these writings, I have employed an approach that centers around the “reflexive performativity” of actors in order to avoid a feature that I believe permeates a number of writings in this literature that attend to the materiality of nature: its critical stance is underpinned by the same oppositional binary between “nature” and “the economic” that informs the very same neoliberal processes that it critiques. For both neoclassical economic theory and its critics, the non-human is posited as the economic other. Under the logics of neoliberalism, the non-human exists

outside the functioning of economic rationality until it can come to be framed in a way so that it enters into the rationality of economic actors. It is this binary logic that has lead to ongoing efforts to, for example, privatize water and commodify the atmosphere (see Bakker 2004; Bumpus and Liverman 2008). Geographers who are critics of these projects, however, have reversed this binary and have posited nature as that which cannot be fully incorporated into the economic sphere. Thus, for example, writers working under a broadly Polanyian critique of capitalism treat the non-human as an object that, in the course of its incorporation within a neoliberal process, requires Polanyi’s “double movement” – special protection by the state - such is its “otherness” to the economic (e.g. Mansfield 2004; McCarthy 2004). My intention here is not to provide a fleshed-out critique of the explanatory efficaciousness of writings within geography on neoliberal natures that engage with its materiality from a broadly substantivist approach. Instead, I flag this feature in order to highlight the analytic possibilities that emerge when one takes an approach that centers on neoliberalism as a performance. Seen in this light, commodification (one variant of neoliberalism) can be understood as the simultaneous constitution of particular economic frames of being and the objects of exchange themselves. As my descriptions in this chapter have shown, this is far from a durable state. Instead, I highlight the precariousness of neoliberal projects, where the process of neoliberalizing nature is fraught with moments of its own undoing, where its fragility is not a result of an exogenous materiality. Rather, the incompatibility of nature’s materiality is integral to neoliberalism’s own moments of becoming.

3.7 Conclusion In this chapter, I have tried to address the question of the materiality and agency of the non-human by exploring what these terms mean in the performative moments where both “the economic” and its objects are emergent. I have demonstrated how technologies such as maps and GPS devices occupy a transitive space between the abstract and the material, and it is through this very transitive movement that calculative

agencies are formed. I have shown that it is through the formation of these calculative agencies that the economic frame of “carbon trading” and the carbon offset commodity are emergent – an emergence that, like the map itself – occurs by positioning the space, and the actors performing the space, in between an ongoing articulation between the abstract and the material. I then analyzed how this process occurs through the self- reflexive actions of actors, who employ the very same metaphors of scale and tricks of perspective that we social scientists use to understand their actions. It is through this reflexive understanding of what their performance was supposed to accomplish that ultimately made some spaces temporarily untenable as commodities. My analysis does not seek to identify biophysical qualities of the forest that have “interrupted” its commodification, nor have I tried to speculate on how the process of commodification, and the epistemological stance of those seeking to “commodify nature,” is inadequate for understanding the ontology of the non-human. Instead, I have sought to understand the practices by which abstractions, materiality, and the economic itself are produced, linked, and mobilized. It is through these ongoing linkages and mobilizations that the agencies of particular actors become constituted. In the case of the indigenous president, this process constrained his agency in particular ways. In the case the Italian volunteers who came to visit Costa Rica, their agency as verifiers of the space emerged from their performance. And in the case of the forest, its materiality and its agency, can be understood as an effect of this performative process. The forest’s spatial extent and its ephermerality—those qualities that require costly and contentious verification trips in the first place—exist as “barriers” to commodification only in so far as these performances which join, and create, the forest as commodity with frame of exchange itself continue to operate.

Chapter 4: Territorializing the Indigenous Body: Discourse, the State, and the Spaces of Accumulation

4.1 Introduction

For the indians live now just as their ancestors lived before the discovery, neither better nor worse, and they will go on living thus indefinitely, unless by some opportune help the foundations are laid for the future progress of the race, to which it is a right, as the mother in part of our own and as a member of the Costarican [sic] family.

Alejo Marin, Letter to the governor of Limon District, January 12, 1897 (Marin 1897, p. 509)

At the time Alejo Marin wrote these words he was the Jefe Politico (Political Chief) for the Talamanca region, an economically marginal space over which the Costa Rican state exerted only tenuous claims to sovereignty. Within fifteen years of this letter’s composition, the region would become transformed from a lightly populated area of indigenous peoples and a few agricultural colonists to a vast network of railroads and banana plantations. In the midst of this transformation, in 1916, the United Fruit Company (hereafter UFC) drafted a cartographic map of property claims in the Talamanca valley. In response to pressure from government ministers, the UFC set aside a small space that was to comprise land reserved for “indigenous peoples and agricultural colonists” (ANCR 1916; see figure 4.1). This “reserve” was short-lived as the UFC began to occupy even this land less than a year later (Bourgois 1994, p. 61; Boza 2004). Nevertheless, this cartographic space marked the first appearance of an “indigenous reserve” in the Talmanca region—a Cartesian space set aside specifically for indigenous bodies to occupy. Not until 1977 would such a space appear again, when the Ley Indigena was passed, and the Talamanca Indigenous Reserve was created (Guervara and Chacón 1992).

Figure 4.1: UFC property maps. Color map (ANCR 1916b) was made specifically to delineate the reserve and is laid over a larger black-and-white UFC property map (ANCR 1916a). Both maps delineate the property claims of the UFC and others, baldio land, and a “reserve for the indians and colonizers of Talmanca, in accordance with Decree XXII of 21 December 1885.” (writing on bottom right). The area set aside as a reserve is marked with red border (added by author). Colored blocks of land are property held by different claimants, with the reserve consisting of land claimed by three different parties. The yellow block belongs to the UFC.

Split into two adjacent reserves in 1988, today the Cabécar and Bribri indigenous reserves are today the site where the carbon offset projects under study in this dissertation unfold. A recent attempt to create a CDM carbon forestry offset in this region was explicitly located within these two reserves. The title of the project – “Carbon fixation in cacao agroforestry on indigenous farms in Talamanca, Limón, Costa Rica” – identifies the carbon as being explicitly tied to indigenous farming that is located within one of the Costa Rican state’s districts. The first-half of the report explicitly and repeatedly defines the space of this project in relation to these two indigenous reserves, where the project area is contained entirely within the boundaries of these spaces (CATIE 2006; see figure 5.2). The report also documents a variety of geologic, meterological, and demographic characteristics that are embedded within the spaces of these two indigenous territories (Figure 5.3). In other words, the carbon project is situated within a territorial purview that has defined indigenous territories since their creation in 1977. These territories are spaces that have features that separate them from the nation-state – juridical spaces with their own forms of property and governance that differ from the rest of the country – but are nevertheless part of Costa Rica as well, with various forms of resource management that are ultimately subject to the laws of the nation.15

15 For example, the sale and demarcation of property is handled by the reserves’ governance structure – the Development Council. In the eyes of the state, the Development Council is the owner of all of the property within the reserve, and the delineation of individual title is considered to be an internal matter, where individual land titles are registered and granted by the Development Council. Nevertheless, indigenous peoples are still subject to state laws. This is true regarding various forms of resource use. In order to extract timber from one’s property, for example, a land owner must follow the same state-mandated guidelines that all property owners in the country follow. Similarly, mining rights are determined by the state (see Guevara and Chacon 1992). 95

Figure 4.2: Map of the carbon project area. This was taken from the project’s final report. The project area is represented by the light green spaces that stretch across the Cabécar Indigenous Reserve (brown) and the Bribri Indigenous Reserve (dark green). Map taken from CATIE 2006, p. 8.1.

Figure 4.3: Map from the final carbon project document (CATIE 2006, p. 15). This one shows Holdridge Life Zones (land use classification based on climactic data) found in the project area, with the spaces of the project embedded within the Cabécar and Bribri reserves. Similar maps show other characteristics such as population density, soil types, land use, precipitation, geology, elevation, and endangered species within these spaces.

In this chapter, I explore the historical emergence of this territorial form, where indigenous territories are demarcated as spaces for indigenous peoples that are simultaneously separate from, yet still part of, the Costa Rican nation-state. I do this by analyzing the creation of the short lived “indigenous reserve” by the UFC in 1916 as a historical moment where the hegemony of this form of territoriality was first crystallized by the map. The cartographic space may appear to be little more than an attempt by the UFC to satisfy a few pesky government bureaucrats; an insignificant event in the long history of the marginalization of indigenous peoples and the dispossession of their lands. In this chapter, however, I argue that the carving out of this space for indigenous peoples by the UFC was reflective of a broader process that saw the emergence of the indigenous body as a particular discursive object; an object that had a relation to space that was incompatible with producing value. Within this discursive formation the region was rendered legible in ways that produced space as a bounded, discrete, and cellular object (Brenner et al. 2003; Lefebvre 2003; Poulantzas 2000). This discursive formation was productive of a wider process of territorialization, where particular political-economic processes coalesced around these spatial forms, ultimately allowing for the constitution of the nation-state to become folded into the production of such spatial forms. Ultimately, this was a process that helped facilitate the Talamanca region as a space of primitive accumulation, where indigenous bodies were settled in reserves, and the region was divided into the abstract spaces of private property. I explore the discursive basis for this moment of territorial hegemony by analyzing the writings of William Gabb, an American geologist who visited the Talamanca region on behalf of the United Fruit Company, and Henri Pittier, a geographer who produced a national map for the Costa Rican state in the early 20th century. I contend that Gabb and Pittier’s writings mark a discursive shift that have helped underpin the assumptions that mark the emergence of particular spaces of the nation-state. My analysis of the discursive statements made by explorers, scientists, and bureaucrats about Talamanca in the mid-19th century is intended to help us understand how, by 1897, when Alejo Marin wrote about improving “the mother race” of the Costa Rican family, he was

referring to a process of folding the space of this region into the constitution of the Costa Rican nation – a process of territorialization that meant incorporating these bodies as part of the territory of the nation and simultaneously separate from it. This chapter is structured as follows. The next section discusses writings on state territory and argues how a Foucauldian understanding of discourse is a productive way to understand how the process of territorialization unfolds. In section 4.3, I introduce the key players in the territorialization of Talamanca—Gabb, Pittier, the state, and the United Fruit Company. The subsequent section analyzes writings from the 19th century and the emergence of the indigenous body as a discursive object, and its discursive relation to space. Next, I provide a history of primitive accumulation in the region, where the United Fruit Company began occupying lands in the Talamanca valley, causing a conflict with the state’s own territorial ambitions in the region—a process that resulted in the short- lived “indigenous reserve”. I discuss how this process was produced, in part, by a discursive formation that posited indigenous bodies and their relation to space in ways that are productive of state territorialization.

4.2 Territorialization and Discourse A number of historical geographers have analyzed the relation between the spatial practices of both the colonial and capitalist state and their effects on indigenous peoples (Braun 2002; Harris 2004; Wainwright 2009). Writers have shown how the spatiality of power that emerges from state practices such as mapping have resulted in the dispossession of indigenous peoples from their lands (Harris 2004; Sparke 2005) and rearranged the geographies of indigenous communities (Wainwright 2008). A number of post-colonial scholars have shown that these actions are far from uniform across society, but instead, often occur through multiple and complex social relations (Goswami 2004; Mitchell 2002). The ways in which the state and capital use and command space, for example, are not always harmonious, but rather, could often operate in tension with each other (e.g. Gidwani 2008). My focus in this chapter is on the apparent conflict between the state and transnational capital over the territory of Talamanca and the status of

indigenous peoples therein, and the ways in which this conflict was grounded in a common discursive formation about indigenous bodies, where the brief resolution to this conflict was symptomatic of the crystallization of particular hegemonic conceptions of space and territory. To make this argument, I draw on Foucault’s (1972) archaeological approach to discourse as a way to think about how bodies become territorialized. In its most basic formulation, an archaeology asks what “serious” statements can be made and the conditions that allow for such statements to form. Applied to the writings of 19th century scientists in Costa Rica, Foucault’s archaeological method provides a way to understand the conditions that have allowed for their statements to become intelligible amid the network of government officials, capitalists, and other scientists within which these statements circulate. Instead of evaluating their writings in terms of an empirical truth or falsity, an archaeology identifies the types of statements about the indigenous body and space that can be understood as statements that are true or false, and inquire about the conditions that allow such statements to emerge. This approach appeals to neither the rules of grammar nor logic to answer these questions, but rather, to a more variable and less obvious set of rules that guide discourse. These discursive rules of formation shape the type of statements that can be made. They refer not to the necessary and sufficient conditions that a statement must fulfill to be intelligible, but rather, “rules of formation” are understood here as the ways in which statements are related to each other. As Foucault puts it: “A statement always has borders peopled by other statements” (Foucault 1972, p. 97). Foucault labeled the dispersion of these statements discursive formations. This approach opens a line of questioning about the emergence of the spaces of primitive accumulation: what are acceptable ways of speaking about indigenous bodies and the spaces they occupy? What are the effects of speaking this way on the production of territory? In this chapter I use a Foucauldian approach to discourse in order to engage with two schools of thought concerning territory. First, post-colonial writings that have explored the close relation between the process of territoriality – the strategy of using and

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commanding space – and subject formation, where both of these processes are produced, in part, through discourse (e.g. Braun 2002; Said 1979; Sparke 2005; Wainwright 2008). While territory is undeniably material, these writings show that it is also constituted by a discursive process that is simultaneously produce the “subject” of territory. Here, territorialization can be understood as a practice of defining inclusions and exclusions with regard to particular objects and conditions, discursively and materially marking a constitutive “inside” and oppositional “outside” (Ó Tuathail 1996; Vandergeest and Peluso 1995). Through this process of securing a stable “inside”, one’s subjectivity becomes constituted through an attachment to particular objects, spaces, and conditions (Dalby 1991; Said 1979). Such an attachment is created, however, not only through the formation of the subject that comes to be included inside territory, but through discursive and material practices of exclusion as well, demonstrating who, and where, the “barbarians” are (Said 1979, p. 54). Here, territory can be read as a strategy of demarcating the spaces that constitute not only one’s subjectivity, but also, the exterior spaces that constitute “the other” (Dalby 2002; Grove 2009). Thus, territorialization can be thought of as a process that extends not just to space, but to bodies – territory’s subjects and it’s others – that define the inclusions and exclusions of territory’s being. In this way, territorialization is a process not limited to a particular characterization of space, but one that extends to bodies as well, where some bodies become marked as the other. In understanding the link between discourse about the indigenous body and its relation to the territorialization of the Costa Rican nation-state, I also draw on a second set of arguments, from Marxist literature on the state, that broadly argues that territorialization is a process that occurs under historically specific conditions (e.g. Lefebvre 2003; Poulantzas 2000). Here, territory is a process that not only constitutes the identity of subjects, but the identity of the nation-state itself as well, where space becomes folded into the being of the nation-state. This includes a process by which the identity of the state is as a bounded territorial space – a geopolitical unit with boundaries, borders, and a defined spatial extent over which the state exerts control. It is also a

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process in which socio-economic relations become structured through an all- encompassing territorial space (Brenner et al. 2003; Poulantzas 2000). This is a process that occurs through the development of capitalist social relations, where the worker’s separation from the means of production is constitutive of a restructuring of socio-spatial relations that have come to define the modern capitalist nation-state (Jessop 1991; Poulantzas 2000). These readings of discourse and territory inform my understanding of the creation of an indigenous reserve by the UFC as a moment where the hegemony of the nation- state’s territoriality began to crystallize. I understand hegemony in the Gramscian sense, where power is constituted by consent as much as coercion, where people come to accept, and even support, specific modes of domination (Gramsci 1971; see also Burawoy 2001). These formative modes of consent are underscored by complex assemblages of state- society relations that ultimately result in particular modes of representation, discourse, and practice that come to be understood as “common sense”—uncontested assumptions that guide social, economic and political action (e.g. Gramsci 1971, pp. 12-13). My contention is that this brief appearance of the UFC’s demarcation of the indigenous reserve was a settlement between the state and capital in this region that was grounded in a common discursive formation about indigenous bodies and space, but also was the beginnings of the hegemonic territorialization of this region. To do so, I refer to Gramsci’s conception of hegemony, to refer not to the forceful taking of this region by the state, but the acceptance by the UFC that this space is part of the nation’s territory, where the spaces of Talamanca became folded into the being of the nation-state. This was a process that was grounded in particular discursive conceptions about the indigenous body. I argue that, underscoring this hegemonic territorialization was a discursive process by which the indigenous body became re-made into a subject of the nation, while simultaneously being excluded from specific Cartesian spaces of accumulation that came to define the territorialization of this region. In other words, during the process described below the indigenous body occupied an unstable position. It was at once an object of inclusion for the broader project of nation building, yet with

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regard to the indigenous body’s relation to space, it was an object of exclusion as well, resulting in the delineation of abstract property claims for the UFC, and separate Cartesian spaces for indigenous bodies.

4.3 The Struggle for Talamanca: The Key Players I engage in a discursive analysis primarily by examining the writings of William Gabb and Henri Pittier. Gabb was an American geologist who was hired by Henry Meigs Keith, the uncle of Minor C. Keith, one of the founders of the United Fruit Company, to explore the Talamanca region for petroleum and mineral deposits (Denyer and Soto Bonilla 1999; Keith 1872). Gabb spent three years in Talamanca, from 1874 to 1877, looking for such deposits as well as evaluating the region in terms of its potential to support commercial agriculture. In addition, he conducted a population survey of the area, created a Bribri-to-English dictionary, and had a child with an indigenous woman (Denyer and Soto Bonilla 1999; Gabb n.d.; Gabb 1875). His notes on the population and natural resources of Talamanca were written up as a report to the government of Costa Rica (Gabb n.d.), and delivered as an address to the American Philosophical Society in 1875 (Gabb 1875). Gabb was one of many foreign scientists and naturalists who came to Talamanca during this time looking for exploitable mineral deposits, all with little success (Fernandez Guardia 2006; Frantzius 1882). Gabb reported that he had found little in the way of commercially exploitable petroleum deposits, he did provide fairly extensive observations about the indigenous inhabitants of the area, as well as the region’s potential for commercial agriculture. Working a few decades after Gabb, Henri Pittier was a Swiss civil engineer, who was hired by the Costa Rican government to teach secondary school at the newly formed Liceo and Colegio in San José. Upon his arrival, Pittier was able to convince local politicians to create a meteorological observatory in San José. Soon thereafter Pittier began lobbying the government to consolidate the observatory with the Museo Nacional (National Museum) in order to begin a project of producing a detailed map of the country (Eakin 1999). Frequent border disputes with both Nicaragua and Colombia (today’s

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Panama), as well as the possibility of a inter-ocean canal meant that government leaders had a keen interest in a systematic study of the country’s geography, and knowing exactly what was in the frontier spaces of the country. In 1889 the Museo Nacional and the Instituto Meterologico (Meterological Institute) were combined to form the country’s first geographic institute, the Instituto Geográfico-Físico Nacional de Costa Rica (Costa Rican National Institute of Physical Geography), with Pittier named as its first director (Eakin 1999). Pittier and his team began mapping work in 1891 and continued, with varying levels of government support, until the map was completed in 1901. These efforts involved excursions to the country’s southern regions, where detailed and extensive inventories were taken of the country’s topography, rivers, plants, and animals (e.g. Pittier 1891; Pittier 1893; Pittier 1895). In addition, extensive measurements and observations of indigenous inhabitants were made as well (e.g. Pittier n.d.; Pittier 1892; Pittier 1895; Pittier 1898; Pittier 1938). After Pittier’s map was completed in 1901, however, its publication was delayed by the government so as not to complicate delicate negotiations with Panama over their common border. In 1903, the map was finally published, but without a southern border (Eakin 1999). The delay in Pittier’s map is reflects the unstable territorial context in which both Pittier and Gabb worked. In the early years of the newly-formed Republic of Costa Rica (beginning in 1838, when Costa Rica withdrew from the Central American Federation), the state had little control over the Talamanca region, which was effectively under control of the “Miskito Kingdom” until the signing of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty between the United States and the United Kingdom in 1850, which ended the British practice of using Mosquito peoples to maintain control over the Central American Caribbean coast (Boza 2003; Fernandez Guardia 2007). After 1850, state control over the area was still weak. Not until 1861 was the area visited by a representative of the Costa Rican government, the Comandant of the Port of Moin, who visited Talamanca and installed the first government functionary over the area (Boza 2003). In 1885 the Costa Rican state began to exercise more nominal control over Talamanca with the founding of the agricultural

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colony of San Bernardo, where land was reserved for settlers from the central valley. The colony, however, was always in need of supplies, and by 1895, there was little left of it (Boza 2003; Tonduz 1895). Meanwhile, the constant presence of Colombian nationals in the region were a source of concern for the state as the border between Panama and Costa Rica in this region remained an unresolved, and contentious, issue until the modern day border was agreed upon in 1941 (Boza 2004; Eakin 1999). The ongoing border dispute with Colombia (and later Panama) was a constant source of worry in the state’s efforts to secure this territory. Prior to independence from Spain, the Talamanca region was an area that straddled both sides of the Sixaola river – the river that today forms the boundary between Costa Rica and Panama. The Costa Rican state, while claiming this territory throughout the 19th and early 20th century, had little presence here – neither in the form of government functionaries nor in the presence “colonists.” Through much of the late 19th century, the non-indigenous population likely included more Colombian nationals than Costa Rican citizens (Boza 2004; Viales 2001). In 1900, the border dispute between Costa Rica and Colombia was arbitrated by the president of France, Emilio Loubet, who adjudicated the Talamanca valley to Colombia. Costa Rica rejected this decision, and Colombia was never in a position to pursue its claims. In 1903, Panama separated from Colombia, and continued to press its claims on the region. In 1907, both sides agreed to allow Chief Justice of the United States, Edward Douglas White, to adjudicate the dispute. In his 1914 decision, White granted the Talamanca valley to Costa Rica. Panama refused to accept this decision. A violent conflict between the two states arose in 1921 over their border, and formal relations between the two countries were suspended until 1928. A permanent agreement was not reached until 1941 with the Arias-Calderon Guardia Treaty, which fixed the present-day border between these two states (Eakin 1999; Edelman and Seligson 1994; Garcia Zuniga 1956). As we shall see, the UFC’s activities in this region complicated matters for the Costa Rican state. Prior to its acquisition of land in Costa Rica’s Talamanca valley, the UFC already had extensive banana plantations across the border in the Bocas del Toro

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region of Panama. The state’s presence in Talamanca throughout this period was minimal, and the continued economic integration of the Talamanca region with Panama through the UFC’s operations was a constant source of worry for the state.

4.3.1 Caciques and Other Liaisons: Antonio Saldaña and Guillermo Gabb While the presence of state functionaries, the military, and colonists was weak, the Costa Rican state did have some success in asserting its sovereignty by cultivating relations with various indigenous leaders in the region. In 1867, after a Bribri cacique (an indigenous leader) organized an attack on a non-indigenous settlement that resulted in the deaths of two non-indigenous people, the state passed a law that granted indigenous caciques the official post of Jefe Politico (Political Chief), a move that essentially deputized indigenous caciques as the chief state functionaries in the region, who then served as political liasons between the state and indigenous peoples (Boza 2003).16 Beginning in 1885, with the establishment of the San Bernardo agricultural colony, the cacique was replaced by non-indigenous professional bureaucrats in the role of Jefe Politico. Nevertheless, the role of the cacique, as intermediary between the state and the rest of the population remained critical for the state to maintain some degree of control over this area (Boza 2003; Borge and Villalobos 1996).

16 There is not sufficient space in this chapter to discuss the complex leadership structure of Bribri and Cabecar society in the nineteenth century, and the shifting role of the cacique. The Costa Rican anthropologist Bozzolli speculates that the position of the cacique originated in the late 18th century and existed as the third-highest position in the leadership hierarchy, with the highest position occupied by the Usecar, the Cabecar shaman, and the second highest being the funeral singers (stsökölpa). The caciques occupied the third most important position, where their original function was to act as essentially military chiefs and to serve as lay intermediaries between the Usecar and the general population. Sometime in the early nineteenth century, probably as a result of the ongoing conflict between the Bribri and the Terraba, there emerged a single cacique more powerful than the others, who adopted the title of “king.” During this conflict the Bribri were backed by the Miskito, and Bozzolli speculates that during this time one cacique managed to accumulate more power, and adopted the title of “king” in imitation of the Miskito. Originally the Costa Rican state meant to install multiple caciques as different Jefe Politicos of various parts of Talamanca, but instead, for reasons that are unclear only one cacique, Santiago Mayas, emerged as the Jefe Politico. For more on this history see Bozzolli (1973) and Boza (2003). 106

The cacique Antonio Saldaña, was appointed Jefe Politico in 1880 but abrogated his position in 1885, still maintained close relations with the government functionaries that followed, and was even on the government payroll (Boza 2003). Saldaña proved to be a reliable ally for the state. His background positioned him as an effective cultural and linguistic liaison between state funcitonaries and the indigenous population: he spoke Spanish and had traveled to Panama, Guatemala, and San José in an era where such trips for someone of his background were rare. A second critical actor in helping the Costa Rican state assert its control over Talamanca was none other than William Gabb’s son, William Gabb Lyon. Gabb Lyon was raised by an American merchant living in Talamanca, John Lyon, whose sister-in-law was Gabb Lyon’s mother (an indigenous woman). He grew up learning Spanish and English, and was educated in a Liceo (high school) in San José. In addition, he served as an interpreter and guide for naturalists and scientists visiting the region, including Henri Pittier (Boza 2003; Denyer and Soto Bonilla 1999). His educational background and family also meant that, alongside Antonio Saldaña, he was a key intermediary between the government and the indigenous population. Like Saldaña, Gabb received a salary from the government (Boza 2003). Incorporating Gabb and Saldaña as semi-formal government administrators was part of the Costa Rican government’s strategy to claim indigenous populations of Talamanca as citizens of Costa Rica. During this period, this was a critical strategy by the state to assert its claim to this region in light of ongoing border disputes with the Colombian state of Panama (and after 1903, the independent Republic of Panama). The state’s strategy of claiming the indigenous population as citizens was meant to strengthen its claims to the territory they occupy (Boza 2003). In their border dispute with Panama that went to arbitration in 1914 before the Chief Justice of the United States Edward Douglas White, the Costa Rican state filed a legal brief citing the presence of “civilized indians” on the Atlantic coast as part of its argument against Panamanian claims to their territory.17 (Costa Rica 1914; Boza 2003). Another way of strengthening these claims of

17 The detailed context of this claim was that Costa Rica was arguing against an 1803 colonial decision that rendered most of the Atlantic coast of Costa Rica as part of the ungovernable “Mosquito Coast.” This decision was the basis for Colombia’s earlier claim over the entire North 107

citizenship was to organize voting by indigenous peoples in the Talamanca region. Here, Gabb Lyon and Saladaña played critical roles in organizing, and delivering votes. By 1909 their involvement in the political process had become entrenched enough that Gabb Lyon was denounced by the Republican Party in its official paper for promising to deliver the indigenous vote for the Civil Party in exchange for personal favors and concessions (see Boza 2003, p. 130) As we shall see later in this chapter, the insertion of Gabb and Saldaña into the political system helped play a role in future conflict between the UFC and the state over land possession in Talamanca.

4.3.2 The United Fruit Company While the Costa Rican state maintained tenuous links to Talamanca, the United Fruit Company was considerably more successful in asserting its own control over this region. Later in this chapter, I will provide more details on the UFC’s appropriation of land in Talamanca. Here, I will note that the UFC had long had a contradictory relationship with the Costa Rican state. One of the company founders, Minor Keith, got his start in bananas when he was contracted in 1883 to build a railroad from Limon to San José (Edelman and Kenen 1989, pp. 59-61). It was with this agreement that the Keith brothers received a land concession of 800,000 hectares from the government (6% of the country’s total land area), which were soon converted into banana plantations that then spread south to Panama (Bourgois 1994; Seligson 1980).18 In 1899, the plantation

coast of Costa Rica. Central to this claim was the presence of “uncivilized indians” working in the service of the English. In the brief, the Costa Rican side argues:

“…it would be well to ask what uncivilized Indians, allied with the English, remained on the north shore of Costa Rica in 1803. There were none, of course; on the contrary all the Indian tribes inhabiting the region embraced between Matina and Cartago were entirely subject to the authorities of the province and of the Kingdom (p. 57).”

While no specific claims about indigenous peoples of Talamanca were made in this brief, it is clear that claiming sovereignty over indigenous bodies was part of the state’s legal strategy.

18 The now infamous Soto-Keith contract was one of many unfavorable financial deals the state made with transnational capital in efforts to build a railroad that can take coffee from the central 108

holdings of the Keith family were merged with the Boston Fruit Company to form the UFC (Striffler and Moberg 2003). This was also about the time that Minor Keith’s operations began to expand toward the Talamanca valley. An outbreak of disease in the Bocas del Toro region of Panama necessitated a search for new banana land farther north, and by 1912 the first land in Talamanca was being legally appropriated by the UFC, and by the end of 1913 the UFC had come to possess 13,111 hectares of land in Talamanca (Borge and Villalobos 1996). By 1916 a railroad line between the Bocas region in Panama and heart of the Talamanca valley at Suretka, where the Telire and Coen rivers meet (figure 4.4), was established (Borge and Villalobos 1996; Boza 2003; Vargas Carranza 1985). By this time, the UFC’s operations in Talamanca left the region considerably more economically integrated with Panama than with the rest of Costa Rica. Currency in circulation was either in Panamanian balboas or dollars, and the railroad line meant that there were considerably stronger transportation and communication ties to the Bocas region of Panama than with the rest of the Costa Rica (Boza 2004; Viales 2001). By 1916, the UFC had arguably more “success” at integrating the Talamanca region into its production networks than the Costa Rican state had in securing their sovereignty over this region. This state of affairs was not lost on Costa Rican ministers and politicians, many of whom actively opposed the UFC’s incursions into this region (Boza 2003). I will detail the nature and extent of this opposition in a later section. Above, however, I have provided this thumbnail sketch of the activities of the state and the UFC in this region in order to note the context in which Gabb and Pittier carried out their work.19 In the next

highlands to the Atlantic coast. Previous efforts to secure financing for a railroad resulted in deals with financial houses in Europe that charged hefty commissions, with often less than half of the loan amounts ending up in the hands of the state (Seligson 1980, pgs. 50-51).

19 During their time in Cost Rica Gabb was under contract with Minor Keith, and Pittier worked for the Costa Rican state. It is not my intention here, however, to set these two up as being in some sort of proxy conflict. Much of my material for Gabb, in fact, comes from a report he wrote for the Costa Rican government, with recommendations for how to better “develop” the region. Similarly, the Instituto Físico Geográfico-Nacional, which Pittier founded, received substantial support from the UFC during his time there. Eventually, Pittier quit his post at the Instituto d ue t o 109

section I will analyze how the indigenous body and its relation to space emerged through the writings of these two scientists, and in the following section I will argue that, even though the state and the UFC were often at odds over their ambitions in this region, they both were operating within the same hegemonic conception of space and territoriality that ultimately secured this region as part of the Costa Rican state’s territory, and marked the indigenous body as an object of exclusion from this territory.

his frustration at the lack of state funding, and went to work as an agronomist for the UFC (Eakin 1999). 110

Figure 4.4: Map showing the area of eventual UFC occupation, railroad lines, and areas of indigenous “migration.” Map adapted from Borge and Villalobos 1995 and Vargas Carranza 1985.

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4.4 Gabb and Pittier: The Emergence of the Indigenous Body as Discursive Object The document, then, is no longer for history an inert material through which it tries to reconstitute what men have done or said…history is now trying to define within the documentary material itself unities, totalities, series, relations.

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault 1972, p. 7)

Gabb’s writings are notable in that they are among the first writings of this era that specifically posited the indigenous body as responsible for the agricultural productivity of land.20 While descriptions of the indigenous inhabitants of Costa Rica were common in colonial-era writings from the 17th and 18th century, these writings rarely posited the indigenous body as a source of agricultural productivity. Instead, agricultural productivity was seen as a feature of the landscape itself, not the result of indigenous labor. For example, in 1610, Fray Agustin de Ceballos wrote that the Talamanca region contains: …fertile land that produces advantageously all the seeds and plants of this region, such as maiz, yuca, batata, oyamas, plantain and every type of fruit; being the temperament of benevolent land that all of the months of the year corn is sown and harvested. [The land] is abundant in cacao and of the best type and quality… (Ceballos 1610, cited in Fernandez Guardia 2006, p. 4; my translation).21

Here, it is the land itself that produces cacao, seeds, fruits, and other plants of this region. This trope of the abundance of the land itself extended well into the colonial era. Here is Fray Manual de Urcullu, writing in 1763:

20In fact, Gabb, along with Pittier, were among the few people who visited this region that wrote in any detail about the indigenous inhabitants at all. The work of the German geologist, Alexander von Frantzius (1882), for example, was exclusively focused on minerals and geological formations, or the writings of Bishop Thiel (1896) were accounts of his daily activities and only included references to indigenous peoples in passing

21 “…tierra fertile y que produce con ventajas todas las semillas y plantas de esta region, como es maiz, yucas, batatas, oyamas, platan y todo genero de frutas; siendo el temperamento de la tierra tan benevolo que en todos los meses del ano siembran y cogen maiz. Abunda de cacao y de los major del reino en cantidad y calidad…

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That which the mountains produce for human life are an abundance of plantain, pejibayes, guayabas…and lots of maize, since it is sown all year round (Urcullu 1763, cited in Fernandez Guardia 2006, p. 10).22

Such products are not the result of any labor, but rather, are provided by the mountain itself. Again, maize is sown year round, but not as the result of work by anyone, instead, the food simply grows. (footnote: This trope concerning the abundance of nature that can be found elsewhere in colonial writings in Latin America (see Wainwright 2008, pg. 72- 78). In contrast, by the time Gabb visited Talamanca, the landscape itself had been discursively transformed from the luxuriant and bountiful area described in colonial writings, to a chaotic and foreboding wilderness. Describing the coastal areas of Talamanca, Gabb wrote:

Their muddy shores are overgrown with a dense forest that forms an almost impassable barrier to the adventurous traveler who tries to penetrate their dark recesses…Some of these lagoons are so dark and forbidding that the simple hearted, ignorant people living near them, have all sorts of superstitious beliefs regarding them (Gabb n.d., pp. 10-11).

In this passage, Talamanca is a sexualized and disorderly place that exists outside the norms of civilization. It is a place that is occupied by indigenous inhabitants who are “simple” and “ignorant.” I suggest that these terms are more than racist put-downs, but rather, symptomatic of a way of speaking about the indigenous body, and the body’s relation to space, that followed particular patterns. I propose three such patterns below. First, the indigenous body is irrational in its use of labor. Concerning indigenous cacao production, Gabb wrote:

22 Lo que producen dichas montanas para la vida humana son platano con abundancia, pejibayes, guayabas, yucas, camotes, batatas y mucho maiz, porque se siembra en todo el año.

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Cacao is in great demand…It is the greatest luxury they possess. And still, I have never seen a young cacao tree belonging to an Indian. They depend for their supply on the old trees, planted by past generations. I have known an Indian make a two days’ journey to collect a little cacao, when less labor would plant him fifty trees near his house (Gabb 1875, p. 523).

Here, cacao trees are not the result of work done by an indigenous farmer, but rather, something that was already there for them to appropriate. This appropriation of past generations’ efforts signifies an irrational, and under-optimized form of labor, ultimately denying the land, and themselves, the full agricultural potential of the region. In his writings, Gabb found situations like this infuriating, and ultimately concluded that the indigenous body was irredeemably “uncivilized:”

No money inducement, not even double or triple wages will make an Indian work when he does not want to…When an Indian is in debt he will work to clear himself, but one not in debt considers himself under no obligation to labor. Possibly the introduction of civilized emigrants, with the new customs and wants that they will take with them, will in the course of time teach these people to be a little more industrious; but not much can be helped from them. Colonists must do their own work, or take their own laborer with them (Gabb n.d., p. 86).

Such thoughts were not confined to Gabb alone. Reports from the Jefe Politicos stationed in this region are replete with similar tropes about the uncivilized, and superstitious, nature of the indigenous inhabitants. The epigram that begins this chapter was one of a pattern of decades of reports to the regional governor imploring him for more funds or supplies to help reform the “uncivilized” and “irrational” indigene. This included pleas for schools, roads, and more security. For example, in 1907, a government functionary wrote to the Secretary of State’s office, imploring the office for greater state involvement in the region to “protect” the Bribri: “…if there is no law, there should be one passed favor of these aborigines of Talamanca. It is very hard to think, besides, that these wretches have no property whatsoever” (Saborio 1907). While Gabb was frustrated by the apparent irrationality of the indigenous body, his writings also followed a second rule concerning the spaces of indigenous labor: the

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indigenous body produces chaotic and unruly spaces. In describing the manner in which maizee is grown, Gabb writes:

Maize grows wherever planted and receives so little care that I have seen a good crop gathered where the weeds have actually overtaken the maizee stalks. The Indians often clear a raw piece of forest, burn over the light brush…then plant their crop, and never trouble themselves about it again until it is ripe (Gabb n.d., p. 72).

Here, maize is produced in spite of indigenous production methods, where the weeds overtake the maize stalks. This characterization of indigenous agriculture as chaotic and unplanned was a common characterization in this era. In 1912, the region’s Jefe Politico wrote:

…though the maize grown by the Indians to make their chichi (a native beverage) gives a very small yield, because it is not only planted on a very small scale but it is also badly done, the seed-corn being scattered by handfuls. There is, therefore no hope of any intensive development of agriculture as long as the population consists of natives, addicted as they are by nature to idleness and sloth (Lara 1912, pg. 648).

In this passage, we see the discursive emergence of specific agricultural spaces that are produced by indigenous bodies, but are spaces that are ultimately “neglected,” “scattered,” and “badly done,” produced by bodies that are, “by nature,” idle. Such spaces were of little value, which, for Gabb, meant that the Talamanca region existed as a region of potential value only. In his writings, he gushes at the potential of the region:

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The agricultural resources of Talamanca are its great wealth, and are sufficient to make it equal in value to any other equivalent area of the Republic. It never suffers from droughts and, with a climate about the same as that of the country east of Cartago, it has a soil of varied character, suitable for all of the productions of the tropics (Gabb n.d. p. 72).23

Gabb dedicates substantial space to the ways in which the region could be transformed to take advantage of such potential. Nowhere, however, are the spaces produced by the indigenous body considered to be a source of current or potential value. In addition to the indigenous body’s “irrationality,” the physical body itself was posited as being responsible for the disorderly, and valueless, spaces of Talamanca. Thus, a third discursive rule: the indigenous body is unhealthy and lazy. Speaking the language of vitalism that was common in this day, Gabb saw the indigenous body as lacking the “vitality” necessary to realize the agricultural potential of this region. In Gabb’s report to the government he discusses his census and its indications of a declining population, Gabb writes: The cause of the rapid decrease in the population is their extreme indolence. With a country fitted to produce all the fruits of the tropics; where maize grows luxuriantly, and where cattle and pigs increase without care or labor; they are content to make plantains their staple, and almost their only food…The natural consequence of a bulky and comparatively innutritious diet is a low physical state (Gabb 1875, pg. 492).24

For Gabb, indigenous inhabitants live in a region where food practically grows itself, and yet they can only manage a minimal diet because, for Gabb, the indigenous body is

23 Gabb continues in this same vein for several pages in his report, detailing the how easily each type of commercial crop could grow. Considering his role as the eyes and ears of the Keith family, it is probable that his glowing descriptions are self-consciously exaggerated. Nevertheless, it is significant that his writings about the potential value in this region quite explicitly exclude anything produced by, or involving, indigenous bodies.

24 This theme is continued years later. One of the Jefe Politicos writes in 1912: “…anemia also prevails, consequent upon the poor food they procure, consisting of plantains, meat from the mountains when they can get it, cacao consumed in its bitter state for want of sugar or anything wherewith to sweeten it and their before-mentioned chichi (Lara 1912). 116

incapable of realizing the full potential of this region. This is because the indigenous peoples that occupy this region are, according to Gabb: “…without exception, a lazy, miserable, and unimprovable race” (Gabb 1875, p. 525). For Gabb, these features of the indigenous body, its irrationality and its inherent laziness, were barriers to developing the agricultural potential of this region. Gabb saw the region as containing great potential value, however, so long as the space of Talamanca is occupied by indigenous bodies, this value will never be realized:

(Cacao) could become one of the most important industries of the country, and would yield an increase to the people and the government; if attended to with the industry that characterizes the agricultural classes of the civilized portions of Costa Rica (Gabb n.d., pg. 73).

Gabb’s mention of “agricultural resources” refers not to the agriculture practiced by indigenous inhabitants, but rather, to the soils, climate, and rainfall of the area. These are resources that can potentially be transformed into something valuable, but only through labor; labor that needs to be done by the right kind of body. As Gabb makes explicit in his writings, this type of body must be one that has been “civilized,” is accustomed to the climate, and has the vital force necessary to transform the potential wealth into existing value. As Gabb saw it during his expedition, this space was empty of such value because the indigenous bodies that occupy were incapable of producing this transformation.

4.4.1 Pittier’s Bodily Calculations Gabb’s concern with the indigenous body reflected an era where indigenous bodies around the world were extensively described, measured, and accounted for – part of an ongoing process of governmentality in which frontier spaces were brought under the calculatory purview of the state (Anderson 2004; Braun 2000; Pels 1997). In this regard, the work of the Swiss geographer Henri Pittier was instrumental. Pittier’s writings displayed a often-times more sensitive observer. When discussing indigenous place names, he writes: “The indian is a great observer. Living from his infancy in intimate

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contact with nature, he is used to noting, with surprising agility, the smallest differences in the landscape and committing it to memory” (Pittier 1893, p. 87). While this passage contains familiar colonialist tropes of the indigene as uncivilized, there is also a level of sensitivity and respect in his writings that Gabb avoids. While Pittier’s more careful observations led to some more sympathetic descriptions, they resulted in extremely exacting ones as well. The above passage is part of an introduction to an extensively catalogued list of indigenous place names as well as animal and plant species. This detailed accounting extended to the indigenous body as well. Around 1895 Pittier published “First contribution toward the study of indigenous races of Costa Rica” (Pittier n.d.), which was a detailed study of bodily measurements that Pittier had taken of individual indigenous bodies. These were compiled in statistical tables as well as written descriptions of specific individuals, where he described features such as skin tone, pulse rate, eye color and head shape. This report also included drawn outlines of hands and feet as well as photographs of individuals (see figure 4.5). Such exacting data had the effect of placing indigenous bodies as one object among many that were contained within the state’s territorial purview. These measurements were one of many that Pittier and his assistants took of the climate, topography, flora and fauna of the southern areas of Costa Rica, in an effort to map and catalog the country’s territory (Eakin 1999). Here, indigenous peoples were transformed into data in way similar to Pitter’s weather readings and soil classifications, where such information become part of a circulation of knowledge that was ultimately housed in what Latour (1987) refers to as “centers of calculation”, in this case the Physical Geography Institute that Pittier founded. Where Gabb’s work contained a great many descriptions of the landscape, and the people therein, Pittier’s project extended beyond description into an exact accounting of the objects of the state’s territory. Through Pittier’s work, the indigenous body emerges as a discursive object that is knowable and measureable, a “graspable” part of the Costa Rican nation. Here, the discursive emergence of the indigenous body can be seen as part of an ongoing process of securing the territorial integrity of the Costa Rican nation-state, where the frontier regions of the

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state were secured, and its borders solidified. Pittier’s mandate to produce a map and inventory of the southern regions of Costa Rica was specifically linked to just such a process, where the state was seeking to further strengthen the country’s claim on this territory, whose boundaries were not formally defined with Panama until many years later (see Eakin 1999).

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Figure 4.5: Hand and foot measurements of indigenous bodies made by Henri Pittier. This was from one of his trips to the Borunca region in southwest Costa Rica (Pittier n.d., p. 153).

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Timothy Mitchell (1991) has argued that the state can be viewed as an effect of the mundane activities of statecraft—passports, fencing, currency control—where such practices produce the effect of the state as an entity external to society and enframe the space over which the state has control as part of the state itself – producing the effect of territory. Pittier’s efforts at mapping and cataloging the southern regions of Costa Rica can be seen as part of such mundane activities which ultimately produce the effect of territory. In this case, they produce indigenous population as part of the territory of the Costa Rican nation-state. A few years later, indigenous peoples helped the state further territorialize this region through the state’s claims to indigenous bodies, both in its negotiations with Panama over their border, and through incorporating indigenous peoples into the process of voting. While the production of the indigenous body as a discursive object allowed the state to lay claim to objects—and through them, its territory—the state was also busy opening other spaces within its territories as spaces of accumulation through the denuncio process of land claims. This was a process that the UFC skillfully used in order to acquire large blocks of land. The UFC’s incursions ultimately posed a perceived threat to the state’s sovereignty over this region. They also placed the indigenous body in a contradictory position in relation to the emergent territory of the state. I now turn to a brief history of this denuncio process, and the ways in which the UFC was able to use it to its advantage as a mechanism of primitive accumulation.

4.5 Denuncios, Baldios, and the UFC: Territory and Primitive Accumulation

This Mr. Peel even had the foresight to bring besides, 3,000 persons of the working class, men, women, and children. Once he arrived at this destination ‘Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river’. Unhappy Mr. Peel, who provided for everything except the export of English relations of production to Swan River.

-Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (Marx 1976)

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Even though the Costa Rican state broadly followed Gabb’s recommendations and established a small agricultural colony in this region, the state’s largest contribution to increasing the “productivity” of the land was through instituting the denuncio process of land claims in the Atlantic region. In 1839, the nascent state passed the “reglamento para la Hacienda Publica del Estado”, which converted all untitled land into baldios – or unproductive land that can be claimed (Guevara and Chacón 1991; see also Sluyter 1999). Shortly after this, in 1841, the dictator Braulio Carrillo, in an effort to facilitate the expansion of coffee plantings in the country’s central plateau (near San José), ended the practice of recognizing communal land tenure for indigenous peoples (Guevara and Chacón 1992). This effectively re-classified such lands as baldios and helped to legitimize land grabs by coffee growers during this time (Seligson 1980). Lands that were declared baldios were now open to the denuncio process, in which one could make a claim before the government to a tract of baldio land. In 1884, the baldio system was slightly modified so that a denuncio could only take place without infringing on the rights of “third parties.” This modification allowed for denuncios to be contested, and ultimately adjudicated by the state (Guevara and Chacón 1992; Viales 2001). In the latter half of the 19th century, denuncios became a major avenue for “opening up” the Atlantic Region to colonization. Between 1881 and 1935, there were 659 denuncios in Limón Province, covering approximately 214,000 hectares (approximately 23% of the province’s land area; see Viales 2001). Beginning in the 1890s, Minor Keith, already the largest landowner in the Limón province due to previous state land concessions, began acquiring land in the Talamanca through the denuncio process. In 1890, 20,000 hectares of land were claimed by the River Plate Company, the railroad company that Keith owned. This was the start of a period of intense land speculation, where an ever-growing number of land claims were made by Costa Ricans and foreign land speculators alike (Boza 2004; see also Borge and Villalobos 1995).25

25 Concerned that land speculation was growing out of control, the state passed a six month freeze on denuncios in 1896, which was eventually extended to 1898 (Boza 2004).

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The Costa Rican state also sought to extend its sovereignty over Talamanca by establishing the agricultural-military colony of San Bernardo in December 1885, one of a number of agricultural colonies established by the state throughout Costa Rica during this time (Viales 2001). Due to difficulties in attracting colonists and a number of leadership upheavals, the colony was ultimately unsuccessful. By 1895, the colony was found by the botanist Adolfo Tonduz to be “ruined and decayed,” without a single colonist (Tonduz, cited in Boza 2004, p. 213). Another colony was attempted in 1891 where the American businessman William Reynalds was to bring one hundred North American colonists to establish land on 10,000 hectares of baldio land in Talamanca (Bourgeios 1994; Boza 2003). Despite this land grant, the colony never materialized (Boza 2004; Guevara and Chacón 1998). It is within this context that the state’s strongest claims to sovereignty over the area were its links to the indigenous population, through the figures of Saldaña and Gabb Lyon. From 1885 to 1903, the position of Jefe Politico, the principal government representative in the area, was occupied by sixteen different people, many of whom would often leave their post for months at a time (Boza 2004). Beginning in 1907 the Jefe Politico began to stabilize when Federico Alvarado took up the post. During this time Alvarado began fostering close relations with these Gabb Lyon and Saldaña. Their abilities, and willingness, to act as mediators between the state and the indigenous population placed them as a critical hinge in the state’s efforts to assert its sovereignty in this region (Boza 2003). Such was their importance to the local state governance that writing in 1908, the Jefe Politico Federico Alvarado wrote: “today my authority has no necessary force until the cacique Antonio Saldaña is in its service” (cited in Boza 2003, pg. 125).

4.5.1 Denuncios as Capitalist Territorialization Writing about the spaces of the pre-capitalist state, Nicos Poulantzas (2000) writes that the barbarian does not exist “outside” of the state’s land. Such a conception of territory under a pre-capitalist mode of production did not employ such discrete spatial

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forms. Instead, Poulantzas argues, the barbarian was a no-land, belonging not “inside” or “outside” of the sovereign’s territory, but rather, simply not belonging. With the rise of the capitalist state, however, “territory” became the discrete spatial expression of an enclosure of power. I contend here that the denuncio process of the late 19th century is this territorial enclosure of power in the making. The baldios, land outside of the Cartesian abstractions of property, existed not as the “no-land” of the pre-capitalist state, but rather, as the state’s territorial other: land that is yet to be territorialized. In other words, baldios were the concretized “outside” of the abstract spaces of potential value that were produced by the denuncio system. Under this territorial enclosure, where the state’s “territorial grid” becomes ever more clearly defined, the indigenous body becomes further encaged within the state’s territorial purview (Brenner et al. 2003). Nevertheless, the state’s insecure sovereignty over this region necessitated other actions that incorporated indigenous bodies as part of the Costa Rican nation: putting indigenous caciques on the state payroll, facilitating voting, establishing Jefe Politicos who had the power to punish and coerce indigenous bodies (with the consent of the cacique), filing legal briefs that claimed those bodies as citizens of the Costa Rican nation. Through these two processes of state territorialization—the marking of capitalist spaces through the denuncio process and the inclusion of indigenous bodies within the state’s space—the indigenous body came to occupy a liminal position between the “inside” and “outside” of the nation. This position emerged through the discursive and material practices of the state, and of its agents. The discursive production of baldios and the denuncio process ultimately marked indigenous bodies, and the spaces they occupied, as objects in need of reform and improvement, and incongruent with the capitalist spaces of accumulation that the state was encouraging. Nevertheless, for the state to successfully assert its sovereignty in the region, it was still critical to the state that these bodies remained part of the nation, thus the state’s efforts to cultivate relationships with Gabb Lyon and Saldaña, and to extend the process of voting to indigenous populations.

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This unstable position of the indigenous body is reflective of a broader tension of the capitalist state’s territoriality. On one register, these mundane practices of statecraft serve to materialize the state: Pittier’s mapping, Gabb’s reconnaissance reports, the filing of legal briefs, and the running of elections. In this respect, they served to materialize the indigenous body as a member of the Costa Rican nation, a materialization that, at the time, was meant to help secure the state’s sovereignty over the Talamanca region. The demarcation of the abstract spaces of property through the denuncio process, however, resulted in the production of capitalist socio-spatial relations that simultaneously marked the indigenous body as “other.” This awkwardly-laid foundation upon which the state’s territoriality rested—an incongruent mix of the state’s assertions of territoriality through its claims on the indigenous body and the development of capitalist spaces that excluded these very bodies—was soon to show cracks from the weight of the United Fruit Company’s own assertion of space, with disastrous results for the indigenous peoples of Talamanca.

4.6 Territorialization Threatened: The UFC Expands A weak state presence in Talamanca, and the state’s already-established practices of granting land concessions in the Atlantic region, provided the context for further expansion of the United Fruit Company’s land holdings and operations to the Talamanca region. An outbreak of banana blight in the company’s holdings in the Bocas region of Panama in the 1890s provided the impetus for just such an expansion (Boza 2004; Vargas Carranza 1985). As mentioned earlier, Minor Keith had already laid claim to upwards of 20,000 hectares of land in Talamanca in the 1890s, and by 1913 the company had 12,734 hectares of titled land in their possession. That same year, construction on a railroad line into the Talamanca valley began, and by 1916, 1,200 hectares of bananas were planted (Bourgois 1994). By the beginning of the 1920s, the UFC was exporting 3 million bunches of bananas from the Talamanca and Sixaola regions each year (Bourgois 1994, p. 58).

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This relatively rapid expansion was able to occur through the denuncios made by Minor Keith, as well as by a combination of symbolic purchases of land from indigenous inhabitants combined with the threat of violence against them if they refused such offers (Bourgois 1994, pp. 59-66). By law, the UFC was supposed to provide a payment to anyone who was growing crops on baldio land that was adjudicated to them through the denuncio system (Bourgois 1994; Guevara and Chacón 1992; Viales 2001). In theory, this meant that indigenous inhabitants would be compensated for losing their land, but in reality, this resulted in little more than symbolic payments, if there were payments at all (Boza 2004; Bourgois 1994). These “purchases” were augmented by acts of violence against indigenous inhabitants, where their houses and crops were burned in order to intimidate them to leave the area (Boza 2004; Bourgois 1994). In response, Antonio Saldaña and Guillermo Gabb made appeals to the state to try and stop these practices. In 1907, for example, the Jefe Politico of Talamanca wrote to the Governance Secretary, on behalf of Saldaña and Gabb, requesting that the government: “prohibit foreign businesses from acquiring land that is currently occupied by bribri, talamanca and cabecar [sic] indians” (cited in Boza 2004, p. 228). Within the state, there were a number of actors who were sympathetic to these appeals. While many of the UFC’s land acquisitions were technically legal, the 1885 law that established the San Bernardo colony provided a legal avenue to oppose the UFC’s expansion. This law declared that land within a twenty mile radius from the colony was “off limits” to land claims (Bourgois 1994, p. 60). A number of government functionaries began complaining that this law was not being followed (ANCR 1912; see also Boza 2004, pg. 229). Concerned about the incursion of the UFC holdings onto state land, Ramon Figueroa, the Jefe Politico of Talamanca, wrote to the Governance Secretary in 1912 complaining that the UFC was spreading rumors that it was going to purchase land on the old site of the San Bernardo colony (Boza 2004), which in fact, it had already begun doing the year before (Bourgois 1994). In 1914 the Jefe Politico wrote to a Sub- Secretary of State requesting that the government dispatch a land surveyor down to “…delineate the two thousand hectares of land that have been adjudicated to the indians.”

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The Jefe Politico warned that: “If it turns out that you cannot comply with such a small request, I can assure you that no matter the size of the land adjudicated it will end up worthless because of the United Fruit Company’s opposition” (ANCR 1914). This particular request was denied due to lack of funds (ANCR 1914). With written appeals by the Jefe Politico to solidify territory for indigenous peoples having little effect, the Bribri cacique, Ramon Almengor, traveled to San José in 1915 (and again in 1916) to meet with government functionaries about indigenous claims against UFC land (Bourgois 1994, pg. 67). While the history of relations between the state and the UFC show that a number of high-level government ministers aided the UFC in their land acquisitions (Bourgois 1994, p. 67), other government functionaries in San José were concerned over the growing land acquisitions by the UFC in the Talamanca region, expressing concern that the Decreto of 1885 wasn’t being followed, and that the country was losing its sovereignty over the region (Boza 2004, pg. 234). While such government functionaries and various Jefe Politicos of Talamanca lent a sympathetic ear to indigenous complaints of land dispossession by the UFC, they most likely had an eye on the potential loss of the country’s sovereignty due to the UFC’s actions in Talamanca, where the UFC’s land acquisitions continued apace, strengthening this region’s economic ties to Panama. It is unclear how much effect the efforts of Bribri leaders and various government officials had in securing land for indigenous inhabitants. Nevertheless, the UFC finally recognized the need to at least nominally follow the law established in 1885. In 1916, therefore, it created a map of its property claims in Talamanca. On this map it set aside an area for an “Indian reserve” and, in a note dated 1917, it explained that it was a “reserve project for the indians and colonizers of Talamanca in accordance with the Decree No. XXII of December 27, 1885” (see figure 4.1). This land represented a fraction of the indigenous population’s former lands, but out of this minor conflict between the UFC and the state, came the first appearance of an indigenous reserve in Costa Rica. This concession, however, was short-lived. By 1918, the UFC began planting bananas within this area as well (Boza 2004; Bourgois 1994). By this time, the UFC’s

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further incursions into Talamanca began raising alarm bells in higher levels of the government. For example, in 1919 a congressman complained that Sipurio (the location of the San Bernardo colony) shouldn’t “…be a fiefdom of any Company.” (cited in Boza 2004, pg. 235). He expressed worry over the need to “nationalize” Talamanca with the goal of fortifying Costa Rica’s sovereignty over the region. That same year the government issued a decree that reserved 35-hectare blocks of land to be allocated only to “Costa Ricans by birth or nationalized foreigners”(Boza 2004, p. 235). In addition, the government promised to retain baldios in Talamanca of up to 2,000 hectares in order to distribute to indigenous peoples in the region, with the caveat that they could not be sold, with the state reserving the right to these properties (Guevara and Chacón 1992). This distribution, however, never occurred, and the UFC came to occupy almost the entire Talamanca valley, with indigenous inhabitants being forced to migrate to other areas in the hillsides (see figure 4.4).

4.6.1 Territorial Hegemony and Transgressive Bodies I give this account of competing land claims between the UFC, the state, and indigenous peoples in order to highlight the hegemony of particular forms of space in these claims, and how the emergence of the indigenous body as a discursive object was constitutive of this hegemonic production. As I show, the roots of the conflict can be seen in the indigenous body’s unstable position in relation to state space: it was at once part of, and in opposition to, the spatiality of the nation. This simultaneous movement of the indigenous body between inclusion and exclusion was ultimately untenable in light of the appropriation of territory by the United Fruit Company. The brief establishment of a specifically indigenous space can be read as a temporary settlement of the conflict between the UFC and the contradictions of the state’s own positioning of indigenous peoples. More importantly, the reserve solidified a hegemonic conception about indigenous bodies and their relation to space, in which they occupied a transgressive space between being part of the nation yet excluded from its spaces of property and accumulation.

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This unstable position can be seen as being productive of a state that was still asserting its sovereignty over territory while also facilitating the development of capitalist spaces. Nicos Poulantzas argues that the rise of capitalism marked a historical point where social relations were transformed by spaces that are “serial, fractured, cellular, and irreversible” (Poulantzas 2000, p. 103). By this, Poulantzas means that the separation of the direct producer from the means of production, and the severing of previous ties and bonds to the soil and sovereign, results in social relations that become formed within a new spatial grid, in which our social, economic, and political relations become defined by our movement in, and between, discrete social, juridical, economic, and political spaces of action, intelligibility, and belonging. And it is within this specifically capitalist spatial matrix, that the state exhibits control over both territory, and the subjects therein. As Poulantzas describes it: “The direct producers are freed from the soil only to become trapped in a grid – one that includes not only the factory but also the modern family, the school, the army, the prison system, the city and the national territory” (Poulantzas 2000, p. 105). The emergence of this spatial matrix, for Poulantzas, has the effect of territorializing the nation, where the conditions of production, as well as politics and social mobilization – class alliances and class struggles – occur within the discrete and bounded spaces of the nation. This process, through which people, social relations, and objects are structured through the development of a territorial grid is also one through which the space of the nation-state itself becomes coherent through material and representational practices. The brief contestation over the status of the Talamanca region between the UFC and the Costa Rican state can be seen as a movement within a wider process of territorialization, where the differences between the state and the UFC had the effect of reasserting the hegemony of particular spatial forms: property markers and abstract spatial containers that reinforced the capitalist social relations that have come to dominate this region, and ultimately, the spaces of Talamanca as unfolding within the territory of the Costa Rican nation-state.

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4.7 Conclusion The UFC remained in Talamanca until 1929, when an outbreak of Sigatoka disease led them to abandon their banana plantations and dismantle the railroad infrastructure that they had established (Borge and Villalobos 1996; Vargas Carranza 1985). Displaced indigenous peoples, who were forced to “migrate” to the surrounding highlands (see Figure 4.4) then slowly began to return to the valley. Their legal relationship to the land was in flux for some time. The practice of declaring indigenous lands as baldios officially ended with the passage of the “General Law on Baldio Lands” in 1939, which declared that “…places where (indigenous) tribes exist…” are considered “inalienable and the exclusive property of indigenous peoples” (Guevara and Chacón 1992). This law was further strengthened by an executive decree in 1956 and another law - Law 2330 - in 1959. Both of these reiterated this claim. In 1961, however, the 1939 baldio law was abrogated with the passage of the Law of Land and Colonization. This law declared indigenous occupied lands to be the property of the state and created the Institute for Land and Colonization (Spanish acronym: ITCO) to administer these areas (Guevara and Chacón 1992). While these laws recognized the existence of “indigenous land,” it wasn’t until 1977, with the passage of the Indigenous Law (Ley Indigena) that Cartesian spaces were carved out specifically for indigenous peoples (Borge and Villalobos 1996; Guevara and Chacón 1992). Since that time, these spaces – the Bribri and Cabécar Reserves – have been the legal and political grounds upon which development projects have unfolded in this region. Under the 1977 Ley Indigena, property rights are allocated as an internal matter by the Reserve’s Development Council (Guevara and Chacón 1992). This means that, for a carbon forestry project, payments for carbon sequestration credits – no matter whose land they are on – are paid to the Council, and then re-distributed (or not) to individual land-owners within the reserve. A discussion of how this current legal framework affects the way in which carbon offsets are implemented in indigenous reserves is not within the scope of this chapter. I note here, however, that under the purview of today’s indigenous reserves, the relationship between the indigenous body, the state, and its territory bears

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striking similarities to how this relationship became was solidified with the UFC’s “first” indigenous territory in 1916. Indigenous bodies are at once part of the state, yet separate from it within specially designated spaces. In this chapter I have shown how the territorialization of the nation-state of Costa Rica occurred through specific claims on indigenous bodies. I demonstrated that particular ways of speaking about indigenous bodies, and their relation to space, were constitutive of a process that allowed for indigenous peoples to be excluded from the spaces of private property and accumulation, while still being subject to claims by the state. This transitive position of the indigenous body was a result of the state’s efforts at territorializing its spaces while simultaneously working to secure the territory as a capitalist space. The position of the indigenous body became temporarily institutionalized through the demarcation of the first “indigenous reserve.” While this reserve was short- lived it was reflective of this hegemonic idea of the indigenous body—part of the nation, yet separate from it—that has informed the creation of indigenous reserves that exist today. My investigation here is meant to provide a historical-discursive context for ongoing carbon sequestration and other development project in this region because the carbon projects under study in this dissertation are consistently situated within specific spaces and territories that are productive of a historical process of capitalist territorialization that has its roots in the 19th century.

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Chapter 5: Local Neoliberalisms and Global Valuations: Carbon Calculations as Discursive Statements of Value

5.1 Introduction In 2004, the World Bank initiated a pilot carbon offset project among Bribri and Cabécar smallholders in southeast Costa Rica (Figure 5.1). This project’s goal was to create a carbon forestry offset under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), where indigenous land-users would receive a carbon payment for converting their pesticide- intensive plantain fields to more carbon-intensive cacao agroforestry practices. After project managers completed a cost-benefit analysis of various indigenous land-use practices, however, the focus of this project shifted. They determined that the opportunity costs of making this land-use change were too high, even with carbon financing. Instead, project managers calculated that carbon credits are better positioned to encourage the abandonment of swidden (slash-and-burn) systems of agriculture. In the course of performing these calculations, recently-fallowed land, or barbechos, were treated as their own separate agricultural space, one currently lacking economic value, but with high levels of carbon sequestration potential. Today, the project’s single largest source of carbon storage now comes from allowing barbechos to revert to secondary forest over a period of twenty years (CATIE 2006). As a result of these calculations, this project’s trajectory shifted from its original goal of reviving one form of indigenous agriculture to, instead, replacing another type. At first blush, the shift in this project’s trajectory can be seen as another example of the unintended negative effects of commodifying nature (Boyd et al. 2001; Castree 2003; Robertson 2000), where the universal demands of market exchange result in forms

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Figure 5.1: Location of the Bribri and Cabécar indigenous reserves, Talamanca, Costa Rica

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of representation that obscure local complexity in undesirable ways (Harvey 1996; McAfee 1999). A cursory glance at the specific econometric calculations of this project seem to confirm this pattern, and reveals potentially serious problems: fallow land is not without value in the context of a wider system of agriculture, where other crops will be planted there someday; the ecological results of taking all fallow land out of this cycle are not considered; fallow land is (often) part of a swidden system that provides subsistence foods that are often managed by women (Borge and Castillo 1997). While the ostensible goal of the carbon project was to promote ecologically friendly forms of land-use in a culturally sensitive way, this project’s calculations helped produce a final result that, in some ways, seem to run counter to these aims. This example follows a number of other cases where the articulation between the abstract calculations of neoliberal projects and local natures and spaces result in projects that differ from their original intent in ways that often silence local knowledge and threaten to have long-run negative social and environmental consequences (e.g. Hayden 2003; Prudham 2004). In this chapter I analyze the calculations that underpin the process of commodifying carbon among indigenous smallholders in Costa Rica. I do this by asking how and why the spaces of barbechos came to be understood as atomized “empty” spaces that are “ready” for sequestering a commodified form of carbon. I wish to analyze these calculations as a means to explore the relation between discourse and value in the process of producing a carbon commodity. I link these two processes together in order to understand how and why a commodity is produced that has a simultaneous relation toward specific local spaces (like the barbechos in this project) and a global conception of atmospheric carbon balance. Here, specific Cartesian spaces are marked as spaces of carbon storage. The usefulness of this storage, however, holds only in so far as these sites of carbon sequestration help contribute to a globally coordinated management of the world’s carbon cycle. This simultaneous orientation of a carbon offset toward both the local and the global leads me to analyze these calculations in relation to the concepts of discourse and value for the following reasons. First, I analyze these calculations as discursive

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statements, where I evaluate them not in terms of their correctness, or their correspondence with reality, but rather, in terms of the discursive context that allows for such calculations to be taken seriously by the contingent assemblage of actors needed for a carbon offset to come into being. In other words, I ask how these calculations came to be understood as intelligible statements, where each form of land use is understood as having a pre-exisitng value and a potential carbon-value. I argue that these calculations are situated within a wider discursive formation concerning indigenous bodies and their relation to agriculture that produce a specific development discourse, where indigenous agriculture can and should be improved in particular ways, where ultimately, the carbon offset project emerged as a solution to a particular socio-spatial problematic. Second, I take a value-theoretical approach to understand why and how these calculations, as discursive statements of value, were able to open up some spaces (barbechos) for carbon while foreclosing on others (cacao agroforestry). I argue here that, due to the global climate regime within which the carbon offsets are situated (i.e. Kyoto Protocol), these calculations were necessary to establish an offset’s use value. The simultaneous position between the local and the global means that a carbon offset commodity is an instance where the usefulness of a localized, spatially bound nature derives from its ability to contribute to a globally coordinated management of the world’s carbon cycle (i.e. the Kyoto Protocol). I argue that this position means that a carbon offset’s use value is not to be found in its qualitative characteristics, but from the quantitative representations of the space itself. Thus, the shift to barbechos that proceeded from these calculations derived not from the need to make these spaces measurable and commensurable for exchange, but rather, to allow for their commensurability with the worldwide carbon cycle, and ultimately make them useful as commodities within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol. In short, I seek to explain this project’s origins and trajectory through the relation between the local discursive context that allows for these calculations to be taken seriously, and the global orientation of this commodity that required a process of valuation that altered the specific local spaces that were ultimately available to be commodified.

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My approach contributes to working through an implicit problem of drawing generalized explanatory principles across a set of particular, and variable, empirical case studies—an approach that has pervaded the literature on “neoliberal natures”. The specificity of numerous case studies on this process have demonstrated that the “neoliberalization of nature” is far from a universal or coherent process, but rather, is a set of multiple, contingent, fragmented, and context-dependent articulations of different market-based processes, natural resource contexts, and geographic sites (Mansfield 2004b; Martin and Perreault 2005; Martin 2004; Laurie and Marvin 1999; see also Peck 2004; Peck and Tickell 2002; Brenner and Theodore 2002). The plurality of neoliberalism, and the influx of empirical case studies that have made this point, have made it difficult to identify common features and connecting logics across distinct cases. In a recent review of the geographic literature on neoliberalism and nature, Noel Castree (2008a; 2008b) addresses this problem by asking: “Why are human interactions with the nonhuman world being ‘neoliberalised’ across the globe?” (Castree 2008a, p. 131). To answer this question, and bridge the gap between the contingency of case studies and the search for universal logics that such a question demands, Castree “scales up” the level of abstraction in his analysis and provides a synthesis of the literature in a way that points to the diverse processes and practices that define various neoliberalisms as constitutive of a variety of “environmental fixes” – efforts by capital or the state to resolve fiscal, political, or accumulation contradictions through the implementation of market-based forms of governance (Castree 2008a; Castree 2008b). Not only does Castree “scale-up” the level of abstraction in his analysis, but his question quite explicitly “scales-up” the geographic purview of his analysis, where his question inquires in to why neoliberalism is occurring across the globe. My aim here is to “scale-down” the geographic scope of my inquiry, and ask why a neoliberal project comes to occur at a specific site. In short, I ask “why neoliberalism here?” Doing so, my aim is to understand neoliberalism as a plural and contingent process that becomes articulated with specific sites and natures, while also pointing to common logics and features that point to a broader social process through which neoliberalism is constituted. By framing these calculations as productive of value I

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seek to examine the “global” qualities that shape this project, while my focus on discursive statements can be thought of understanding why this particular variant of neoliberalism—the commodification of carbon—has come to be implemented in indigenous communities in the Talamanca region of Costa Rica. In short, my focus on these calculations as discursive statements of value is meant to bridge the chasm of universals and particulars that haunt (any) case studies of neoliberalism. To be clear, my focus on a “local discursive context,” however, is not to deny a global discursive context for this particular project. The cost-benefit calculations undoubtedly occur within a wider discursive formation of neoclassical economics, where individuals are understood as rational economic actors and free markets maximize efficiency. They are also part of a broader global discourse about climate change and environmental management, where under the auspices of the Kyoto Protocol, carbon markets have been deemed an acceptable way to mitigate climate change. The emergence of these discourses, and how they became articulated with each other, are worthy points of entry into understanding the global-scale neoliberal management of the climate. This, however, is not the analysis I present here. Instead, I frame my question of “why the commodification of carbon?” as a question of understanding a geographically specific, and ultimately historically and socially contingent context. Doing so, I intend to shed light on why a neoliberal solution becomes a desirable project by showing that neoliberal projects do not necessarily become diffused to a specific context, but that the specific sites of neoliberalism come to be represented in ways that allow for particular neoliberal projects to emerge as the solution to locally specific socio-natural problems. To do so, I posit that carbon’s commodification emerged as the solution to a specific discursive socio-spatial development problematic in the Talmanca region where carbon offsets emerged as a way to align a particular conception of the indigenous body with the spaces of agriculture in particular ways. In this chapter, however, I inquire into how these calculations occurred within the context of value in order to show that, while these articulations between neoliberal processes and specific sites are hybrid and multiple, they have features that are common across different contexts. By analyzing these calculations

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within the context of value production, I aim to show that this particular variant of neoliberalism – the commodification of carbon in Talamanca – was driven by the logics that drive all commodities: the need for commensurability. The chapter proceeds as follows. In the next section I explain the Clean Development Mechanism’s requirement of “additionality,” and explain how the project’s cost-benefit calculations are part of establishing the additionality of a carbon offset. Then, I elaborate on what it means for additionality calculations to be discursive statements of value by placing these calculations within a Marxian understanding of value and a Foucaultian understanding of discourse (Foucault 1972). Specifically, I draw on Kojin Karatani’s (2003) interpretation of Marx in order to argue that these calculations can be understood as discursive statements intended to establish an offset’s use value. In the following section I provide a history of development interventions in the Talamanca region, and the emergence of three discursive objects – the indigenous land manager, indigenous agriculture, and cacao agroforestry. I argue that the rules of formation around how these objects are spoken about have opened a specific socio-spatial problematic of development that carbon is meant to solve. This is followed by an analysis of the cost- benefit calculations that underpinned this specific CDM carbon project in Talamanca, and how project managers came to treat barbechos as atomized spaces of carbon-value. I follow this with a discussion of why a carbon offset’s simultaneous position within a local and global space led to the conflation of additionality calculations with this commodity’s use value.

5.2 The Value of Additionality and the Discourse of Value The cost-benefit calculations I described at the beginning of this chapter were done in order to comply with the Clean Development Mechanism requirement of “additionality.” The term “additionality” encompasses a broad range of evaluative approaches that are designed to ensure that carbon financing will produce a project that sequesters additional carbon, and not subsidize status quo forms of land use (Michaelowa 2005; Salinas and Hernández 2008). This means that a project must meet two types of

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additionality criteria: projects must be environmentally additional and financially additional (Boyd et al. 2007; Dutschke and Michaelowa 2006). With regard to carbon forestry offsets, ecological additionality means that CDM carbon projects must result in new forms of biomass that would not have existed otherwise (Dutschke and Michaelowa 2006). Establishing this type of additionality involves constructing a carbon sequestration baseline, where likely forms of land use, and their carbon sequestration rates, are projected into the future. A project’s “additional” carbon is that which is projected to be stored over-and-above this counterfactual baseline (see Chapter Two). Demonstrating economic additionality means showing that carbon finance is the critical trigger that allows for a particular land-use change to go forward (Boyd et al. 2007; Salinas and Hernández 2008). Proving this type of additionality was the impetus for the cost-benefit calculations I described above (Segura 2005; interview 2007). To meet CDM approval, project managers needed to demonstrate that certain types of land use changes were not possible under current market conditions, but would be possible with the influx of carbon financing. Thus, project managers needed to compare the value of different forms of land-use with their levels of potential carbon sequestration in order to show what potential types of land use “switching” need carbon financing to occur. In this way, these calculations served to quantify an imagined future where carbon finance could change the future decision-making of indigenous farmers. Additionality calculations remain one of the most controversial aspects of the CDM (Bumpus and Liverman 2008; Michaelowa 2005; Woerdman 2000). Critics of carbon offsets argue that, due to the counterfactual nature of these calculations, their truth or falsity is always conjectural (Lohmann 2005). Others have argued that this feature means that project managers are able to manipulate their figures in order to exaggerate the carbon-benefits of their projects (Bode and Michaelowa 2003). My aim is not to evaluate these calculations in terms of their claims to truth, but instead, as discursive statements situated in a process of value creation. In order to understand the effects these calculations have as discursive statements, I analyze their role in the process of creating

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value. I therefore draw on the importance of use value and the role of a commodity’s use- value at the point of what Marx refers to as the salto mortale of value (Marx 1976, p. 201)—the moment when a commodity is produced, but has not yet been sold. Using this approach toward value, I argue that the practices of calculation and quantification at the point of a carbon offset’s production, are discursive statements needed for the commodity of the forest-space to acquire a use value. This contention may appear surprising since Marx’s writings seem to focus on units of calculation and measurement in relation to a commodity’s exchange value, where such practices allow commodites to acquire the commensurability needed for exchange. Indeed, a great deal of Marxist literature on quantification and calculation is similarly focused around the role of these practices in relation to exchange value (Castree 1995; Harvey 1996; M. O’Connor 1994), while even Marx himself posits the commodity’s qualitative material properties as the source of its use value (Marx 1976, pg. 126).26 Here, however, I propose that by looking at the carbon commodity at the point of production, but before it is sold, we can see that additionality calculations are essential discursive statements for a carbon commodity to acquire a use value. In order to show how practices of calculation and measurement are sources of a carbon offset’s use value, I draw on the insights of Kojin Karatani (2003), and his argument that to see the true unfolding of value, one must understand that Marx’s investigation into the commodity form was done from an ex ante perspective – the perspective where the commodity object’s value has yet to be realized through its sale, and consumption. Karatani argues that it is only after the commodity is sold that the value created in the production process is finally realized, and that a commodity’s form as a synthesis of both use and exchange value is one that can be seen. In other words, the synthesis of use and exchange is understood from an ex post facto perspective, where the commodity is put into circulation and exchanged. Karatani posits that Marx’s

26 Marx writes: “It is therefore the physical body of the commodity itself, for instance iron, corn, a diamond, which is the use-value or useful thing” (Marx 1976, p. 126). As I show in this chapter and others in this dissertation, there is not a clean line that separates a commodity’s “physical body” from its representations, where here, its are the representations itself that constitute the carbon offset’s use value. 140

investigation into the commodity form is grounded in an analysis of how value is emergent not from this ex post facto perspective, but from an ex ante perspective, before the synthesis of use value and value that mark the commodity form occurs:

…a certain thing -- no matter how much labor time is required to make it - - has no value if not sold. Marx technically abolished the conventional division between exchange value and use value. No commodity contains exchange value as such. If it fails to relate to others, it will be a victim of ‘sickness unto death’ in the sense of Kierkegaard. Classical economists believe that a commodity is a synthesis between use value and exchange value. But this is only an ex post facto recognititon. Lurking behind this synthesis as event is a “fatal leap (salto mortale)” (Karatani 2002, p. 8).

This “fatal leap,” the salto mortale that Marx describes it in Capital: Volume One (Marx 1976, p. 201), is the moment when the capitalist puts a commodity into the exchange relation – when the commodity-object enters into an equivalence relation with money. It is in this moment of the salto mortale that the use-value of a commodity takes on a special importance. This is because the production of use-values at the point of production is merely the production of potential use values, and the critical synthesis between use-value and value that embodies the commodity form does not emerge until the commodity crosses the threshold from production to exchange, and the commodity is purchased and the use-value of this object is realized. Marx writes:

All commodities are non-use-values for their owners, and use-values for their non-owners. Consequently, they must all change hands. But changing of hands constitutes their exchange, and their exchange puts them in relation with each other as values and realizes them as values. Hence commodities must be realized as values before they can be realized as use- values (Marx 1976, p. 179).

This exchange, where money is advanced and a commodity becomes a use value (and then also results in value for the producer) paradoxically cannot happen unless the commodity already has a use-value before the exchange occurs. Marx continues:

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On the other hand, they [commodities] must stand the test as use-values before they can be realized as values. For the labor expended on them only counts in so far as it is expended in a form which is useful for others. However, only the act of exchange can prove whether that labor is useful for others, and its product consequently capable of satisfying the needs of others (Marx 1976, p. 179-180, italics mine).

In other words, the producer of a commodity must produce use values for these commodities to realize value, however, a commodity only becomes a use value after it is sold and is useful for its consumer. In other words, the producer is taking a leap of faith that their commodity will have a use value for someone and will ultimately be realized as value. Thinking about use value in the role of the salto mortale of value highlights the importance of quantifying an offset’s additionality so that an offset may have a use value. Remember, the ultimate point of a carbon offset is to regulate the global climate, or more specifically, the usefulness of a carbon offset is to allow a person or industry to emit carbon dioxide in a way that does not adversely impact the climate. In this sense, additionality calculations are needed to ensure this – so that the purchaser of a credit knows that the project they are financing results in additional carbon in the ground, rendering his equivalent emissions as “climate neutral.” Here, the usefulness of a CDM forestry offset is dependent upon its demonstration that it “really is” contributing to this worldwide mitigation of carbon. If money advanced for a carbon credit were subsidizing already existing trees, an offset would not be neutralizing someone’s greenhouse gas emissions, and would fail to be useful under the regulatory structure of the Kyoto Protocol. To avoid this, an offset must demonstrate that the space of the project will one day be occupied by a complex system of trees, soils, hydrology, etc., and that this assemblage of carbon-sequestering biomass will be there because of the sale of a carbon offset credit. In other words, an offset must be put in an exchange relation before it can become useful for someone, however, this offset must be shown to be useful before it can be exchanged.

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Here, additionality calculations fill this role. Through these calculations, the commodity’s use value is demonstrated, the salto mortale of exchange can be completed, and value can be realized.

5.3 Development Discourse: The Problems of Development and the Solution of Carbon While these calculations help to establish a commodity’s use value and allow for exchange to occur, these calcluations also occur within a particular discursive context. My interest in these calculations’ relation to use value is in understanding how these particular calculations are able to emerge as intelligible statements, and the effects they have on the production of particular spaces for receiving commodified carbon. My interest here, however, is not in the ways in which the “global” imperatives of the CDM have affected how these calculations occur. Instead, my analysis focuses on the local discursive context that allows for these calculations to unfold in the way they do. Here, I therefore take a Foucauldian approach to discourse, where statements are understood not in terms of their truth or falsity, but instead, in terms of their ability to be evaluated as such. In other words, I ask about the conditions that allow for such calculations to be taken seriously among the broad group of actors that bring carbon credits into being, and what effects such calculations have. While such additionality calculations are necessary for the “universal” dictates of value creation within the context of a global carbon market, the calculations themselves occur within a discursive context that is grounded in a local history of development interventions in the region. In other words, I analyze these calculations as discursive statements in order to understand how indigenous agriculture came to be considered as a site of carbon storage at all. In this section, I examine the rules of formation that define the emergence of three discursive objects that have consistently been at the center of development interventions in Talamanca since the 1980s: the indigenous land manager, the indigenous agricultural system, and cacao agroforestry. My goal in this section is to show how a history of agricultural development projects has

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created a discursive context in which carbon calculations are able to occur, where these discursive objects have come to be spoken about in particular ways that create a specific socio-spatial problematic of development that carbon is posited to solve. Modern agricultural development interventions in indigenous communities of Talamanca did not begin in earnest until the 1980s. In the first decades of the 20th century, most of the Talamanca valley was essentially a vast United Fruit Company banana plantation, a landscape that barely existed in this part of Costa Rica prior to 1909, when the UFC began taking possession of large quantities of land in this region (see Chapter Four). The UFC’s operations, however, were severely disrupted in the 1930s by an outbreak of Sigatoka disease, a fungal infection that decimated the UFC’s banana plantations (Borge and Villalobos 1995; Vargas Carranza 1985). By 1940, the UFC’s operations were reduced to a few small cacao plantations, and the footprint of a dismantled railroad infrastructure (Borge and Villalobos 1995; Bourgois 1994). Around this time, indigenous peoples began to return to their formerly occupied lands, so that by the 1970s, much of their dispossessed land had been re-claimed (Borge and Villalobos 1995; Guevara and Chacón 1992). Other than a short-lived agricultural extension and development project in the 1960s, this area received little attention from the state, NGOs or finance capital after the 1970s (Dahlquist et al. 2007;Borge and Villalobos 1995; Vargas Carranza 1985). This changed in 1979 when the moniliasis fungus (Moniliophthora roreri) – microbial spores that attach themselves to cacao pods and render them inedible – swept through the Talamanca region, which at the time, was the country’s largest cacao- producing region (Dahlquist et al. 2007). Indigenous farmers with land on the valley floor quickly felled their cacao trees and planted plantain monocultures. Within a few years, the Talamanca region went from being Costa Rica’s largest producer of cacao to its largest producer of plantains, a pattern that persists to this day (Dahlquist et al. 2007). This transformation marked the beginning of a series of agricultural development projects aimed at reviving cacao agroforestry in the area (see Table 5.1).

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Organization Project Date • Coopetalamanca Rehabilitation of cacao farms 1984 • Association of New Promotion of new cacao Alchemists (ANAI) genotypes 1984-1991 • Association of Small Producers of Talamanca (APPTA) Reforestation in cacao farms 1987-2000 • Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Timber and spice trees with Education Center (CATIE) cacao 1989-1999 • The Nature Conservancy Chocolate production 2000 • CATIE and World Bank/Global Environmental Biodiversity in cacao Fund agroforestry systems 2001-2004 Environmental service • CATIE/World Bank payments for carbon storage 2004-2006

Table 5.1: Cacao development and conservation projects in Talamanca. Table adapted from Dahlquist 2007.

As discussed in Chapter Four, prior to the 20th century, writings rarely posited the relation between the indigenous body and agriculture as following a coherent rationality. Instead, colonial-era writings located the production of food as inherent in the natural bounty of the landscape itself, while writings from the 19th century posited the indigenous body as practicing agriculture, but not in any organized or coherent way. Beginning in the 1950s, however, indigenous agriculture began to be spoken about as a form of agriculture with its own internal logic, where the indigenous body was linked to a specific system of agriculture. For example, a discursive relation between the indigenous body and an agricultural system makes its first brief appearance in the anthropologist Doris Stone’s (1961) work on the Bribri and Cabécar of Talamanca, where she provides brief descriptions of the variation of indigenous agricultural practices due to rainfall patterns, as well as a description of the tools and types of activities indigenous people undertake to

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cultivate a field (see also Bozzoli de Willie 1973). Other than a few brief appearances in anthropological writings on the region, little more was written about the link between indigenous bodies and indigenous agriculture in this way, however, until the 1980s. After the arrival of the monilia fungus in 1979, interest in agricultural development projects increased and the “indigenous land manager” and “indigenous agriculture” became increasingly common objects of study. In general, development projects, as well as academic writings during this time, tended to be oriented around two key “problems” associated with indigenous agriculture. First, the abandonment of ecologically friendly, “traditional” forms of land use such as cacao and banana agroforestry as well as swidden (“slash-and-burn”) forms of agriculture (see for example Somarriba and Beer 1999; Somarriba and Harvey 2003). A second problem that was commonly posited was that of unsustainable population growth (Borge and Castillo 1997; Vargas Carranza 1985).27 These two problems were often linked, as writings during this period tended to argue that indigenous agriculture is unable to keep up with the demands of a growing population without recourse to increasingly ecologically destructive, and modern, forms of land use (APPTA 2009; Borge and Laforge 1995; Borge and Castillo 1997; Castillo 1999). The proposed solution to these problems were often centered around two things: 1) the importation of new technologies – usually hybrid, monilia resistant varieties of cacao; or 2) increasing the economic value of “traditional” crops through either better marketing of “organic” products for export (Polidoro 2008; Hinojosa 2002), or by intermixing more valuable plant species, such as lumber and spice trees, within the spaces of “traditional” agriculture (Beer 1991; Somarriba et al.1995; Somarriba 1997). Projects designed to improve indigenous agriculture were often linked to improving the indigenous body itself. This relation between the two can be seen in, for example, the stated objectives of a large Dutch-financed development project in this area in the mid-1990s, Proyecto NAMASOL, whose goal was to: “…try and create a process

27 See Ross 2003 for an account of the neo-Malthusian thinking that was pervasive within CATIE and post other post-WWII agricultural development organizations. 146

of technological change within the evolutionary context of the indigenous culture of Talamanca; which means triggering the potential transformation of the Talamancan producer” (Borge and Laforge 1996, pg. 3; italics mine; see also Yepez 1999).28 It is worth examining more closely how this report conceptualizes the “Talamancan producer” and its relation to the “agricultural system,” for it is revealing of how the relationship between the indigenous body and agriculture are spoken about within the contemporary context of development interventions. Co-authored by an agricultural economist and a cultural ecologist, this report advances fifteen hypotheses concerning the Talamancan producer.29 I consider two of them here. One hypothesis states that “there exist two systems of production in opposition: the traditional system and the outside system” (Borge and Laforge 1996, p. 5). The document concludes that these two systems do not exist in opposition, but rather, are complementary, and are linked to each other through the “indigenous producer”. Figure 5.2 is taken from the report, where showing how two systems are brought together through the cultivation of corn, which allows the indigenous land manager to throw work parties. Using an econometric analysis, the report demonstrates that these work parties - where workers are “paid” by being paid with Chicha – a mildly alcoholic beverage fermented with corn – is an economically more efficient way for the producer to access labor for their cash crops (the modern half of the system) than paying cash for the labor. Thus, traditional agriculture provides an economic subsidy for modern cash crops.

28 As if to underscore the tropes of overpopulation and the invasion of modernity, this passage continues: “The agricultural system should respond to current conditions in which there exists an increasing population and an economy that is strongly linked to the capitalist world economy.”

29 While this report is only one document of many that have been authored in the 1980s and 1990s, I argue that it is an appropriate exemplar of the ways in which indigenous agriculture and indigenous producers were written about during this time. One of the co-authors, the anthropologist Carlos Borge, is widely considered to be one of the leading experts on the indigenous peoples of Talamanca. He is also frequently employed to write consultancy documents for development agencies working in this region. Published in 1996, this report represents the distillation of roughly twenty years of work by Borges, his collaborators and his students, an ensemble of “experts” who have been responsible for a significant percentage of expert advice about this region. 147

Figure 5.2: The indigenous agricultural system. Figure re-drawn from the NAMASOL consultancy report (Borge and Laforge 1996, pg. 29). Here, Corn (middle) acts as the hinge between the “western system” (left side) and the “indigenous system” (right side) where it allows households to brew Chicha, and throw work parties, which is deemed an economically efficient way to access labor for cash cropping.

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Underpinning this conceptualization of the indigenous agricultural system is a conception of the indigenous body as economically rational. A second hypothesis states that: “Indigenous people maximize the efficiency of their labor” (Borge and Laforge 1996, pg. 6). The indigenous body as a source of labor is but one conception of the body that is in the report. The authors go to great lengths to provide a holistic view of indigenous bodies, spelling out a definition of “wellness” that encompasses “good relations with neighbors”, “land security”, and “good health”. The authors contend that the agricultural system, rather than being a purely economic activity, is geared toward maximizing this expansive definition of wellness. The authors argue: “The agricultural system, with all of its strategies and styles, is fundamentally designed to meet this conception of wellness” (Borge and Laforge 1996, p. 17). Nevertheless, despite this holistic view of indigenous bodies and agriculture, when it comes to explaining how the indigenous agricultural system works, with both its modern and traditional elements, the indigenous body emerges in the form of the abstract rational economic actor. The report ultimately concludes that its hypothesis about how indigenous producers maximize their labor is “true,” and it is the indigenous producer’s ability to optimize labor that is the source of the current indigenous agricultural system’s ability to function. Here, the indigenous body emerges as a complex discursive object, one that is oriented toward the world in a “non-economic” way where culture, health, and community are critical. Nevertheless, when this same body is spoken about in relation to a wider system of agriculture, it emerges as a more simplified discursive object, one who’s economic rationality toward labor is the critical hinge upon which a complex, and precarious, balance between the modern and traditional parts of agriculture is maintained. Despite the perceived rationality of the indigenous body, development writings on Talamanca have consistently posited the agricultural system as a problem. The “modern” half of the system – plantain monocultures – is often referred to as an ecologically unsustainable system that “demands a lot from the soils” (Borge and LaForge 1996, pg. 37), and results in pesticide and fertilizer run-off (e.g. Polidoro et al. 2008), with little contribution to biodiversity (e.g. Somarriba and Harvey 2003). Meanwhile, the

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“traditional” half is often argued to be insufficiently productive to meet projected population growth trends (Borge and Castillo 1997; Borge and Laforge 1996; Borge and Villalobos 2006). In other words, each part of the agricultural system is unsustainable in different ways, where the modern half of the system is characterized as bad for nature, while the traditional half is characterized as unable to accommodate the needs of society. While in the NAMASOL report, corn is posited as a cultural-economic hinge that allows for both the “modern” and “traditional” sides of the system to complement each other, development interventions in this area have often focused their efforts around improving a different component of this system: the cacao tree. In addition to the indigenous body and the indigenous agricultural system, the cacao tree itself has emerged as a third discursive object that has been critical in the framing of development interventions in this region.

5.3.1 Cacao and Carbon The cacao tree has been a critical object of intervention for the Tropical Agricultural Research and Education Center (Spanish acronym: CATIE), a regional agricultural development institution that was responsible for implementing the CDM carbon offset project in Talamanca. The carbon project, in fact, was widely considered as a crucial way to secure financing to continue CATIE’s long-standing cacao research and promotion work in the area (interview, 2008). From its founding in the 1940s, CATIE has had an interest in promoting cacao. Prior to the late-1970s, however, its efforts were primarily centered around helping farmers maximize their cacao yields and in preventing fungal diseases (Barquero 1949; Martin 1957; von Buchwald 1949). Beginning in the late 1970s, however, “agroforestry” emerged as a specific object of promotion, not only within CATIE, but worldwide (CATIE 1993; Nair 1993). Understood as a system of intermixing crops and tree species, agroforestry systems have a long history of being practiced worldwide. Numerous indigenous groups have long practiced agroforestry (Nations and Nigh 1980) while the British instituted a colonial version of agroforestry, the taungya system, where early stage tree plantations would co-exist with food crops

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(Bryant 1993). Beginning in the late 1970s, however, a particular conception of agroforestry emerged as a development tool, where such systems were promoted as a means to improve the environment and livelihoods of local populations (Schroeder 1999). During this time CATIE began promoting agroforestry as a solution to the perceived problems of overpopulation and desertification in tropical areas (CATIE 1995). The discursive context in which cacao agroforestry emerges as a “solution” to these problems is expressed by Somarriba, writing in a study on agroforestry for CATIE in 1981:

The exponential growth of the population in tropical areas has led to increased demand for food and expansion of area under cultivation. This expansion has put pressure on tropical soils which will not support intensive use. At the same time the local and worldwide demand for forestry products increases and establishes a conflictive situation between land use options…An appropriate alternative would be agroforestry systems, which would fundamentally give the moist tropics a forestry vocation (Somarriba 1981, p. 2).

In this passage, agroforestry emerges as an ideal tool of rural development because it is both spatially optimized and economically efficient – it can produce both crops and lumber in the same space. At the time that scientists at CATIE were writing about the virtues of agroforestry, however, long-standing cacao agroforestry practices in Talamanca were quickly vanishing because of the monilia fungus. It is within this discursive and material context that CATIE initiated its first major agricultural undertaking in Talmancan indigenous communities. Its first project began in 1984 and was centered on introducing monilia-resistant, hybrid varieties of cacao trees (Dahlquist et al. 2007). In 1987, a second project, a collaboration with the German government, was an effort to introduce more economically valuable forms of agroforestry practices, such as increasing the density of valuable shade trees in cacao plots, encouraging farmers to plant tress along their property lines, and introducing black pepper trees (Beer 1991; Somarriba, Dominguez, and Lucas 1994). CATIE’s third major intervention into promoting cacao in Talamanca began in 2002 and marks a shift away from its previous approach toward maximizing the economic efficiency of cacao

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agroforestry, and instead expanded to promoting the ecological value of agroforestry in the region. The “Cacao and Biodiversity” project, a World Bank financed project, sought to “improve the sustainable production and biodiversity conservation in organic cacao farms in Bribri and Cabécar indigenous territories…” (Somarriba et al. 2004, p. 138). While still trying to increase the economic and biological viability of cacao trees, this new project changed its mandate and linked the value of cacao agroforestry to wider ecological benefits in the region. I provide this brief sketch of CATIE’s history of cacao promotion in Talamanca, and the justifications of its work in order to mark the discursive rules that have guided the ways in which cacao agroforestry is spoken about. Agroforestry is both an economically efficient use of space and an ecologically sustainable form of land-use. Because of these two characteristics, cacao agroforestry is positioned to solve the problems of overpopulation and desertification. Later, cacao agroforestry became a geographically connective space as well; a farming system that can provide an anthropogenic “link” to parks and wildlife corridors (CATIE 2006; Harvey, Gonzalez and Somarriba 2006). Nevertheless, despite these advantages, “cacao agroforestry” is a system that requires development interventions if it is to flourish. In Talamanca it remains biologically and economically unviable. Its susceptibility to monilia requires the introduction of resistant varieties of cacao, and its economic non-viability has been the impetus for efforts to make cacao agroforestry more profitable, either through increasing its exposure to “organic” markets (Hinojosa 2002) or by increasing the value of the spaces of a cacao plot itself – namely through increasing the intensification of commercially valuable trees (Beer 1991; Borge and Laforge 1996; Somarriba et al. 1995). In short, cacao agroforestry is posited as an ecologically friendly and efficient use of space, but with specific biological and economic constraints that require development interventions for it to spread in Talamanca. It is within this development puzzle that the discursive objects of the “indigenous body” and “indigenous agriculture” become key pieces. Recall that while the indigenous agricultural system as a whole follows a particular cultural-economic logic, its reliance

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on “modern” crops like plantains renders it ecologically unsustainable (Harvey et al. 2006; Polidoro et al. 2008). Promoting cacao agroforestry can potentially solve this problem. The indigenous body’s economic rationality, however, means that the success of a project requires an increase in cacao’s relative value. According to the discourse of development interventions during this time, indigenous farmers, in their role as economically rational maximizers, tend to favor the most profitable crops. This means that maximizing the relative value of cacao agroforestry is a necessary step towards increasing its use (e.g. Somarriba 1993; Somarriba 1997). In other words, cacao agroforestry is discursively tied to the “rational” indigenous body so that its viability as a “solution” to the “problem” of indigenous agriculture requires that the ecologically- friendly practices of cacao agroforestry be brought in line with the economic rationality of the indigenous body. CATIE’s efforts to introduce commercially exploitable crops and to promote denser stands of timber trees were efforts to “improve” cacao agroforestry so just such an alignment could occur (Beer 1991). The disjunction between these three discursive objects - the economically rational indigenous body, the ecologically unsustainable “agricultural system” and the ecologically friendly yet economically unviable cacao tree – has been the central problematic for agricultural development projects in Talamanca since the 1980s. This is also the same development problematic that has defined the emergence of carbon offsets in this region. As we will see, once this effort at prmoting cacao intersected with the process of creating carbon-value, different spaces altogether emerged as “ready” for development.

5.4 Enter Carbon Offsets: The Cost-Benefit Calculations Like most agricultural development projects in the region, the original goal of this particular carbon offset project was to promote the use of cacao agroforestry. According the project’s Project Design Document, increased use of this form of agriculture would, among other things, provide an anthropogenic habitat for birds, beetles, Jaguars and other animals (CATIE 2006; see also Harvey et al. 2006). The idea behind this project was that,

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with the creation of a CDM carbon offset, cacao agroforestry would become an economically viable space, and by following their rational economic interests, indigenous farmers would switch from growing monoculture plantains to planting cacao (Segura 2005; CATIE 2006). In order to establish such an offset, however, project developers needed to prove that just such a financially induced “switching” would take place – the “financial additionality” requirement discussed above. Project managers therefore needed to show that carbon financing is what is needed to induce switching from plantains to cacao agroforestry (Michaelowa 2005; Segura 2005). To accomplish this particular calculation the costs and incomes associated with each land use were linked to its carbon content, resulting in calculations that showed what the level of carbon payment has to be in order to induce “switching” from one form to the other. Under this reasoning, for example, a farmer would need a carbon payment that is quite high in order to induce a switch from plantain fields to cacao agroforestry, since the financial returns from plantains are so high compared to the potential income from the carbon fixation of a cacao agroforestry system. In order to make these calculations, project developers considered each type of land use as a separate, stand-alone form of agriculture. This meant treating barbechos (fallow land) as their own separate calculable space. While a typical barbecho field was once a corn field, and will one day likely become a rice field, each one of these types of land use were considered atomistically separate, and ‘frozen’ in time for the purpose of calculating their value-to-carbon ratio. Project planners had very good reasons for doing this, since the carbon offsets were meant to induce future changes, so the carbon-value of each form of land use had to be considered as they exist at the present moment. As one of the project planners explained:

…[indigenous farmers] have a fallow cycle and a crop cycle, but with this type of system they have a number of options, they have the option of rice, they have the option of maize, they have the option of beans, so we tried to analyze the incomes that each one of

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these choices generates, …in order to see the minimum that we would have to pay them if one producer is working with maize and if another is working with rice, that’s why we did what we did, although obviously it’s a complete cycle (Interview 2007).

In other words, in order to understand how carbon financing would impact the future pathways of individual agricultural spaces, project planners had to bracket the long-term relationship of one space to another. Figure 5.3 shows how these spaces were analytically ‘mapped’ by project developers in relation to their value and carbon content, showing where each space falls in relation to the others. In order to show these relationships, each of the steps of the swidden cycle (crop – fallow- secondary forest – crop) are separated so that they may be related to all other forms of land use in the region in order to calculate the opportunity cost of “switching.”

Figure 5.3: Annotated graph from the final project design document of the Talamanca Carbon Project (from Segura 2005). Individual types of land-use are plotted in relation to their rate of carbon sequestration (x-axis) and their net annual value per hectare per year (y-axis).

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To make this graph, an idealized form of each type of land use was discursively severed from its ecological or economic links to other forms of land-use so that these ideal types might be compared to each other in terms of their present economic value and future carbon potential. By discursively marking barbechos as a space all their own, and separating them from their past and future relations with other forms of land use, fallow- land became disclosed to project developers as the “empty” containers of low economic value and low carbon that were needed for a carbon credit to come into being. My description of this process is intended to draw attention to how this understanding of agricultural space is situated within a wider discursive formation in which the indigenous body, cacao, and indigenous agriculture more generally are spoken about in particular ways. Similar to the way in which cacao agroforestry is spoken about as a way of optimizing space, each form of land use is posited as a container of potential value, where the project offers a way to “fill” these spaces with potentially valuable carbon-sequestering biomass. For these calculations to have meaning, however, one must assume that the spaces are “managed” by the rational maximizer of neoclassical economics. On the one hand, this can be read as simply the unproblematic application of universal economic theories and assumptions to a local context. This is a practice that has come under scrutiny of a number of critics of neoliberalism and neoclassical economics more generally (e.g. Harvey 2005; Hayden 2003; Peck 2004; Robertson 2006). While on one register this is a diffusion of neo-classical theory to a local context, however, I argue that such calculations can only have meaning within a wider discursive formation, where the discursive work that makes such a calculation understandable, even possible, in this context has been ongoing for quite some time. In other words, the previous emergence of the “indigenous land manager” as a rational economic agent – the one who “maximizes economic efficiency” of Proyecto NAMASOL – was a necessary precondition for such calculations to be taken seriously within a context of agricultural development in Talamanca.

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Writing about the conditions that allow for a discursive statement to have meaning as a statement (as opposed to a mere utterance) - or using Dreyfus and Rabinow’s terminology, what conditions allow for a “serious speech act” (see Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, p. 48)—Foucault posits that a statement is only able to exist in relation with a wider set of rules, laws, or relations. This is in contrast to the view that a statement’s truth-value must be correlated to an external object, thing, or referent. Instead, the truth-value of a statement can be found in its linkage with what Foucault labels the “referential”, which for Foucault: “…forms the place, the condition, the field of emergence, the authority to differentiate between individuals or objects, states of things and relations that are brought into play by the statement itself; it defines the possibilities of appearance and delimitation of that which gives meaning to the sentence, a value as truth to the proposition” (Foucault 1972, p. 91). In other words, a statement’s significance is not to be found in its correlation with an external object, or its relation to the rules of logic and grammar, but rather, in its relation to a wider set of contextual rules and norms that allow for particular ways of speaking to have meaning within a particular assemblage of actors. In this case, the ability of carbon calculations to emerge as statements, or statements that can be evaluated as true or false, lies not in their immediate relation to the external objects of the indigenous body or the spaces of agriculture. Instead, their authority and intelligibility comes from their relation to an historically embedded set of discursive rules—r ules that allow for these calculations to discursively relate indigenous bodies to agricultural space in particular ways. As Foucault argues, no statement can exist in isolation, but is always understood in relation to a field of similar statements. As Foucault puts it: “…there is no statement in general, no free, neutral, independent statement; but a statement always belongs to a series or a whole, always plays a role among other statements, deriving support form them and distinguishing itself from them: it is always part of a network of other statements…” (Foucault 1972, p. 99). Understood this way, these calculations are more than a neutral evaluative tool that was diffused from

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the regulatory structure of the Kyoto Protocol or the discipline of neo-classical economics,30 but rather, these calculations are also embedded within, and transformative of, past conceptions of the indigenous body, and its relation to agricultural space. Past discursive statements that posit the indigenous body as an economically rational manager of discrete agricultural spaces, ultimately allow for the intelligibility of a cost-benefit calculation where barbechos “open up” as discrete spaces of potential carbon-value. These types of calculations would not have been understandable in the 19th century, for example, where the indigenous body was considered by Western writers to be irredeemably irrational (see Chapter Four). The emergence of the indigenous land manger and the indigenous agricultural system as discursive objects, however, was such that today these calculations are able to be understood among the diverse local, national, and international actors implementing this project. In the process, the indigenous body follows an economic rationality, and also exists within a presumed spatial grid, in which the body’s actions toward the land are understandable as producing (or not producing) value. While we can see how these calculations can be understood as discursive statements, and can see the locally-specific discursive context that allows for such calculations to have meaning, in the next section I discuss how these statements intersect with the production of value in a way that opens some spaces for receiving carbon while foreclosing on others.

5.5 Discourse and Value In his discussion of Marx’s conception of use value in the political economy of capitalism, David Harvey writes: “Use values are shaped according to the modern relations of production and in turn intervene to modify those relations” (Harvey 2006, p. 7). Harvey reads Marx’s theory of value, and the formative role of use value, as an explanation for why labor assumes the form that it does—where labor’s status as objectified potential labor makes it a use value for the capitalist. Below, I contend that a

30 Although they are these things too. The Kyoto Protocol and neo-classical economics can also be read as discursive formations that give these statement meaning. My focus here, however, is on the local context that allows for this particular site to become a desireable place for carbon. 158

similar understanding of use value can explain why the carbon offset commodity assumes the form that it does. Seen from the perspective of use value, a carbon offset requires that a consumer’s carbon relationship be calculated – that one determine a quantifiable level of carbon dioxide that needs to be offset. This is a practice of calculation that simultaneously enables both exchange and use value. By quantifying one’s climactic impact, a specific carbon-emitting action can now be made commensurate with a level of carbon stored in the ground. The effects of these calculations, however, do not stop at facilitating the commensurability needed for exchange. This quantified relation between a potential offset consumer and her carbon-dioxide emissions are also needed for the carbon storing capacities of a forestry offset to be useful. That is, the use value of a carbon forestry offset is dependent upon a potential offset consumer putting her actions in a quantified relation to a global system of climactic management. Put another way, a potential offset consumer may have a vague idea that her factory’s emissions are contributing to climate change, however, the carbon sequestering properties of a barbecho field are of no use to that owner until her factory is put into a specific relation towards a global regime of climate regulation (i.e. the Kyoto Protocol). Thanks to emissions cuts that are mandated by Kyoto, the carbon dioxide externalities of this owner’s factory have now been quantified and found to be above the regulatory limit. Now the owner has costly emissions reductions she must meet. Through quantification of her factory’s emissions, and by putting these emissions in relation to a global management of the atmosphere, the carbon that is sequestered in an abandoned barbecho field has now become useful for the factory owner. In other words, it is through a consumer’s quantified relation to a global climate management regime that a particular ordering of carbon is needed, and it is through this coordinated ordering of carbon that a carbon offset project becomes useful. On the production end, use value also emerges through a similar quantified relation. Simply put, a CDM offset’s usefulness within the Kyoto Protocol is centered on its contribution to a worldwide coordination of the global carbon cycle, where carbon- dioxide emissions in one place can have, in theory, a neutral climactic impact due to an

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equivalent level of carbon sequestration that occurs somewhere else. For such a geographically dispersed management of the climate to occur, however, additionality calculations are necessary so that offset consumers can be assured that money advanced from a credit sale will materialize in new forms of carbon storage. Such calculations provide assurances that forestry offsets will help a corporation or nation – actors that have conducted their own carbon quantification – will meet the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol. I argue that, under this precarious choreography of the global carbon cycle, it is not the carbon-in-the-ground that gives an offset a use value. Instead, it is this relational ordering between the spaces of carbon storage, the carbon-dioxide emitter, and the atmosphere itself that ultimately makes a forestry offset useful. Furthermore, I contend that in the context of this ordering, these practices of calculation do not merely represent the ordering of carbon that is occurs within this framework, but rather, the practices of calculation and the relational ordering of carbon are effectively inseparable. This inseparability can be seen through the function of the concept of additionality. Under the Kyoto Protocol, it is only the carbon forestry offset’s demonstrated additionality that counts toward’s that project’s value. A particular project may be de facto additional, but if it is not demonstrated to be such, it cannot be useful to the factory owner trying to meet particular emissions reduction standards under the Kyoto Protocol. Thus, additionality calculations are not abstractions that represent an offset’s use value, but rather, the calculations themselves are the useful thing. Under this overdetermined framework of carbon offset trading, an offset’s materialization becomes inseparable from its representations. A carbon offset credit’s function within the regime of Kyoto means that its usefulness is derived from its quantified additionality as much as from the physical qualities of this commodity (i.e. its biomass) that make it useful. This folding of quantification into use value results in particular discursive transformations of space. To conduct a cost-benefit calculation that would show additionality, each space was treated as a discrete space of carbon-value potential. To create the use value of a carbon offset, the value of each agricultural space has to be

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discursively transformed to discrete spaces of carbon-value potential. To do so, the indigenous body’s relation to space becomes discursively transformed, no longer is he managing a complex, interlocking series of discrete spaces, but instead independent containers of carbon-value potential – one where the spaces of the barbecho emerged not as a hinge that links other agricultural spaces (as with the Proyecto NAMASOL report), but instead, as a valueless space of carbon sequestration potential. While this was a process that was both conditioned by previous discursive formations of the indigenous body and space, it also transforms these objects in new ways through enframings of space that are necessitated by the calculatory demands of a carbon offset’s use value.

5.6 Conclusion In this chapter, I have analyzed how specific spaces become opened up as sites of commodified carbon storage by treating the cost-benefit calculations of a carbon forestry offset as a discursive statement that is needed for this commodity to have value. Doing so has led me to argue that the intelligibility and significance of these calculations derive, in part, from their connections with other statements within a wider discursive formation of agricultural development. In the process, I have demonstrated that their impact as statements derive from their embeddedness within a history of development interventions in this area, from which a sedimented discourse about the indigenous body and its relation to agricultural space has emerged. In other words, these calculations are able to occur, and be taken seriously, through the emergence of the indigenous body, and indigenous agriculture, as discursive objects that are spoken about in particular ways. Such a “local” discursive context helps to explain how carbon offsets were able to emerge as the solution to the problem of indigenous agriculture. Understanding this context, however, does not explain why such calculations need to occur. Thus, I have also analyzed these calculations in their role as facilitating the production of value. I have argued that the calculations themselves are the offset’s use value. This is a condition that derives from the paradoxical and uncertain position a commodity is in before it is sold, and value is realized, where the commodity is not

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realized as a use value until this moment, but yet must still be a use value before the “salto mortale” of value occurs. I have demonstrated that, when confronted with the exigencies of producing a commodity with use value in the context of the Kyoto Protocol, the indigenous body, and its relation to agricultural space, becomes discursively transformed in significant ways, allowing for particular agricultural spaces to be seen as “ready” for the production of carbon value, and foreclosing on other possibilities. Using the facts of this particular offset project, I could have told a much different story. I could have written that these cost-benefit calculations, grounded in the tools of neo-classical economics, failed to grasp the local context and ended up representing indigenous farmers and agricultural space in simplistic ways that ultimately could have negative effects on the area. Similarly, I could have told a story about how the standardized regulatory structure of the CDM was “imposed” on a local context, resulting in representations of indigenous livelihoods that result in perverse forms of commodification that ultimately run counter to the project’s original goals. Both of these analytic strategies have been used to interpret the development of carbon sequestration projects (Bumpus and Liverman 2008; Lohmann 2005), and the process of commodifying nature more broadly (Castree 2003; Robertson 2000). Both of these modes of interpretation rely on a narrative trope where something from the “outside” becomes imposed on, or disseminated to, a local context. My approach to understanding the trajectory of this carbon offset—where the offset’s change in trajectory is an effect of the mutually constitutive relation between value and discourse—offers instead a novel approach, one that seeks to problematize the relation between the global and the local in the production of a commodity. Here, the “local” development context in which this carbon project is situated within a wider project of regulating the global carbon cycle. My aim in this chapter has not been to show how “neoliberal” processes such as commodification become altered through its application in a local context. Instead, my goal has been to show how a particular discursive context allows for specific neoliberal interventions to arise – in this case carbon offsets as a way to promote cacao agroforestry. By evaluating these calculations

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as discursive statement of value, however, I have shown that the exigencies of the commodity form require an opening-up of different spaces entirely—the barbecho. In this case, the local context did not alter abstract neoliberal ideas, but rather, the unfolding of the process of value conditioned the manner in which this specific project was able to unfold. This is particularly significant because this was not a case where calculations were done to provide a commensurability needed for exchange, but rather, commensurability was required for a commodity’s usefulness.

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Chapter 6: Conclusion

6.1 Placing Carbon’s Space

This dissertation has presented critiques of the carbon calculations needed to produce forestry offsets. Despite my focus on discourse and the performative aspects of these practices of measurement, the work should not be read as a kind of dismissal or denial of global warming. While I understand that scientific knowledge is produced through articulated connections and mobilizations between human and non-human actors, such a nominalist view does not preclude the idea that scientific knowledge is describing something “real.” Climate change is surely real. However, the way in which this phenomenon is grasped and understood forecloses on possibilities for our relationship to it. As David Demmeritt (2001b) has argued, the dominance of our understanding of climate change in terms of climate models has resulted in a reductive understanding of climate change as a global-scale environmental problem, fueled by the universal qualities of greenhouse gases. Such an understanding leads to solutions that are based on global- scale management of these gases. I have argued in this dissertation that such a view is grounded in a technological metaphysics, and has led to mitigation solutions that are based on the calculatory logics of the market – where people’s actions can become commensurate to the spaces of a forest through exchange. As some scholars that are sympathetic to offsets have argued, there is little reason to think that offsets alone will somehow “stop,” or even significantly alter climate change (e.g. Smith et al. 2000). And as its most strident critiques have argued, carbon offsets could have potentially disastrous results for local places and peoples, and have the potential lead to a worsening of the climate problem (e.g. Lohmann 2005). In this dissertation, I have taken the critiques of offsets – that they are ineffectual at best, and destructive at worst – as a starting point,

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and have investigated the ontological, historical, bodily, and discursive conditions of their production, and inquired into how these practices, conditions, and assumptions of offsets produce the spaces and territories of carbon that its critics have found problematic. The production of carbon offsets can be read as another example of the neoliberalization of nature, or more specifically, the commodification of carbon. Geographers have been increasingly studying this intersection of neoliberalism and the natural world is a variety of different iterations: water privatization and deregulation throughout the world (e.g. Bakker 2003; Budds 2004); neoliberal fisheries management in the Pacific Ocean (Mansfield 2004a); ecosystem service commodification in the United States (Robertson 2000); privatized mining in Peru (Bury 2005); and privatized natural gas extraction in Bolivia (Kaup 2008)—just to name a few. In general, this body of work offers trenchant critiques and has demonstrated how these projects often fail to live up to their own internal market-based logics (with deregulation, for example, better understood as a form of re-regulation (Bakker 2003; Mansfield 2004a). I believe that the extension of market logics to the crisis of climate change, however, differs from these case studies is one key respect. The commodification of carbon involves the integration of market mechanisms with phenomena that are literally constitutive of everything in the entire world. I make this point in Chapter two, but I will reiterate it here. We are carbon, and regimes of climate management (such as Kyoto) that seek to manage the global circulation of carbon, seek to encompass everything. This all-encompassing techno- scientific management of the world appears to be the epitome of Heidegger’s warnings against the event of technology – the enframing of the world that has the potential to ensnare all of us into a system of ordering and control. Before I overdraw the lines too much, let me say here that while the overall “carbon market” is growing very rapidly – roughly doubling in size from 2007 to 2008 (to $126 billion dollars; see Capoor and Ambrosi 2009)31 – the evidence to date shows that the long-term prospects for the specific mechanism of forestry offsets are uncertain. After countless hours of labor, there are only two functioning CDM forestry offsets in the

31 This figure includes markets for “carbon allowances” as well as offsets. 165

world today, and voluntary forestry offsets comprise a small percentage of this overall market (Bumpus and Liverman 2008; Carbon Offsets Daily 2009). Nevertheless, this approach (where “the climate” is understood in terms of isolated levels of carbon, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, that can be known, and managed, through market exchange) is still the dominant mode of reacting to global climate change. Such a market- based approach is related to this calculatory orientation. Where our understanding of “the climate” is as a global-scale “thing” to be known, managed, and controlled, a market approach to mitigating climate change is also grounded in an understanding of “carbon” as a molecular-scale object to be understood and managed through the mechanism of market exchange. A number of scholars have explored the implications of reinscribing “life” on the molecular level in this way through Foucauldian approaches to the technologies of governance (Agrawal 2005; Braun 2007; Haraway 1997, Rose-Redwood 2006, Braun 2007). These efforts are grounded in what could be considered the “building blocks” of modernity (Escobar 1999): the market, property, science, the state, and the individual subject. Here, however, these components of modern political liberalism intersect with the governance of the climate in contradictory ways. Life becomes understood on the molecular level while simultaneously oriented towards an undifferentiated space of “the global.” The juxtaposition that one sees in carbon offsets (see especially Chapters Two and Five) results in spatial assemblages that are unstable: absolute spaces, relational spaces, and territories that are embodied in modern notions of the political subject, but that must become articulated with these new concepts of life. Rather than analyze the “correctness” of these calculations, or critique the ability of these calculations to properly describe and model the world, I have instead inquired into the hidden rules of speech, the bodily practices, and the metaphysical assumptions that have contributed to this way of engaging with the world. Through this inquiry, I have tried to show how contingent, and precarious these projects are.

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In Chapter Two I specifically explored the ontological grounds of the calculations needed to bring carbon offsets into being as a commodity. I have shown that such a process of producing carbon baselines can work in contradictory ways. An offset’s orientation toward the undifferentiated space of “the global,” and its role in ordering this space on a molecular level, has led to the production of relational spaces between producers and consumers while simultaneously requiring the production of absolute Cartesian spaces that locate the sites of carbon storage. This articulation between the local and the global, and the absolute and the relational, is grounded in a technological orientation towards the world that is productive of a global ordering of carbon. The production of these spaces is predicated upon this orientation, and through the structure of the Kyoto Protocol, results in the enframing of the territoriality of the nation-state iself within this technological calculatory purview. In Costa Rica, the state has so far been unable to incorporate its own policies within the calculatory spaces that are demanded by the Kyoto Protocol – a process that simultaneously undermines and reinforces the power of the state’s territoriality. In Chapter Three I explored the moment-by-moment bodily performances through which this technological orientation becomes manifest. By investigating the performative aspects of producing carbon offsets, I have shown that the materiality of the offset –its space – is emergent through its articulation with its abstract representations, a move that is simultaneously productive of the economic framing that allow for this commodity object to emerge. Through an ethnographic description of these framings that are needed for the carbon commodity to become materialized, I have demonstrated how precarious this project can be, where the spaces and territories of carbon are unstable, but where this instability derives from the process of their emergence. By examining how “nature” becomes materialized as a commodity through performance, I have shown that -- rather than being an object incorporated by the market—the commodity’s emergence is mutually constitutive of the frames of exchange that allow it to be.

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In Chapter Four, I posit that such practices do not occur on an aspatial tabula rasa, however, but are embedded within previous conceptions of space, territory, and the body. Thus, a carbon offset’s geographic positioning in the Talamanca Indigenous Reserve, reflects an historically embedded process of territorialization that itself reflects a discursive and material placement of indigenous bodies in space. The offsets under study seek to territorialize carbon through both the dispersion of discursive statements and the enactment of bodily performances. These actions, however, unfold within an already existing territorial space where the indigenous body occupies a contradictory position – it is at once part of the Costa Rican nation yet separate from it. This transitive position has created a particular juridical-political space – the indigenous reserve – through which carbon offsets must develop. Chapter Four shows how this particular territory, and the unstable indigenous subject that it contains, emerged historically through a conflictual process of territorialization between the Costa Rican state, Panama, and transnational capital. This conflict helped produce the indigenous subject as both part of the nation, yet excluded from its capitalist spaces. This conception became crystallized as hegemonic when the United Fruit Company carved out a Cartesian space specifically for indigenous bodies. Finally, Chapter Five shows how the indigenous subject becomes re-constituted as the rational actor, in part, through the unfolding of development projects, which open both the indigenous body and its relation to the spaces of Talamanca as a “problem” for commodified carbon to solve. The representations of these subjects and their spaces, however, become further atomized when placed in a relation needed for producing carbon-value. The result was a foreclosure on the spaces that have been most heavily invested in by “development” – the cacao field – and opened up new spaces. In this way, the barbecho emerged as a new space of potential carbon value through the discursive severing from other ecological and social connections. This locally contingent process of “opening up” an object for carbon, and the subsequent foreclosure of other spaces, is grounded in the more universal process of capitalist value production. One reason for the specific cost-benefit calculations that were carried out was the need to make the spaces of

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carbon sequestration useful. This is a process that folds the usefulness of these spaces into a quantitative relation with an offset consumer, where carbon’s usefulness becomes its quantified representation.

6.2 Objections, Lacunae, and the Future After reading this dissertation, with its focus on practices of calculation, and the resulting spaces and territories from these practices, one might object that I have not sufficiently engaged with Foucault’s ideas about territory, population, and “governmentality” more generally. This is an important issue to address since the concept of governmentality has been an increasingly dominant one in the social sciences since Foucault introduced the concept in his 1977 lectures at the Collège de France (Foucault 2000; Foucault 2007). Briefly, Foucault’s concept of governmentality is a way of understanding how the political rationality of the state brings objects like populations and the economy into its purview through its own calculatory logics (Foucault 2000). Central to this idea is the concept of biopower, which is a process through which bodies are brought into explicit calculations, creating a field of power-knowledge in which life itself becomes an object of regulation and control (Foucault 1990). As life itself was transformed into an object of governance, biological existence became understood through the regulatory logics of the state. Economic, political and technological existence became a lens through which an understanding of the biological was refracted (Luke 1995). This understanding of biological existence rendered “the environment,” among other things, as an object of governance, and in so doing produced not only the discursive space of “the environment” but “environmental subjects” as well. This point has been expanded on by a number of writers who have traced how “nature” emerged as an object of governance, whether it is forests (Demeritt 2001), agriculture (Murdoch and Ward 1997) or geology (Braun 2000). Braun’s (2000) account of the science of 19th century Canadian geology, for example, emphasizes the fact that nature’s emergence into the field of governance was not the result of pre-formed entities of territory and the state coming into contact with each other, but rather, was a process in

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which science functioned as an epistemic field that created specific “natures” which allowed for certain forms of political rationality to emerge. Similarly, Arun Agrawal uses “governmentality” as a way to understand how these new epistemologies of nature have resulted in the emergence of environmental subjects (Agrawal 2005) in his study of the struggles over Kuamaon’s forests in Northern India. He documents how colonial representations of the forest transformed social understandings of it, where fierce peasant resistance to colonial forestry policies in the 1920s eventually gave way to modern-day local actors who have internalized (and now reproduce) the discourse of “protecting the forest” that was once so controversial. I view my approach as undertaking critical work on the ontological basis for calculation itself that is often overlooked in governmentality approaches toward environmental management (the so-called “environmentality” approach, see Agrawal 2005; Luke 1995). This is why I have chosen to engage with a more explicitly Heideggerian approach in Chapter 2. In this dissertation I take up the issue of calculation, and inquire into the ontological grounds that make practices of calculation possible, and inquire into the spatial and territorial effects that such an ontological orientation – that of a technological metaphysics – produces the notion of “territory” as a singular, bounded space that is inextricably woven with the existence and identity of the nation-state is more than an effect of governmental rationality (although it is certainly that) but also has its grounding in Western thought since the Enlightenment. Therefore, calculation is not just a means by which environmental subjects are constituted, but is also symptomatic of a deeper orientation toward the world, one that allows for “the environment” as an object to be known, managed, and controlled to emerge. In other words, calculation is less a tool of governmental rationality, but rather, governmental rationality is a symptom of an ontological orientation toward the world—where the world becomes revealed to us as that which lies in wait to be calculated (Elden 2006; Elden 2007). I believe that my approach is not in opposition to governmentality studies of the environment, but rather, complimentary to them. The idea of “carbon subjects”—that people begin to constitute their own subjectivity in terms of their relation to climate

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change and carbon—certainly could be an appropriate and important application to governmentality to climactic governance (Bulkeley 2005). By exploring the ontological basis of calculation as derivative of a technological metaphysics, however, I hope to signal that the worldwide management of the climate is rooted in a more fundamental process than political rationality (as important as that is), but in a long-standing metaphysical relation to the world under modernity—as subjects in opposition to the world-as-object. Here, the political and calculative rationality that constitutes governmentality is one symptom of this orientation. My approach then, is to focus on what underlines this symptom, and then to focus on other manifestations of this orientation – discursive statements, performances of calculation, and the imperatives of value. A second potential objection to this dissertation is that it is not very practical. This is true. In this dissertation, I offer no short-term policy prescriptions, because any pragmatic prescription would inevitably fall within the very field of calculation that I have tried to put under critical scrutiny here. For example, one proposed solution to some of the “blind spots” of the CDM is the idea of multi-faceted carbon offsets, where issues such as “biodiversity” and “community development” are explicitly taken into account in the creation of an offset (Nussbaumer 2009). I believe such a project would, in some respects, be an improvement over projects that account for carbon-content only, but they would ultimately be no less problematic for many of the same reasons. Understanding an indigenous woman’s life in terms of a spreadsheet is unlikely to be any less problematic than understanding the “carbon-value” of her barbecho field. 32 I conclude then not with a way forward, but by returning to Heidegger. As George Pattison points out, Heidegger’s essay, “The Question Concerning Technology” is not a normative one, but a reflective one: “His question…is not so much a question concerning what we should do, but a question as to how we understand ourselves in what we do”

32 The difficulties and problems of including entities like “communities” within environmental projects has been extensively documented and critiqued for years (Agrawal and Gibson 2001 for a representative sample). Many of these critiques are centered around the idea that the term “community” itself is difficult to identify, and when it is done so by conservation organizations or the state, it inevitably leads to projects that exclude and silence members. 171

(Pattison 2000, p. 73, italics mine). The point of Heidegger’s essay is to understand technology so that we may “prepare a free relationship to it.” Heidegger ultimately argues that in the essence of technology lies a danger, but also a “saving power,” where by taking a critical stance towards technology we can understand the effects that it has on us (Heidegger suggests that art and poetry be the source of this critical stance). Despite the critical stance towards carbon offsets that this dissertation takes, I contend that agreements like the Kyoto Protocol and the CDM can nevertheless still be seen as positive first steps towards heading off potentially catastrophic environmental change so long as we are aware of the implications of such an approach. After all, even market- based solutions like carbon trading can be seen as beginning the process of seeing ourselves in a different relation towards the world (Irwin 2008). As awareness of calculating one’s “carbon footprint” spreads, even actions like eating meat are becoming increasingly understood in terms of their impact on the climate, and in turn, their deleterious effects on the environment. In this way, the technological orientation towards the world that allows for the calculations of such carbon footprints can be seen as having a positive step towards the world—to a point. The danger lies when this form of relating to the world becomes the only way of seeing the world. Markets in carbon credits can be a start to beginning a shift towards viewing our everyday actions in terms of climate change. However, market forces are also part and parcel of the logic of accumulation that has produced the climate crisis in the first place. Thus, a shift towards a relationship with the world that is less destructive must ultimately come from somewhere else. Before this can happen, however, we must recognize how our current relation to technology, and consequently to the world and ourselves, comes to pass.

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Appendix A: List of Semi-Structured Interviews

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Below is a list of semi-structured interviews conducted during primary fieldwork for this dissertation. This list does not contain innumerable informal conversations. Interviews that were recorded with a digital voice recorder were transcribed. For interviews that were not voice recorded – usually because of high background noise, recorder malfunction, or because the interviewee requested that no recording be made – I took notes during the interview, and then typed more detailed notes immediately after the interview. In order to comply with OSU’s Human Subjects review board, individuals are not identified here by name, but rather, by a brief description of their relevance to my research project. In some cases, details have been deliberately falsified to further protect the identity of some of the participants.

Interview Recorded Person Description Gender Date Durat ion Language (Y/N) Ministry of Environment Engineer Male June-08 53 minutes Spanish Y

Carbon offset project November- manager Female 07 28 minutes Spanish Y Environmental NGO February- field office manager Male 08 45 minutes Spanish Y November- FONAFIFO staff Female 07 42 minutes Spanish Y FONAFIFO technical consultant Male January-08 35 minutes Spanish Y Indigenous leader (male) Male June-08 51 minutes Spanish Y Forestry Cooperative manager Male January-08 67 minutes Spanish Y Continued

Table A.1: List of interview subjects

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Table A.1 continued

Person Description Gender Date T i me Language Recorded CATIE scientist Male August-06 32 minutes English Y CATIE scientist Male October-07 41 minutes English Y December- CATIE scientist Male 07 53 minutes Spanish Y FONAFIFO employee Male January-08 46 minutes Spanish Y November- CATIE scientist Male 07 78 minutes Spanish Y November- CATIE scientist Female 07 78 minutes Spanish Y Indigenous leader Male May-08 32 minutes Spanish Y FONAFIFO employee/forestry expert Male January-07 61 minutes Spanish Y National Forestry Office manager Male January-07 52 minutes Spanish Y Forestry NGO manager Male January-07 49 minutes Spanish Y Forestry NGO December- manager Female 07 55 minutes Spanish Y FONAFIFO December- employee/manager Male 07 15 minutes Spanish Y Indigenous leader/ACOMUITA member Male March-08 25 minutes Spanish Y FONAFIFO employee/case February- worker Male 08 49 minutes Spanish Y Indigenous leader/ADITICA leader Male June-08 53 minutes Spanish Y Indigenous leader/ADITIBRI leader Male January-08 32 minutes Spanish Y Ind igenous leader/ADITIBRI leader Male August-08 49 minutes Spanish Y Indigenous leader/ADITIBRI February- leader Male 08 38 minutes Spanish Y Continued

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Table A.1 Continued

Person Description Gender Date T i me Language Recorded Anthropologist Male June-07 60 minutes Spanish N Indigenous leader/ACOMUITA member Female August-08 45 minutes Spanish N Indigenous leader/ADITIBRI leader Male August-08 60 minutes Spanish N Indigenous leader Male May-08 30 minutes Spanish N FONAFIFO employee/manager Female July-08 30 minutes Spanish N December- CATIE scientist Male 07 30 minutes Spanish N CATIE scientist Male July-07 30 minutes English N Environmental NGO November- manager Female 07 60 minutes Spanish N Environmental NGO head Male August-08 60 minutes Spanish N Indigenous leader/ADITICA leader Male July-07 90 minutes English N U.S NGO founder Male April-07 60 minutes English N Environmental NGO November- founder Male 07 68 minutes Spanish Y Forestry NGO February technical advisor Male 08 59 minutes Spanish Y

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