Center for International Forestry Research, the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and Wagenigen University.

Climate change is a key global challenge and national, sub-national, and local actors are responding in the political, social, and economic spheres. Forests are a key part of the international mitigation agenda. Transformational change is required to realize the forest sector's mitigation potential through avoided deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+). Dense webs of economic interests, political realities, and local needs come to the forefront as countries become "ready for REDD+" and start to develop national REDD+ strategies and policies.



For the past four years, CIFOR and partners have been conducting a Global Comparative Study on REDD+ on policy development and the early stages of implementation. In this side event we will present the results of this work that are pertinent to the objectives of the CSD and the development of a green economy.

REDD offers the opportunity to transform the forest sector in a manner consistent with the vision of a green economy. However, following the decisions in Durban, there does not yet exist a policy environment capable of support robust growth of forest carbon markets, and REDD+ in the foreseeable future is likely to be funded mainly from bilateral/multilateral sources (partly as aid), smaller regional carbon markets, and voluntary efforts. As efforts around REDD+ intensify at the international level, global economic turbulence relegates attention to climate change further down on the list of national priorities. Contributing further to this relegation are food price spikes and land shortages. These also put pressure on forest conversion for food production, biofuels and valuable cash crops to spur economic development, even though the basis for these choices are in many ways not yet substantiated. As a consequence, REDD+ is getting off the ground more slowly than expected at the national level, but some countries are initiating reforms that were unthinkable pre-REDD+.

In this session we will explore how REDD+ is shaping the forest sector for a green economy, and also how REDD+ is being shaped by institutional path dependencies, interests, ideas and the power and politics of data and information.

Presentations:

Arild Angelsen, Norwegian University of Life Sciences.

In its beginning, REDD+ served to merge two different agendas, the environmental and development agenda, in a similar manner as ?sustainable development? did two decades earlier. Thus REDD+ avoided the ?iron law of climate policy? that says whenever environmental and economic goals collide, the economic goal will win (Pielke 2010). However, ?REDD+? has undergone drastic changes since RED was launched at COP 11 in Montreal in 2005. It has changed as an idea, as an objective, and as a description of a specific set of policies. This presentation will outline key aspects of this evolution, and review the forces behind the change. We also ask the question: If REDD+ has changed fundamentally, what are the implications?

Maria Brockhaus ? A comparative analysis of politics and power in REDD+ national processes

Contentious politics is at the heart on any policy process and the REDD+ policy arena is no exception. Policy actors have diverse interests, they frame policy processes in distinct ways, and they wield their power to try to influence policy makers. They are engaged in building political alliances to realize their ideas, which are influenced by their beliefs, ideological convictions, discursive practices and by their interests. We identified four prerequisites to overcoming politico-economic hurdles to policy reforms for achieving emission reductions through avoided deforestation and forest degradation: (i) the relative autonomy of the state from key interests in these sectors, (ii) national ownership over REDD+ policy processes, (iii) inclusion in policy processes, and (iv) the presence of coalitions for transformational change. We will argue that without a shift to a new economic development paradigm that aims to achieve more sustainable forms of economic growth, business as usual scenarios are likely to remain dominant.

William Sunderlin - REDD+ projects as a hybrid of old and new forest management approaches: Opportunities and challenges under policy and market uncertainty

Early findings from 19 REDD project sites indicate that REDD+ subnational projects are hybrids that combine conventional forest conservation approaches (notably Integrated Conservation and Development Program - ICDP) with the more recent approach of payments for ecosystem services (PES). This latter approach is what is supposed to be distinctively new about REDD+: a significant funding stream for performance-based payments for reduced carbon emissions. Under conditions of policy and market uncertainty, this hybrid structure enables proponents to make early progress on project establishment in the absence of a clear REDD+ architecture and carbon markets, and pre-REDD+