EEI SEMINAR: “Carbon conflicts and complexity: what is representation?”, by Emma Jane Lord

EEI SEMINAR: “Carbon conflicts and complexity: what is representation?”

Speaker: Emma Jane Lord

Moderator: Zora Kovacic

Day: Wednesday, November 15th 2017 (New date)

Time: 12.30h

Room: Z/022- Z/023

This seminar explores understandings of representation from post-normal science, anthropology and political sciences in the context of carbon conflicts in East Africa. We compare literature review with empirical results based on five months of field observation, qualitative interviews, local documents and records in a REDD+ pilot project in Western Tanzania. Carbon conflicts vary in scale and intensity from discursive contestations and negotiations to violent confrontations over land and forced displacement. Climate negotiations considered biophysical Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) of forests as an essential aspect of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+). MRV methodologies supposedly ‘prove’ the efficiency of REDD+ in combatting global changes in land use and climate. This research shows how such reductionist, positivist methodologies epistemologically annihilate the context-specific requirements of forest-based communities, who were intended as the target groups of REDD+. Technocratic requirements instead created a rule of experts, multiplying the quantity of consultants and civil society actors involved in forest governance. This multiplicity of actors and interests creates political contestation and it creates complexity; non-equivalent representations of the same object of study. What is scientific observation within these complex socio-ecological systems? Representation is both an epistemological act and a political process. How do researchers and development practitioners broach questions of representation; speaking about or speaking for their study groups?

Bio

Emma Jane Lord is studying Foundationals of Degrowth because her economics qualifications are too capitalist. She has a Masters in Sustainable Tropical Forestry from University of Copenhagen and Agroparitech in Montpellier and undergraduate in Environmental Science from University of Stirling.