Once again, the international community focuses on the preservation of Amazonian forests, in particular through a bundle of initiatives grouped under the term of REDD+. Initially focusing on reducing carbon emissions, the REDD+ process became increasingly linked with developmental goals that represent the primary interest of all Amazon countries. In consequence, REDD+ can be seen as another attempt to achieve the twin goals of environmental protection and rural development, and consequently, relies on the strategies and tools of past efforts. Against this background, we explore past experiences with key strategies for environmental protection and poverty alleviation in the Amazon to critically reflect about the potential of REDD+ to contribute to sustainable local development in the region. The analysis demonstrates that initiatives that pursued environmental goals mostly led to more restrictions and bureaucratic barriers to local forest users, while the prevailing approaches to promote rural dwellers showed ambivalent environmental outcomes.
There is more to sustainable forest management than reduced impact logging. Partnerships between multiple actors are needed in order to create the institutional context for good forest governance and sustainable forest management and stimulate the necessary local community involvement. The idea behind this is that the parties would be able to achieve more jointly than on their own by combining assets, knowledge, skills and political power of actors at different levels of scale. This article aims to demonstrate by example the nature and variety of forest-related partnerships in Brazilian Amazonia. Based on the lessons learned from these cases and the authors’ experience, the principal characteristics of successful partnerships are described, with a focus on political and socioeconomic aspects. These characteristics include fairly negotiated partnership objectives, the active involvement of the public sector as well as impartial brokers, equitable and cost-effective institutional arrangements, sufficient and equitably shared benefits for all the parties involved, addressing socioeconomic drawbacks, and taking measures to maintain sustainable exploitation levels.
River Basin Management (RBM) as an approach to sustainable water use has become the dominant model of water governance. Its introduction, however, entails a fundamental realignment and rescaling of water-sector institutions along hydrological boundaries. Creating such a new governance scale is inherently political, and is being described as politics of scale. This paper analyzes how the politics of scale play out in the institutionalization of RBM in Mongolia. It furthermore scrutinizes the role of the broader political decentralization process in the introduction of RBM, an issue that has so far received little attention. Finally, it assesses whether the river basin is an adequate water management scale in Mongolia.
Anthropogenic climate change is a formidable global challenge. Yet countries’ contributions to global greenhouse gas emissions and the climate change impacts they face are poles apart. These differences, as well as countries’ different capacities and development levels, have been internationally acknowledged by including the notion of Common But Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR) and Respective Capabilities under the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The private sector is increasingly being engaged in climate finance and climate-related activities. Private sector opportunities for engagement in climate change adaptation are less clear than for mitigation, particularly in developing countries. This article first conceptualizes private sector engagement in adaptation by exploring (1) different roles of the private sector in adaptation in developing countries and (2) the way governments can create an enabling environment to increase private sector engagement. Second, it analyses how 47 least developed countries (LDCs) envisage the role of the private sector in their National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs). This article argues that private sector engagement in adaptation is often inevitable and potentially significant. Yet, the results show that it receives little attention in NAPAs.
Fiscal instruments are potentially among the most effective, and cost-effective, options for addressing externalities related to poor air quality, urban road congestion, and greenhouse gases. This paper takes a case study, focused on Mauritius (a pioneer in the use of green taxes) to illustrate how existing taxes, especially on fuels and vehicles, could be reformed to better address these externalities. We discuss, in particular, an explicit carbon tax; a variety of options for reforming vehicle taxes to meet environmental, equity, and revenue objectives; and a progressive transition to usage-based vehicle taxes to address congestion.
This paper reviews the fiscal implications of climate change, and the potential role of the Fund in addressing them. It stresses that:
- The potential fiscal implications are immediate as well as lasting, and liable to affect—in differing forms and degree—all Fund members.
- Climate change is a global externality problem, calling for some degree of international fiscal cooperation…
- …and has features—an intertemporal mismatch between the (early) costs of action to address climate change and (later) benefits, pervasive uncertainties and irreversibilities (including risk of catastrophe), and sharp asymmetries in the effects on different countries—that raise difficult technical and ethical issues, and hinder policy coordination.
- In addition to itself impacting the public finances, climate change calls for deploying fiscal instruments to mitigate its extent and adapt to its remaining effects.
Until the 1980s, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon had largely been the result of public policies (incentives, investment). Since the 1990s, with basic infrastructure installed and cattle-ranching turned profitable due to innovations, deforestation has relied on its own endogenous dynamics. To stop this trend, politics will have to use both traditional and modern instruments for influencing economic behaviour, that is, control and sanctions as well as dialogue and negotiation. Since democratisation, civil society organisations (CSOs) have grown in the Amazon region, often with important support from foreign non-governmental organisations. Today, they are important partners for sustainable, bottom-up development strategies. This has become evident in the political mobilisation against two large public infrastructure investment projects: the dam and hydroelectric plant of Belo Monte; and the paving of the federal highway BR-163 between Cuiabá and Santarém.
The part played by the Brazilian tropical timber industry in deforesting the Amazon region has not been studied very much. This book describes the expansion of the timber industry in the Brazilian federal state of Para since the 1960s, when Amazon development became an important item on the government's agenda.