| dc.description.abstract | In 2010, Norway and Indonesia signed a bilateral agreement on their partnership on Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+). REDD+ is a mechanism that aims to reduce forest-based emissions in developing countries, compensating them with international funding. Norway committed to provide funding for Indonesia’s efforts to implement REDD+ and, once implemented, provide result-based payments for reduced emissions. The concept of REDD+, which originated from a technocratic, market-based idea, changed to put more focus on social, ecological and economic co-benefits. On the local level in Indonesia, a strong discussion on customary land rights and people’s benefits evolved within the early implementation phase. Access to and control over land has historically been a contested issue for Indonesia’s people, with colonial control over land, transmigration programmes and legislations during New Order. Recent developments such as the global land rush and the introduction of REDD+ have produced new realities for Indonesia’s land situation. This study aims to investigate REDD+ and Indonesia’s land and people by applying discourse analysis. On the one hand, the study investigates how discourses in environmental governance, deforestation and REDD+ become apparent within the Indonesian-Norwegian REDD+ partnership. On the other hand, it aims to identify local discourses and representations of land and people in REDD+ in the Indonesian context. Indonesian land and people are approached through a political ecology, focusing on actors and scales. Land, as a natural, but social resource is theoretically explored through the concepts of access and exclusion and incorporated into meta-discourses in REDD+. The methodology of discourse analysis applied is based on Foucauldian Discourse Analysis combined with Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) on the text-level after Norman Fairclough. The study identified a positive, managerial discourse, a moderate, reform-oriented discourse and a critical counter discourse based on their attitude towards REDD+ and found all of them apparent within texts on the Norwegian-Indonesian REDD+ partnership. Through the application of a CDA, linguistic features of the discourses could be detected. The study further showed that, while on an international basis REDD+ is framed as a solution to climate change, the concept is rather used opportunistically and with a strong focus on rights on the local scale. There are two main representations of land in REDD+, the one framing the right to land as a precondition for REDD+ and the second one highlighting its technicalities. | |
