Does REDD+ have a chance? 729
Accordingly we contend that valid critiques of REDD+ as a strategy in Brazil and Indonesia (Brockhaus et al., 2012; Edwards et al., 2012; Henders et al., 2015) are misplaced for a large number of REDD+ projects where forest-dependent communities are struggling tomake a living; these communi- ties have interests inprotecting their forests fromoutsiders. In this sense our conclusions align with those of Robinson et al. (2013) for other sites in Tanzania, where key drivers of defor- estation are also local extraction of forest products (see also Blomley et al., 2016). In such contexts an approach based on community forestry linked to REDD+ can offer a suite of in- centives to reduce deforestation, precisely because its incen- tives reward those primarily responsible for deforestation.
Centralization is not inevitable
Since its inception, the risk of centralization has loomed over REDD+ (Phelps et al., 2010; Sandbrook et al., 2010). The main concerns are loss of community control over traditional forests (Barr & Sayer, 2012), exclusionary gov- ernment regulations (Thompson et al., 2011), and elite capture (Andersson et al., 2018). Where these occur, centra- lized forest management engendered by REDD+ can un- dercut community management (Brown, 2013). Centralizing tendencies emerge in part because REDD+ is increasingly implemented at a national or jurisdictional level (ostensi- bly to avoid leakage), and in part because complex carbon accounting, including monitoring, reporting and verifica- tion, demands expertise from skilled partners who are gen- erally unavailable locally (Phelps et al., 2010). In addition, the increased commodity value of forests on environmental markets inevitably lures central governments, and/or other investors, to seek rents or land grabs (Sandbrook et al., 2010). Nevertheless, REDD+ projects vary greatly in their scale, degree of centralization and how each programme inter- acts with government institutions (West, 2016), making such generalizations problematic. Tanzania has a history of progressive forestmanagement
that provides fortuitous institutional pre-adaptations for the development of REDD+ institutions (Burgess et al., 2010; Kweka et al., 2015; Blomley et al., 2016). The Hifadhi ya Misitu ya Asili programme grew out of this tradition, specif- ically from an earlier (1996–2005) small community forestry project funded by CARE, which focused on conservation and community development in 10 villages around Ngezi forest, the largest remaining area of high forest on the island. Because of these early successes, the Hifadhi ya Misitu ya Asili partners elected to scale up this community manage- ment model from the village to the shehia level, and roll it out at the archipelago scale. Thus, the programme was not imposed on a void but rather built onto a history of de- centralized forest management with formal government support; conservation committees, albeit of varying skills, reputation and credibility, already existed at some sites.
Some such committees date back to British colonial con- servation policies (Supplementary Material 3) and continue to display strong commitments to protecting their forests. Engaging with existing institutions rather than imposing new structures is associated with successful outcomes for community projects (Brooks et al., 2012). In short, with such pre-existing institutions pressures for centralization are less likely to destroy REDD+ programmes. Quite to the contrary, across Pemba we observe consid-
erable opportunities for complementarities between com- munity management and government oversight. Not only does the fate of government-run forests depend heavily on the activities of Shehia Conservation Committees in neigh- bouring communities, but members of the Shehia Con- servation Committees depend on Department of Forestry personnel to help depersonalize socially costly punish- ments and fines amongst otherwise tightly-knit communi- ties (Robinson & Lokina, 2012). There is thus a synergy in which both communities and the forest department provi- sion specialized conservation goods that they each have an advantage in producing. This may be a byproduct of an un- usually highly community-orientated stance amongst some government personnel (Eilola et al., 2015), but it shows that REDD+ interventions can potentially profit from closer co- ordination (either spatially or institutionally) with govern- ment institutions when there are benefits fromspecialization.
Leakage can promote conservation adoption
Finally, we note that leakage, typically considered a barrier to sub-national programmes, can be co-opted under specif- ic conditions to drive the spread of community forestry. Leakage is a major problem for any performance-based payments intervention scheme because people and com- munities can simply shift their environmentally degrading activities to other areas (Atmadja & Verchot, 2012). As elsewhere, leakage occurs on Pemba. Once a REDD+ shehia begins to develop formal institutions to protect its local for- est, citizens are potentially incentivized to enter neighboring shehia that do not have such protections, to harvest forest products. This is particularly prevalent given the mosaic structure of the REDD+ shehia (Fig. 1). The result is a growth in the rate of deforestation for adjoining shehia and an increase in competition amongst communities over remaining patches of forest. To reduce leakage, multiple adjoining shehia have begun to petition the Department of Forestry to obtain Community Forest Management Agree- ments, thereby attaining the legal rights to develop their own institutions to protect their forests from outsiders (Andrews& BorgerhoffMulder, 2018); this mirrors instances of shehia cooperation seen in Unguja (Eilola et al., 2015). Capitalizing on the shift in opportunity costs created by leak- age into adjoining areas allows REDD+ projects to leverage this ‘frontier effect’ (cf. Turchin, 2003) to promote a cascade
Oryx, 2021, 55(5), 725–731 © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605319001376
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