Financial flows and diverging interests: REDD+, forest, mining, and cattle concessions in Mai Ndombe, DR Congo
Grace Wong, Niina Pietarinen, Niak Koh, Maria Brockhaus
Forest-agriculture frontiers are rapidly being converted either to agro-industrial practices and conservation interests throughout the tropics, often pursued under the guise of ‘sustainable development’. These transformations have not led to expected win-win social and ecological outcomes and benefits are often reaped by powerful and capital-rich actors (and the State) who are remote from these landscapes. We argue that such outcomes are a consequence of infrastructures that have persisted since colonial times – from the “infra” or underlying material, social and political framework, the physical infrastructure of roads, mills or tourism, to the paper infrastructure of lists, accounts, laws, and regulations which enables the capture of economic or ecological rent (Li 2019).
This study examines the material flows of finance, and the different actors and interests they represent, in the case study of Mai Ndombe in DR Congo, a forested region highly coveted for conservation values and development aspirations. Understanding that frontier change is driven not only by local people’s behaviours and land-use practices nor national policies alone, this paper applies a telecoupling approach and leverages on diverse open source data (LandMatrix, Global Forest Watch, Forest Carbon Partnership, ORBIS, OCCRP Aleph) to examine global flows of public and private finance and trace corporate ownership of investments in the region. Our preliminary findings highlight the complexity of transnational influences on frontier change for development and conservation interests, the reach of persistent infrastructures beyond boundaries and their consequences on local contestations over land-use and forest commons governance.
XIX Biennial IASC Conference
Nairobi, Kenya
19 June 2023
Panel 6.1 – Infrastructures of inequality in the transformation of forest commons for large-scale commodity production