How REDD+ governs: Multiple forest environmentalities in Guyana and Suriname

Abstract

The Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation mechanism is a policy instrument intended to achieve environmental conservation and utilization simultaneously. Recently, researchers have adopted ‘environmentality’, a theoretical approach that recognizes the different strategies for the ‘conduct of conduct’ embodied in environmental governance, to parse the diverse governing logics supporting Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation implementation. Thus far, use of this lens has focused predominantly on how Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation introduces new forms of environmentality, overlooking the pre-existing, context-specific approaches to governance on which the mechanism builds, and hence potentially overstating the novelty of its governance techniques. Challenging this dominant use of the environmentality lens, I further develop its critical potential by demonstrating how environmentality's temporal dimensions illuminate the shifts, continuities and disruptions in how environmental governance evolves over time. I do this by demonstrating how Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation builds on pre-existing forest governance interventions in Guyana and neighbouring Suriname. I argue that while Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation remains a global expression of neoliberal environmentality, it builds on a pre-existing sovereign environmentality established throughout the overlapping histories of Guyana and Suriname, draws on but also subverts context-specific truth environmentality in the spiritual relations of forest dependent communities with the forests, and is made palatable for resistant communities through disciplinary environmentality. In this way, these four forms of environmentality help to explain how Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation implementation in the two countries assumes its current character, while demonstrating how environmental projects work towards shaping the subjects of their governance.