Event Details

Forests of Refuge questions the effectiveness of market-based policies aimed at governing forests in the interest of mitigating climate change. It interrogates the biggest and most ambitious global plan to incentivise people away from deforesting activities: the UN endorsed REDD+ initiative.

Reading from her manuscript of the same name, in Forests of Refuge Dr Yolanda Ariadne Collins explores REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) in Guyana and neighbouring Suriname, two highly forested countries with low deforestation rates, where conservation efforts would be expected to have a relatively easy path. Yet, REDD+ has been fraught with challenges. She argues this is due, in part, to global environmental policies’ inattentiveness to colonial histories that have positioned the forests as places of refuge and resistance.

Forests of Refuge explores the implementation of, and resistance to, environmental governance policies in postcolonial, racialized environments. It shows how colonialism continues to structure Guyanese and Surinamese society in a manner that weakens conservation initiatives and ongoing attempts to govern climate change. Forests of Refuge contributes to three ongoing discussions: the feasibility of market-based tools for encouraging conservation within the neoliberal conservation literature; processes of racialization within critiques of the Anthropocene; and the possibility of decolonization within the critical development literature. Questioning ‘homo economicus’, the imagined, rational human subject of market-based environmental governance policies, it posits instead the existence of colonially rooted, racialized subjects. These racialized subjects are largely unresponsive to the financial incentives upon which market-based policies depend. Market-based policies, when enacted in the Global South, are stymied by these racialized subjects and resource use practices, a consideration unexplored in discussions around climate change mitigation and neoliberal conservation. Forests of Refuge contributes to and reframes these discussions by recognising processes of racialization rooted in the colonial experience. Adopting a multi-sited ethnography, Forests of Refuge takes readers into the halls of policy making, conservation development organisations and to forest dependent communities most affected by environmental policies and exploitative colonial histories. Based on 8 years of research from within an interpretive, ethnographic frame, this research is undertaken from the positionality of a Guyanese woman.

For any questions about the seminar please contact Ben Neimark at b.neimark@lancaster.ac.uk

If you would like to Dr Collins directly please email ariadne.collins@ici-berlin.org; Collins_yolanda@alumni.ceu.edu