Book
“A stunning book.”
“A must read for academics and policy makers alike!”
Forests of Refuge questions the effectiveness of market-based policies aimed at governing forests in the interest of mitigating climate change. It interrogates the implementation of the biggest and most ambitious global plan to incentivize people away from deforesting activities, that of the United Nations endorsed Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) initiative. Adopting a multi-sited ethnography, Forests of Refuge explores REDD+ in Guyana and neighbouring Suriname, two highly forested countries in the Guiana Shield with low deforestation rates where conservation efforts would be expected to have a relatively easy path. Yet, REDD+ has been fraught with challenges.
This book situates these challenges in the inattentiveness of global environmental policies to roughly five hundred years of colonial histories that positioned the forests as places of refuge and resistance. It advocates that the fruits of these oppressive histories be reckoned with through processes of decolonization. The chapters of Forests of Refuge show that pursuing decolonization in countries shaped almost entirely by the colonial encounter depends on reducing deference to the sovereign state in questions of environmental governance; removing the market from its increasingly central position as arbiter of environmental and social affairs; un-disciplining the racialized subjects of colonial governance, and amplifying those ethics and ways of being in the world that are associated with pre-colonial and non-Eurocentric knowledge traditions.
Forests of Refuge takes readers into the halls of policy making, conservation development organizations and some of the forest dependent communities most affected by environmental policies and exploitative colonial histories. Based on 10 years of research from within an interpretive, ethnographic frame, this research is undertaken from the positionality of a Guyanese woman.
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