Amelia Thorpe

Community-based Monitoring, Reporting and Verification of REDD Projects: Innovative Potentials for Benefit Sharing

Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) has rapidly become a key focus of discussions in the development of a future climate change regime to be agreed at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meetings in Copenhagen. While support for REDD at a general level is high, there remains considerable divergence on detailed issues of implementation. Monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) of REDD projects to accurately quantify emissions reductions is a key issue, particularly given that there is limited capacity to undertake MRV at the level required by the international community in the developing countries where REDD projects are intended to take place. This paper discusses the importance of MRV to REDD and the potential of community-based mechanisms to improve capacity, as well as helping to address other contentious issues such as equitable benefit-sharing. The paper will focus on Papua New Guinea (PNG), drawing lessons of applicability to developing countries more generally.

Hegel’s Hipsters: Claiming Ownership in the Contemporary City

Property is both revered and reviled. Praised for its connections to autonomy, agency, power and community, property attracts scorching critiques for its implication in exclusion, inequality and injustice. This article provides a new perspective from which to examine this dual nature of property. Drawing on fieldwork in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, property is examined in the context of citizen and community-led ‘do-it-yourself’ interventions in the urban environment. Perhaps even more than in formal planning processes, claims about ownership are central to these activities. Finding multiple forms of property at work in the city, and noting that formal legal title is often less important than more informal ownership, this article sheds new light on some of the oldest debates in property. Amongst echoes of Lockean labour-based theory, Hegelian personhood theory emerges as particularly helpful in explaining the intimate connections between property and identity, community and power in the city.

Rethinking Participation, Rethinking Planning

Abstract If planning is more than ‘what planners do’, what does this mean for efforts to make planning more inclusive and representative? This article examines the connection between efforts to democratise the practice of planning and efforts to democratise its definition. Drawing on insurgent historiography, I argue that public participation was not introduced in the twentieth century, it was reimagined. Just as mainstream planning histories have been challenged as efforts to claim and legitimate certain roles for the professional planner, celebratory narratives of participation as a post-1960s phenomenon can similarly be understood as an effort to contain and control the work of planning. Instead of a bounded, professional and state-led process to which participatory practices can (and should) be added, this article puts forth an account of planning as a contingent and continuing process extending well beyond the profession.

Too little, too soon? An assessment of Australian carbon capture and storage legislation against the new standards set for the Clean Development Mechanism

At the 2011 UN climate summit in Durban, agreement was reached on rules for the inclusion of carbon capture and storage as part of the Clean Development Mechanism. Advocates of the technology have hailed this as a major milestone, and it is widely predicted that the industry will now grow considerably. Australia, with significant geological formations and enabling legislation already in place at both federal and state levels, is likely to be one of the countries pioneering this growth. The CDM decision, being the first internationally agreed set of rules for CCS, provides an important benchmark against which to assess Australian legislation. In this context, the article reviews the legal frameworks for CCS in Australia. Interestingly, Australia’s CCS laws would not satisfy the standards set for host-country legal frameworks under the CDM. However, Australia does offer some lessons that may be useful for the regulation of CCS in other jurisdictions.