David M. Lansing

Performing Carbon's Materiality: The Production of Carbon Offsets and the Framing of Exchange

In this paper I provide a first-hand account of a trip designed to verify the existence of a carbon forestry offset in Costa Rica. In so doing, I reflect on how various actors become the stabilized calculative agents of scientists, state bureaucrats, indigenous leaders, GPS devices, trees, signs, and field reports that such trips require. In addition, I show how various articulations of these actors, and their emergent agencies, simultaneously maintains both the carbon offset as a commodity object as well as a field of action and communication that allows for such an object to be exchanged. In short, I consider the verification of an offset as a performance. Doing so, I examine the agency of some actors in this process, and account for the uneven power relations inherent in such a process. Specifically, I advance three arguments. First, the agency of actors is constituted, in part, by various calculative devices, which themselves simultaneously occupy an unstable position of being both a material object and an abstraction. Second, the normative power of the performance I witnessed derives from its relation to the abject: spaces and ways of being that are unintelligible to the logics of offsetting that nonetheless serve to further reiterate the need for an offset’s calculative frame. Third, performing an offset is a self-reflexive process, and it is through the self-reflexivity of actors involved that the qualities of ‘the forest’ emerge in ways that confound the stability of an offset commodity. In this way, the biophysical qualities of the forest are not necessarily barriers to its commodification. Instead, it is the reflexive practices inherent in performing ‘the economic’ that can serve to confound the emergence of the commodified forest. Keywords: performativity, carbon offsets, materiality, commodification, power

Carbon's Calculatory Spaces: The Emergence of Carbon Offsets in Costa Rica:

This paper analyzes the practices of calculation needed to create carbon forestry offsets in Costa Rica, paying special attention to the spaces that are produced through such practices. I argue that the calculations needed to bring a carbon offset into being as a commodity is a process that results in the coconstitution of relational space, absolute Cartesian spaces, and the bounded territory of the nation-state. I develop my argument by drawing on Martin Heideggers writings on calculation, technology, and the question of being and examine the spaces that result from carbon offset calculations performed by the Costa Rican state. Central to my argument is the idea that the practices of calculation are productive of a technological metaphysics, where the world becomes disclosed to us as an object of orderability. This ontological orientation allows for the objects and subjects of the world, in this case carbon commodities as well as producers and consumers of carbon offsets, to become relationally embedded in the world through the production of bounded Cartesian space. The production of such ‘graspable’ spaces simultaneously reinforces and undermines the territoriality of the Costa Rican state.

The Spaces of Social Capital: Livelihood Geographies and Marine Conservation in the Cayos Cochinos Marine Protected Area, Honduras

This article explores the relation between a households social capital and its use of marine resources in the Cayos Cochinos Marine Reserve. Recent writings on social capitals role in facilitating community conservation efforts have highlighted the ways in which strong levels of this asset can produce positive conservation outcomes. In contrast, this paper argues that social capital formation and use at the household level can produce a geography of resource use that runs counter to the zoning-based resource restrictions that often typify co-managed conservation areas. Drawing on ethnographic and survey work from the Cayos Cochinos Marine Protected Area, this paper shows how marine resources help Garifuna fishing families build networks of trust and reciprocity, which in turn allows them to access marine resources and mobilize them across space in ways that are at odds with the geography of the reserves stated management plan.

Carbon Forestry and Sociospatial Difference: An Examination of Two Carbon Offset Projects among Indigenous Smallholders in Costa Rica

This article examines why some kinds of households are positioned to take advantage of carbon offset projects that target secondary forest fallow. It does so by assessing the results of two offset projects targeting this land use in the Cabécar Indigenous Reserve, Costa Rica. For one project, it finds that a small group of male landowners have most of the land in fallow; however, the presence of this land use is subsidized by the productivity of female land in cash-crop production. In the second project, payments were targeted toward land in the areas fertile floodplain, and resulted in an exclusion of some households from the areas dominant livelihood activity: cash-crop production. These results demonstrate the difficult trade-offs involved in designing equitable and attractive offset projects.

The Neutral State: A Genealogy of Ecosystem Service Payments in Costa Rica

Using the case of Costa Rica, this paper examines how ‘carbon’ became an identifiable problem for that state. Specifically, we consider the prominent role that payments for ecosystem services (PES) have come to play in Costa Rica’s current efforts to become ‘carbon neutral’. We trace how, during the turbulent period of the 1980s, rationalities of financialization and security arose in this country that allowed for PES to emerge as an economic and political mechanism. Our central thesis is that this period initiated a governmental project of securing a viable future for the nation’s resources through the process of linking them to global financial markets and international flows of trade. This project of achieving resource security through economic circulation introduced new financial logics into forest management, as well as new modes of calculating the value and extent of the forest. We show how these ways of framing resources ultimately found expression in the nation’s PES program that is now central to the state’s goal of remaking the nation’s territory as a climatically neutral space. We argue that such financialized practices further reinforce the territorial space of Costa Rica through the encoding of carbon within it. The result is that, today, the nation’s carbon flows have become territorialized as part of the nation’s atmosphere, biomass, people and economy. The significance of this argument is that carbon’s territorialization did not begin with a concern for the climate, nor did it occur through diffusion of global climate policy to Costa Rica. Instead, carbon’s rise can be traced to locally specific ways of coping with the problem of resource security.

Forests in Limbo: Assessing Costa Rica's Forest and Land Reform Policies

ABSTRACT In this article, we consider the stalled implementation of two state policies among recipients of land reform in Costa Rica: the transfer of authority over forests on state agrarian reform lands over to the Ministry of the Environment, and the Rural Development Institute’s requirement to issue land title to the recipients of its land reform projects. To date, neither of these policies is even partially implemented, resulting in both forests and marginalized landholders existing in a state of dual tenure limbo. In this article we draw on document analysis, interviews with policymakers, and interviews with recipients of land reform to determine why these policies have not been implemented. In addition, we assess the potential consequences for forest conservation that this situation has produced by mapping the extent and characteristics of forests that occupy this state of uncertainty.

Effectiveness of Best Management Practices with Changing Climate in a Maryland Watershed

Abstract. Agriculture is one of many contributing sources to water quality degradation in the Chesapeake Bay . It is generally accepted that its contribution can be controlled by adopting Best Management Practices (BMPs) tailored to local conditions and stakeholder preferences. BMPs identified as appropriate for this purpose, under current climate conditions, may however prove potentially ineffective under climate change. The objective of this study is to evaluate the degree to which the effectiveness of a specific BMP varies under the high-emissions IPCC climate change scenario A2, for an agricultural watershed located within the Chesapeake Bay basin.