This presentation by Benjamin Cashore was given at a session titled "Securing rights as a climate change mitigation strategy" at the Global Landscapes Forum in Lima, Peru, on December 6, 2014. By discussing how securing rights can serve as proven and cost-effective climate change mitigation strategy, the session built bridges between policy-makers, practitioners, and scholars.

1. Championing the Diffusion of Community Forestry
Through Pathways of Influence:
Towards the Co-generation of Strategic Insights
Benjamin Cashore
Sebastien Jodoin
Michael Stone
Vivienne Caballero
Sarah Lupberger
Presentation to Global Landscape Forum, Lima Peru, Dec. 6th, 2014

2. I. Project Overview
• Co-generate strategic insights for those
promoting community forestry
• Forest dependent communities, forest livelihoods, indigenous
peoples, rights to resources
• Supported by Climate and Land Use Alliance
• Overarching questions:
• What are most promising interventions and strategies for
“diffusion” of community forestry?
• That are likely to create durable and lasting effects?
• Our approach
• We depart from scholarly work on community forestry “design
principles approaches”
• Instead we turn to transnational “pathways of influence”
framework within political science

3. II. What we are doing
• Conducted research in five case studies
• Tanzania, Indonesia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru
• Assessed global policy instruments
• Including REDD+, Legality verification
• Producing
• Academic conference papers
• Strategic working papers
• Practitioner oriented tool kit/protocol
• For generating insights for “sticky” results

4. III. The Framework
• Bernstein and Cashore (2000, 2011, 2012)
• Distinguishes
• Economic globalization
• Acts as a break on on social and environmental policies as
countries compete for global capital
• Internationalization
• Four pathways of Influence
• Can counteract economic globalization pressures
• Strengthen social and environmental policies
• Each pathway has different “causal logics” of influence
• Rules, norms, markets, ‘direct access’
• Some synergistic, others countervailing

5. IV. Results: Tanzania
• Prof. Sebastien Jodoin research
• Assessed Role of REDD+ in shaping community
forestry
• Generated insights from pathways framework
• Historical context
• Significant deforestation rate of about 1% a year
• However, global commodity markets not (yet) as influential
in Tanzania than other cases
• Drivers of deforestation less costly to address than other
cases in our study
• e.g. charcoal demand from city dwellers
• Commitment to community forestry preceded REDD+
• Though emphasis in on villages, not “indigenous”
communities

6. 1) International Rules Pathway
• Causal influence:
• Whether countries feel need to comply with international law
• UNFCCC decisions
• Cancun agreements on 4 elements for national level
REDD+
• 7 safeguards including respecting local rights to
participation and local knowledge
• Impact on Tanzania: Yes
• Adopted international safeguards

7. 2) Norms/Discourse Pathway
• Causal influence:
• strength of moral evaluations
• Norms of “Indigenous rights to resources”
• now supported by leading international forest organizations
• “Free, Prior Informed Consent” norm
• increasingly accepted as “prerequisite” to REDD+ projects
• Impact on Tanzania: Yes
• Global community forestry norms reinforced Tanzania’s existing
norms
• FPIC norm expand and translated from indigenous focus to
forest dependent communities.

8. 3) Market Pathway
• Causal influence:
• strength of economic incentives and/or disincentives
• Project based carbon markets
• For example, most Verified Carbon Standard (VCS)
certifications are dual with Climate Community and Biodiversity
(CCB) standards
• National level funds for avoided deforestation
• Norway bilateral agreements
• Tanzania: Not (yet) influential

9. 4) Direct Access Pathways
• Capacity building
• Funding, education, training, assistance and capacity building,
partnerships between domestic and international public and
private actors
• Causal influence:
• resources/training/skills
• Empower marginalized domestic organizations
• Prevalent in REDD+ interventions
• “Readiness” efforts – measuring MRV, mapping technologies,
empowering marginalized peoples in stakeholder processes
• Relevance for Tanzania: highly significant
• Norway direct funding to conservation NGOs
• Helped implement forest act, strengthened community
forestry practitioners

10. V. Strategic Implications
• Three synergistic pathways led to influence
• How sticky are these results?
• Could increasing economic globalization in Tanzania weaken
results?
• We theorize synergies of three pathways have
created “stickiness”
• Should “withstand” deforestation pressures even from global
commodity markets

11. V. Strategic Implications
• Why?
• Difficult to reverse granting of community forestry certificates –
there would be significant backlash
• Norms of community forestry growing
• Capacity building gaps have been filled
• Occurred at a “critical juncture”
• Unlikely these results would have occurred if lucrative
agricultural crops had been causing deforestation

12. IV. Strategic Lessons for Elsewhere
• Undertake domestic “scoping” efforts
• Identify “critical juncture” countries
• Where economic drivers of deforestation currently relatively
modest
• But may be subject to change in the future
• More open to “locking in” community forestry
• Through ‘rules’, ‘norms’ and ‘direct access’ pathways
• If established before full fledged “economic
globalization”
• May be able to withstand deforestation pressures of
agricultural expansion
• And, will be positioned to benefit from synergistic market
pathways – if/when prices of carbon is higher.

13. V. STOP HERE

14. Types of Policy Change
Tempo or Speed of Change
Fast Slow
Directionality
Cumulative
(heading to
a new
equilibrium)
In
equilibrium
Classic
paradigmatic
Faux
paradigmatic
Progressive
incremental
Classic
incremental
Source: Cashore and Howlett, 2007