Inside Forest Diplomacy: A Case Study of the Congo Basin under Global Environmental Governance

Minette Nago,Symphorien Ongolo

doi:10.3390/f12050525

Abstract

The growing global interest in biodiversity conservation and the role of forestland sustainability in climate change mitigation has led to the emergence of a new specific field of global environmental governance that we called ‘forest diplomacy’. With the largest tropical forest area after the Amazon, Congo Basin countries (CBc) constitute a major negotiation bloc within global forest-related governance arenas. Despite this position, CBc seem embedded in a failure trap with respect to their participation in forest diplomacy arenas. This paper examines the major causes of the recurrent failures of CBc within forest diplomacy. A qualitative empirical approach (including key informant interviews, groups discussion, participant observation, and policy document review) was used. From a conceptual and theoretical perspective, this research combines global and political sociology approaches including environmentality and blame avoidance works. The main finding reveals that the recurrent failures of CBc in forest diplomacy are partly due to the lack of strategic and bureaucratic autonomy of CBc that strongly depend on financial, technical, and knowledge resources from Western cooperation agencies or consultancy firms. Our discussion highlights that this dependency is maintained by most of the key actor groups involved in forest diplomacy related to CBc, as they exploit these failures to serve their private interests while avoiding the blame of not reducing deforestation and biodiversity loss in the Congo Basin.

Highlights

With the emergence of biodiversity preservation and global climate change mitigation issues on the international relations agenda, tropical forests have become much more significant for global sustainability goals [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
Our discussion highlights that this dependency is maintained by most of the key actor groups involved in forest diplomacy related to Congo Basin countries (CBc), as they exploit these failures to serve their private interests while avoiding the blame of not reducing deforestation and biodiversity loss in the Congo Basin
We assume that a non-zero-sum game puts pressure on parties that stimulates them to make use of the blame avoidance politics because no one wants to defect and be responsible for the failure of not achieving the global sustainability goals which include tropical deforestation reduction

Summary

Introduction

With the emergence of biodiversity preservation and global climate change mitigation issues on the international relations agenda, tropical forests have become much more significant for global sustainability goals [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Since the pre-Rio Brundtland report entitled ‘Our. Common Future’, many rounds of negotiations have been held at international, transnational, and national levels to define or reinforce a set of policy measures (rules, principles, norms) and forest-related instruments. The notion of forest diplomacy developed in this paper builds on recent works related to two fundamental concepts in international relations: diplomacy and environmental diplomacy. Component 1: Role within the forest negotiation processes (fnp). (i) What is your position within fnp?. (iii) Since when are you taking part to these fnp?. Why are you participating to these fnp?. (ii) What type of contribution do you bring (technical, financial, diplomatically)?

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