Negotiating power from the margins: Encountering everyday experiences and contestations to REDD + in Southern Tanzania

Abstract

This paper provides an account of everyday discursive and material practises deployed by marginalised forest-dependent groups in the course of resisting the implementation of Reduced Emission from Deforestation and forest degradation (REDD + ) and conservation regulations. Available literature have documented extensively that REDD + market-based models across the Global South, and Tanzania in particular, have led to increasing inequality, injustices, and exclusions. Nevertheless, there is little attention to exploring how different social actors that are unequally positioned resist exclusions. The paper explores selected case studies of marginalised forest-dependent groups in Lindi, Southern Tanzania, who creatively work to negotiate unequal power relations through a range of encounters around REDD+. Our analysis shows unequal social, spatial, and environmental ramifications of market-based conservation policies and strategies that have led to different kinds of material and discursive resistance to challenge exclusions. In doing so, it provides critical context-specific realities from the Global South and, specifically, Tanzanian scholarship to focus on both the dynamics of power and resistance in socially differentiated forest-dependent groups affected by envisioned market-based and development model-led conservation regimes.