Abstract
Following critiques of the global environmental justice paradigm, a ‘critical’ environmental justice scholarship is emerging. This article contributes to this important field of inquiry by interrogating project evaluation through a critical recognition justice lens that draws on political ecology. We use an embedded case study of the official donor evaluation of a REDD+ pilot project in Tanzania; comparing narrated accounts of the project recipients' experiences with the official evaluation documents and asking whose ways of knowing, values, and perspectives on governance and justice are recognized and whose are excluded. We find that the report represents a narrow framing of the project experience, based on standard evaluation criteria, the technical framing of the project, and the ways of knowing, values and perspectives of the (inter)national conservation community. The project framings of many local-level project recipients are not recognized in the official evaluation, despite attempts to include villager perspectives and some consideration of justice-related outcomes in the report. Project evaluation is therefore identified as a vehicle for recognition justices and injustices, discursively reproducing the ways of knowing, values and perspectives of certain actors while excluding others. The role of project evaluation in the proliferation of dominant conservation discourse is identified, and the ability for standardized evaluations to deliver meaningful learning is challenged. We therefore call for a reframing of project evaluation and highlight the potential of incorporating critical environmental justice scholarship and pluralistic methodologies.
Highlights
Environmental justice (EJ), and what Svarstad and Benjaminsen (2020) call radical EJ, has been established as a core approach for the critical analysis of socio-environmental phenomena, including natural resource governance and conservation interventions (e.g. Dawson et al, 2018; Mabele, 2019)
Villagers rarely spoke about the carbon elements of the project as central, the way they were discussed varied between actor groups. Those in leadership positions spoke more about the MKUHUMI mechanism, its measurement and related international carbon standards. As this group of villagers were those with whom the consultants spoke in their field visits, this is reflected in the report, which shows a good level of understanding of REDD+
This article contributes to the growing field of critical EJ inquiry by combining political ecology and radical EJ to explore recognition justice in project evaluation, focusing on epistemic justice and emphasizing subjective evaluations among project recipients and the broader social and political implications of recognition injustices in project evaluation
Summary
Environmental justice (EJ), and what Svarstad and Benjaminsen (2020) call radical EJ, has been established as a core approach for the critical analysis of socio-environmental phenomena, including natural resource governance and conservation interventions (e.g. Dawson et al, 2018; Mabele, 2019). When applied to natural resource governance and conservation more broadly, the focus of justice-related inquiry remains on distribution and participation (He and Sikor, 2015; Martin et al, 2016) This is so in relation to REDD+, where the primary focus is on benefit sharing and participation in decision-making (Schroeder and McDermott, 2014). A critical recognition lens can deepen understanding of the different ways in which those affected by intervention ‘subjectively perceive, evaluate and narrate an issue, such as their perspectives on an environmental intervention’ (Svarstad and Benjaminsen, 2020: 4) This allows for exploration of whether these perspectives are recognized by powerful actors and whether they are included in, or excluded from, conservation discourses that project evaluations feed into. We challenge dominant and standardized approaches to evaluation, and demonstrate the value of using a critical recognition justice lens that draws on political ecology as a way of identifying underlying causes of justice
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