Tracking the Fault Lines of Pro-Poor Carbon

Forestry
Stephanie Paladino
Stephanie Paladino is with Mero Lek Applied
Research, Athens, GA
Correspondence: Stephanie Paladino, Mero Lek Applied Research,
PO Box 973, Athens, GA 30603, USA. E-mail: macypal@gmail.com

Abstract
Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) has been given a principal role in postKyoto, climate change agreements. Resulting markets and
mechanisms for carbon forestry offsets could generate considerable global revenues for both forest conservation and
sustainable rural development; or they may impose political
and economic pressures on forest governance that threaten
indigenous and rural peoples rights. Some inherent challenges to developing carbon forestry projects that support
rural peoples welfare are reviewed. The experience of Scolel
Te, a carbon forestry project for Mexican indigenous
farmers, suggests how projects can be adapted for smallholder provision of carbon services on benign terms and
still meet the demands of carbon markets. However, carbon
sales alone have not supported investments in knowledge
development, institutional learning, and strategic farmer
participation needed for significant political or economic
change. This supports critiques that policies based on
economic valuations of environmental services are unlikely
to support social and equity objectives. [forest governance, REDD, carbon markets, indigenous, rural poor,
agroforestry]

Carbon: The New Forest

Governance Regime?
The worlds forests are continually in the crosshairs of competing interests and changing policies
that rarely seem to resolve to any of the parties full
satisfaction. Forests serve, to varying degrees, as sites
of commercially extractable resources; sustenance and
identity for indigenous and other rural people; and de

facto or official alternatives to land reform. They are

zones of geopolitical strategic importance; refuge for
the marginalized, the illicit, and the subversive; and
some of the last bastions of ecosystems critical to
global biological and geophysical processes.
Often, the tugs-of-war around forests have
resulted in violence, coercion, and displacement of
people or livelihoods. Unfortunately, the plans, policy
frameworks, and laws that govern forests have often
lived a more vigorous life on paper than they have in
the field, at worst exacerbating conflicts of interests, at
best allowing some degree of business-as-usual to be
carried out on the ground, to the detriments of
forests, forest-dependent people, biodiversity, and
ecosystems.
Since the latter half of the twentieth century, the
rights of indigenous, natural resource-dependent, and
other marginalized groups have increasingly been
recognized in international agreements and national
laws, and incorporated into the operations of multilateral development banks (Alcorn 2010; World Bank
2005) and donor organizations.1 Recognition of the
intertwined fates of forests (and other ecosystems)
and the people who live in and around them
has become almost canon in environmental and
development policy, and has been one of the forces
leading toward more decentralized, adaptive, and
community-based forms of forest management within
a framework of overarching conservation and sustainable development goals (Agrawal et al. 2008).
Nevertheless, through all the permutations
of conservation paradigms that have influenced
forest and environmental governance during recent
decades, indigenous, rural, and other marginalized,
resource-dependent people have too often found
themselves the recipients and objects of policy, rather
than seated at the table that defines it. In the state of
Chiapas, Mexico, for instance, Maya communities
living in the Lacandon rain forest region have experienced, within the space of a single generation, a
version of virtually every conservation and development paradigm that has come down the pike from

Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment (CAF) Vol. 33, Issue 2 pp. 117132, ISSN 2153-9553, eISSN 2153-9561. 2011 by the American
Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.2153-9561.2011.01059.x

people, particularly in reference to the UNFCCC strategy, although they apply to other variants of the
payment for carbon capture model. Based on field
research conducted in 2007 through 2009, I then take
the example of a carbon forestry and agroforestry
project in Chiapas, Mexico that was explicitly
designed to be pro-poor and supportive of rural, sustainable development, and use it to make observations about the challenges to social or pro-poor
carbon projects.

above and outside. This has almost always come

at the risk of some threat to livelihood, community,
identity, or political determination, and has rarely
resulted in enduring material or political benefit
(Paladino 2005).
Maya reactions to these successive paradigms or
models have spanned the spectrum from a relatively
apolitical, tolerant opportunism to outright rejection
and political resistance. At the former end of the
spectrum, communities have adapted each time to the
latest vocabularies, concepts, and institutional formats
that appear, sometimes concurrently and in competition with each other, while looking for ways to insert
their own language and interests onto the agenda
(Paladino 2005). At the other end of the spectrum,
more politicized Maya have rejected policies that they
see as, at best, maintaining indigenous communities
in a marginalized status, and at worst, literally dispossessing them of home, livelihood, community,
identity, and basic human rights.2
Now, an emerging environmental governance
paradigm is poised to become another significant
factor in how the constellations of rights, benefits, and
responsibilities are arrayed around forests and other
lands important to rural and indigenous people. In
this article, I look at a prominent approach to climate
change mitigation, a variant of payment for environmental services (PES), in which emitters of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, compensate
for their emissions by financing the establishment or
preservation of vegetative cover that removes carbon
from the air and stores it in above- and below-ground
biomass. Under varying voluntary (e.g., Chicago
Climate Exchange) or compliance (e.g., European
Union Emissions Trading Scheme) arrangements,
credits for the amount of carbon stored can then be
counted toward the emissions reductions goals of
individuals, businesses, organizations, and nations.
With the recent United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) positioning of
carbon forestry as one of its central climate mitigation
tools (UNFCCC 2010), a substantial amount of political, institutional, economic, and technical weight has
been thrown behind the implementation of this paradigm in some form worldwide. This, in turn, offers to
lay yet another set of expectations, economic valuations, and pressures over those already playing out in
forest and rural landscapes. I briefly summarize some
key concerns that have arisen about the implications
of this paradigm for indigenous and poor, rural
Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment (CAF)

Carbon Forestry and the Poor within

UNFCCC and REDD+
Forests are estimated to capture and store over 75
percent of the worlds above- and below-ground
carbon dioxide (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change [IPCC] 2007). At the same time, deforestation
and degradation of standing forests is estimated to be
responsible for up to 17 percent of greenhouse gas
emissions (IPCC 2007). Despite this critical role of
forests in mitigating global climate change, earlier
post-Kyoto, global climate negotiations through the
UNFCCC found it problematic to allow the conservation of existing forest carbon stocks to be counted
against emissions reductions targets, in large part due
to the question of additionality, as the aim is to
increase the net amount of global carbon stocks over
what would have existed without intervention. The
only carbon forestry activities supported were those
involving afforestation and reforestation (A/R)
through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)
(Bamsley 2009).
Nevertheless, the importance of reducing emissions derived from deforestation and forest degradation, commonly referred to by the acronym REDD,
remained part of the UNFCCC deliberative process, in
part pushed by nations for whom these activities form
the principal sources of carbon emissions and offer
the greatest potential for participation in carbon
offsets. By December 2010, at the 16th Conference of
the Parties meeting in Cancun, Mexico, what is now
being called REDD+ was accepted as a central part of
the global climate change framework to be established
in 2012. A plus added to the REDD acronym indicates that activities that improve and expand existing
forest carbon stocks, including sustainable forestry,
could also be included in the strategy (UNFCCC
2010). In addition, the acronym REDD++ has arisen
as a way of expanding the focus beyond just forests to
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processes of capacity-building and inclusive decisionmaking that bring rural people into more strategic
REDD+, and ultimately, other governance roles
(Schwarte and Mohammed 2011; Sommerville 2011).
To the extent that carbon projects help keep forest and
other ecosystems intact, they may also serve to preserve biodiversity and other environmental services
(such as water and nutrient cycling, flood and soil
erosion prevention, etc.) that can affect the welfare of
rural people (Bamsley 2009).
From more critical perspectives, however, the discussions around REDD+ raise red flags about the
potential risks to the rural poor and indigenous. Most
of these derive from the political and material realities
of these populations, and how these position them in
relation to the technical, financial, administrative, and
political terrain of carbon forestry as it is being carved
out in this context. Many of the points of tension
revolve around the following elements considered
necessary for land use-based carbon projects, not just
those that are forestry-based (Bass et al. 2000; Jindal
et al. 2008; Perez et al. 2007; Tschakert 2007):

include agricultural and pastoral practices, such as

agroforestry, that add and store significant above- and
below-ground carbon storage capacity.
Thus, the preservation and expansion of existing
forest carbon stocks has been given a central place in
global climate policy as one of the principal strategies
for reducing atmospheric carbon. As Angelsen and
Atmadja (2008:1) note, REDD is:
commonly seen as a significant, quick and winwin way to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; significant because one-fifth of global GHG
emissions come from deforestation and forest
degradation (DD); cheap because much of the DD
is only marginally profitable, so, reducing GHG
emissions from forests would be cheaper than
most other mitigation measures; quick because
large reductions in GHG emissions can be
achieved with stroke of the pen reforms and
other measures not dependent on technological
innovations; and win-win because the potentially
large financial transfers and better governance
can benefit the poor in developing countries and
provide other environmental gains on top of environmental benefits.

carbon permanence, that is, pressures to assure that

the carbon stocks and emission reductions
financed, created, or protected are enduring;
carbon cost efficiency, that is, pressures to achieve the
most carbon storage or emissions reduction for the
price;
carbon financing, that is, where it comes from, how
it is structured and administered, how carbon value
is assigned; and
complex technical and administrative systems for calculating carbon baselines and additionality, and for
carbon accounting across time and multiple political scales.

The promise of co-benefits, that is, that not only

carbon storage, but additional environmental, social,
and economic objectives could be achieved through
carbon forestry and with the carbon financing generated, is both one of the more potentially positive and
more controversial aspects of this approach. From a
more positive perspective are hopes that carbon
projects and carbon revenues, if handled properly,
could both directly and indirectly strengthen the
rights and welfare of forest-dependent people. In
theory, carbon revenues could help support the
owners and users of forestsindigenous and other
rural peoplein such things as improving capacity to
monitor, manage, and protect forests, in improving
sustainable, forest-based livelihoods, or in developing
economic options beyond forests (Brown et al. 2008;
Fincke 2010; Sommerville 2011).
Indirectly, if nations undertake the kinds of
readiness activities encouraged as preparation for
REDD+ projects, they could clarify and resolve outstanding tenure issues of rural people and reform
policies and laws that present obstacles to their participation in forest-conserving and other sustainable
livelihood activities. Additionally, they could invest in
Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment (CAF)

In broad strokes, the need for carbon permanence

creates a point of tension with indigenous and rural
peoples often complex, insecure, informal, conflicting, and invisible (to the state) rights to carbonproviding lands and resources. This, in turn, can
interfere with their ability to benefit as providers of
carbon services, as well as make it easier for more
powerful interests, including the state, elites, investors, or other rural people with secure tenure, to
displace them. In the context of international REDD+
discussions, tenure issues are acknowledged as critical to the protection of rural and indigenous peoples
rights, as well as to the creation of a secure carbon
investment climate (Schwarte and Mohammed 2011;
UN-REDD 2010; Diaz et al. 2011; Alcorn 2010). Among
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building (UNFCCC 2010) but how this is done, how

early or late in the REDD+ design process it occurs,
and whether the costs of these activities can be
covered by funds external to carbon projects (such as
the REDD+ readiness funds) or must be subsumed
by the carbon projects themselves will likely affect the
willingness of national governments, investors, and
financers to develop projects with these populations.
Transaction costs, if deducted from carbon prices
could also diminish the amount of carbon revenue
that ultimately reaches rural carbon service providers.
How REDD+ carbon projects will be financed, for
example, whether from private or public sector
sources, carbon markets or dedicated funds, internal
country or external funds, is uncertain and will likely
involve a mixture of sources and types probably
tailored to each countrys situation (Dutschke et al.
2008). How carbon financing ends up being structured will affect its volatility, volume, longevity, and
the political commitments behind it. Different structures will involve the insertion of different arrays of
financial instruments and actors that can include governments, multilateral agencies, donors, lenders,
brokers, speculators, resellers, and regulators, each
with their own sets of interests, incentives, and
respective impacts on and subtractions from carbon
revenues and prices (Brown et al. 2008; Diaz et al.
2011; McAffee in review). These factors will likely
influence whether the funds generated are sufficient
to cover the higher transaction costs of working with
the rural poor, and raise questions about the poors
ability to influence the terms of carbon trade involved
and the formulas used for assigning value to carbon.
Extending McAfees (in review) metaphor that carbon
has been presented as the latest miracle tropical
crop to raise up the poor, the poor are likely to face
the same challenges to inserting themselves into the
carbon commodity chain on favorable terms as they
have with any other commodity to date.
The technical requirements of land use-based,
carbon mitigation include methodologies for establishing the baselines from which emission reductions
and carbon stock additions are calculated, as well as
for estimating the amount of carbon stored in different
types of vegetation cover and land uses. These
calculations can be very site-specific and are affected
by factors such as soil, climate, species, and plant
density (Montoya et al. 1995), although efforts are
underway to develop more generalized and less costly
ways to accomplish this. Carbon projects also require

the red flags raised are that nations may not have
either the resources or the political will to undertake
careful processes of tenure reform or alternatively,
that in the rush to receive REDD+ funds, they will do
an inadequate job that fails to protect, or worse, strips
indigenous and rural peoples of their rights (Bamsley
2009; Sommerville 2011).
It is precisely a key concern of indigenous and
small farmer advocacy organizations that the REDD+
framework offers a too effective vehicle for state,
multilateral, conservation, or corporate interests to
co-opt and displace indigenous and rural peoples
rights to land and natural resources.3 Precedents for
actual or potential disruption of rights related to
carbon projects already exist, reinforcing the seriousness of these concerns. Examples include a project in
Ecuador, where liens placed on land titles as protections against carbon default put participants at risk of
losing their land (Wunder and Alban 2008); and a
start-up REDD++ project in the Comunidad Lacandona, Chiapas, Mexico, where only formal rights
holders in the indigenous, common property territory
are receiving carbon payments for communal forest,
while probably two-thirds of the total adult population is excluded (Teratol, Comunidad Lacandona resident, pers. comm., 2011).
Another point of tension with carbon permanence
is that poor rural people often need to manage land to
meet multiple and changing objectives (e.g., social
obligations, subsistence, cash income), manage risks,
and adapt land management regimes as opportunities
or needs (e.g., crop failures, market changes, health
crises) arise. Carbon projects that restrict or remove
this adaptability could put rural people at risk, particularly if carbon cash flows are insufficient to replace
other livelihoods.
Pressures to achieve carbon cost-efficiency tend
to mitigate for choosing larger units of land managed
primarily or exclusively for carbon, in contrast with
the multiple-objective management styles of the rural
poor. Negotiating projects with many smallholders,
with populations that speak different languages and
have low levels of formal education, little institutional
capacity or weak group representation, and are experiencing political instability or have dispersed,
difficult-to-access land units increases what are called
the transaction costs of carbon projects4 (Bass et al.
2000; Jindal et al. 2008; Tschakert 2007). REDD+
country plans being developed include provisions for
ensuring stakeholder participation and capacityCulture, Agriculture, Food and Environment (CAF)

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transparent, enduring, and credible systems for

carbon accounting, that is, monitoring carbon stocks,
tracking them, and verifying them across the lifetime
of projects. Such systems need to tie each carbon
purchase by a specific actor to the actual amounts of
carbon storage in specific units of land by specific land
managers. They also need to have mechanisms for
how to respond to failures to deliver carbon quantities
that have been purchased. Within the UNFCCC
REDD+ process, fundamental questions about where
carbon accounting responsibilities should fall, at the
level of nation or individual project, and how baselines should be calculated are still being worked out
(Angelsen and Atmadja 2008). How this gets resolved
will likely create other pressures on the carbon and
financial performance of projects, and could result in
prioritizing projects that are more carbon cost-efficient
over projects that are more conducive to rural peoples
participation. How much importance will be given to
rural peoples interests in the technical and administrative aspects, and will funds be dedicated to support
their ability to participate?
Sommerville (2011) points out that, currently,
country proposals for equity-oriented reforms and
social safeguards tend to be very output-focused, with
little specification of the processes for actually achieving them. The architecture, as it is referred to in the
literature, of a global scale REDD+ regime is still very
much under deliberation, with many fundamental
questions remaining to be resolved (Angelsen and
Atmadja 2008). One of the controversial lines of
debate has, in fact, centered on whether the explicit
inclusion of co-benefits and social safeguard provisions such as free, prior, and informed consent for
indigenous people (as specified in the United Nations
Delaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or
UNDRIP) would interfere with or strengthen the
achievement of basic carbon mitigation objectives
(Sommerville 2011; UN-REDD Programme 2010). The
COP-16 meetings in 2010 adopted language that referenced the UNDRIP but established only a need for
full and effective participation (UNFCCC 2010).
In summary, it seems clear that there are many
potential fault lines in the promise of the UNFCCC
REDD+ framework to deliver on co-benefits of
social equity and sustainable development. To overcome these fault lines will require the political will to
invest resources in field-leveling actions that support
rural and indigenous peoples full participation, as
well as in policy and institutional reforms, such as
Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment (CAF)

Figure 1.
Native tree seedlings await boot owner.

Photo: S. Paladino

tenure, to safeguard their rights. Such undertakings

could put additional pressures on carbon finance
streams or require additional financing from other
sources. It also involves making difficult decisions on
how to balance the possibility of making faster
advances toward carbon mitigation goals against the
slower work of building equity in participation.
Unfortunately, these are very familiar demands,
invoked by many previous generations of conservation and development paradigms, and they have
always proven elusive.
Meanwhile, it is clear that many advocates for
and representatives of indigenous and rural people
trust neither this new paradigm nor its architects, nor
the way the structure has been built, to do any better.
While some indigenous groups expect to derive benefits from it (Schwarzmann 2009), others have made
clear they see REDD+ as just one more global project
assembled by the many bigsgovernment, business, finance, and conservationto dispossess rural
people from their rights and resources (Carbon Trade
Watch and Indigenous Environment Network n.d.).

Alternative Architectures? A Pro-Poor

Carbon Example in the Voluntary Market:
Scolel Te
Can carbon projects be done in ways that deliver
on the promise of a new source of value and revenues
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smallholder farmers. Never envisioned as a sole

source of income for participants, carbon revenues
were instead seen as an income supplement that
could help subsidize a transition to land use practices
that restore ecosystem properties and support sustainable livelihoods. Carbon activities were meant to be
integrated into, rather than supplant, existing sources
of livelihood (Montoya et al. 1995; Nelson and de Jong
2003).
The project began out of the collaboration, in
1994, of an indigenous campesino organization representing small coffee growers, Pajal Yakactic, scientists
from a Chiapas research and education institution, El
Colegio de la Frontera Sur (ECOSUR), and an academic from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
The scientists/academics brought knowledge of
carbon cycling in forests and a plate of carbonconserving land use options to the table, while the
members of Pajal conducted a series of vetting exercises among members that tailored the concept to
their needs and objectives. Out of this early process, a
suite of individually customizable, agroforestry
designs were chosen as the preferred carbon storage
activities and remain the primary templates employed
through this day. This makes the project primarily
what is called an A/R project, in contrast with REDD+
projects that focus on maintaining and improving
existing forest stocks.6 Carbon agroforestry was seen
as one of several development activities that Pajal
Yakactic would offer to its members. Pajal initially
administered the project, with support from members
of the original academic and technical team. In 1997,
the first participants began receiving carbon payments. By 1999, the project began to be administered
independently of Pajal by Ambio, a nonindigenous,
technical services cooperative set up for the purpose,
and participation was opened to any smallholder
anywhere in the state of Chiapas or nearby areas of
Oaxaca. Ongoing technical support is provided by
ECOSUR. And access to the carbon market was provided for many years by an Edinburgh broker until
2008, when Ambio began to take over all marketing
responsibilities.7 To date, the project has 9,645 ha
enrolled in the program with 2,437 producers; since
inception, it has sold 470,123 tC.8

for rural development? Can they be done in ways that

strengthen the rights and resources of rural poor
people, and advance their welfare and prosperity?
Could carbon, under the urgency of climate change
mitigation, actually be the generator of a new source
of pro-poor investment and change?
In tandem with more formal processes such as the
UNFCCC, a worldwide, voluntary market in carbon
offsets has been growing and evolving over the past
couple of decades (Peters-Stanley et al. 2011; Diaz
et al. 2011). Freer of regulation and costly technical
and administrative requirements such as those
imposed by the CDM, the voluntary market has
offered a favorable venue for innovative, pro-poor or
social carbon projects. As with other global commodities, market niches have developed for carbon offsets
with specialized, environmental, social or other criteria. These niches have been supported, in turn, by the
emergence of sets of voluntary standards for carbon
projects,5 as well as organizations that provide thirdparty verification of project practices and carbon registries (Diaz et al. 2011). This has been especially
important in the face of critiques that the voluntary
market has suffered from inadequate transparency
and accountability, and consequently, fraudulent practices such as the double-counting of carbon credits
(Checker 2008; Peters-Stanley et al. 2011). While the
voluntary market is independent of compliance
markets and trading schemes, the different frameworks substantially inform each other in terms of
methodologies, definitions, and technical standards
for performance and accounting. Suppliers often position themselves to supply various markets, as well as
to stay competitive with market share (Diaz et al.
2011; Quechulpa, Ambio staff, pers. comm., 2008).
One of the standards for carbon projects with
explicit social and rural development goals is Plan
Vivo, and its flagship project is Scolel Te. In the text
that follows, I look at how Scolel Te, one of the
longest operating, pro-poor carbon projects in the
world, responds to the tensions of articulating carbon
forestry projects to the needs and objectives of rural
people.
Outline of Scolel Te
Scolel Te evolved the approach that ultimately
became the basis of the Plan Vivo model. Operating in
the Mexican states of Chiapas and Oaxaca, Scolel Te
was from its beginning conceived as a pro-poor
carbon project for mostly indigenous campesinos or
Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment (CAF)

Carbon Permanence
There are several characteristics of the Scolel Te
project model that help mitigate the tensions between
the requirement of carbon permanence and the special
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subsequent annual monitoring exercises, and carbon

payments that are modified if there are substantial
changes in the actual number of trees present. It is
understood that participants may cut trees for their
own use over the years, and carbon storage calculations for the plot are discounted slightly to reflect that
assumption. When attrition from the project happens,
trees already planted have typically been left standing, if unattended. I did not find evidence for attrition
due to a need to convert plots back to some other
use.10
The project, thus, does tend to select for families
with a certain minimum of land resources. The participants I interviewed had landholdings of 3.5 ha to
31 ha, with a median of 10 ha.11 The majority of indigenous participants participate practice swidden agriculture, with rotation cycles of three to ten years. The
farmer with 3.5 ha lives in a region where a parcel of
about half that size is needed to provide a years
subsistence crops. He is from a community that uses
permanent (non-rotating) plots for crop production,
depending on agro-chemicals to maintain fertility.
The agroforestry model employed has been developed with the aim to provide both short-term and
long-term incentives to support tree permanence.
Short-term incentives include synergies derived from
combining trees with other production activities, as
well as from carbon payments that are front-loaded to
the first five years. Native, commercially viable timber
species are planted within one of three main, individually customizable schemes: in fallow lands; combined with either annual (e.g., corn) or perennial (e.g.,
coffee, oranges) crops; and as living fence around
pastures and production plots. Farmers enroll one
hectare to begin with; some have enrolled one to three
more hectares in the program in subsequent years.
The agroforestry approach has allowed trees to be
incorporated into existing land management practices
without displacing subsistence activities or cash cropping. Farmers who combine trees with corn crops
have other plots they plan to use for that purpose
when tree competition and shade becomes too great.
In most cases, combining trees with other crops has
allowed participants to increase their returns to both
land and labor, a strategy explicitly chosen by
farmers, as the labor for maintaining both crops is
only marginally increased by the addition of the trees.
In some cases, it appears that carbon payments may
even help some farmers subsidize the costs of day
labor or inputs for agricultural crops.

conditions of poor, smallholder farmers, although

there are some as yet unaddressed weaknesses. These
include secure land tenure and transferable carbon
payment rights; an individual self-assessment process
for each participant to evaluate the feasibility of
carbon forestry within existing family resources; agroforestry models intended to provide some front- and
back-end benefits for maintaining tree plantations;
and contingency funds that help relocate or replant
carbon stocks in the event of losses or default.
Scolel Te does require secure land tenure of the
participants, which comes in the majority of cases
through membership in ejidos, a form of communal
tenure produced by Mexican land reform. An unexpected result of the vetting process with early participants was that, despite the presence of communal
lands and forests in most ejidos, the farmers preference was to engage in the project via what is effectively a private property model. That is, the farmers
preferred to carry out carbon projects on the familymanaged plots of land to which they have exclusive
use rights as ejidatarios (formal rights holders in the
ejido). Each participant signs an agreement and
engages with the project individually, although they
may have come to the project via their membership in
an organization that has established contact with the
project. The adult offspring who are designated heirs
of ejidatarios are also able to enroll in the project.
Rights to the trees and outstanding carbon payments
can be transferred to heirs or new plot owners.9 The
requirement of tenure, however, excludes enrollment
in the project of people who do not have access to
land via one of these routes. Some community
members in this situation benefit from occasional
wage labor when tree owners need help. I found no
evidence that tree plantations caused displacement of
preexisting use rights to resources on family plots,
such as plants, minerals, or animals.
The core of the Plan Vivo process is a planning
exercise that each would-be participant conducts to
evaluate whether he or she has sufficient land, labor,
time, and other resources to support tree planting
without displacing other activities or causing family
hardship. The intention is that a farmer will not enroll
in the project if it risks boxing him or her into a
situation where household security or other demands
conflict with tree raising. The result is a map of each
participants landholdings, with the chosen plot
design, species, and planting distances listed. This
then becomes the basis of carbon storage calculations,
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organizational, and business skills among farmers.

The project has not yet invested in addressing these
needs, nor in helping farmers find economic options
for the middle phase of agroforestry plots. Nevertheless, deforestation in the region has been especially
rapid during the past half century, and most of these
communities depend heavily on wood for cooking
and construction. The participants I interviewed
anticipated that, apart from creating new timber reservoirs to serve family needs in the face of vastly
diminished sources of local wood, the trees will have
economic value for local sale in the future. Many of
them talk of the trees as fulfilling a role that cattle
have often played: a resource that requires little care
and can be converted to cash as necessary. Many also
describe a profound satisfaction, even love, from
having the trees, and speak of them as one of the few
a legacies, as a campesino, that they can leave to heirs.
Participants sign an agreement with the project to
maintain trees on the plot for a targeted period of 100
yearsa period derived from international protocols
for carbon permanence. Clearly a stretch of time
beyond the control of any one person, the project sets
aside a percentage of carbon revenues in buffer funds
to help finance the start-up of new plots to meet
carbon commitments in the event that participants or
their heirs decide to discontinue the activity. A buffer
is also maintained to help participants replant in the
event of losses due to fire or other unforeseen events.
The agreement with farmers is not legally binding, so
the project has no ability to sanction participants,
other than to cease further carbon payments. In fact,
farmers who sign up but do not follow through are
often maintained on the rolls for some years (without
payments or being counted toward carbon credits) in
case their circumstances change.

The scheduling of carbon payments has evolved

over the project life. Four of the five total payments
are delivered in the first five years of the project, with
a final delayed payment originally planned for the
tenth year, and now advanced to the eighth. The
frontloading of payments reflects early farmer preferences, and helps to subsidize labor costs, if any, the
farmer may incur, typically for land preparation and
planting in the first year. Both project staff and
farmers also describe this arrangement as helping to
cement the credibility of the Scolel Te project. For
most participants I interviewed, the money was
largely absorbed into household budgets. The payments are typically not large enough to have a significant impact on the participants overall economic
status, for example, through helping to capitalize new
economic activities, and there is little evidence that
they contribute to inequities within communities or
families. Depending on the ecological zone and the
plot design, in 2008, annual payments ran from
roughly US$70 to US$150 per hectare, with the total of
all payments ranging from US$350 to US$750.
Long-term incentives for tree permanence are
built around the projection that farmers could sell the
mature timber species planted after at least 2025
years of growth, and replant behind them. This is
envisaged as a step towards the development of a
smallholder, sustainable forestry and forest products
industry that could provide ongoing economic benefits while maintaining long term carbon stocks. A
potential weakness of the model in relation to carbon
permanence, however, is that most plots experience a
midterm period when there are no direct, economic
benefits, as coplanted crops are no longer viable but
the trees are not yet at harvestable age. Conceivably,
this could present a window of vulnerability should
the farmer come under pressure to fill that benefit
gap, that is, to derive immediate economic benefit
from that land. Shade crops, such as coffee, are likely
antidotes to this problem, but crops appropriate to the
different micro-climates of the project need to be
found, and some farmers are experimenting with
livestock grazing once the trees are big enough to
tolerate it.
Another potential weakness is that there is little
precedent in the region for sustainable smallholder
forestry on such small plots. The ability to deliver on
this part of the project design will require meeting
some potentially challenging permitting requirements, as well as developing appropriate technical,
Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment (CAF)

Carbon Cost-Efficiency
These procedural and administrative adaptations,
plus the trade-offs made between maximum carbon
impact and the multiobjective land uses of campesinos, confirm that carbon cost-efficiency is an issue
with which smallholder carbon projects must
contendwith some provisos.
Each of the basic agroforestry systems employed
is estimated to capture different amounts of carbon
over the designated time period, according to variables such as climate, soil, tree species, and planting
density. By incorporating multiple objectives, such as
food crop production, into plot management, some
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Vol. 33, No. 2 December 2011

services cooperative, became responsible for administering both the trust fund and field activities. With
this shift, also, came a redirection of energies away
from varied development activities and to the operation of a carbon agroforestry project.
For roughly half the projects life, average carbon
prices hovered between US$10 and US$13 per tonne
of carbon; by 2005, carbon prices began to reach the
range of US$16.50US$28.05 (Ambio 2008). Through
2007, two-thirds of the income from carbon sales went
toward farmer payments, including the contingency
buffer funds, with the rest supporting administrative
and operating costs. During this period, Scolel Te was
able to run almost exclusively on the basis of carbon
sales, although outside projects taken on from time to
time by Ambio staff contributed to office and related
expenses.
During those years, the projects interactions with
buyers were mediated by a broker based in Edinburgh. By 2008, Ambio began taking over marketing
functions, working on developing a national market
for its carbon and expanding the scope of its operations, as described in the next section. It also had
received, at that time, more purchases than it was able
to immediately place with farmers, in part due to
backlogs in monitoring and administration tasks with
existing participants. By contrast, the next two years
saw a notable drop in carbon sales. At this juncture,
Ambio found it needed to seek funding sources independent of carbon sales in order to help finance the
additional administrative, marketing, recruitment,
participant training, and technical demands being
placed on the project. As part of an effort to regain
some ground in supporting a broader developmentoriented agenda, it also received outside funding to
support activities such as an improved efficiency
wood stove project for participants families. Faced
with expanding commitments and fluctuating carbon
sales, payment amounts to farmers were maintained
at the same levels, but operating costs drew higher
percentages from carbon sales and other funding
sources (Ambio 2009; Ambio 2010).
The projects reliance for most of its life almost
exclusively on income from carbon sales has had its
pros and cons. On the one hand, the relatively short
commodity chain, with few intermediaries, may
have allowed the project to retain more of the carbon
sales income toward project activitiesa boon to a
high transaction cost project like this. The affiliation
with a local research institution, ECOSUR, meant that

carbon storage trade-offs are made relative to land

managed exclusively for that purpose. However, there
is growing evidence that agroforestry plots are undervalued for carbon impact as the calculation methodologies used, generally and by Ambio, have not taken
into account the significant amounts of soil carbon
created and conserved over baseline conditions. The
net impact is particularly significant if the baseline is
a swidden cornfield where fire was used to clear
vegetation, which is the prevailing practice in much of
the region (Roncal-Garcia et al. 2008; Soto-Pinto et al.
2010). Soil carbon may thus be an important, source of
carbon revenue for smallholders and rural people
across many landscapes, including grasslands (Neely
2009; Perez et al. 2007). Project staff has begun looking
toward incorporating more sophisticated calculations
of total system carbon impact as a way to better
document carbon performance of the systems, and as
a result, increase market price, a strategy that would
be supported by the global acceptance of REDD+
approaches.
In the communities where Ambio has developed
projects that support the conservation and improvement of communally-owned forests, project staff finds
that transaction costs, as might be expected, are lower.
Staff consider that being able to engage in a higher
volume of REDD-based projects like these might help
cover the higher costs of the projects with individual
farmers. Thus, an ancillary benefit of international
acceptance of REDD+ toward climate mitigation
might be that the increased funding or market for
projects focused on standing forests could, effectively,
help subsidize the continuation of agroforestry
projects that adapt to smallholders and the poor, if the
two goals can be linked institutionally and financially.
Carbon Financing
In 1997, the project was registered with the United
States Initiative for Joint Implementation of the
UNFCCC (Corbera 2005), and a large purchase by the
International Automobile Federation Foundation,
responsible for Formula One and other car racing
competitions, got the activities underway. A trust
fund for receiving funds from buyers and disbursing
payments to farmers was set up, initially managed by
members of Pajal Yakactic and the academic team. By
1999, the fund was separated from the campesino
organization, along with the overall projects administration. Ambio, a local nongovernmental, nonindigenous organization constituted as a technical
Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment (CAF)

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The second phase began with the separation of

the project from Pajal and its placement under the
independent administration of Ambio. From about
1999 onward, the project refocused itself, purposefully
or by default, on the task of developing the organizational procedures, tracking systems, technical methodologies, field methods, and banking system for
receiving carbon sales and placing them with rural
smallholders. There was little precedent to guide the
way for what they were doing, and much was learned
in the school of hard knocks. To all accounts, the
learning curve did not have a lot of time to flatten out:
farmer and carbon buyer demand increased; formal
processes such as the UNFCCC continued to evolve
the standards of practice; to stay competitive in the
growing voluntary market where other players were
entering the social carbon niche, project procedures
had to adapt, including obtaining third-party verification of the projects methodologies and practices.
Capacity-building and institutional development was
primarily internal and focused on project administration staff. Farmer skills-building focused mainly on
the nuts-and-bolts of field implementation and
problem-solving. Locally-nominated farmers, acting
as community and regional tcnicos (technicians)
helped carry out and coordinate the first stage of
annual monitoring, served as communication conduits between project staff and participants, and
attended meetings and training related to silviculture
and monitoring. During most of this time, the project
ran mostly off of carbon revenues. And during this
time, few noncarbon-related activities were pursued.
The third phase began around 2007. The national
and international profile of Scolel Te was high, as one
of the few and longest running pro-poor carbon
projects. Carbon forestry, especially REDD+, became a
new focus of international policy, as well as of state
and national level efforts to establish payment for
environmental services programs. Demands were
made on project staff to serve in policy processes.
Ambio took over Scolel Tes marketing and promotional responsibilities, and was still modifying procedures and practices, such as its database systems and
field monitoring methodologies, to meet the recommendations of third-party verifiers. Backlogs in
carbon payments and in the placement of new carbon
sales with farmers began to occur. In partnership with
other non-governmental organizations and new
funding sources, Ambio began a new phase of expansion of Scolel Te to communities in a region of the

many of the costs associated with developing data

and methodologies from which to calculate carbon
advances were covered by outside funds. Some costs
to the project were effectively reduced by the fact that
farmers carry out several roles in the field aspects of
the project, such as annual plot monitoring, and seed
collection.
On the other hand, the reliance on carbon sales
proved limiting to the number of activities the
project could engage in. Activities that might have
supported the original, broader, developmentoriented goalssuch as farmer capacity-building,
livelihood strengthening, skills-building, and organizational development for smallholder sustainable
forestrywere largely left by the wayside, in part
because it would have required seeking additional
funding outside that of carbon sales.
An additional challenge related to carbon financing has had to do with volatility in market prices.
Carbon prices had been relatively steady for much of
the projects life, establishing several years of precedent for consistent payment amounts to farmers.
Once carbon prices started fluctuating in the late
2000s, project staff began to face the problem of how
to adapt farmer payments so that equity across participants is maintained. For a social equity-oriented
project operating in a political climate of entrenched
campesino distrust of government and NGO projects,
significant differences in payment parity among
farmers could pose serious challenges to project legitimacy and credibility.
Technical and Administrative Demands
Early participants in the project, as well as
researchers and staff, tend to describe two phases in
the institutional development of the project; from
my research, I add a third. Each of these has had
implications for the extent to which the project has
been able to realize non-carbon, social goals of the
project.
The first phase was while the Scolel Te project
was under the wing of the campesino organization,
Pajal Yakactic. During this phase, through the late
1990s, farmers, first in collaboration with academics
and then more independently, were centrally involved
in the strategic direction as well as administration of
the project. This is when the carbon agroforestry
activities were considered as merely one activity in
the pro-development portfolio of Pajal (Corbera 2005;
Nelson and de Jong 2003).
Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment (CAF)

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Vol. 33, No. 2 December 2011

Figure 2.
Carbon Certificate Issued to New York Mayor Bloomberg

(reproduced by permission of Ambio)

.

state where it had not worked before.12 And, ironically, Ambio was increasingly being pressed to document its social impacts.
At this stage, it was clear that carbon sales alone
would not suffice to support the increasing institutional demands on Ambio, let alone activities that
might increase Scolel Tes impact on rural poverty or
sustainable development, and it began seeking
outside funds. At the same time, Ambio began to
increase the roles of farmer participants. It began
paying part-time salaries to regional tcnicos to take
on more formal responsibilities in the project, such
as in farmer recruitment, training and skills development, and field monitoring. Meetings in different
Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment (CAF)

field locations were held to foster learning, exchange,

and initiative among participants within and across
regions of the state and with participants in the
neighboring state of Oaxaca. Training events were
held so that farmers could gain skills and take more
active roles in silviculture, tree nursery management,
and seed collection. Most of these new farmer
support activities were financed by grants from
outside sources, as were many of the growing
institutional and administrative demands being
experienced.
The project has gone from 677 farmers enrolled in
2007 to 2437 in 2010 (Ambio 2010). Non-carbon
revenue has continued to be critical to supporting
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Vol. 33, No. 2 December 2011

Some strategies might help direct higher portions

of carbon finance towards rural dwellers. One is to
continue to expand ideas of what constitutes effective
land-based carbon storage, to include the different
kinds of working landscapes that the rural poor
inhabit. Valuing reduced emissions from lost soil
carbon as well as increased soil carbon storage
achieved by many agricultural and pastoral practices
might help increase carbon projects and prices
directed to the poor.
Another option is to look at how to raise the value
given to social carbon. Lessons might be takenpro
and confrom other efforts by the rural poor to insert
themselves into commodity production on positive
terms, for example, in the fair trade sector. What has
been successful in the efforts of coffee producers, for
instance, to gain more control over the terms of trade,
and how does the complexity of navigating carbon
markets compare with that of agricultural commodity
markets?
In a similar vein, what are the possibilities for
reducing the costs of social carbon? Are there larger
units through which poor producers could pool their
efforts and reduce the transaction costs even if they
are working from individual plots? Could such units
allow for the participation of people without tenure to
participate?
However, fundamental questions remain about
the whether such measures merely constitute a tweaking of the inner walls of an architecture that is inherently unsuited, if not antithetical, to pro-poor carbon
undertakings. For one, the rationale that carbon forestry offsets in developing countries are more costeffective relative to other mitigation options is
predicated precisely on the relative income poverty of
the regions and populations in question. To the extent
that the monetary value assigned to such offsets is
based on estimations of opportunity costs that only
take into account the few, economically viable alternatives available to poor populations and poor countries (as was the case for early calculations of Scolel
Te carbon prices), the relative cost advantage exists
only as long as there are underlying income disparities between emitters and offsetters, buyers and producers. As with other global commodities, except for
carbon buyers or financers with altruistic or imagegreening motives, the underlying economic rationale is unlikely to generate incentives for assigning
extra monetary value (and therefore higher carbon
prices) for poverty reduction or rights-strengthening

Ambios ability to handle the increasingly complex

demands of running Scolel Te.

Conclusions
The example of Scolel Te, as well as sister projects
being developed along the Plan Vivo lines,13 suggest
that there is an array of techniques that can be used
to adapt carbon forestry and carbon farming so that
the rural poor can participate with minimal negative
economic or social impacts, and some economic and
capacity-building benefits. The Scolel Te agroforestry
example, however, is tailored to the specific situations
of indigenous smallholders who have tenure and a
minimum amount of land with which to participate.
Other lessons can certainly be derived from the
projects increasing work with communal forests on
ejido lands, but this is not explored here.
One of the critiques of the project is that its
original development-oriented focus came to be subsumed by a narrower focus on carbon, and that
farmers were no longer strategic participants. Yet the
project has achieved a remarkable record of longevity
for a highly politicized region where most conservation and development projects fall prey to local and
national politics, constantly changing programs and
paradigms, and poor delivery of promised results.
Ironically, this longevity may be in large part because
the project did invest intensely in creating a reliable,
credible mechanism that could articulate the very
different objectives and interests of rural people with
those of the global carbon market. Perhaps because of
this investment in internal development, the project
has been largely able to deliver on what it offers, even
if the reach of its offer became much more modest
once it was separated from the campesino organization. That, in itself, is a real achievement.
Nevertheless, one of the lessons taken is that just
the demands of achieving this level of institutional
learning has required considerable time and effort
and in the end, more financial support than carbon
sales alone could supply. It seems clear that a commitment to building the capacity for locally run and
beneficial carbon activities requires the dedication of
extra funds, and even more so for populations who
have little experience with the languages, technologies, and concepts involved. It is hard to imagine how
carbon sales alone could also support more transformative activities that seek to actually change the
status of the rural poor.
Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment (CAF)

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table carbon most definitely is not. Whether the forces

gathering under the new paradigm of managing
forests for carbon are ready or able to pay for it
remains to be seen.

projects. Pagiola et al. (2005) found that PES projects

clearly favored buyers terms. McAfee (in review)
finds similar results and argues that the underlying
logics of cost- and market-efficiency structure these
transactions to maintain poverty and direct wealth
upward.
For another, the structures emerging for REDD+
projects within international climate change negotiations seem likely to create strong international and
national pressures to meet quantified emissions
reduction goals to which financial inflows are
attached. The incentives for achieving stated goals of
full and effective participation and social safeguards for affected peoples, on the other hand, remain
relatively weaker and more vaguely specified. The
tensions in this disparity are underscored by ongoing
arguments that carbon mitigation may be too urgent
to wait for murkier, more elusive processes of social
inclusion and policy reform to take place.
Further, the volume of funding needed to finance
REDD+ actions at a scale that could meet intended
emission reduction goals almost certainly requires
the involvement of the private, financial sector.
Though financial institutions and private investors
are already important players in existing carbon
markets, this has raised the specter of a vaster,
unregulated, carbon capitalism that manipulates
carbon derivatives and other financial instruments as
sources of profit in and of themselves, potentially
distorting prices in ways that have little relation to
the actual value and purpose of carbon offsets in
regulating emissions (Chester and Rosewarne 2011;
Kassenaar 2009). Far from the classic PES scenario of
a level playing field on which buyers and producers
create win-win outcomes, the prospect is one of
financial and intermediate actors structuring markets
for their profit while the percentages of carbon
finances going to rural producers or to processes
strengthening them are diminished (McAfee in
review).
Finally, securing and appropriately directing nonmarket funding to finance the additional or full costs
of pro-indigenous and pro-poor carbon projects
requires a political will and capacity across political
scales that has too often been the missing link in so
many conservation and development projects. Carbon
forestry, especially in developing countries or regions,
may be considered cheap relative to other mitigation options, but the example of Scolel Te and similar
projects suggests that socially sustainable and equiCulture, Agriculture, Food and Environment (CAF)

Acknowledgments
Research on Scolel Te was sponsored by El
Colegio de la Frontera Sur and funded by the Consejo
Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologa (CONACYT) of
Mexico. It was carried out as part of a larger project
evaluating agroforestry systems for carbon capture,
under the direction of Dr. Lorena Soto-Pinto. Research
assistance was provided by Jos de Jesus Trujillo,
Manuel Anzueto, and Florinda Lpez. The collaboration of Elsa Esquivel Bazn and Sotero Quechulpa
Montalvo (Ambio staff), and Nicols Rodrguez
Lpez and Fernando Lpez Aguilar (Scolel Te
regional tcnicos), as well as many farmer participants, was essential.
Stephanie Paladino is an independent, environmental anthropologist whose recent work includes
assessing the impacts on Maya farmers of participation in a carbon trading project for El Colegio de la
Frontera Sur (ECOSUR), Chiapas, Mexico; and ethnographic research on the human consequences of the
2010 BP oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico for
Impact Assessment, Inc.

Notes
1. International agreements include the International
Labor Organization, the Convention on Biological
Diversity, and the UN Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples. Donor organizations such as CARE
and Oxfam programs incoporate rights-based
approaches.
2. See, for instance, The Declaration of Patihuitz: Divided
We Become Allies of the Government, April 5, 2011.
http://www.towardfreedom.com/americas/2351declaration-of-patihuitz-in-chiapas-mexico-divided-webecome-allies-of-the-government. Accessed September
4, 2011.
3. See Communique from the Communities of Amador
Hernandez Region, Montes Azules, Lacandon Jungle.
http://climate-connections.org/2011/09/05/
communique-from-the-communities-of-the-amadorhernandez-region-montes-azules-lacandon-jungle/.
Accessed April 9, 2011.

129

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Alcorn, Janis
2010 Getting REDD RightBest Practices That Protect
Indigenous Peoples Rights and Enhance Indigenous Livelihoods. Best Practice Note, prepared for
the Inter-American Development Bank. December.

4. Transaction costs include costs of negotiating, contracting, implementing, and monitoring a project and of
registering, verifying, and certifying a project (Jindal
et al. 2008:126).
5. For instance, the Climate, Community and Biodiversity
Standards. http://www.climate-standards.org.

Ambio
2008 Reporte Anual 2007. San Cristobal de las Casas,
Chiapas, Mexico.

6. Scolel Te also works with a few ejidos to support

communal forests through a REDD+ approach, and has
slowly expanded the number of such communal forestry contracts.

2009 Annual Report. http://www.planvivo.org/wpcontent/uploads/2009Annual_Report_ScolelTe_

Final.pdf, accessed July 25, 2010.

7. For more detailed accounts of project history, see Nelson

and de Jong 2003, Corbera 2005, and Montoya et al.
1995.

2010 Annual
Report.
http://www.planvivo.org/
projects/registeredprojects/scolel-te-mexico/,
accessed September 14, 2011.

8. Figures taken from Plan Vivo website, http://

www.planvivo.org/projects/registeredprojects/scolelte-mexico/. Accessed April 9, 2011.

Angelsen, Arild, and Stibniati Atmadja

2008 What Is This Book About? In Moving Ahead with
REDD; Issues, Options and Implications. Arild
Angelsen, ed. Pp. 110. Bogor: CIFOR.

9. Since 1992, most ejidatarios individual plots have been

certificated through the Programa de Certificacin de
Derechos Ejidales y Titulacin de Solares Urbanos
(PROCEDE), facilitating their transfer to non-ejidatarios
under certain conditions. According to project staff and
farmer interviews, transfer of enrolled agroforestry plots
to date has been rare, and then only within the same
ejido.

Bamsley, Ingrid
2009 UNU-IAS Guide. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing
Countries (REDD). A Guide for Indigenous
Peoples.
http://www.ias.unu.edu,
accessed
September 3, 2011.

10. Ambio staff could not provide percentages of attrition at

the time of my study because of database system limitations. Reasons given by participants and staff for
attrition are varied and include expectations that monitoring of the plantations would be lax (conditioned by
a history of government payments to farmers that
demanded little in return); farmer assessments that
carbon payments were not worth the effort; and disagreements within ejidos, farmer organizations, and
between project and organizations that had little to do
with the merits of the agroforestry plots themselves.

Bass, Stephen, Olivier Dubois, Pedro Moura Costa,

Michelle Pinard, Richard Tipper, and Charlie Wilson
2000 Rural Livelihoods and Carbon Management. IIED
Natural Resources Issues Paper No. 1. London:
International Institute for Environment and
Development.

11. Records of landholding size for all project participants

were not available, but the project staff and farmer
participants agreed that the range found among interviewees was representative of the typical participant.

Brown, David, Frances Seymour, and Leo Peskett

2008 How Do We Achieve REDD Benefits and Avoid
Doing Harm? In Moving Ahead with REDD;
Issues, Options and Implications. Arid Angelsen,
ed. Pp. 107118. Bogor: CIFOR.

12. See
http://www.planvivo.org/projects/registered
projects/scolel-te-mexico/ and http://www.ambio.
org.mx/site/ for more information.

Carbon Trade Watch and Indigenous Environment Network

N.d. NO REDD! A Reader. http://noredd.makenoise.
org/, accessed September 5, 2011.

13. See http://www.planvivo.org/projects.

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