The politics, spaces and subjects of forest conservation in Colombia

This thesis follows the development of policies for controlling deforestation in Colombia from 2015 to 2022. It enquires about the changes that REDD+ (Reduction of emissions by deforestation and forest degradation) triggered on the governance of rural forests, and subjects. Current literature argues that REDD+ still takes a dominant space in global and local forest politics, despite its ambiguous and sometimes conflicting results. An argument why REDD+ has pervaded is that it manages to shapeshift according to local conceptualizations of nature and governance, and supports historical struggles over power. The thesis considers the ambiguous concept of REDD+ to be determined in the entwinement of the environment with the political. By utilizing Michel Foucault's notions of governmentality, political rationality, and technologies of the self, the thesis shows across five chapters that REDD+ is an instrument that is manifested in practices, discourses and knowledges that allow different powers and actors to self-perpetuate and to gain agency.
The introduction chapter sets out the problem statement, research questions, and research strategy in line with the above. The second chapter offers empirical detail about how social actors draw from four political rationalities to define the purpose, means, and social problems that REDD+ should address. The third chapter shows REDD+ as an explicit force assembling a conservation frontier in the northwest of the Colombian Amazon. Similar to a resource frontier, the conservation frontier portrays the Amazon region as exotic, violent and in need of intervention, while reigniting old conservation conflicts and frustrating actual conservation targets. The fourth chapter presents three cases where REDD+ and other forest conservation projects became the means by which peasant, afrodescendant and indigenous peoples assemble their collective subjectivities. The three different empirical chapters all show how environmental practices and discourses are the vehicle through which social movements strengthen their political power and self-government. The discussion chapter finally highlights that REDD+ brings the opportunity to reimagine subjects, spaces, and politics. The thesis concludes by arguing that REDD+ is prone to reinforce local power structures and old forms of governance. This is because its local acceptance depends upon the historical claims of local actors and on existing forms of governance. Due to its political nature, REDD+ is prone to conflict, either by creating new ones or by exacerbating existing ones. The conclusion stresses that this conflict is not exclusive to REDD+, but rather a historical feature of forest governance. The conflict mostly reflects the frictions of old and new meanings and the friction that comes with the reconfiguration of power. While the thesis highlights the contradictory, conflictive and messy nature of forest governance, it also concludes that practitioners should embrace such features as a healthy manifestation of disagreement. The role of practitioners is then to transform such conflict into inclusive and legitimate forms of conservation.