Reconsidering REDD+ Authority, Power and Law in the Green Economy Cambridge Studies on Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Governance Series

In Reconsidering REDD+: Authority, Power and Law in the Green Economy, Julia Dehm provides a critical analysis of how the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) scheme operates to reorganise social relations and to establish new forms of global authority over forests in the Global South, in ways that benefit the interests of some actors while further marginalising others. In accessible prose that draws on interdisciplinary insights, Dehm demonstrates how, through the creation of new legal relations, including property rights and contractual obligations, new forms of transnational authority over forested areas in the Global South are being constituted. This important work should be read by anyone interested in a critical analysis of international climate law and policy that offers insights into questions of political economy, power, and unequal authority.

Introduction: Reconsidering REDD+; 1. Background to REDD+; 2. Asserting global authority over the carbon sequestration potential of forests; 3. Actualising authority through public and private law: REDD+ through the lens of property and contract; 4. Responsibility and capacity: recasting north-south difference; 5. Scale, multilevel governance and the disaggregation of property rights in REDD+; 6. REDD+ at the 'local' level: between rights and responsibilisation; 7. Conclusion: Possibilities for climate justice and planetary co-habitation.

Julia Dehm is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Law, La Trobe University, Victoria. Her research addresses international climate change law and regulation, transnational carbon markets and the governance of natural resources, as well as the relationship between human rights and economic inequality. She is the Co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment. Previously she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin and a Resident Fellow at the Institute for Global Law and Policy, Harvard Law School. Her work has been widely published in journals such as the Leiden Journal of International Law, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, and the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment.