Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Carbon forestry plantations are a way to achieve statutory global emissions reductions and are also claimed to decrease deforestation. Carbon forestry is not a new system, but has greatly increased in use in recent decades. One such afforestation project, owned by a Norwegian company, is located in northern Uganda. Villages close to this plantation have been affected in different ways. The plantation is part of a local context occupied by different individuals belonging to different social categories. In the villages, various local activities are arranged by the plantation company, many in connection with tree resources, such as seedling distribution to the communities. The goal is poverty reduction in the area, but the stakeholders intended to benefit from these activities are not clearly defined.
Through ethnographic fieldwork carried out January-March 2016, this thesis examined exclusion or inclusion of villagers in the seedling distribution system. Using a participatory approach, villagers themselves articulated the social categories existing in the village. The social categories investigated were poverty and gender, which are commonly studied in the world of development policies. The theoretical concept of intersectionality was used to analyse villagers’ experiences of belonging to different social categories; how these categories differed and sometimes contradicted how individuals positioned themselves; and events at the intersections between social categories.
The results showed that gender and poverty are not homogeneous social categories, but that each contains different individuals with differing backgrounds and needs. Scrutiny of how the social categories intersected with each other in the study area indicated groups, e.g. women and the poor, that were more or less excluded from the process of seedling distribution. The intersectionality lens revealed that some individual women and poor villagers were even more excluded from seedling distribution than others within those groups. When organising local development activities in villages around carbon forestry plantation, it is thus important to analyse the different social categories in the village, since a single, inflexible approach risks excluding those who really need support.