Beyond Carbon: Enabling Justice and Equity in REDD+ Across Levels of Governance

The global nature of climate change and the globalization of environmental governance have highlighted the challenges of enabling justice and equity across diverse societies and multiple levels of governance. At the center of these challenges are ongoing debates over the distribution of rights and responsibilities for environmental and social impacts e.g., to what degree are developed countries responsible for climate disasters and developing countries responsible for adapting to them?; what rights do global versus national and local actors have to steer decision-making?; and what are the relative rights of present versus future generations or human versus non-human species? These debates have been variously framed in normative terms, drawing on particular norms of justice or equity as de facto goals in and of themselves, or based in instrumentalist arguments, e.g., the importance of justice and equity to achieving lasting emissions reductions. Perhaps nowhere have these debates been more complex and multi-faceted than under Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+), a mechanism of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).