Forest Management Decentralisation in a REDD+ World : A Case Study of a REDD+ Pilot Project in the Kolo Hills Forests, Kondoa District, Tanzania

Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradatin (REDD+) is a market-based approachto address tropical deforestation as a key driver of anthropogenic climate change. In Tanzania, participatory forest management (PFM) was used as a vehicle for the institutionalisation of REDD+and implementation of pilot initiatives. With the lens of political ecology, this thesis analyses the effects of the REDD+ pilot project ‘Advancing REDD+ in the Kolo Hills Forests’ (ARKFor) inKondoa District, Tanzania, on structures of access and use of forest resources for local communities. This analysis is done by using qualitative interviews with villagers living within the REDD+ project area and government actors involved in forest management as well as textual analysis of a PFMagreement and community bye-laws established within the ARKFor project. The findings suggest that REDD+ pilot activities were planned without real participation by local communities and failed to take complex conservation histories and underlying power structures into account. Community access rights were not legally secured which resulted in processes of re-centralisation of forest managementand ‘green grabbing’ after the conclusion of project activities in 2014. The study underscores that successful forest management decentralisation needs to be based on localised, longer-term adaptive processes which clash with the globally driven, neoliberal conservation logic of REDD+