A global agenda meets local practices : an ethnographic study of the introduction of REDD+ in Zanzibar

This thesis discusses REDD+ as an example of a highly ambitious global environmental policy framework conceived at international levels and implemented at local levels in forest communities across the Global South. The main objective is to investigate the encounter between the REDD+ global agenda, that is, the effort to reduce forest-based CO2 emissions and thereby mitigate climate change, and the pre-existing social contexts to which REDD+ is introduced, and which REDD+ aims to regulate, modify and change. Inspired by scholars working within two partly overlapping fields of research, Political Ecology and the Anthropology of Development, this investigation of REDD+ explores both the discursive powers inherent in REDD+ and the assumptions on which REDD+ is based, as well as the particularities of existing socially embedded practices, meanings and relationships at local level in Zanzibar