Beneficiaries of Forest Carbon: Precarious Inclusion in the Brazilian Amazon
Maron Greenleaf
Abstract
ABSTRACT Sustainable development projects and progressive politics of all kinds emphasize inclusion. Sometimes inclusion is meant to occur through giving benefits to poorer people, who are then governed as “beneficiaries.” But what does it mean to be a beneficiary? I examine this question through analyzing climate‐motivated forest‐protection efforts in the Amazonian state of Acre, Brazil, that distribute benefits to poorer smallholders. This environmentally premised redistribution connects beneficiaries to the state, engendering a form of benefits‐based citizenship and everyday spaces for negotiating its meaning. Whereas the state positions the beneficiary as a temporary status, beneficiaries envision it as a long‐term relationship based on an exchange: state benefits given in exchange for them forgoing deforestation. Some beneficiaries use their new inclusion to assert this mutual dependence and claim more from the state. The increase in Amazonian deforestation threatens forest beneficiaries’ already precarious inclusion. [ distribution, climate change, precarity, deforestation, Amazon ]