Socially embedding REDD+? A moral economy of leakage, corruption and agro-pastoral conflicts in Kigoma and Katavi regions, Tanzania

Global actors investing in REDD+ assumed performance-based payments would incentivize the reduction of forest degrading activities, preventing activity shifting between forested areas known as “leakage”. This case shows causal complexity underlying forest degradation processes, in practice, being overlooked by a Tanzanian REDD+ pilot project implemented between 2009 and 2012. Findings are based on repeated field observations, multi-sited interviews with diverse groups of actors and literature review. Analysis draws upon critical institutionalism and scholarship on the moral economy of corruption. We examine migration of Sukuma-Nyamwezi agro-pastoralists, direct drivers and underlying causal processes of forest degradation, including demographics, cultural norms and values of cattle keeping and customary institutions. The logic of cattle accumulation generates economic wealth, used to negotiate movement permits and land formalization in a manner seen as corrupt. Environmental actors stigmatize this corruption, evicting agro-pastoralists, without compensating them through the REDD+ mechanism or constructively mediating pre-existing conflicts. The logic of brokerage enacted by REDD+ facilitated unanticipated side effects of leakage, in offsetting terminology and the concentration of agro-pastoralists outside the project area over time, leading to a violent confrontation over their eviction for a government ranch. This article questions the performance-based logic of the REDD+ mechanism in general and the socially disembedded implementation enacted in this case. • Forest conversion occurs with the backing of legal or extra-legal political support • Processes of agro-pastoral forest degradation are complex, including socially embedded institutions, values and norms • Primary leakage occurs where mobile actors are relocated from demarcated forest areas and degrade forest elsewhere. • The Kigoma REDD+ pilot project facilitated primary leakage of Sukuma-Nyamwezi agro-pastoralists through carbonized exclusion • Legal reforms are needed to incorporate agro-pastoralist conflict resolution mechanisms within forest governance