REDD+ and Extractivism: Navigating Sustainability in Ghana’s Cocoa Landscapes
Esther Wahabu
Global Environmental Politics, 2025, vol. 25, issue 3, 78-99
Abstract:
REDD+ is a global green vision that addresses climate change by reducing emissions from deforestation and enhancing carbon storage in forests while promoting sustainable forest management. Despite the implementation of REDD+ interventions in Ghana’s cocoa forests, extractivist forest practices persist. Based on official documents, interviews, and participatory observation, this article analyzes and explains the coexistence of forest-based extractivism with REDD+ in one of Ghana’s flagship REDD+ project areas. The findings show that REDD+ interventions designed for cocoa forests are not only inadequately equipped to halt Ghana’s forest-based extractivist development path but also insufficiently address the dispossession of local communities who find themselves deprived of their management and forest access rights and thus powerless to protect and restore the forest. The article argues that the carbon-based greening of the cocoa sector under REDD+ opens a new frontier for transnational accumulation while simultaneously reinforcing the legacy of extractive capitalism.
Keywords: REDD+; deforestation; climate change; extractivism; political ecology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1162/glep.a.10
Access to PDF is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:glenvp:v:25:y:2025:i:3:p:78-99
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=1526-3800
Access Statistics for this article
Global Environmental Politics is currently edited by Steven Bernstein, Matthew Hoffmann and Erika Weinthal
More articles in Global Environmental Politics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().