A recent short documentary by the BBC World News’ Africa Business Report (BBC n.d.) presents Madagascar’s forests as sites that could generate from 50 to 60 million dollars in carbon credits within the next five years (up to 2020). As the video shows a burning hill in the forest of Analamazaotra in Andasibe, reporter Jason Boswell tells us that,
‘Over the last half century, huge swathes of Madagascar’s unique forests have been lost to slash-and-burn farming and urbanisation, but the government is now working to develop a number of projects in the country which could transform this sea of green into a different type of resource: one, which would not only protect the country’s dwindling forests, but could in turn bring in profits from the sale of carbon credits’.
The story then goes on to present this multi-million dollar ‘potential revenue’ as an opportunity for both the government and the communities that live in and around the forests.
As exemplified in this short video, forests in developing countries are being re-conceptualised as repositories of a new source of value—the carbon credit—with enormous potential. By turning a source of emissions into a carbon sink, forest carbon projects aim to actualise this value and provide economic, environmental and social benefits.
What kind of value do carbon credits propose in forest landscapes and how is it to be rendered visible, measured and distributed? What kind of material and discursive elements are mobilised to bring it about and how does it articulate with perceived forms of waste? If, in turn, value is a
‘relational concept’ and ‘must always be thought of as “value for whom?”’
(Ferry 2011:925), what other forms of locating and understanding value are negated or obscured through carbon credits?
These are some of the questions that I pose in the next two chapters, as I interrogate the nature and effects of this specific form, or social life, of carbon— the carbon credit or Certified Emission Reduction (CER)—as it is put to work in the landscapes of Andasibe.
As we will see, the transformation of perceived waste into a source of value was TAMS’ most fundamental objective as a forest carbon project, as it aimed to turn present or future waste (degraded fallows from tavy) into a source of value (the carbon credit through the carbon sink). It was only through halting tavy and transforming what were perceived as actual and potentially degraded landscapes into forested ones, or what is the same, through an intervention in a teleology of degradation, that actual
‘reductions’ could take place and hence value could be generated. The transformation of waste must therefore be seen as the most fundamental element of a forest carbon economy: credits or CERs originate exclusively by transforming perceived waste into value. Value and waste—and their relation to forests and tavy—are therefore the key organising principles that I employ in the next two chapters to explore this particular social life of
‘carbon’. I do it, however, through various perspectives.
Rather than taking waste solely as the semantic counterpart of value, as it has sometimes been portrayed (Thompson 1979), my aim is to show the complicated and productive interplay between these two concepts, which are often far from clear-cut. Thus, in chapter three, we will see how ambiguity and liminality are defining features of degraded fallows as waste.
In chapter four, in turn, the straightforward division between forests and tavy, as value and waste, will be complicated, as I focus on the way these two concepts are mobilised and entangled to generate carbon value. Therefore, far from treating ‘loss, waste and the unproductive’ as ‘anti-economic’ (as strucuralist positions have sometimes represented waste, see Hawkins and Muecke 2003:xii), I will explore how waste mediates processes of value production as part of forest carbon projects, as I open the black box of the carbon credit, or CER, and dig into what I term its ‘constitutive elements’.
As we saw in the previous chapter, TAMS was not ‘born’ as a carbon project, but progressively became one. The project’s transformation into a carbon generating activity led to a shift in the kinds of things that were seen as valuable and those that were perceived to be waste—with key implications for the future of Andasibe’s forests and its inhabitants. These are the transformations that I trace in chapter three, as I focus on the specific logic of value that carbon credits introduced in TAMS.
In chapter four I present a historical account of the economic and political roles that the forests of Andasibe have played in colonial and post-colonial times, which are often forgotten due to a conservationist discourse on the area’s pristineness. I will also show how, while always represented as the antithesis of value and relegated to a marginal position, tavy has historically been central to processes of forest ‘valorisation’. This continues to be the case in a more acute way since, I will argue, the threat of tavy is fundamentally constitutive of carbon credits as a form of value. Forest carbon projects, often presented as radical new forms of valorising forests, will thus be shown to follow very specific historical trajectories of land and labour exploitation.
Instead of a natural resource or an already existing commodity, then,
‘carbon’ appears in the next two chapters as a particular form of value—the carbon credit—with specific capacities and effects. It is to these that I now turn.