Carbon markets as green extractivism: Land governance, indigenous rights and livelihoods

Abstract

This paper critically examines how market-based environmental strategies within the broader discourse of green colonialism and its current facet of green extractivism reconfigure land governance and indigenous rights and livelihoods. The paper posits that REDD+ based carbon forest development activities deployed under the global imperative of carbon sequestration reinforce neoliberal environmental governance and dispossess indigenous people and commodify nature. The paper therefore explores the socio-political dynamics of green colonialism and its current facet of green extractivism in the Ashanti, Brong-Ahafo, Volta and Northern regions of Ghana targeted for capitalist carbon markets regime. In doing so, this paper questions the ontological dispossession catastrophism embedded in green capitalist logics of accumulation by employing political ecology and decolonial theoretical framework to examine how and why green colonialism and its current facet of green extractivism take the form they do in Ghana. It concludes by calling for resistance and counter-narratives grounded in ecological justice and indigenous sovereignty.