UC Irvine

This dissertation is about the epistemic and policy evolution of the environmental financial mechanism of REDD+ (Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) in Brazil. Derived from the ecological or environmental economic model of creating economic incentives, REDD+ is rather a grand economic project of financializing the Amazonia, through public funds or markets, to reduce deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions. This dissertation examines the mobilization, production and competition of various forms of knowledge(s) in designing and testing this economic invention.

In this study, I propose three research hypotheses. The first and underlying one is that in the cause of developing a global environmental financial mechanism as REDD+, there is not a single universal knowledge producer or justification, but rather there are multiple modes of knowing and thus multiple kinds of "knowers" as local or native to their social cultural contexts of knowing. The second hypothesis is that the multiple modes of knowing are in collaboration and negotiation with each other in a shared project, in this case, of REDD+. The third one is not so much a theoretical hypothesis, but more of an exploratory attempt on the role of anthropological research in collaborative knowledge production as in this case.

This ethnographic study is based on eighteen months of fieldwork among scientists, policymakers, carbon market practitioners, environmentalists as well as forest community residents in Brazil. My fieldwork relied primarily on ethnographic research methods, including participatory observation, in-depth interviews and archival research, but was also complemented by more structural and quantitative methods, such as policy network analysis and survey research.

This dissertation concludes supporting my first two research hypotheses. Ethnographic accounts of REDD+ knowledge production and mobilization reveal that multiple modes of knowing collaborate and negotiate with each other. Moreover, ethnographic research brings forth the productive, but yet informal, culture of cross field collaboration in scientific knowledge production. Beyond that, anthropologists may also help to enable various stakeholders to keep track of their positions in the complex process of carbon market making, especially those unprivileged stakeholders, such as the forest community residents, and the "Third World scientists."