No abstract

Recent debates about Africa's energy future have been heated, often shaped by geopolitical interests, but detached from the context-specific climate and development realities that

The growing global interest in biodiversity conservation and the role of forestland sustainability in climate change mitigation has led to the emergence of a new specific field of global environmental governance that we called ‘forest diplomacy’. With the largest tropical forest area after the Amazon, Congo Basin countries (CBc) constitute a major negotiation bloc within global forest-related governance arenas. Despite this position, CBc seem embedded in a failure trap with respect to their participation in forest diplomacy arenas. This paper examines the major causes of the recurrent failures of CBc within forest diplomacy. A qualitative empirical approach (including key informant interviews, groups discussion, participant observation, and policy document review) was used. From a conceptual and theoretical perspective, this research combines global and political sociology approaches including environmentality and blame avoidance works. The main finding reveals that the recurrent failures of CBc in forest diplomacy are partly due to the lack of strategic and bureaucratic autonomy of CBc that strongly depend on financial, technical, and knowledge resources from Western cooperation agencies or consultancy firms. Our discussion highlights that this dependency is maintained by most of the key actor groups involved in forest diplomacy related to CBc, as they exploit these failures to serve their private interests while avoiding the blame of not reducing deforestation and biodiversity loss in the Congo Basin.

Environmental cooperation in the Congo Basin region is facing a paradox as the region has an inflow of aid but deforestation and poverty continue to grow. We examine the role of aid agencies in this paradox, who we assume are policy entrepreneurs who influence and benefit from the process. To test these assumptions, we use policy entrepreneurship theory coupled with a comparative qualitative approach to conduct two case studies. The first case study is a climate change adaptation capacity building initiative with the German aid agency GIZ in the central role. We prove that GIZ led the project with high effectiveness, benefit from it but failed to align the initiative's goals with the local needs. The second case study is the Congo Basin Forest Partnership (CBFP), which functions without an aid agency in the central role. We observe that although the CBFP's actions strongly matched local needs, it lacked some effectiveness and could not yield relevant policy outcomes. Therefore, we suggest that suboptimal institutions meeting a minimum standard in both management and orientation toward local needs should be built.