The Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (known collectively as REDD+) initiative has emerged as a means through which individuals, projects and communities in developing countries can be financially rewarded for reducing emissions from deforestation, forest degradation and enhancement of carbon stock. In this article, we analyse the various framings and actor coalitions around REDD+ and institutional dynamics within the conceptualisation and development of REDD+. We conclude with a reflection on the key aspects for the political economy of REDD+ under a post-Kyoto agreement, arguing that increased institutional recognition and support to less powerful forest voices is needed if equity rights as social justice are to be considered as key aspects of the future global climate change regime.

This paper examines primitive accumulation by studying changes in fishermen and mollusc collectors' labour before and after the privatization of 1,800 hectares of mangrove forest in rural Senegal through the creation of a tourism-oriented protected area. Locating this privatization within a broader context of capital's enclosures, the paper shows a process of depeasantization, labour intensification (via the multiplication of petty commodity production activities and proletarianization) and changing socioecological relations. This is a process where enclosures continuously alienate workers by separating them not necessarily from the land, but, more generally, from the conditions of their labour even when these are already commodified. As workers cope with alienation, they encounter it anew, contributing to capital's survival through their search for money and other commodities (i.e., means of production and subsistence). Workers' everyday adaptations to capital, and hence alienation, need to become central in future research on primitive accumulation and agrarian change.

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The making and survival of capitalist conservation depends upon the creation and maintenance of contradictory class relations based on alienated labour. The literature has, however, often ignored this aspect. Looking at capital as a contradictory class relation and through the study of a tourism-oriented protected area and three reforestation payment for ecosystem service projects in Senegal, this article shows how capital’s instrumentalisation of conservation requires a constant adaption to workers’ struggles against alienation. In the case here analysed, this adaptation manifests in the avoidance, silencing and appropriation of workers’ mobilisations against forest privatisation and labour exploitation. This resistance to workers’ disalienation reinforces not only capitalist class relations but also state, neo-colonial and white people’s power.