Transnational Legal Process and Discourse in Environmental Governance: The Case of REDD+ in Tanzania

Abstract

Governments in developing countries have adopted policies, laws, and programs to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), with the funding and rules provided by global institutions and transnational actors. The transnational legal process for REDD+, entailing the construction and diffusion of legal norms that govern the pursuit of REDD+, has been driven by discursive struggles over the purposes and requirements of REDD+. At the global level, the development of legal norms for REDD+ has been primarily influenced by coalitions committed to the discourses of ecological modernization, civic environmentalism, and to a lesser extent, climate justice. Through discourse analysis of the transnational legal process for REDD+ in Tanzania, I show how domestic efforts to operationalize REDD+ have been dominated by a government coalition that has emphasized green governmentality, made few concessions to the discourse of civic environmentalism, and completely neglected the climate justice claims of Indigenous Peoples. This case study reveals how discourse analysis may enhance the study of transnational legal phenomena by drawing attention to the complex interplay of global and domestic discourses and its role in shaping legal norms and reinforcing or challenging structures of power and knowledge within and across legal systems.

Discursive mismatch and globalization by stealth: The fight against corruption in the Brazilian legal field

“…First, it highlights the importance of analyzing discourses in legal globalization outcomes while also focusing on globalization processes. Although processual scholars acknowledge law's power in promoting global discourses of domination (e.g., neoliberalism), their analyses have focused more on the specific legal transformations driven by these discourses (Halliday & Shaffer, 2015; Jodoin, 2019; Levi & Hagan, 2012). To fill this gap, the paper combines processual theories' emphasis on legal actors' disputes for power with the law and colonialism scholars' focus on the law's role in promoting imperialist and capitalist ideas.…”

“…As Halliday and Shaffer argue, TLOs' “ideological content” and “distributive consequences … very often remain implicit or unexamined” (Halliday & Shaffer, 2015: 482). To fill this gap, TLO scholars have called for discourse analyses of globalization outcomes (Halliday & Shaffer, 2015; Jodoin, 2019). But to conduct such an analysis and still consider how legal actors affect globalization processes, it is useful to employ theoretical concepts that zoom in on the actor level, emphasizing their identities, beliefs, and practices.…”

Breaching Barriers: The Fight for Indigenous Participation in Water Governance

“…These actions and decisions often combine to de-emphasize or ignore altogether the perspectives, values, and experiences of Indigenous peoples. Globally, Indigenous peoples continue to face these types of boundaries in wide-ranging environmental decision-making activities that include forest management [54,55], climate change mitigation and adaptation [56,57], resource extraction [13,14], and infrastructure siting [58,59]. Whether through a single permitting action or centuries-long legal and political developments, we contend that the exclusion of Indigenous voices is a self-reinforcing process; exclusion today breeds exclusion tomorrow.…”