Presentation short abstract

While recent forest reforms in the DRC promised to address historical exclusions, new forms of territorialization have formed around community and carbon forestry. In Mai-Ndombe, these reshape politics of access and representation as actors struggle to benefit from emerging ecological land uses.

Presentation long abstract

Since the turn of the 21st century, forest governance in Central Africa has been increasingly shaped by a neoliberal shift towards decentralization, market-based conservation, and carbon finance. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a reform of the forest code in 2002 laid the basis for community forestry and REDD+. It opened a way to recognize the customary rights of historically marginalized populations over forested lands and introduced new mechanisms to generate revenue for their conservation efforts. Yet, although these policies are presented as win–win solutions that could reconcile social and ecological objectives, it remains unclear how they articulate with each other in practice. Their implementation raises two central questions for political ecology: To what extent do current community conservation and carbon projects transform power relations in forested territories? How do they reconfigure access to land and revenues?

To address these questions, we draw on ethnographic research conducted in Bolobo Territory (Mai-Ndombe Province), including semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and policy documents analysis. Our case study shows how local and international conservation NGOs have positioned themselves as key territorial intermediaries, benefiting from their privileged access to financial resources and technical expertise. We highlight the ways through which they have institutionalized community-based forest management and thereby reconfigured local land uses towards conservation. Finally, by examining the effects of these changes on access to land and its revenues across different groups of actors, we show how these new forms of territorialization, legitimized by “community” and environmental discourses, can reproduce earlier patterns of exclusion.