Presentation short abstract

Through a short desktop documentary of five soil carbon offset projects in Southern Africa, I highlight the visual, discursive, and cognitive processes that shape the construction of ‘restoration economies’ on rangelands.

Presentation long abstract

Soil carbon and biodiversity offsets on rangelands are emerging as new investment frontiers that draw in a wide array of stakeholders, including social enterprises, universities, climate-tech firms, fintech consultancies, entrepreneurs, and carbon-emitting multinationals. Focusing on five rangeland-restoration projects in Southern Africa - and informed by the process of archiving, reading, tabulating, and investigating 54 Verra-registered soil carbon-offset projects- I present a short desktop documentary and use digital ethnographic methods (Pink 2013, 2015) to show how myths, narratives, and imaginaries are mobilized by these actors in different ways online and in practice.

In this case, audio-visual storytelling complements written analysis by more effectively highlighting the visual, discursive, and cognitive mechanisms that construct ‘restoration economies’ or new ‘economies of repair’ (Fairhead et al., 2012; Huff & Brock, 2023) on rangelands.

These case studies demonstrate that, although restoration narratives vary slightly across rangeland contexts, they consistently reproduce long-standing myths about livestock production systems, grassland ecologies, human–environment relations, and dominant cultural imaginaries of “nature”. Most of the soil-carbon initiatives examined reinforce historical legacies of land injustice, promote ranch-style grazing management ideals, and instrumentalize grazing livestock as a carbon-offset technology rather than acknowledging them as living animals and sources of nutrition and livelihoods. This is problematic because the design of these types of rangeland restoration projects recycles colonial “solutions” and ironically continues to reward the destructive legacy of large-scale, commercially oriented, livestock-management models rather than supporting mobile-based, small-scale realities of pastoral and smallholder animal husbandry.