Presentation short abstract

Drawing on nine well-regarded East African carbon projects, we show that even best-case initiatives are shaped by unequal exchange, Northern institutional dominance and depoliticising narratives. This reveals limits to “decolonial” offsets and points instead toward reparative funding.

Presentation long abstract

Carbon offsets have become a rapidly expanding form of climate finance across the Global South, commonly framed as win–win interventions that deliver mitigation while supporting local livelihoods. Drawing on nine case studies from Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda (2014–2025)—including plantations, smallholder agroforestry, rangeland conservation, and REDD+—this paper interrogates whether such initiatives, even when explicitly designed to generate community benefits, can meaningfully be considered “decolonial.”

We show that forest carbon projects reproduce—and at times intensify—colonial power relations through three interconnected mechanisms central to contemporary climate finance infrastructures.

First, unequal economic exchange: carbon finance is celebrated as a North–South transfer yet operates through pricing that devalues Southern land and labour, enabling low-cost Northern offsetting. After consultancy fees, audit costs, and bureaucratic compliance burdens are extracted, communities receive only a fraction of the value they help generate.

Second, institutional asymmetries and epistemic gatekeeping: technical carbon accounting systems create profound knowledge hierarchies. Farmers lack access to basic price information; implementers struggle with complex audit cycles; and accredited verification bodies remain overwhelmingly Northern, positioning intermediaries as indispensable but value-capturing brokers of climate action.

Third, narrative depoliticization: dominant discourses present climate change as a universal ‘we’ problem, obscuring historical responsibility and structural inequality, naturalizing the idea that Southern landscapes should absorb Northern emissions.

We conclude that while community-rooted projects can yield local benefits, the offset mechanism itself remains structurally colonial. Decolonizing climate finance requires moving beyond offsets toward deep Northern emissions cuts paired with non-offsetting, reparative funding for locally grounded initiatives designed for quality rather than scale.