Content area
This dissertation analyzes REDD+ in the context of Brazilian Amazonia from an Indigenous rights and climate justice perspective, focusing on the effect of the mechanism on historical patterns of state-Indigenous relations in the region. I draw on content and discourse analysis of electronic databases, official documents, reports, and social media to understand how REDD+ is structured in Brazilian Amazonia, and how they affect Indigenous peoples, their rights and political goals of self-determination. I also applied data obtained from fieldwork conducted in 2019 in the Brazilian Amazonian state of Acre. This dissertation follows a three-article format. Chapter 1 (Not market-based, but still neoliberal: the historical evolution of REDD+ in the Brazilian Amazon) aims to analyze the history of REDD+ in Brazil, covering the first initiatives, and particularly the evolution of jurisdictional, which I call state-centered, REDD+ through the Amazon Fund, REM Acre and REM Mato Grosso. Chapter 2 (The discourse practice of state-centered REDD+ and Indigenous rights) aims at understanding to what extent state-centered REDD+ has helped advance Indigenous land rights and calls for climate justice in Brazilian Amazonia. I draw on a Critical Discourse Studies approach, and apply the 12 principles for a climate justice approach to climate change mitigation in the Amazon (Osborne et al. 2024) as an analysis framework. Chapter 3 (REDD+ and settler colonial traces of state building and territorialization) examines processes of state territorialization associated with state-centered REDD+ in Brazilian Amazonia. I conclude that state-centered state-centered programs are helping state-sponsored deforestation drivers to continue and expand under the neoliberal discourse of economic diversification as a conservation strategy, agri-environmentalism, and ecological modernization. The participation of topics of Indigenous rights and climate justice has been marginal in the discourse of state-centered REDD+, despite governance models that supposedly guarantee Indigenous participation in decision making. State-centered REDD+ also favors processes of state territorialization with settler colonial features over Indigenous lands. My recommendation is that the fight against deforestation and forest carbon emissions in Brazilian Amazonia should drift away from neoliberal perspectives towards new economic models, climate justice, and non-economic values of nature.