Robin Hood in the Untenured Forest

Robin Hood in the Untenured Forest: Chapter 3 traces how the Acrean state made forest carbon’s new international value into a kind of public wealth it then redistributed to some rural people. It did so by detaching forest carbon’s value from land, obviating the need to settle pervasively uncertain land rights or measure deforestation on specific pieces of land. Instead, they attached forest carbon’s new value to labor and ecosystem services. Examining subsequent redistribution as a form of statecraft, the chapter argues that this approach engendered an environmentally premised welfare state. While inchoate and not always effective, this state differed from the private property–making and —enforcing state envisioned in supportive and critical discussions of forest carbon and neoliberal capitalism. Yet, this approach also skirted the powerful forms of belonging that land rights can engender. The chapter’s analysis points to the forms of land- and labor-based inclusion and exclusion that green capitalism can entail.