Producing Carbon Credits

How to conserve a forest in Cambodia and sell it in

Finland?

Noora Isomäki

Master’s Thesis

15/06/2021

University of Helsinki

Global Development Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences

Abstract

Faculty: Faculty of Social Sciences

Degree programme: Master’s Programme in Society and Change

Study track: Global Development Studies

Author: Noora Anniina Isomäki

Title: Producing Carbon Credits – How to conserve a forest in Cambodia and sell it in Finland?

Level: Master’s Thesis

Month and year: June 2021

Number of pages: 70 + references and appendices

Keywords: Cambodia, carbon markets, carbon offsets, green economy, political ecology, REDD+

Where deposited:

Additional information:

Abstract:

Carbon markets form a fundamental part of green economy, that is supposed to bring the world out of

climate crisis, while maintaining economic growth and human well-being. This thesis contributes to the

critical research on the green economy assumptions and draws from the political-ecological literature.

It explores voluntary carbon markets with qualitative methods, through a case study of a production

chain of carbon credits starting from their production in the Cardamom Mountains, Cambodia and

ending in their buying and re-sale by the Compensate foundation in Finland. The focus of the analysis

are the representations needed to create supply and demand for the carbon credit, and their effects.

The thesis examines the complexity of commodification of carbon credits. Carbon offsets rely on highly

technical auditing schemes. To produce carbon credits with forestry projects, the project developers

must describe a “baseline”. The baseline describes a threat, which the relevant area is facing, and the

conservation organization can tackle. I analyse how the representations of the threat make the

conservation area governable and justify intervention and how they, at the same time, are unable to

include the wider context, so they leave important drivers of deforestation unaddressed and instead

target small-scale activities of individuals and local communities. Similarly, I show how in order to sell

such carbon credits, climate change must be represented as a problem that can be solved by individual

climate action of responsible consumers rather than as a systemic problem. As an effect, both the

production and sale of carbon credits have a strong focus on targeting individuals at the expense of

leaving broader societal structures unaddressed.

This thesis highlights that the global North’s ability and moral justification to continue high-carbon

lifestyles through offsets, requires people living in the global South to change their livelihoods and

environments. Even if the communities in the conservation areas have some power to impact the ways

the offset project operates, the level of optionality is much lower than in the global North, where the

consumer is only subtly nudged to offset the distant damage they do. This approach is generally justified

based on orientalist and neo-colonial discourses, according to which the people of the global South are

unable to take care of their environments – and even themselves. The fact that no changes are demanded

from the people of the global North and no existing power structures or practices are challenged

arguably increases the desirability of the carbon markets as the major climate solution. This, however,

also makes it justified to call carbon markets a non-transformative climate solution.

Abbreviations

CCB Climate, Community & Biodiversity standard

CDM Clean Development Mechanism

CO₂e Carbon dioxide equivalent (unit of measurement used to standardize the climate

effects of different greenhouse gases)

CORSIA Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation

CPP Cambodian People's Party

CR Corporate responsibility

EU ETS European Union Emissions Trading System

FAO Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

GHG Greenhouse gas

IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

MoE Ministry of Environment

NGO Non-governmental organization

OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

REDD+ Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation

SCRP Southern Cardamom REDD+ Project

SDGs Sustainable Development Goals

UN United Nations

UNEP United Nations Environment Programme

UNFCCC United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

VCS Verified Carbon Standard (previously Voluntary Carbon Standard)

VCU Verified Carbon Unit

Table of Contents

1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1

1.1. How big is your carbon footprint? .............................................................................. 1

1.2. The story of the carbon markets .................................................................................. 2

1.3. Carbon offsets from Cambodia to Finland .................................................................. 6

2. Theoretical framework ..................................................................................................... 10

2.1. Political ecology of the carbon markets .................................................................... 10

2.2. Behind the carbon markets – decoupling and ecomodernism ................................... 11

2.3. Commodifying the ecosystem services ..................................................................... 14

2.4. Privatised or communalised? .................................................................................... 16

3. Methodology .................................................................................................................... 19

3.1. Data collection........................................................................................................... 19

3.2. Research challenges and ethics ................................................................................. 21

3.3. Case study approach .................................................................................................. 22

4. Analysis and findings: Complexities of carbon commodification ................................... 24

4.1. “Here is how we’ll stop climate change” – Selling carbon credits in Finland .......... 25

4.2. Journey of the carbon credit ...................................................................................... 31

4.3. Uncertainties in the money flow ............................................................................... 34

4.4. Representations of successes and threats .................................................................. 37

4.5. Excluded from problematisation: broader politics of deforestation in Koh Kong .... 41

4.6. Moving target ............................................................................................................ 46

4.7. Facing the critique – heated discussions around offsets ........................................... 51

5. Discussion: Non-transformative carbon markets ............................................................. 56

5.1. Climate action as a commodity ................................................................................. 57

5.2. Saving the world – agency and justice ...................................................................... 61

5.3. Contested views on ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ kind of climate action ................................ 64

6. Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 68

7. References ........................................................................................................................ 70

8. Appendices ....................................................................................................................... 90

Appendix 1 ........................................................................................................................... 90

Appendix 2 ........................................................................................................................... 96

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1. Introduction

1.1. How big is your carbon footprint?

From 3790 kg CO₂e to 5100 kg CO₂e. After using several online calculators, I found that

somewhere between those values falls my personal carbon footprint of 2019. That was a normal

year, before the Covid-19 limitations, that I lived with mainly plant based diet, in a small

apartment, without a car, moving long distances by trains and busses. Trying to find out how

far I was from the goal, I found some differing results: Global average should be under 2 tons

(The Nature Conservancy, n.d.), 1,5 tons (Shrink That Footprint, 2012) or even 0,7 tons (Mänty

& Lettenmeier, 2019) by 2050. Some of my emissions can still be avoided, but small lifestyle

changes would not take me to any of these goals. After measuring, avoiding and reducing

personal carbon footprint, some say that the final step is to offset (e.g. Stevenson, 2020).

It is clear that the business as usual cannot continue if we want to keep the planet liveable and

the temperature from rising over 1,5-2 degrees (e.g. IPCC, 2018), but the suggestions for

answering the problem vary. Green growth or green economy is described as a way of

achieving both ecological sustainability and poverty eradication by decoupling environmental

destruction from economic growth (Bryant, 2019; Schandl et al., 2016; UNEP, 2018). Trading

in ecosystem services – something that nature provides and humans benefit from, such as trees’

ability to store carbon – has been described as “an archetypal application of green economy”

(McAfee, 2016, p. 333). By creating markets for carbon credits that each correspond to one

tonne of reduced or prevented CO₂e the idea of the carbon markets is to put a price on emissions

and thus make clean environment a rational outcome. Buyers of the carbon credits can be, for

example, individual consumers or companies. Companies buy carbon credits either when they

exceed their given emission cap and must buy credits to emit more, or voluntarily, as a part of

their corporate responsibility (CR) or public relations (PR) strategies, to claim carbon neutrality

to appeal to certain group of consumers. Consumers pay for carbon credits through “carbon

neutral” products or buy them individually to offset their personal emissions. Often offsets are

discussed in relation to air travel, but in theory any action’s emissions can be offset. In other

words, consumption increases one’s carbon footprint and offsets are marketed as a way to

decrease it. Prices of the credits vary depending on the time, the marketplace and the project

producing them. For example, from Gold Standard’s marketplace in December 2020 one could

buy credits from most projects for $15, $18 or $20 USD, meaning that I could have offset my

emissions of 2019 (say, roughly 4000 kg CO₂e) for about $60 to $80.

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This thesis builds on a case study around a production chain of carbon credits uniquely drawing

connections between their production and sale. The chain starts from an offset project in the

Cardamom Mountains, Cambodia and ends in the sale of carbon credits by Compensate

foundation in Finland. The focus on the representations that are needed to create both supply

and demand for carbon credits, and the impacts of these representations in the context of global

climate change mitigation and its justifications. Before discussing the case study and my

research question in more detail, I first briefly introduce the history of the carbon markets, their

ways of operating and the literature around them.

1.2. The story of the carbon markets

Carbon markets are the answer to the so called “market failure”, an idea that with correct

information, regulations, taxes and markets for emissions, climate change can be addressed by

internalizing the externalities, namely putting a price on carbon emissions and making the

decarbonisation of the society part of the everyday economy (Bryant, 2019, p. 9; Lohmann,

2011; Stern, 2009). The main argument for creating a market for carbon is that it is the most

cost effective way of reducing emissions – flexibility ensures that cuts happen where they cost

the least and the price inspires innovation for clean technologies (Bryant, 2019; European

Commission, 2016; Lohmann, 2011). Other arguments vary from carbon markets’ ability to

create profit to them allowing deregulation, and getting rid of clumsier command-and-control

instruments (Lohmann, 2011, p. 96). Rather than a single clear path, the history of the hundred-

billion dollar carbon markets has been seen deriving from, for example, growing influence of

neoliberalism, financialization, surplus capital seeking for new outlets and continuing political

dominance of the United States (ibid. p. 93).

Carbon markets developed from sulphur dioxide trading, started in the US in 1990. Sulphur

dioxide trading was interpreted as successful, even though in Europe more direct regulatory

measures resulted in greater sulphur dioxide emission reductions (Milieu, 2004). Still, the US

negotiators used the perceived success to push for market-based approaches for Kyoto protocol

in 1997. Their lobbying work was a success and they managed to overturn not only sceptical

European negotiators more in favour of a carbon tax, but also developing countries, that viewed

market-based approaches as something that might push responsibility of emissions to those that

have not emitted (Bryant, 2019, p. 5). The fear was overturn with a proposal of Clean

Development Mechanism (CDM), through which emission reductions from clean development

projects could be sold forward to count to the targets of the global North (Bryant, 2019, p. 5;

Grubb et al., 1999). CDM was first meant to work as a redistributive fund, but the US argued

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that with market logic the it would work more consistently and offer encouragement for

positive action rather than penalties (Bryant, 2019, p. 77).

Kyoto mechanisms consist of CDM, Joint Implementation (JI) and Emission Trading.

Emission trading works through cap and trade system, where carbon credits are created based

on agreed targets for reducing emissions and then distributed or auctioned to companies

(Bachram, 2004; Bryant, 2019, pp. 6–7; European Commission, 2016). If companies exceed

their target, they must buy more credits (Bachram, 2004, p. 7). CDM and JI on the other hand,

are based on the model called “baseline and credit”, in which the reduction is assessed

according to the difference between actual greenhouse gas emission and a baseline scenario of

what it would have been if the project did not exist (Bryant, 2019, p. 5). The model has been

critiqued for its hypothetical or imaginative approach: “Offsets are an imaginary commodity

created by deducting what you hope happens from what you guess would have happened” (a

journalist Dan Welch, quoted in Davies, 2007). Especially baseline manipulation has been seen

as problematic. By exaggerating the threat, a company can “conjure” huge estimated emissions

that would have been produced without it, which allows almost limitless creation of carbon

credits and increases both emissions and the company’s profits (Bachram, 2004, p. 8).

Despite the hard work of the US negotiators to include the market-based mechanisms in Kyoto

protocol, the US never ratified the protocol. The EU took the lead in the carbon markets in

2005 by setting up the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) that produces

credits through cap and trade. CDM and JI grew between 2008 and 2012 with the help of the

link with EU ETS, as over half of the global demand for them came from the EU (World Bank,

2012b). The growth offered a ground for a carbon trading industry and carbon brokers,

exchange platforms, auditors, and project developers to grow. The transaction value of carbon

credits grew from US$1 billion in 2004 to US$176 billion in 2011 (Bryant, 2019, p. 7).

However, value of the credits collapsed in 2012 and thousands of projects were left with

unclaimed credits (The Economist, 2019). In 2015, in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement the

negotiators decided to create a new market mechanism, that would be built on the lessons learnt

(UNFCCC, n.d.-b). The Agreement made market-based solutions a key mechanism in global

emission reduction (Bryant, 2019, p. 1). As the negotiations continued, the conversations of

what to do with the remaining credits worked a part in sinking the 2019 COP 25 in Madrid, as

some countries would have liked the credits be transferred to new Paris trading scheme and

others argued that this would flood it with credits that no longer correspond to emission

reduction (The Economist, 2019).

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On the side of the turbulent international agreements, voluntary carbon markets have increased

in popularity. They were valued around $320 million USD in 2019 and the market is growing

and being drawn by demand from companies’ net-zero and CR commitments despite the

impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic (Ecosystem Marketplace, 2020; Environmental Finance,

2020; Hamrick & Gallant, 2017). Projects producing carbon credits can be of many kinds: tree

plantations theoretically working as carbon sinks, renewable energy projects, improvements to

existing energy sector, and so on (Bachram, 2004, p. 8). Projects that store and eliminate

greenhouse gases (GHG) from landfills are considered the most effective and easiest to

measure while the additionality in forest planting and protection is often more difficult to prove

(Bailis et al., 2016; Finnwatch, 2021). Still, forest projects are popular. In the voluntary markets

alone they sold credits for $66 million USD in 2016 (Hamrick & Gallant, 2017) and together

with renewable energy projects were considered to account for around 40 percent of the whole

market in 2019 (Finnwatch, 2021, p. 8). The forest-based projects vary from planting

monoculture tree farms that often will be cut in the future, to protecting older forests and

national parks. What lays behind the forest-based offset projects is the need to remove carbon

from the atmosphere: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2018) has

argued that 10 million km2 of forests should be added by 2050. Partly because of the

hypothetical baseline-approach, but also due to the fact that the trees storing the carbon and the

consumer buying the carbon credit are not directly linked, carbon credits can be described as

non-physical, but rather discursive, virtual or even performative commodities (Cavanagh &

Benjaminsen, 2014; Fairhead et al., 2012). Their production entails particular ways of framing

the climate problem and proposing the interventions necessary for their fixation, that can be

executed with the project in hand, represented with highly professionalized technical carbon

accounting methods that show an ability to prevent, avoid or capture emissions.

Approximately one third of the projects in the voluntary market are a part of the UN’s REDD+

(Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) programme (Carton, 2016).

REDD+, finalized in 2015 under United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

(UNFCCC), focuses on forest-based emission reduction and was created as an answer to the

problem of land use changes, namely deforestation and forest degradation, that were shown to

account for 12-29% of global GHG emissions (Fearnside, 2000; Van Der Werf, 2009). Rather

than afforestation and reforestation, REDD+ offers forest management options for developing

countries and encourages them to reduce emissions and enhance carbon capture (UNFCCC,

n.d.-a). REDD+ credits are results based, which means that the projects producing them must

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be able to show additionality before they can sell anything. Thus, a substantial investment is

often needed to start a project. REDD+ is funded through different mechanisms, both public

and private, market and non-market based (FAO, 2018; UNEP, 2017). Currently, majority of

the money comes from multilateral and bilateral donors, but the goal is to increase the share of

the market-based funding (Fletcher et al., 2016).

REDD+ has received critique from several directions. Many countries of the global South, have

questioned using carbon markets to finance REDD+ due to their malfunctioning and the

inability of the carbon credits to correspond to actual emission reductions (Carbon Market

Watch, 2013). The demand for offsets has been low and the projects seem to lack specific and

coherent biodiversity goals, which has led to questioning the long-term sustainability of

REDD+ (Foster et al., 2017; Ken et al., 2020; Panfil & Harvey, 2016). REDD+ has been seen

distracting attention and failing to address the original causes of livelihood loss and forest

degradation (McAfee, 2016). The price of the REDD+ credits also does not cover the

implementation cost of the projects (Luttrell et al., 2018) nor offer financial incentive to refrain

from cutting the forest (Sandker et al., 2010) or to develop energy and carbon saving

technologies (Bosello et al., 2015). It has been claimed that REDD+ benefits the participants

of the European carbon markets more that the regions where the projects are implemented (ibid.

p. 107). The programme has also been accused for neo-colonial practices such as paternalism

and causing loss of indigenous rights, lands and cultures (UNPFII, 2013), for causing

disadvantage or dispossession to rural communities (Osborne, 2015) and for blaming

indigenous peoples for deforestation without a credible base for doing so (Mamo et al., 2020).

Rather than enclosing forests with REDD+, formalising indigenous rights has widely been seen

as an effective way to reduce deforestation: “Deforestation rates are lower in indigenous and

tribal territories where governments have formally recognized collective land rights; and

improving the tenure security of these is a cost-effective way to reduce carbon emissions”

(FAO & FILAC, 2021, p. 39).

The contestation of efficiency of the carbon markets is not limited to REDD+. For example,

carbon markets do not cause differences in emissions between energy sectors of countries that

use market mechanisms and those that do not (Aho, 2020). It has been evaluated, that

companies might be overcompensated for their losses caused by the carbon markets, which

cancels even the small incentive the markets offer for development of emission reduction in

companies (ibid.). Also, simply the too cheap price of the credits has been seen as a problem.

Examining both emission trading and carbon taxes, OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-

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operation and Development) reported that the price of carbon is not high enough to produce

emission reductions and with current growth it would take until 2095 for them to do so (OECD,

2018). The so-called double counting remains a part of the unresolved problem especially with

the targets set with the Paris agreement. Double counting refers to a situation where two entities

count deducted emissions as their own. As an example, an offset project could sell credits to a

buyer that would claim reduced emissions and carbon neutrality, while the same credits are

already counted in the project’s host country’s target. This could lead to greater emissions and

higher costs and undermine the system (Schneider et al., 2019). Still, in addition to the Paris

Agreement, the carbon markets form the ground for many emission reduction agreements (e.g.

CORSIA, Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation) despite their

bad track record. Since their establishment more than 20 years ago, global emissions have been

growing, not decreasing. In an interview with La Nuova Ecologia, researcher Larry Lohmann

(2020) notes: ”Carbon markets are not designed to reduce emissions. Their function, in the

Paris Agreement and elsewhere, is to extend the life of the fossil fuel economy and, indirectly,

an exploitative and unequal system of extractivism and nature degradation.”

1.3. Carbon offsets from Cambodia to Finland

This thesis focuses on a Finnish Compensate foundation, operating on voluntary carbon

markets, selling carbon credits to those who want to make their carbon footprint smaller. The

case-study looks into one of the projects Compansate buys carbon credits from, a forest

conservation project in Cardamom Mountains, Koh Kong province Cambodia, the Southern

Cardamom REDD+ Project (SCRP) (see Figure 1). This thesis describes the representations

necessary for the production of carbon credits and connects their production in the Cardamoms

to their sales in Finland, introducing connections and differences especially from the angle of

climate action and the ways of demanding for it from different groups of people.

Cardamom Mountains (ជួរភ្ន ំក្រវាញ, Chuor Phnom Krâvanh) in southwest Cambodia are one of

the largest and most diverse forest in mainland South East Asia, supporting half of Cambodia’s

known resident bird, reptile and amphibian species, and most of large mammal species (Coad

et al., 2019). Historically, the mountains have been hard to access and sparsely populated but

have also acted as the arena for political struggle. During the Cambodian civil war in the 1960’s

and 70’s the forests were heavily mined and thousands of Mon Khmer Pear people were driven

from their homes by the Khmer Rouge (the communist party of Cambodia), that hid in the

forests after the war, starting from 1979 (Coad et al., 2019; Grogan et al., 2009). Rich with

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natural resources, Cardamoms have been seen as an opportunity for economic development in

the form of agriculture, forestry, hydropower and carbon markets (e.g. Killeen, 2012).

Main owner of the SCRP is Cambodian Ministry of Environment (MoE) that partners with an

international non-governmental organization, Wildlife Alliance, and an American conservation

company, Wildlife Works, to conserve the southern parts of the Mountains. International

cooperation is not unusual in REDD+ and it has been seen that in general very few local

organizations are involved in implementation of REDD+ initiatives (Luttrell et al., 2018). The

SCRP, started in 2015, is marketed to protect 497,000 hectares of tropical rainforest and

prevent more than 3,000,000 tons of carbon emissions annually (Wildlife Alliance, n.d.). The

SCRP is accredited with Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) and Climate, Community &

Biodiversity (CCB) standard, both administered by Verra that develops and manages standards

for carbon markets. The SCRP is not the only conservation project in the Cardamoms and

different international conservation organizations have a lot of power and impact on life in the

area. For example, Käkönen and Thuon (2019, pp. 1198–1199) point out that “[t]he

international conservation organisations have been tightly woven into the governance of these

protected areas, which form exclusive zones exemplifying fortress-type conservation with

community-based elements targeting those within and near the protected areas”. While

Figure 1. Map of the SCRP (a screenshot from Project Description by Wildlife Works, 2018, p. 18).

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conflicting preferences have appeared between the organizations and the locals, extreme

measures or large conflicts have not risen to publicity from the SCRP.

One of the buyers of the credits from the SCRP is the Finnish Compensate foundation, headed

by a Finnish-Icelandic businessman, a former parliamentarian (Green League) and a TV-

persona Antero Vartia. Compensate’s idea is to include a possibility to offset to everyday

purchasing processes, but it also markets its service to businesses. The foundation has had

difficulties in explaining and justifying its operation rationale, which reflects, for example, in

a legal case around it. If the payments Compensate gets are considered gratuitous, it needs a

permit for fundraising but the foundation itself argues that they are not – the payments go

directly into buying carbon credits (e.g. Haapanen, 2019b; Teittinen, 2020). According to the

Finnish gambling administration, as the money paid and the product/service bought do not

directly meet, the payments are gratuitous (Teittinen, 2020). Compensate’s case and public

discussion around it have inspired an ongoing change in legislation: In 2020 Finnish Ministry

of Interior started the process of changing the fundraising law to rule out the voluntary offset

services, so that they can operate without a fundraising permit, which as a principle would

recognize carbon credits as commodities. The legal process and the reporting around it can be

seen as reflecting the difficulty of turning ecosystem services into commodities, as both the

legal framework and the consumers appear to have difficulties of recognizing them as such.

Becoming more and more important element in climate change mitigation efforts on different

policy levels, being at the centre of a legal process and at the core of the work of an interesting

foundation headed by a charismatic celebrity, offsets have become an important topic of public

discussion in Finland. In June 2021 Finnwatch, a civic organisation focused on global corporate

responsibility, published a report on the responsibility of Finnish offset providers arguing, that

there is still much to improve (Finnwatch, 2021). The report notes that especially the lack of

official regulation causes a situation where almost any action can be claimed to be offsetting

and thus a company can call their products “carbon neutral” very easily (ibid. p. 12). Based on

the report and my own assessment made during this research, Compensate can be called one

of the most progressive actors in its field. This claim is based on their critical and careful

attitude towards the market and openness regarding their product and prices. Compensate

appears to be committed into developing carbon markets towards a more responsible direction,

and has suggested, for instance, that since majority of offset projects overestimate their climate

benefits and the claim for carbon neutrality is difficult to assess, it might be better to move

towards alternative claims, such as “support host countries in reaching their commitments

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under the Paris Agreement” or “finance climate change mitigation projects” (Compensate,

2021, pp. 39–40). This suggestion, while gaining more momentum (Carbon Market Watch,

2021), is not yet mainstream. Carbon offsets are one of the key strategies in international

climate change mitigation efforts, (e.g. European Commission, 2019; OECD, 2011, 2017;

World Bank, 2012a) and the net-zero strategies of different organizations, companies, cities,

and municipalities (e.g. City of Helsinki, 2018; ICAO, n.d.), and as a part of the larger process

of valuing and trading ecosystem services, at the core of so called green economy (Bäckstrand

& Lövbrand, 2006; Hickel & Kallis, 2020; McAfee, 2016).

Green economy has been claimed to solve climate change while also creating positive

development and increasing global well-being (OECD, 2011; UNEP, 2018; World Bank,

2012a). Like green economy, carbon offsets are often described as a win-win, or even a win-

win-win solution: good for biodiversity, climate change mitigation, and socioeconomic

development (Cavanagh & Benjaminsen, 2014; Delabre et al., 2020; Mousseau & Biggs,

2014). Pursuing “triple-win” should, however, be seen through critical lens, since for example,

there is evidence that acquiring land to establish forestry plantations for climate change

mitigation compromises local ecologies and indigenous and poor peoples’ livelihoods without

sufficiently including them into the decision making (Cavanagh & Benjaminsen, 2014; Fischer

& Hajdu, 2018; Leach & Scoones, 2015; Malkamäki et al., 2018; Milne & Adams, 2012;

Mousseau & Biggs, 2014; Takacs, 2014). Studies also show that new forests’ ability to store

carbon has been overestimated (Hong et al., 2020), tree plantations cause loss of biodiversity

and store less carbon than forests that they often replace (Heilmayr et al., 2020) and carbon

markets have not decreased the emissions of the biggest emitter, the energy sector (Aho, 2020).

Additionally, carbon offsets can create misleading claims about emissions reductions, and their

accumulation potential mainly benefits few privileged groups rather than local communities

they target (Bosello et al., 2015; Fletcher et al., 2016; Watt, 2021).

This research contributes to the critical literature around carbon markets by exploring the

framing of the problems necessary for the offset projects and the interventions they execute to

fix these problems. The thesis builds around the following question. What kinds of

representations are needed to create both supply and demand to a non-physical commodity,

such as the carbon credit, and how these representations impact climate action and especially

the question of demanded change? Through a qualitative analysis of a case-study, the thesis

will show how voluntary carbon markets offer a possibility for consumers of the global North

to continue their high carbon lifestyles with a small payment, while large-scale changes in lives

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and livelihoods are demanded from people of the global South to accommodate the possibility.

The approach of the carbon markets at both ends – production and consumption of the carbon

credits – focuses on individuals or groups and side-lines the structures that can be seen seriously

impacting the rising emissions or tropical deforestation, such as accumulating wealth of the

richest of the world, or the structures of consumption in the global North (Oxfam, 2020;

Wedeux & Schulmeister-Oldenhove, 2021; Wiedmann et al., 2020).

2. Theoretical framework

This thesis approaches carbon offsets with the framework of political ecology, a study of

environmental issues through their relations with political, economic and social factors, and

the power within those relations with some help of, for example, marketing research and

behavioural economics. In this chapter, after first giving a few introductory words to political

ecology and its relevance to this thesis, I discuss ecomodernism and the idea of decoupling

emissions from economic growth – both important in understanding the concept of green

growth – and their critique. Then I move to the commodification of ecosystem services

necessary in the production of carbon credits. Finally, I briefly talk about the discussion behind

the community-based approaches in privatized conservation work, which links to the

justifications of the ways the conservation areas in are governed.

2.1. Political ecology of the carbon markets

Political ecology arose as a response to apolitical way of viewing ecological questions, a

difference that is visible, for example, on identifying broad system rather blaming proximate

local forces for ecological changes (Perreault et al., 2015; Robbins, 2012). Debates in political

ecology have focused, for example, on access to and control over resources and on how

knowledge-making processes shape modes of governing the resources while foreclosing on

others (e.g. Paulson et al., 2003; Vandergeest & Roth, 2016).

In relation to carbon markets, researchers in political ecology have previously analysed, for

example, how project requirements impact the forests’ biodiversity and carbon storage

potential and contradict socioeconomic uses and cultural understandings of forests (Osborne,

2015), gendered impacts of offset projects (Gay-Antaki, 2016) and what types of conflicts can

arise from the implementations of REDD+ projects (Hein, 2019). The heart of the analysis can

quite often be seen in how production processes of carbon credits shape the social and material

realities in the project areas, from which the production emerges.

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Vandergeest and Roth (2016), who focus on political ecology in South East Asia, describe it

as a broad field, that has put attention on topics such as how rural people manage the ecologies

that they live at, how political and economic processes shape land, resources and access to

them, and environmental narratives that often either blame marginalized people for natural

destruction, or romanticize them as the saviours of nature. These common topics of political

ecology arose in this research as well. For example, carbon markets can be seen as contributing

the expansion of protected areas in the Cardamom Mountains, which affects the lives and

livelihoods of the locals. Small scale forest use is prevented by framing the local communities

as the ones to be blamed for tropical deforestation so they can be kept away from using the

forest by armed rangers and military police, strategies that do not in the same scale impact, for

example, the Cambodian government and its larger scale projects, or plans for them, in the

area. These processes are introduced in more detail in chapter 4.

This research also looks for the implications outside of the most immediate production of the

carbon credits and examines how carbon markets shape realities and identities in the end of the

consumers. The political ecology approach allows to see the connections between the two

seemingly different worlds of Finnish offset sales, that mainly focuses on trying to nudge the

consumers into acting and consuming in a more sustainable way, and Cambodian forest

conservation, that can have large scale effects on the lives and livelihoods of the locals. As put

by Robbins (2012, p. 13), political ecology is “a field of critical research predicated on the

assumption that any tug on the strands of the global web of human-environment linkages

reverberates throughout the system as a whole”. Finally, classics of development studies and

political ecology, such Escobar (1995), offer tools for examining these connections in a critical

manner.

2.2. Behind the carbon markets – decoupling and ecomodernism

Carbon markets and green economy are rooted in neoclassical economics: an idea that putting

a price on ecosystem services will prevent overuse and pollution (e.g. Bakker, 2005, 2010;

Bryant, 2019; Lyons & Westoby, 2014; Mansfield, 2008; McAfee, 1999). “The logic starts

with the premise that climate change is a case of ‘market failure’ that can be addressed by

putting a price on carbon, which ‘internalises’ the costs of carbon pollution as an ‘externality’”

(Bryant, 2019, p. 9). The goal of green economy is to decouple environmental destruction from

economic growth with processes such as the carbon markets (e.g. Schandl et al., 2016).

12

Idea of decoupling is supported, for example, by ecological modernization, or ecomodernism,

a discourse that can be seen behind the ideas of green economy and green growth. Different

versions of the ecomodernist discourse put different weighs on, for example, the importance

neoliberal markets and national regulation, but come together in trusting the idea of decoupling.

In ecomodernism, or especially its version, market environmentalism, one of the basic ideas is

that if environmental goods are treated as economic goods, they can be more efficiently

allocated and markets can become the solution rather than the cause of the environmental

problems (Bakker, 2005). This type of thinking can clearly be identified behind the justification

of the carbon markets.

Roots of ecomodernism lay on a thought that on the contrary to the argument by the Club of

Rome (Meadows et al., 1972), there are no limits to growth – at least not ones that the humanity

cannot overcome. In An Ecomodernist Manifesto, a group of researchers and activists discuss

processes that, according to them, are already ongoing to show that “the total human impact on

the environment, including land-use change, overexploitation, and pollution, can peak and

decline this century” and argue that “re-greening” of the planet can start while the living

standard keeps rising (Asafu-Adjaye et al., 2015, pp. 14–15). The processes indicating these

possibilities are, for example, meat consumption that has, according to the writers, peaked in

many wealthy nations, where consumption has shifted towards less land intensive protein

sources (ibid. p. 14). While alternative protein sources are indeed developing fast (e.g. Witte

et al., 2021), it has been left unnoticed by the authors that the meat consumption per capita

more than doubled between 1961 and 2014 and is highest in wealthy countries such as the US,

Hong Kong and Australia (Ritchie & Roser, 2017). “Peak meat”, has been predicted to be

reached in Europe and North America in 2035, if the support from regulation and technology

are optimal (Witte et al., 2021). Nevertheless, the ecomodernists argue that the limits to human

knowledge are the only limits to growth and the environmentalist discourse of humans having

reached the limits of the planetary resources is just “Flogging the Malthusian Dead Horse”1

(Sagoff, 2017, p. 2).

Ecomodernism and the aim for decoupling have perhaps become the tightest part of everyday

politics in some of the countries of the Northern Europe. Lidskog and Elander (2012) analyse

environmental governance in Sweden, the “forerunner in environmental policy and one of the

1 Malthus (1936) predicted that if population continues to grow geometrically, while food production can only

grow linearly, the humankind will eventually run out of resources. While his theory has been proven wrong

multiple times, it has also been argued that while with the help of developing technology the Earth appears to be

able to sustain a growing population, it is not as likely be able to sustain the ever-growing greed (Kallis, 2019).

13

most ecologically modernized countries in the world”. According to them, Sweden has adopted

ecomodernist understanding of society, but a balanced policy practice between economic

growth, social welfare and environmental values has not been reached, and while decisions that

compromise the country’s environmental ambitions are often made, Sweden has yet to

introduce an environmental policy that challenges the growth logic. When the two contradict,

the “issues are framed in a way that economic and environmental sustainability are harmonized,

at least rhetorically” (ibid. 421). Instead of achieving any true decoupling from environmental

harm, Sweden has achieved a decoupling of domestic responsibility from emissions caused in

other countries: “Economic growth continues to result in increased environmental emissions,

but in the Swedish case not so much within its borders but in those countries which sell products

to Sweden” (ibid. p. 423). Outsourcing the environmental burden to global South can be argued

to be in line with ecomodernist discourse, as per Bäckstrand and Lövbrand (2006, p. 53) the

“technocratic greening of industrial production has been silent on the experiences of

developing countries in equity and poverty issues. The predominant focus is on fixable and

cost-effective environmental problem-solving rather than social justice.”

Many see combining infinite economic growth and ecologically sustainable society as

impossible, as chances for absolute and rapid enough decoupling of emissions from economic

growth have been noted to be slim or even non-existent (e.g. Hickel & Kallis, 2020; Jackson,

2016; Kallis, 2011; Kallis et al., 2018; Parrique et al., 2019). Scepticism towards absolute

decoupling is visible, for example, in degrowth, eco-socialist and eco-anarchist discussions and

the thinkers have presented a plea for a more radical systemic change, that would aim to detach

the society from systemic growth (e.g. Wiedmann et al., 2020).

The idea of decoupling also has been criticized from the angle of seeing climate change as an

externality of the markets. Environmental harm has been argued to be an integral part of the

process where natural destruction and capitalism coproduce each other. For example, Bryant

(2019, pp. 25–32) discusses “climate-changing capitalism”, meaning coproduction of climate

change and capitalism in two ways: First, rather than seeing climate change as an external

problem to the markets, it is produced by capitalism and second, capitalism itself is modified

by climatic conditions that are of its own making. Jason Moore discusses capitalism’s central

position in the world and the human forms of organization, such as power or work, as a part of

nature rather than separate from it (e.g. Moore, 2015; Patel & Moore, 2018). Rather than the

concept of “Anthropocene”, which separates humans from the rest of the web of life and tells

a story of humanity destroying the nature, Moore (2015, 2017a, 2017b) discusses

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“Capitalocene”, the age of endlessly accumulating capital and capitalist world-ecology built

around a distinct divide between Nature and Society. The binary is not only present in the

mainstream economic thought, but even in the forms of resistance, for example, in green

thought in the narrative of capitalism that emerged out of nature, extracted wealth from it and

is now facing the consequences (Moore, 2015). World-ecological conversation attempts to

challenge this binary and Moore argues that all beings and systems are a part of “web of life”,

an evolving totality, in which capitalism and nature coproduce each other. World-ecological

conversation shows that climate crisis (as well as, for example, poverty and social

marginalization) are not externalities of capitalism, but capitalism needs them to exist (Moore,

2015, 2017a). As other reproductive aspects of the system, the carbon capturing abilities of

nature are also presupposed, and the combined dependence but indifference to these abilities

locks climate change and capitalist production together (Benton, 1989; Bryant, 2019).

Critical views towards the idea of combining economic growth and ecological sustainability

can be considered as rather marginal, as the current growth paradigm sees economic growth as

vital for wellbeing (Kallis et al., 2018). Green growth and ecological modernization represent

the predominant solution to climate change (Bäckstrand & Lövbrand, 2006; Hickel & Kallis,

2020) especially among large international organizations (e.g. European Commission, 2019;

OECD, 2011, 2017; World Bank, 2012a), and play a large role in Paris Agreement and the

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (Hickel, 2017, 2019; Sandberg et al., 2019).

2.3. Commodifying the ecosystem services

Aspects of reality are not “resources” or “commodities” by nature. Leach and Scoones (2015,

pp. 5–6) note how carbon, while part of a carbon cycle and equipped with biological and

physiological properties, is also a part of trees that have diverse cultural and economic

meanings, and has an ability to become a commodity on its own. The carbon commodity and

the projects producing it have wider range of political-economic effects, for example, source

of foreign exchange for poorer countries, or a business opportunity for brokers, traders,

consultants or private companies (ibid.), but the larger effects are rarely visible to the consumer.

Marx’s (1867/1955) concept of commodity fetishism refers to the distorted relationship that an

individual has with the production and consumption of goods – consumption often necessitates

that the conditions of production are faded. Cavanagh and Benjaminsen (2014) point out that

since the CO₂ emitted and the trees protected are not directly in contact, the link must be

constantly proven to the consumers through performance – images, measurement, certification

and accounting technologies – to assure them that what they are purchasing is something that

15

exists. This leads to fetishization of nature which is used to mask the relationship between the

commodity and conditions it’s been produced under (ibid.).

It has also been pointed out that since ecosystem services are enjoyed by everyone – no one

can be denied the benefit of the forests’ ability to store carbon – the regular price mechanism

involving scarcity does not fully function (Reynolds, 2012). Carbon credits as a non-physical

commodity depend on representations of environments and situations. Previous research

around the markets has found the production of carbon credits with forestry projects to be

heavily leaning on the representations of the positive sides and successes of conservation

organization (Büscher, 2014), obscuring the possible issues and violence to the technical

writing of the project documentation (Cavanagh & Benjaminsen, 2014) with “thin, partial and

pseudo-mathematical” calculative methods (Bracking, 2012, p. 271) and simplifications of

complex local realities (Milne & Adams, 2012).

In this thesis, the processes of commodifying and making governable is in large parts looked

though Tanya Murray Li’s (2007a, 2007b) concept of “will to improve”, that describes an often

genuine determination to do good, exposing the practices that enable experts to diagnose

problems and plan interventions. While Li’s research focuses on development interventions in

Indonesia, strategies to prove the project necessary and successful are essentially the same in a

market-based conservation project in Cambodia. The analysis is especially valuable for this

research, as it puts attention on the justifications the project developers present to themselves

and the ways they want to see the interventions they execute. In this thesis, the analysis around

these justification is also supported, for example, by Robert Watt’s (2021) analysis on carbon

market practitioners and by Lamb et al. (2020) who examine the discourses and reasonings

around inadequate climate action.

The will to improve translates into projects through two processes: problematization and

“rendering technical” (Li, 2007a). Problematization refers to identifying something in need of

repair (or something that can be conceptualized as such). After a successful problematization,

the problem is institutionalized, meaning that its legitimacy is presupposed and the

interventions to fix it are no longer in need of further justification. Rendering technical refers

to a set of processes, where the domain to be governed through the project is represented as

intelligible field, with boundaries and characteristics and aspects that can be mobilized through

known techniques (ibid.). Rendering technical, or rendering non-political, as Li (2007a)

describes using the thoughts of James Ferguson (1994), removes the surrounding uncertainties

16

to create a clearly orderable resource, that can then be used in a needed way. Will to improve

thus becomes what Li (2007b, p. 264) also calls a “will to govern – the attempt to direct conduct

and intervene in social processes to produce desired outcomes and avert undesired ones”. The

project developers, while likely genuinely willing to do good and improve the situation in the

area, end up defining what the locals need in accordance to what they can do about it.

The willingness to do good, to improve and to develop has historically not been enough to

create good outcomes and has even often resulted in the opposite (e.g. Illich, 1968). Arturo

Escobar (1995) explains that in the discourse of development, western way of thinking has

overrun the alternative knowledge systems in the global South, which now allows controlling

and maintaining western hegemony. According to him and many other post-development

scholars, “['d]evelopment' is colonialism in disguise” (Escobar et al., 2019). Post-development

thinkers show how despite good intentions, projects and interventions meant to improve, can

work as tools of neo-colonial suppression and control.

The commodification process in the Cardamom-Compensate chain is not limited to Cambodia.

As the commodified ecosystem services are discursive, virtual or performative (Cavanagh &

Benjaminsen, 2014; Fairhead et al., 2012), convincing the consumers about their

trustworthiness and selling them has not been completely unproblematic for Compensate. In

addition to explaining what offsets are, how they work and why they are important, the

foundation’s marketing strategy bases on trying to persuade or nudge (Thaler & Sunstein,

2008) consumers to act in a more sustainable way. The strategy, that includes aspects such as

creating sense of hope, community and peer pressure and making the virtual commodities feel

proximate and tangible, is analysed in this research with the help of sustainable marketing

literature (e.g. White et al., 2019a, 2019b; White & Habib, 2018). The analysis helps to

understand the difference in the ways of demanding change, and the level of demanded change

itself. While a variety of strategies is used to persuade Finnish consumers to act sustainably

and “clean up after themselves” (Vartia, 2019), a very different set of strategies, less persuasive

and more unavoidable, is used in Cambodia to create this possibility.

2.4. Privatised or communalised?

Roots of the approach that emphasize the importance of privatisation and commodification

regarding the ecosystem services can be seen in Garret Hardin’s (1968) theory “tragedy of the

commons”, which takes root in three assumptions that form the ground for neoclassical

theories: “1. People have rational preferences among outcomes, 2. Individuals maximize utility

17

and firms maximize profits, 3. People act independently on the basis of full and relevant

information” (Weintraub, 2007). These assumptions lead Hardin to argue that if a resource can

be freely accessed and used, people will try to maximize their gain from it, which will evidently

lead to ruining or draining the resource dry. Thus, natural resources must be privatized and

protected so the tragedy of the commons can be avoided.

Hardin’s theory is often answered with Elinor Ostrom’s views on the commons. Ostrom (1990)

describes commons as systems that are so large that it is difficult and/or costly to exclude others

from benefiting from using them. In this sense, it can be seen that the whole idea of commons

is bound to disappear as technologies for control develop – if areas and resources of any size

can be subjected to surveillance through technology, nothing will be too large to exclude others

from. This approach is already visible in some conservation areas, that are watched over with

drones designed for military surveillance, and prevented from common use (Cavanagh et al.,

2015). Ostrom’s (e.g. 1990, 2000; Ostrom et al., 1999) most famous contribution to the

commons debate is showing that groups of people can take care of commons without conflict

or overusing the resources, while large privately-owned resources tend to cause overuse and

biodiversity degradation – a result quite opposite to Hardin’s tragedy of the commons.

According to Ostrom, caring for commons should be organised on a face-to-face basis, from

the ground up and in respect towards local cultural norms (ibid.).

In relation to carbon offsets Ostrom (2009) opposes single, global scale policies such as CDM

and REDD and proposes a polycentric approach that would encourage experiments and

increase benefits and individual commitment. Ostrom’s theory is supported, for example, by

Reynolds (2012, p. 542), who argues that in forest-based carbon sequestration projects

“community-based projects on lower-quality sites often successfully generate and sell offsets,

while private for-profit initiatives appear susceptible to collapse”. Formally recognizing

indigenous and traditional governance and collective land rights has quite widely been seen as

an efficient way of reducing deforestation (e.g. FAO & FILAC, 2021; Osborne, 2015; Perkins,

2019; Vandergeest & Roth, 2016).

Community-based approach is implemented to some extent in most private, for profit offset

projects, which can be seen reflecting Ostrom’s ideas. Free, prior and informed consent is

mandatory for any kind of relevant accreditation. However, it has been analysed that the focus

on building the project from ground-up, and even reaching the consent can be rather superficial,

one-way communication, where locals are told what is going to happen and even if their

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opinions and wishes are asked, they can easily be ignored (Takacs, 2014). Osborne (2015), for

example, argues that carbon offsetting schemes tend to centralize the forest governance to the

project implementers and brokers and necessitate legible rights, boundaries and technical

measurement, calculation and monitoring, which undermines the social and ecological benefits

of the locals. She argues that “the process of commodifying carbon, which requires institutional

and technological manipulations, has weakened the social and ecological controls communities

use to manage common property, thereby compromising the success of collective action

captured in the work of Ostrom and other institutional political economists” (ibid. p. 74).

Ostrom’s approach calls for acceptance of bigger variety of institutional arrangements but is in

essence not that different from neoclassical thought and could even be seen as complementing

it. Suggesting that forest management is trusted on groups of people is privatization as well,

just in a different scale, as the ownership is collective rather than placed on the hands of a single

person or company, and more traditional institutional arrangements are ignored. Rural

communities around the world often govern land based on customary, traditional, or indigenous

systems of common property, where ownership is administered according to the unwritten

customs (Dell’Angelo et al., 2017; Elahi & Stilwell, 2013). This “informality” does not go

together with neoclassical approach and the so called “global land rush” has been happening at

the expense of these types of systems (Dell’Angelo et al., 2017). Today competition on land is

growing faster and more complex than ever and offset projects are competing for land with

food and biofuel production, and other environmentally-driven projects (Fairhead et al., 2012;

Zoomers, 2010). It has also been noted that “green grabbing”, a process where land is acquired,

for example, for ecotourism and conservation, should be seen as separate from large-scale land

acquisitions for commercial agricultural purposes (Dell’Angelo et al., 2017, p. 3). As Ostrom’s

theory has not provided solutions to these kinds of issues, some have seen it lacking of justice,

society or economy angles and thus offering only little, if no help for social transformation:

“The emphasis on internal threats to the commons without a similarly extensive analysis of

external threats to the commons further leaves Ostrom’s commons lacking in practical

significance for anyone who is not a participant in an enclave with characteristics of a

commons” (Obeng‐Odoom, 2016, p. 381). This type of focus on internal threats complemented

with ignorance towards external, or wider, systemic threats, is also visible in the SCRP and

will be discussed further in chapter 4.5.

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3. Methodology

This research is based on a case study around Cardamom-Compensate carbon offset production

chain. The data consists mainly of communications of organizations involved, project

documentation and interviews with relevant people, and is analysed with qualitative methods.

3.1. Data collection

For this research, I analysed websites and communications of the organizations involved in the

production chain, went through the project documentation on the SCRP, conducted 10

interviews with relevant people and to support my findings, collected media data from Finnish

and Cambodian newspapers. The data was collected mainly during summer and autumn of

2020 and information especially on websites might have changed since. Compensate’s website

in particular has been in the state of constant change and the foundation has published new

projects, reports and statements during the time of this research.

Description of the SCRP was taken from Wildlife Alliance’s, Wildlife Works’, Everland’s,

Verra’s and Compensate’s websites. Compensate’s website was also analysed as a whole, as

well as their newsletters between 11.9.2019 and 15.10.2020 and videos on their YouTube

channel. This was done to create balance and to better understand the sellers of the carbon

credits, as the largest body of data was provided by project documentation, that focuses on the

production: Project description (Wildlife Works, 2018), Validation report (Brown & Haxtema,

2018a), Monitoring report (Williams, 2018) and Verification report (Brown & Haxtema,

2018b) describe in more than 700 pages how the SCRP is operating on the ground and why

certain interventions are chosen.

The interviews were conducted in Zoom or Skype in 2020-2021 with people some directly and

some indirectly involved in the Compensate, SCRP or the Cardamoms (interviews listed in

Table 1). The interviews were conducted from Helsinki, while 3 of the informants were based

in Cambodia, 5 in the US and 2 in Finland during the time of the interview. The interviews

were semi-structured and 40 to 80 minutes long. One informant asked for the questions to be

provided beforehand and was cautious about the research. Thus, more details and structure

were provided in one interview than the others. The questions changed based on the person,

but revolved around the informant’s thoughts on carbon markets, market-based mechanisms in

forest conservation and climate change mitigation, and the informants’ relation to SCRP (initial

interview structures in Appendix 1). The last interview was conducted later than the rest and

20

thus misunderstandings and interpretations from previous data gathering were discussed in that

one more than in others. Informants were chosen based on the project documentation, prior

knowledge, a search for ecotourism providers in the area and finally on recommendations from

other informants, which resulted in a partial snowball sampling method.

Table 1. List of interviews.

No. Date

(dd/mm/yy)

Position of the informant

1. 25/08/20 Cambodian environmental activist, currently works with ecotourism

in the Cardamoms, no direct connection to the SCRP.

2. 27/08/20 Used to work at Wildlife Alliance with the SCRP in expert position.

No longer involved with SCRP.

3. 31/08/20 Manager position, Wildlife Alliance.

4. 21/09/20 External advisor for the SCRP’s REDD+ process. Expert position in

another Cambodian REDD+ project.

5. 22/09/20 Manager position, Compensate.

6. 23/09/20 Manager position, Everland marketing.

7. 12/10/20 Expert position, Compensate.

8. 12/10/20 Manager position, Wildlife Works.

9. 23/10/20 Manager position, Everland marketing.

10. 18/01/21 Manager position, Wildlife Works

Media data was collected from Cambodian English-language newspapers Phnom Penh Post

and Khmer Times with keywords “Carbon offset” “Wildlife Alliance” + “Cardamom” and

“REDD+” and Finnish media houses Helsingin Sanomat and Yle (The Finnish Public Service

Media Company) with keywords “päästökompensaatio” (emission offset), “Compensate” and

“REDD+”. Keywords were searched with each media’s own search function and

Google’s within a site function (that allows to search inside a domain). All relevant articles

from 2015 onwards were included up until the date of the collection, 19.9.2020. Articles’

relevance (if keyword was the topic of the article and not just mentioned as a part of another

topic) was assessed individually. Only concerning Wildlife Alliance keyword manipulation

was conducted, as the organization’s job openings and other projects are also featured in

Cambodian media and would have flooded the data. Thus, in Wildlife Alliance’s case only

articles that also mentioned Cardamom were chosen. The collection method resulted in 60

original articles from Cambodia and 39 from Finland (articles listed in Appendix 2). When

cited directly, the Finnish data has been translated to English by the author.

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3.2. Research challenges and ethics

Writing of this thesis started approximately at the same time as Covid-19 gained its pandemic

status. As such, it was clear from the beginning, that I would not be able to visit the Cardamoms,

and the research was planned with this limitation in mind. To understand the Cambodian

context, I depend on second-hand sources, such as interviews and newspaper articles, but also

websites, social media and blogs. Unfortunately, I do not speak Khmer and rely on English

sources. Additionally, Reporters Without Borders ranks Cambodia to 144 out of 180 in World

Press Freedom index (RSF, n.d.). All major media houses in Cambodia are currently directly

linked to the prime minister Hun Sen and journalists who report on topics that are not to

regime’s liking can be imprisoned (ibid.). As the Cambodian Ministry of Environment acts as

the main proponent of the SCRP, it can be expected that possible problems caused by and

related to the project are not necessarily reported by the Cambodian press. As gaining a

trustworthy understanding of the situation in Cardamoms in the current media climate, without

visiting the area and without understanding the local language is challenging, my main point is

not to show how the SCRP affects the local lives in Cambodia, but how it can be used to

describe the overall logic of the carbon offsets as a climate change mitigation tool.

The interviews form an important part of this research. In addition to interviews conducted,

unanswered interview requests were sent to auditing bodies, writers and local experts

mentioned in the project documentation, and ecotourism providers working with Wildlife

Alliance. Even though interviews with auditors and writers of the project documentation were

not conducted, information about auditing procedures is well available online and especially

the interviews 4, 8 and 10, gave a lot to this part of the analysis. Because the informants were

chosen based on their position in relation either to the SCRP, to Compensate, or to both, I did

not have much control over the demographics and from the 10 people interviewed, 9 were men.

6 of the final informants were American men, which appears to be the most descriptive

demographic of the managerial or other key positions around the SCRP. All the informants

except one work in managerial or other high expert positions and are spokespersons of their

organizations and negative impacts for individual informants are unlikely. Still names and

exact positions are faded out to avoid any possible negative consequences. Anonymity was

also specifically requested by informant 1, who as a Cambodian activist is in the most

vulnerable position of the informants (see Amnesty International, 2020).

During the interviews I found out that there is a strong sense of sensitivity around carbon

markets, which I had not expected in such extent. Some of the informants discussed the critical

22

treatment their business gets in research and in media as unfair and emphasized how careful

they must be about what is written about their organizations, which might have impacted their

answers. There is even a possibility that the informants told me what they thought I might want

to hear, which might explain why I got some contradicting answers regarding, for example, the

money flow and role of different organizations in the process of production. I have dedicated

some space in this thesis for analysing the sensitiveness around the topic and its possible

origins. One of the informants also argued that the present-day carbon markets are criticized

on the basis of mistakes made as long as twenty years ago, but the markets have developed

since and those aspects are not necessarily relevant anymore. To avoid unfair treatment towards

the present-day carbon markets, I have made an effort to focus on information from the past

decade, preferably past five years. Events and literature from further past are, however, also

described, as they have an impact on how carbon markets have developed (often by answering

the said critique) and the way how people see them today.

Linked to the sensitivity is the critical nature of this research. The aim of the thesis is not to

grade, value or denigrate the SCRP, Compensate, or any of the other the organizations

involved. However, as I along with other things also bring up aspects in the Cardamom-

Compensate chain that appear problematic, there is a possibility that some might interpret this

thesis showing some organizations in a negative light. I hope that rather than been seen as an

attack, my thesis can offer some tools for further improvement and impactful, just and

sustainable climate action.

Additionally, it should be mentioned that while I do use the Cardamom-Compensate chain to

describe the voluntary carbon markets and their logic in more general, it is only one example

of a carbon credit production chain. This research should be read as a case study of spatially

and temporally restricted circumstances and even though the findings are looked at in a wider

context, they do not necessarily represent a more universal situation.

3.3. Case study approach

This thesis looks into a production chain of carbon credits and describes the representations

needed for supply and demand of carbon credits and the impacts of said representations. Rather

than focusing on technical carbon calculations, the focus is put on the demanded change – what

needs to change to counter the global climate crisis and what kind of change is asked for and

from whom by the voluntary carbon markets. To analyse the impacts and representations of

the production chain, a first step is to understand and describe the chain itself.

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Explanatory case study is used as a basis for finding large structures and to describe the

phenomena and is well suited in answering “how” and “why” questions (Yin, 2014, pp. 10–

11). Main idea of explanatory case study in this thesis is to answer the question “how is a

carbon credit produced?”, which is be answered mainly in chapter 4.2. I originally expected

tracking of the carbon credits’ production to be simple, just gaining an understanding of

different actors and their tasks during the process. However, it turned out that the process is

not necessarily fully clear even to those who are part of it, as is explained in chapter 4.3.

According to Yin (2014), explorative case study looks for analytical and empirical observations

and possibilities from the data rather than just causal or normative explanations. The goal of

the explorative case study method in this thesis is to find out what are the possible impacts of

the representations needed in the carbon credit production. I used the Atlas.ti qualitative

research and data analysis software to aid in the data categorization and organization and

explored the data from ground-up and noting patterns, concepts and insights that arise and the

way they link to each other. In addition to Yin’s (ibid.) description, the exploration process

moved along the lines of qualitative content analysis (Mayring, 2000, 2004) and consisted of

several read-throughs, examining which themes and words appear together, outlining

categories and searching with several keywords and finding if different themes, representation

and justifications appeared in different types of data. During this process, the research widened

from simply describing how the carbon credits are produced into, for example, looking at the

wider context around the Cardamom-Compensate chain and to exploring what might have been

left out of the project’s official descriptions and what implications the left-out information

might have. This analysis was conducted with the help of Li’s (2007a, 2007b) concept of

rendering technical, which describes how to justify certain interventions, experts executing

them only describe problems they can suitably intervene with. The approach creates a cycle

where a project targets something and can show success and improvement in the area, but larger

context and roots of the presented problem can be left ignored (Büscher, 2014; Li, 2007a).

In addition to describing the justification process for the interventions in the Cardamoms, this

thesis delves into the ways of asking change from individuals and groups. To function, the

voluntary carbon markets require change in the projects’ locations, where some aspects of the

local lives are changed or forcibly denied, to demonstrate forest conservation. Other point of

change is in the end of the sales of the carbon credits, where the consumers must be persuaded

to voluntarily pay to offset their emissions and to act sustainably. The consumers’ end is

analysed with the help of sustainable marketing literature, especially a report by White and

24

Habib (2018) and later writings by White et al. (2019a, 2019b), that collect together almost 400

publications in the area of sustainable marketing.

The data gathering and the explorative case study method also revealed the heated discussion

around carbon markets and a certain reluctance around accepting critique. The way the carbon

markets are supported despite the long-run criticism is explored through Li’s (2007a, 2007b)

concept of will to improve, Roberts Watt’s (2021) findings around carbon market practitioners

and analysis on fantasy and desire directed at the markets, and Lamb et al.’s (2020) discussions

on the ways of justifying inadequate climate change mitigation efforts.

Finally, to support my other findings, a representation analysis focusing on media appearance

(Kiousis, 2004) was used on media data. Articles under each keyword were arranged by the

year of their publication to see how themes around the topic of this thesis have appeared in the

Finnish and Cambodian media, and then read carefully. As field work was not possible,

analysing the public discussion helped to confirm assumptions gained from other parts of the

data collection and to fill in the gaps that would otherwise remain. The media analysis sets the

case of Cardamom-Compensate to a wider context that is not only based on writings of western

academia and experts in the carbon markets arena. While the voices of the media are also few,

they hold a gatekeeper role and can thus be seen as relevant.

4. Analysis and findings: Complexities of carbon

commodification

In this chapter I present my findings of the Cardamom-Compensate case. The focus is on

describing how offsets are made into a marketable commodity, and in the complexities of that

process. I start the description from the consumers’ end and first discuss how Compensate

markets and creates a need for carbon credits. Then I move to explain what it is exactly, that

they market, and describe the journey of the carbon credit including the accreditation processes.

As a continuum, chapter 4.3 explains the difficulties of gaining a detailed understanding of the

process in the middle of vague information and contradicting answers.

After the first three chapters, I move to examine Cambodia and the Cardamoms more closely.

Chapter 4.4. focuses on the construction of the baseline, that needs to be seen as threatening as

possible, so the project can show that their intervention is causing additional benefits. The

baseline is built by using representations of the aspects of reality in and around the Cardamoms,

25

that the SCRP can easily intervene with and they determine what type of change the project is

trying to achieve. In chapter 4.5. I focus on themes that appear to have been left out of the

official project documentation and definitions of the needed interventions. I also present my

interpretations on why this might be necessary, even though at least most of the informants I

talked with seemed to have much wider understanding of the threats to the area, than what the

project documentation states. Chapter 4.6. focuses on the impacts of the selective

problematisation and analyses if it changes the final target and the effects of the project.

Finally, chapter 4.7 presents the wider context of carbon markets and REDD+ in Cambodia

and its connection to the heated discussion around offsets and the passionate and careful

responses I got in my interviews. This connects back to the Finnish discussion and the way

carbon markets are seen and discussed in that context, and the difficulties the Compensate has

had in convincing the public about the legitimacy of its product.

4.1. “Here is how we’ll stop climate change” – Selling carbon credits in

Finland

This chapter introduces the Compensate’s end of the production chain. The foundation was

launched with high ambitions in April 2019 and it has received a good amount of media

attention since the beginning. The CEO gave a keynote in the launching event with an

ambitious title, “Here is how we’ll stop climate change” (Vartia, 2019). The speech revolved

around the point that if we all just “cleaned after ourselves” – which would be made easy by

Compensate – the climate crisis would be solved. Later on, most of the media attention has

been focusing on the legal case regarding if the foundation’s product should be considered

gratuitous or not, which has no doubt made its operations more difficult, but kept it at the centre

of media attention.

Interest towards Compensate has likely increased the news coverage on carbon offsets get in

Finnish media and the number of articles around the topic has increased in the past two years.

Out of the 38 Finnish articles analysed, only five dealt with larger context of the global carbon

markets (Elonen, 2019; Elonen & Niiranen, 2019; Hartikainen, 2020; Kanninen, 2015;

Palosuo, 2015) while most articles link offsets to the context of (individual) climate action.

They bring up regular people that offset their emissions, live “low-carbon” lifestyles and want

to impact people around them. This links to bigger ambition that Compensate and carbon

markets have – if the true price of our actions (e.g. the natural destruction caused by our

consumption) is made visible, it can make people think twice about their choices. However, it

26

also goes to show that the Finnish public attention regarding carbon offsets is focused on

consumers rather than larger impacts. Focus like this is likely beneficial for Compensate, as its

business idea targets people who want to decrease their individual carbon footprint with

individual climate action rather than by aiming to change larger societal structures.

While climate change is mostly recognized as a looming disaster caused by humans, action

towards it has not risen to the level of the risk. It appears, that the disaster and quilt filled talk

does not spark action: for example, Palm et al. (2020, p. 827) note that recommendations for

behavioural changes decrease individuals’ belief in climate scientist and willingness to take

action, to reduce personal emissions, or to vote pro-climate candidates. It appears, that

education and fact-based tips – or “nagging and guilt-tripping” (Yoder, 2020) – do not

encourage environmentally friendly action. If the goal is to make sustainability a norm across

societies, as Vartia’s speech implies, the narrative of giving up consumption and the comfort

of modern life is not tempting enough (Gorge et al., 2014; Sandberg, 2018). As Japan’s

environment minister Shinjiro Koizumi put it, the fight against climate change should be made

"sexy" and "fun" (Koizumi quoted on M. Green, 2019).

Compensate acts accordingly to marketing research around sustainable consumption. White et

al. (2019a, 2019b) note that people often announce that they want to buy sustainable products

and are prepared to spend more money on them, but in reality don’t end up doing this very

often. It appears that this willingness is at the centre of Compensate’s (and voluntary carbon

markets’) mission and the way of making it translate into reality is at the core of their marketing

strategy. To overcome the action-intention gap between willingness to act sustainably and then

not doing it, White et al. (ibid.) propose strategies circling around social influencing, domino

effect, creation of habits and emotional and rational appeal, or as they put in the SHIFT-report,

“Social influence, Habit formation, the Individual self, Feelings and cognition, and

Tangibility” (White & Habib, 2018). Compensate’s strategy to increase individual consumers’

environmentally friendly action can be analysed as constructing around these elements.

Currently, Compensate offers a monthly subscription for offsetting one’s carbon footprint.

Subscribing can be done easily through an app (examples from app in figures 3 and 4), that

also works as a carbon footprint calculator. I tried the service to return to my carbon footprint

of 2019 (from chapter 1.1) and found that with Compensate, I could offset my roughly 4000kg

CO₂e footprint with €9 a month. For the whole year that makes €108, meaning about $130, as

a comparison to Gold Standard’s service, where I could have done it for $60 to $80. So, while

27

Compensate is about twice as expensive as the Gold Standard, which at least the Finnish media

holds in great value regarding trustworthiness (e.g. Hartikainen, 2020; Pinola, 2018a; Riikonen,

2019), it is still cheap enough so that the price does not scare the buyer away. Additionally,

after calculating one’s carbon footprint, the app gives suggestions on what area of one’s life to

change to make the footprint smaller. In the end, the app works as a game, where the user

makes changes in their daily routines, tracks them in the app and gets to compensate with lower

and lower price, earn badges and compare their score to the average score of their own country,

other countries and the world. Perhaps this is what Mr. Koizumi meant with sexy and fun.

Regarding a question of “tangibility” in the SHIFT-framework, White and Habib (2018, pp.

49–51) note that the reward of environmentally friendly actions can seem far-off in the future

and psychologically distant, while the action itself can be costly in the present. Compensate’s

app with its pictures and ways of visualizing and explaining climate impact corresponds to their

recommendation of “concrete communications”, for example, by highlighting the specific steps

the consumer can take and using vivid imagery and graphs (ibid. p. 51). In a sense it can also

be seen as concretizing the otherwise abstract commodity by making it at least seemingly

digital and creating an immediate “prize” for the consumer. Additionally, discussing proximal

impacts of the consumers sustainable action is more effective, than putting attention on those

that are far in the future, or physically distant (White et al., 2019b, p. 31; White & Habib, 2018,

p. 49). This might explain why Compensate does not put that much effort into communicating

about the impacts of the forest protection in Cambodia or other project locations. Rather than

using a lot of images of local people or sympathetic animals – which at least many charity

Figure 3. Compensate’s app’s opening page (left)

and recommendation based on user’s “climate

status” (right).

Figure 4. App’s explanation of necessary climate

action (left) and interactive introduction of

Compensate’s project portfolio (right).

28

organizations appear to find effective – they focus on the way the individual can think about

themselves after they have offset and on presenting clear numbers, quantifying large scale

impact. Cardamoms and how the SCRP impacts them is only in focus on the page that

introduces the project (Compensate, n.d.-b) otherwise Compensate’s communications focus on

things that might feel familiar to a western consumer, rather than awaken sympathies in them.

Compensate’s goal is to get individual consumers to offset their emissions regularly as a habit.

Deriving from behavioural economics, nudge theory suggests that minor alterations to

everyday structures can steer people into the direction of making better decision and forming

better habits (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008). An easy way to create a habit is to make something a

default. Pichert & Katsikopoulos (2008), for example, found that when green electricity was

set as a default, most people chose it as long as the price difference was moderate. Subscribing

to a service requires effort, but after subscribing one will be charged regularly and

automatically. However, the subscription service as it is does not perfectly correspond to the

idea of habit formation, which was an elemental part of Compensate’s original strategy to make

offsetting a part of everyday purchasing process. Making offsetting a default in every-day life

depends on Compensate’s partnerships, companies that cooperate with the foundation and set

the possibility to offset as a default inside their purchasing process. This process, however, has

been hindered by the legal case with the Finnish gambling administration.

Social influencing consists of norms, identities, observability and desirability (White et al.,

2019b). Social norms refer to practices that are expected, approved or appropriate in a certain

context. Compensate communicated around its launch how it wants to make offsetting a norm

– something that everyone does, something that is expected. A good example of this is a

metaphor that Vartia uses, for example, in his launch speech (2019) and some newspaper

articles (Onninen, 2019): offsetting is cleaning up after yourself. Vartia connects offsetting to

picking up the trash one has dropped or cleaning spilled milk. Mild guilt is present in this

metaphor and White et al. (2019a, 2019b) note that when used subtly, quilt can be a powerful

tool in aiming for behavioural change. When too excessive however, negative feelings are often

off-putting (ibid.). Compensate is more focused on hope, encouraging messages and positive

feelings. Their way of communicating emphasizes togetherness from Vartia’s “Here is how

we’ll stop climate change” (emphasis by the author) to often used “#WeCompensate -family”

on social media, newsletter and website. While climate change is being taken seriously and

talked about as a crisis, the communications focus on hope and solving the problem together:

29

Watching global news right now can make the climate crisis seem like an impossible challenge. But we

have to remember that hope only lives in action. We are all more motivated than ever to drive change,

we have all the necessary knowledge and tools available. It’s time to spread that hope, push ourselves

just a little bit more and build this community effort. Let’s make 2020 the year – the decade – that we

truly stepped up our game. As a part of the #WeCompensate-family, you’ve already begun your journey.

– Compensate newsletter, January 2020.

White et al. (2019b, p. 29) note that positive emotions, such as joy or pride work as drivers for

sustainable action in stronger way than negative ones, such as quilt and fear. Additionally,

emphasis on action can lead to hope and decrease fear and anger, which can as a continuum

lead to increased support for positive climate policies in all political / ideological groups

(Feldman & Hart, 2018). A hope for this type of a domino effect was raised, for example, by

Compensate’s employee, informant 5, who hoped that Compensate could have a part in

changing the world in a larger scale as it offers people something they can easily do and does

not leave them feeling as powerless. He speculated that a simple way of offsetting can ideally

be seen in leading into, for example, more climate-oriented voting behaviour.

White et al. (2019b) refer to a concept of descriptive norms, information about what other

people are doing, that can be strong predictors of consumption behaviour. People’s tendency

to participate in sustainable behaviour increases when they receive messages that their peers

are doing it too (e.g. Bollinger & Gillingham, 2012; Kormos et al., 2014). Creating this type of

peer pressure through descriptive norm is not one of Compensate’s most visible strategies, but

they occasionally describe “normal people” and their relation to the idea of compensating on

their website and newsletter. More effort, however, is put on introducing companies that have

joined Compensate. Partnerships are presented on the front page of the website and new

company members of the “#WeCompensate -family” are featured in the newsletter. According

to White et al. (2019a) descriptive norm’s influence is often underestimated: “Harnessing the

power of social influence is one of the most effective ways to elicit pro-environmental

behaviours in consumption.” To create a hoped norm of offsetting, presenting relatable stories

directly to consumers thus might be a necessary marketing strategy.

Descriptive norms can be communicated publicly: consumers are more likely to make

sustainable choices in public contexts, when they can be observed and evaluated and see others

making similar choices (T. Green & Peloza, 2014). Compensate’s vision for future includes

the descriptive norm of making offsetting a public action. Vartia (2019) suggested in his launch

event speech that people who have paid to offset the emissions of their flights would be let into

30

the plane first. Announcement such as “Now boarding the eco-friendly class” could be seen as

increasing social desirability. In his speech, Vartia (ibid.) hopes that in the future he could see

Compenste’s logo on different products that have had their emissions offset, symbolizing

responsibility of its carrier. People who have shown public commitment this way, might feel

praised for their good action, but also mildly pressured to show consistency. According to Van

der Werff et al. (2014) people like to appear self-consistent, thus environmentally friendly

actions lead to similar decisions especially when they are public or when people are reminded

of them. In addition to positive, action-focused communication, the aim to act consistently adds

to informant 5’s hope of Compensate’s role in changing the world: When people act in a

sustainable way, they have a sense of hope and want to continue said behaviour, but also to act

in a consistent and rational way and enforce the rationality of their previous choice, thus, for

example, voting behaviour that supports stricter climate policies becomes more rational.

People’s aim for self-consistency leads to a point that viewing oneself a part of pro-

environmental group increases the likelihood of an individual making sustainable choices (Van

der Werff et al., 2014; White et al., 2019b). This also works the opposite way and people who

lean right on the political spectrum are less open to adopt eco-friendly behaviours (White et

al., 2019a). This has been seen as a true juxtaposition in Finland, where especially after the

parliamentary elections of 2019, the media has been analysed to present the populist narrative

of attitudes to climate being either “realistic” or “hysterical”, where all climate action is

presented as radical, ideological, leftist, and so on (Suominen, 2021; Vuorelma, 2019). In a

way, carbon markets cater to this problem and the whole idea of sustainable consumption can

be seen as enlarging the idea of environmentally positive action and playing a part in turning

environmentalism from a radical niche to mainstream. If one has a possibility to do

environmentally positive actions through markets, the whole idea of climate action might start

to feel more familiar, as one does not necessarily have to side oneself with more radical or

rebellious groups. By consuming ethically and offsetting, it is possible to side oneself with

moderate and rational, but still environmentally conscious group of people. It can, however,

still be seen, that emphasizing the individual choices as climate action makes the way humanity

is facing a large, gnawingly physical problem, into a question of identity.

It can also be argued that moderate market environmentalists are with small symbolic actions

obtaining a moral Get Out of Jail Free card. White et al. (2019b, p. 27) call this negative spill

over a licensing effect, “wherein individuals who have engaged in a sustainable action at one

time point will later be less likely to engage in another sustainable or positive behaviour”.

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Kristofferson et al., (2014) note that small, public, token-like actions rarely lead to more action

in private. It has been argued that paying for clear consciousness allows people and companies

to keep on polluting, discourages personal accountability and “contributes to a form of global

economic discrimination, both at a personal as well as a geopolitical level” (Dhanda &

Hartman, 2011, p. 121). The significance of individual behaviour change in relation to climate

change is also questionable, as those committing to greener everyday lifestyles often produce

higher than average emissions elsewhere (Higham et al., 2013; Symons & Karlsson, 2018).

According to White et al. (2019b), both inconsistent and consistent behaviour (sustainable

action increasing or decreasing the likelihood of future sustainable behaviour) can emerge in

the same context. They argue that effortfulness of the first sustainable action helps built

commitment more than something easy and token-like (White et al., 2019a), but also say that

“[a]ctions that encourage repetition, such as making sustainable actions easy and utilizing

prompts, incentives, and feedback, can strengthen positive habits” (White et al., 2019b, p. 26),

and that viewing sustainable actions “effortful, time-consuming, or difficult to carry out” raises

a barrier to do sustainable actions (ibid.). To conclude, continuity and consistency in

individuals’ environmentally friendly actions is something that can be hoped for but should not

be relied on, which takes some ground from Vartia’s (2019) “Here is how we’ll stop climate

change” -speech. It has been argued that rather than nudging individuals to voluntarily act

sustainably and offset their emissions, larger scale, industry-level corporate accountability

mechanisms, such as carbon tax are acutely needed to achieve change (e.g. Tyers, 2018).

Next, I move to what is it that Compensate is selling and how is it produced. How exactly does

one protect a forest in Cambodia and then sell it in Finland? What is needed to make a

commodity out of the trees’ ability to store carbon?

4.2. Journey of the carbon credit

Conservation projects produce carbon credits via the audit process. In other words, the

possibility to start selling credits starts when an outside entity ratifies a project and recognizes

its ability to prevent, avoid or capture emissions. Voluntary carbon markets have increased

their use of audit process over time and in 2016 already almost all projects were audited with

either Gold Standard, Plan Vivo or VCS (Foster et al., 2017; Hamrick & Gallant, 2017). The

audit is based on the project documentation and field visits. While the auditing company is

separate from the project, it is also separate from the actor providing the auditing criteria. The

SCRP was validated and first verified by a company called SCS Global Services, with VCS

32

and CCB criteria provided by Verra. VCS offers a criteria for production of carbon credits

called Verified Carbon Units (VCU), that represent a reduction or removal of one tonne of

CO₂e (Verra, n.d.). A project can simultaneously with VCS be certified with another, non-GHG

label, that typically represents community and biodiversity benefits, like CCB (ibid.), from

which the SCRP has been awarded with an additional gold level. To avoid unconscious bias,

the same auditing company cannot be used too many times, so the different vintages of credits

are often verified by different companies, but under the same standards.

In the auditing process the project is first validated, which refers to checking if the project

description complies with the VCS rules. After validation, the project can produce carbon

credits through verification, which must be done every time it wants to set out new credits and

works to check if what has been promised in the description is being executed. Essentially,

using VCS and CCB standards, both validation and verification become two-fold. What must

be proven is that the product exists, e.g. that carbon is captured, or emissions avoided; and that

the product is responsible, e.g. no people or wildlife or others have been harmed in the process.

Finally, the saleable credits coming out of verification are categorized by the year they were

verified. Unlike wine, carbon credit vintages don’t get better as they age – according to

interviews, buyers prefer new credits.

Audit’s importance reflects its cost, that can rise up to one third of the offset revenues and has

been seen as causing economies of scale, essentially making smaller projects financially non-

viable (Bellassen et al., 2015; Foster et al., 2017). The SCRP is a large REDD+ project, which

decreases the relative cost, but some of the informants still thought that the audit is expensive,

especially at the start of the project, when no revenue is coming in. Often a substantial prior

investment is needed to start a project. According to the informant 10, who works as a manager

in Wildlife Works, the company has built its business strategy around this investment and then

helping the projects through audit and credit sales. The high cost of the audit is said to assure

the credibility of the markets, but unfortunately the auditing schemes have been seen as rather

questionable, often creating only virtual emissions reduction through, for example, baseline

manipulation and performative science (e.g. Bracking, 2012; Cavanagh & Benjaminsen, 2014;

Foster et al., 2017; Seyller et al., 2016). It has also been argued that the technical rules and

standards behind the audition “hide local contestation, sideline criticism and deny justice”

(Milne & Mahanty, 2019, p. 133). Foster et al. (2017, p. 140) encourage project developers and

auditors to aim for more conservative and realistic estimates to avoid creating carbon credits

that don’t correspond to emission reductions and thus negatively impact the credibility of the

33

markets. Some people interviewed for this research, especially informant 9 from Everland,

thought that the estimate in the case of SCRP is already very conservative and that the project

could produce more credits, if it more emphasized the threat that the area is facing. Coming

from a person that works for an organization making profit from sales of REDD+ credits, the

credibility of this claim is naturally difficult to assess, but there is also no reason to argue

against it. It can also be pointed out, that soil carbon is not included in the SCRP’s carbon pool

calculation (Williams, 2018, p. 42) even though it has an extensive impact on both carbon

capturing and release in tropical forests (Hong et al., 2020; Nottingham et al., 2020) and

including it could potentially increase the amount of carbon credits the project can issue.

Carbon credits are “results based”, which can be understood by comparing them to charity-

based conservation work, where money comes in and the work is done with it. In offset projects

the protection work must be done before credits can be issued or money earned. Verification,

i.e. the process that issues new credits, has to demonstrate “GHG emission reductions and

removals that have occurred as a result of the project during the verification period” (Brown &

Haxtema, 2018b, p. 2). This raises a question about permanence of the carbon capture and risk

of reversal: How does one prove that a forest that has “already been protected” will remain

standing also a reasonable time to the future? In VCS the projects get non-permanence risk

score. Risks are assessed in three categories: Internal (e.g. financial issues, the management

team is inexperienced), external (e.g. land tenure related disputes, lack of community

acceptance, unstable political situation) and natural (historical likelihood and significance of

events such as flooding, forest fires or pest outbreaks) (VCS, 2016). Project proponent

demonstrates mitigation activities that decrease scores in each category and the final score is

counted by summing all the sub-categories (ibid.). The score indicates how many credits the

project must place into a buffer pool, which works as an insurance, from which the credits

cannot be sold (ibid.). If the project fails the risk assessment, it cannot issue credits (ibid.).

The main owner of the SCRP is the Cambodian Ministry of Environment, that is not involved

in the daily practicalities of the project. Wildlife Alliance had already worked in the Cardamom

Mountains with similar forest biodiversity and community projects through private funding

(mainly founder’s family foundation) when they got the chance to become the main operator

of the REDD+ project. They work on the ground organizing operations such as community

development, biomass measuring and ranger patrolling. Wildlife Works, has invested in the

project and operates more with the project’s technical side. Carbon credits from the SCRP can

be bought through Everland marketing, a spin-off of Wildlife Works. Everland works for the

34

projects and creates contacts with potential buyers, such as Compensate that sells credits from

the SCRP as a part of a larger project portfolio. The idea of the portfolio is similar to a secure

investment portfolio, where dividing money between several entities offers security.

Compensate openly discusses the difficulty to trust the carbon markets, for example, by saying

that the international standards such as Gold Standard and VCS are not enough to prove the

trustworthiness of carbon credits and do not guarantee that one credit corresponds to the

promised 1 tonne of reduced CO₂e (Compensate, 2020c). Compensate tries to overcome the

problems with its own criteria and gives each evaluated project a score based on climate

integrity, wellbeing of local communities and biodiversity (Compensate, 2020a). The score

works to define if the project is accepted to the portfolio, but it also forms a so called

“overcompensation factor” that together with tight criteria attempts to overcome the most

common problems of offsets (too cheap price of the credits, difficulty of showing additionality

and the standards not actually proving much). Compensate notes, that around 90 percent of the

projects they have evaluated, fail that criteria (Compensate, 2021). Interestingly, in a webinar

around the report that revealed this fact in April 2021 Markku Kulmala, the chair of

Compensate’s advisory panel, mentioned that he would have failed even a larger percentage.

The critical attitude Compensate shows towards the carbon markets has worked in its benefit.

The report around the responsibility of the Finnish offset providers (Finnwatch, 2021) gives

Compensate credit for not trusting the international auditing system, for using their own, tighter

criteria and for openly communicating about it.

4.3. Uncertainties in the money flow

Credits issued by the SCRP are sold to different organizations that use them to offset their own

emissions or sell them forward. Compensate is a non-profit foundation that funds its own

operations (administration, etc.) by collecting a license fee from its partner companies through

Compensate Operations Ltd, owned 100 % by the foundation. When someone pays

Compensate to offset their emissions, the money is divided between the projects in

Compensate’s portfolio. In other words, the consumers cannot pick which project they want to

support and are unlikely to be able to investigate every project they are paying for through their

offsetting. This characteristic can be seen resembling the production chain of most physical

commodities in the global markets – for example, when a consumer buys a shirt, they are most

likely unable to track each strand of cotton to its origins. While unlikely to be the cause, the

outcome of the large portfolio is that the conditions of the production are more carefully hidden

from the consumers, than when buying credits from individual projects.

35

Everland negotiates the deals for carbon credits from the SCRP with buyers individually, so

the price of the credits varies, and large buyers are usually able to get better deals. Credits are

bought from Everland, that then forwards the money to the project, which is a part of Wildlife

Alliance’s finances. Some percentages of the money earned go to Wildlife Works and Everland

that as for-profit companies charge for their services. Another percentage is allocated for MoE,

that can use parts of it for ministry functions. The rest project can use for its expenses, such as

paying for the all daily operations like salaries, and, for example, verifications whenever new

credits need to be issued. All REDD+ projects also have a benefit sharing mechanism, which

determines how much, and under what terms the money goes to local communities. The

communities can use the money, for example, on education and health care.

The complete money flow in the whole chain is hidden from public, so, for example, the exact

percentages going to each party and the price of the credits are unknown. When asked about

transparency, employee of Wildlife Works, informant 10, said that the process is, in fact,

transparent, “it’s just not transparent to you”, which, he then explained, means that some things

can be hidden from the public, as this is a question of business, not charity. Compensate seems

to be willing to counter the more secretive nature of its business partners and has shared its

bank statements and project certificates online (documents accessible at Compensate, n.d.-a).

According to the project certificates, Compensate bought 22 433 VCUs form the SCRP in 2020

and the bank statements show €153 300,6 transferred to Everland during the same year. Thus,

it is reasonable to assume, that the price that Compensate is paying for the SCRP’s credits is

approximately €6,8, meaning about $8,25 USD, which is in line with the estimated price that

informant 10 was willing to give me, from about $6 to $9 USD per credit.

There is a possibility that the presentation of the money flow above is not completely accurate

since I was presented with some slightly contradicting views regarding it. A former employee

of Wildlife Alliance, informant 2, for example, told me that the MoE can use revenue from

different REDD+ projects to fund their other operations. A current employee, informant 3, on

the other hand said, that all the money goes to the project that then administers activities the

government would otherwise have to. Informant 4, who worked as an advisor for the SCRP,

denied this and sided with informant 2, explaining that the revenue the government makes is

exactly the reason they execute REDD+ projects in the first place. Wildlife Works’ position,

explained by two employees of the company, did not come across as clear either. Informant 8

said that the organization was first an advisor and has now become another project developer

and is doing it together with Wildlife Alliance, but informant 10 denied this and said that

36

Wildlife Works is a technical consultant and an investor. Perhaps the biggest point of

confusion, however, was Everland’s position. Informant 6, who works in manager position in

Everland, said that Everland is hired and paid by the project, which informant 7 from

Compensate first confirmed, but then said Everland is buying and then reselling the credits.

This was then denied by another employee of Everland, informant 9, who wondered where I

got that idea from and said that Everland simply creates connections between buyers and sellers

and is not itself buying or reselling anything. The question of where the money goes first

received three differing answers during the interviews, Everland, MoE and the project itself.

Neither of the interviewed Everland’s employees admitted that the money flows via their

company, but Compensate’s bank records seem to counter their claims.

“So we’re not a broker or a trader rather we work for and are paid by the projects and what we do is

we facilitate direct contacts between the clients and the projects and we’re not buying and selling carbon

credits, there is no mark-up. The money from the customer, goes directly to the project, and you could

think of us like the project’s in-house marketing team.” – Informant 6 on Everland’s role.

The partial reason behind the confusions and contradicting answers is likely in the fact that all

the projects operate slightly differently and are rarely very straight forward. Money flow and

benefit sharing mechanisms can be arranged in several ways and especially people working

with multiple projects deal with multiple differing arrangements. Also Foster et al. (2017, p.

124) notice in their research about VCS audited REDD+ projects, that project proponents and

developers, ”whether novice or experienced, lack complete information to quickly answer

common questions”. Even The International Criminal Police Organization has described

carbon offsets as “legal fiction that is poorly understood by many sellers, buyers and traders”

(Interpol, 2013, p. 11). According to the organization, this lack of understanding and the

“imaginary” nature of the commodity makes the market particularly vulnerable to fraud and

other illegal activity (ibid.). No evidence of such appeared during this research, but the

contradicting answers, evasiveness and non-transparency of the money flow indicate at least

that the markets are complicated and difficult to understand even for those working with them.

In Finland, the complexity is a visible part of the discussion around offsets and the uncertainties

of the market have been a popular topic in the media. Articles refer to offsetting business as

“wild” (Haapanen, 2019a; Hartikainen, 2020; Hukkanen & Kanerva, 2020) to emphasize the

point that it can be difficult for a consumer to know, if offsets they buy correspond to anything.

Many of the Finnish articles address this issue, aiming to explain the problems of offsets and

ways to avoid them and often end up in a conclusion that it’s difficult to know. When talking

37

about problems of offsetting, Finnish media focus mainly on the question if the carbon credits

bought correspond to emission reductions. The headlines ask “is claim for carbon neutrality

greenwashing or not?” (Pinola, 2018b), “can emissions be offset with money?” (Pinola, 2018a)

and “indulgence trade or climate activism?” (Riikonen, 2019). The articles show scepticism

towards the business idea and the angle they take is mostly in protecting the consumer from

buying untrustworthy products2.

The contradicting answer in my interviews, focus on uncertainties in public discussion and, for

example, Compensate’s legal case with the Finnish gambling administration, show the

difficulty in constructing a commodity out of ecosystem services. It has been seen that the

complexities of the offsetting system and the previously revealed misuses increase the mistrust

towards the market (Finnwatch, 2021). At least Finnish legal framework, media, civil society

organizations and the consumers find the idea of offsetting difficult to grasp and trust.

4.4. Representations of successes and threats

The SCRP operates in an area that many want their piece of. The ecosystems in the Cardamoms

are threatened by high demand for agricultural land, large infrastructure projects, mining,

logging and poaching (e.g. Al Jazeera, 2019; Killeen, 2012; Pasgaard, 2013). In all of the

SCPR’s communications, deforestation is presented as the main problem the project is

targeting. Deforestation of specifically the Cardamoms is shown to be a problem by stressing

the importance and uniqueness of the area. Cardamoms are often described as a “biodiversity

hotspot” (e.g. Brown & Haxtema, 2018a, p. 66, 2018b, p. 42; Compensate, n.d.-b; Everland,

n.d.; Wildlife Works, 2018, pp. 9, 13, 175), and the Mountains’ importance to endangered

species (especially large mammals) and local communities is emphasized.

People offsetting their carbon footprint and implementing the projects often operate with a

premise that that their projects can create well-being in a global scale while also mitigating

climate change and creating economic growth (e.g. Cavanagh & Benjaminsen, 2014). To

justify the project, its developers must showcase a threat to the area they are protecting to create

the baseline, but also show success to justify themselves as the right actor to fix things

(Büscher, 2014). Moore (2017a, p. 597) describes the mainstream of the current green thought

2 Though, the problems of the carbon markets have also occasionally been noted in wider sense as well, for

instance in 2017, when Yle reported about an offset project partially owned by Finnish development financier and

professional impact investor, Finnfund, that has forcefully driven people from their homes, treated them with

violence and confiscated their property in Uganda (Frilander, 2017). Finnfund denied all accusations, argued that

the project has brought positive development to the area (Finnfund, 2017).

38

as based on the clear distinction between nature and society, humans and the rest: “The

resulting story of ecological crisis is a kind of Tale of the Fall. Humans do bad things to Nature.

Nature becomes a fantasy of the wild, of pristine nature, awaiting our protection, fearing

destruction at our hands.” This tale is visible along the way of the carbon credit in the

Cardamom-Compensate chain. In this chapter I discuss how in the Cardamoms the nature is

described to be under a threat by (some of the) locals and in need of protection from

international conservation organizations, which then justifies the intervention. Strengthening

the justification, the rarity and endangeredness of the Mountains’ pristine nature is emphasized

in the project documentation and communications and the need of action from (good) humans

is a frequent talking point of the Cambodian media.

In the SCRP, showing success happens mostly through emphasizing victories and the expertise

of the organizations involved. Similar way of describing the threats, emphasizing the good

work done by Wildlife Alliance and quantifying the achievements is seen on SCRP’s project

documentation and all websites analysed for this research. Some of the websites texts are even

organized under headings of “The Problem” and “The Solution” (Everland, n.d.; Wildlife

Works, n.d.). In them, and in some of the interviews, the Cardamoms’ situation is described

with a certain narrative: previous situation is described as critical, but then luckily a solution is

found in good organizations and REDD+ money, and a disaster is avoided. After the narrative-

like description, comes a “scorecard”, where achievements are quantified in kilometres

patrolled, chainsaws confiscated, snares destroyed, and court cases filed against forest

criminals (Wildlife Works, n.d.), which shows success in quantifiable, technical and easy-to-

understand way. In addition to work of the organization, also the greatness of individuals is

emphasized: Suwanna Gauntlett, Founder and CEO of Wildlife Alliance is described by her

organization as follows: “Dedicating her life to protecting rainforests and wildlife in some of

the world’s most hostile and rugged environments, Suwanna Gauntlett has set the trend for a

new generation of direct action conservationists” (Wildlife Alliance, 2017).

In Compensate actions have been personified in the founder and CEO Antero Vartia. In the

media, Compensate’s launch was reported with headline “Antero Vartia is going to save the

world” (‘Antero Vartia aikoo pelastaa maailman’, Onninen, 2019). The foundation’s publicity

leans on Vartia’s persona and previous public visibility, but expertise is based on a scientific

advisory panel, that has together with the foundation created a set of criteria for evaluating

land-use based carbon capture projects and is constituted of mostly Finnish scientists in areas

of, for example, atmospheric and forest science (Compensate, 2020a, 2020b). The panel has

39

received some credit for increasing the foundation’s credibility in the physical environmental

questions, but critique over the fact that it has not had a member that is expert in areas such as

human rights (Finnwatch, 2021, p. 60). This is in line with the ecomodernist thinking, that has

been analysed to be focused on cost-effective environmental problem-solving rather than

human rights or social justice (Lidskog & Elander, 2012). It can be seen that in the case of

Cardamom-Compensate it is white Americans and Europeans who are raised to the roles of

experts, saviours and philanthropists, though it should be noted that at least Wildlife Alliance

also employs at least some Cambodian experts. Meanwhile, people and countries of the global

South are framed as in need of help or as causes of the problem.

Wildlife Alliance has effectively been able to perform its successes publicly, for example, in

relation to poaching. Commercial hunting, wildlife trade and snares are seen as a cause of many

species such as Javan Rhinoceros, Indochinese tiger and Indochinese leopard becoming extinct

or near-extinct in Cambodia (Coad et al., 2019). Wildlife Alliance discusses poaching and their

operations to curb it actively in their communications. Protecting endangered animals is

something the audiences can easily comprehend and appreciate, which makes communicating

about it fruitful. This is perhaps because it is something concrete and thus appealing to

consumers, as White and Habib (2018) explain in relation to tangibility. The activities related

to rescuing animals and arresting poachers are popular also in the Cambodian media (e.g.

Chakrya, 2020; Chork, 2014; Dara, 2018; David, 2020; Khmer Times, 2020). This reporting is

golden for the organization, as it emphasizes both their successes and the threats the area is

facing, contributing to the thought that the situation would be much worse without them. From

Compensate’s end, arresting poachers seems less significant, as the foundation sells carbon

capture rather than animal protection. Thus, cute, rescued animals, or especially the grotesque

carcasses found by the rangers, do not get such a big part in their communications.

In the SCRP’s project documentation, each problem and the specific interventions directed

towards it are listed and evaluated in tables, which corresponds to Li’s (2007a, 2007b) concept

of rendering technical – presenting problems with clear boundaries and characteristics and then

solutions that match to them. Describing and analysing threats and problems is intuitively

important in planning and justifying any intervention. In the case of offsets however, it

becomes even more vital because of the importance of the baseline, the estimated situation in

the area if the project did not exist, that describes the level of future deforestation without

intervention. Defining a baseline is tantamount to define the amount of credits the project can

produce, and it forms the ground for whole production of carbon credits. The baselines’

40

accuracy is estimated through a reference area, that is similar to the project area, but without

intervention. Projects can try to produce more credits by manipulating the reference area, for

example, by choosing an easy-to-access area near big road or a city, whereas the project area

itself could be difficult to access, for instance, up on mountains. No evidence of reference area

manipulation was found from the SCRP in this research and as mentioned, some informants

thought that the project has, on the contrary, underestimated its baseline.

The project documentation of the SCRP aims to show how the problems in the area can clearly

be answered with the project’s interventions. Deforestation is largely presented to be happening

because of human activity and as people are presented as the biggest problem, the project

naturally targets them. The ways to stop deforestation and biodiversity loss can roughly be

categorized into hard and soft ways: law enforcement and community development. Law

enforcement is what it sounds like: Wildlife Alliance has over hundred rangers in the area, and

it has built seven ranger stations over the years to catch illegal loggers and poachers, to

confiscate chainsaws and to remove snares from the forest. Law breakers receive punishments,

for example, jail time. Just enforcing the law is not enough. Something must be offered to

replace the harmful activities and to show that the project is beneficial to the local people. The

intervention type called community development consists of work such as teaching new

agricultural practices and supporting community-based ecotourism. Community fund helps

locals get education and healthcare that would otherwise be outside their financial limits.

Ecotourism brings money from international tourists to the area, but the project developers also

hoped that it could work to spread environmental awareness domestically:

“I think in time, you are going to build a domestic constituency for environmental conservation just by

keeping the forest standing and getting people in there through domestic ecotourism. 30 years from now,

whether REDD is still going on, I have no idea, but you are going to have a lot more support from

Cambodian voters, elite and leaders for why to preserve the Cardamoms.” – Informant 3.

The baseline and the emphasis on threats are interesting and even somewhat contradicting in

situations like the Cardamoms, as the project developers need to simultaneously perform

expertise and trustworthiness. Wildlife Alliance operated at the Cardamoms before the

beginning of the REDD+ project and the SCRP’s way of showing trustworthiness leans heavily

on Wildlife Alliance’s long experience in the area. At the beginning of the REDD+, the

narrative changed to say that the area is under a massive threat, almost at the verge of

destruction, which a sense this can be seen as undermining Wildlife Alliance’s previous work

and as slightly contradictory. Though, when I discussed this interpretation with the informants,

41

some heavily disagreed, while some admitted that the change in narrative is indeed stark,

almost comical.

4.5. Excluded from problematisation: broader politics of deforestation in

Koh Kong

Describing rendering technical, Li (2007a) refers to Ferguson (1994) in explaining that the

problem is diagnosed simultaneously as properly trained experts appear with a solution to it.

The dimensions rendered technical are also rendered non-political, as the said experts exclude

the fuller structure of political-economic relations from their analysis to better fit their solutions

to the problems (Li, 2007a, pp. 7 & 126). In the case of the SCRP this appears to mean that

some aspects, such as the political context in and around the conservation area, are left

unmentioned. Listing the main threats and drivers of deforestation, the project documentation

of the SCRP leaves out some aspects that came up in other parts of the data gathering and the

literature review. The finding is consistent with previous literature, for example, Milne and

Mahanty (2019, p. 133) note that REDD+ standards commit to an “audit culture”, that is

“apolitical and indifferent to local realities.” Isolation from political-economic surroundings

has even been seen necessary for the commodification of carbon (e.g. Leach & Scoones,

2015).

The Cardamoms are a place of many conflicting interests. To keep their position on the area,

conservation organizations must overlook or even indirectly support other types of projects,

such as dams. Atay, Tatay and Russei Chrum in the Cardamoms are CDM dams, meaning that

in addition to electricity, they also produce carbon credits. Unfortunately, they are also seen as

negatively impacting local livelihoods and vulnerable coastal ecosystems and their ability to

produce real emission reductions through additionality has been questioned (IR, 2013;

Käkönen & Thuon, 2019). Building of the dams caused general restlessness in the area, as

building infrastructure around them opened new channels deeper into the forests, which meant

new ways to access areas that had been inaccessible before, thus increasing activities such as

logging and poaching (ibid.). The forest clearance rights around the dams in were given to the

responsibility of two Cambodian companies with close ties to the political elite (Käkönen &

Thuon, 2019; Milne, 2015). Due to these large industrial projects, the year 2012 was

particularly eventful in the Cardamoms and the connection between the individual incidents in

the Mountains and the building of the CDM dams, is apparent, for instance, in Käkönen and

Thuon’s (2019) article. For example, rangers paid by American organization Conservation

42

International, were found taking bribes from illegal loggers, whose very work they were

supposed to prevent (Boyle & Titthara, 2012). In April, an environmental activist Chut Wutty

was shot dead in the mountains while he was showing the area to journalists.

Also in 2012, Cambodian government and Chinese-owned company Sinohydro started

planning a dam project in the Areng Valley, that is now inside the SCRP project area. The

valley is important to biodiversity and home to the indigenous Chong people and many

endangered species, though interestingly, the SCRP’s project documentation makes a point to

question the indigenous status of people living in the valley (Wildlife Works, 2018, pp. 16,

155). Cambodians and international activist community successfully defended the valley and

according to a Cambodian environmental organization Mother Nature Cambodia, the dam is

now a “mere distant threat”, as the government changed its mind about the dam being vital to

the country’s energy needs to saying that it would cause “massive environmental impacts” and

“inhibit potential revenue through ecotourism in the billions” (Prime Minister Hun Sen quoted

in Mother Nature Cambodia, n.d.-a).

Informant 1, a former Mother Nature activist, argued that foreign countries such as China and

Singapore have influence in the area that poses a threat to its natural resources. In addition to

the Areng dam project, he described a sand mining project near the Cardamom’s, that aimed to

transport sand to Singapore. In 2017 it was revealed that Singapore had imported sand for

US$700 million, while Cambodian government data had only recorded US$5 million, which

then revealed a large tax evasion scandal in Cambodia’s end (Mother Nature Cambodia, n.d.-

b; Seangly & Turton, 2017). As a result of Mother Nature’s campaigning, the sand exports to

Singapore were banned (The Straits Times, 2017). Together with the CDM dams (Käkönen &

Thuon, 2019) the sand mining negatively impacts mangrove trees and the fisheries at the

coastline of Gulf of Thailand (Mother Nature Cambodia, n.d.-b), the same area which is

supposedly enjoying the benefits of the SCRP: “The SCRP’s watershed is important for the

fisheries of the Gulf of Thailand as it provides fresh water to the largest contiguous mangrove

forest left in the Gulf, Peam Krasop Wildlife Sanctuary, which is a critical nursery for the

region’s fisheries” (Wildlife Works, 2018, p. 10). It appears, that without Mother Nature, the

impacts of the SCRP wouldn’t be as comprehensive, as they are now claimed to be.

Another thing the informant 1 found problematic was corruption. Corruption-like activities are

mentioned a few times in the Project description and Monitoring report, but only in the results

of the community workshops, as something that would worsen without the project and thus

43

contribute to illegal logging. Similarly, in relation to poaching, the local rangers mention the

relationships between the poachers and police as problematic (Dara, 2018). This can be seen

showing that locals as a larger group see corruption and the larger phenomena of patronage-

based relations as a problem. The situation in the Cardamoms has been seen as overshadowed

by the CPPs “personalized relationships and patronage exchanges” (Milne, 2015, p. 206),

where allocating resources, positions and business opportunities to elite close to the party is a

not an uncommon practice (Un & So, 2011). However, the Validation and Verification

documents only mention corruption when noting that no traces of taking bribes or other bad

behaviour was found from the project staff, not as something that might be a threat to the area.

REDD+ projects such as the SCRP while often large still only protect patches of forested land.

Cambodia is losing its forest cover dangerously fast, but this is partly masked by the

UNFCCC’s technical definition of forests, which excludes important ecological and socio-

economic qualities and allows Cambodia to concept monoculture tree farms such as rubber

plantations as forests (Scheidel & Work, 2018). Despite Cambodia’s eagerness to participate

in REDD+, the government has also become known for granting land concessions to domestic

tycoons and multi-national corporations, for example, for pulp, paper, rubber and sugar

production (e.g. Dasgupta, 2015; Käkönen & Thuon, 2019; Keeton-Olsen, 2020; Milne, 2015;

Nophea et al., 2001; Scheidel & Work, 2018). It has also been argued that together with large

corporations, international conservation organizations serve to reinforce current governmental

institutions, CPP and its members’ personal gain and regime strengthening (Milne, 2015).

As different actors operate in Koh Kong and in the Cardamom area, interests seem to

sometimes collide. For example, campaigning against the Areng Valley dam Mother Nature’s

strategies involved vocal critique towards government, civil disobedience and bringing tourists

to the valley to increase awareness and to bring revenue to the locals.

“In 2015 we blocked the road for 6 months because Chinese company and government tried to come

inside and built the dam. After 6 months the governor of the province came and arrested 11 people and

founder of Mother Nature. They went to Koh Kong police station. -- After fighting to stop the hydropower

dam for 2 or 3 years, the government had no choice, and that’s why they organized ecotourism into the

valley but not with Mother Nature, but with Wildlife Alliance. We were still happy about that, because

the nature in the Areng is not under threat anymore.” – Informant 1.

Essentially, Mother Nature’s work has been of use to the goals of the SCRP and Wildlife

Alliance. However, the relationship between the two is not simple, and informant 1 mentioned

that Wildlife Alliance has told locals to not to work with Mother Nature:

44

“Their policy doesn’t allow them to work with Mother Nature or other NGOs. I don’t know why. We got

the information about this from the local people. -- I’m not unhappy when they organize ecotourism in

the area. But they try to control the area so that we cannot do anything. -- They are working with the

government and have a lot of power. -- We have the same environmental goal, so why are they fighting

against us?” – Informant 1 on Wildlife Alliance.

When presented with a claim that Wildlife Alliance limits its partners’ cooperation with other

organizations, informant 2, a former employee of the organization, declined the existence of

such policy:

“That’s not true…. Though… there has been some conflict with some NGOs. Cambodian organization

called Mother Nature that was integral in preventing the development of the Areng dam, has become too

vocal critic of the government for NGOs to… Wildlife Alliance operates by partnering with the

government. Mother Nature has gone down the line, which is probably needed in Cambodia, being

essentially an extremely direct vocal critic of the government, to the extent that they were strongly aligned

with the now dissolved opposition party3. And for an NGO like Wildlife Alliance, or any big or even a

small conservation NGO, they cannot be seen politically aligned either with ruling party or the

opposition, and Mother Nature was too aligned.” – Informant 2.

The comment about Wildlife Alliance not being aligned with either ruling or opposing party

seems strange in the light of the fact that the SCRP is essentially owned by the Cambodian

government and thus of the ruling party, Cambodian People's Party (CPP). Therefore, some

cooperation and alignment is necessary for the execution of the project, especially since the

CPP is known for its rather dominant and authoritarian touch, where environmental questions

do not make an exception (e.g. Milne, 2015). Mother Nature continues to operate near the

SCRP, for example, in the Koh Kong Island, under the threat of commercial logging. The

Cambodian government continues to oppose Mother Nature with force and arrests of young

environmental activists have been criticised, for example, by Amnesty International (2020).

Disregarding the influence of foreign nations, patronage relations or clear corruption, and the

overall action of the CCP and the domestic elite in the project’s official documentation and

communications is interpreted in different ways. One of the informants argued, that it is

because the documents were prepared such a long time ago and these things were not problems

then, which seems surprising, as the project documents are all dated to 2018 and as was

discussed earlier, many of these issues escalated in the area already in 2012. Ignorance or

3 Cambodia’s main opposition party, CNRP, was dissolved in 2017 and its 118 members all received a five-year

political ban (e.g. Lefevre & Thul, 2017). The ruling was criticized by rights groups, who said it leaves the prime

minister unopposed, makes the elections meaningless and pushes Cambodia to a de facto one-party state (ibid.).

Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge commander, has been a prime minister of Cambodia since 14 January 1985.

45

unprofessionalism from Wildlife Alliance’s part is also unlikely to be the culprit – the NGO

seems to recognize the problems and even work to counter them, for example, by lobbying

outside of the REDD+ project.

“Chinese investment. Mines. Plantations. Wanting to convert forest to palm oil or whatever. Yea, that’s

the biggest things. Mining concessions. And now there is a road proposal that would cut right in the

middle. High power voltage line going right through the middle. -- There is always proposals and we’re

fighting against them and oftentimes win. Majority of times we win. But there is always nibbling at the

edges.” – Informant 3 on biggest threats to the Cardamoms.

Similar understanding towards the larger structures and the political situation in Cambodia

arose in the interviews with Compensate’s employees:

Of course, when you see Cambodian map, the country has lost like 50 % of its forest cover in 20 years

and that’s a lot. And this is mostly driven by the government’s logging concessions. That’s the main

driver. Even conservation areas, like some national parks and wildlife conservation areas, can still be

part of logging concessions. – Informant 7.

On the basis of information available for this research, it is likely that the CCP does not want

to frame their own actions or foreign influence, especially the relationship with China, as

problems for political reasons. Even though Cambodia appears to gain a lot of benefit from

Chinese projects going on in the country, for example, in the form of economic activity, the

endeavours are usually not just single projects, but “constitutive components of multipurpose

bilateral affairs containing a wide variety of more or less bundled aid, investment, trade and

diplomatic deals” (Käkönen, 2020, pp. 98–99). This complex nature of the bilateral affairs

causes effects, that usually benefit China more than its partner countries (ibid). Due to its ties

to CCP especially in the SCRP, Wildlife Alliance is balancing on a narrow ridge to make an

actual impact to protect the nature, without breaking the cooperation. The organization cannot,

for example, publicly note the effectiveness of Mother Nature’s strategies, because that would

endanger their cooperation with the government and with that, the execution of the whole

project and the bargaining power they now have. Additionally, possible problems and threats

in the area are left unmentioned, because solutions matching those problems would not fit into

the cooperation and political environment surrounding the project.

Alongside the political reasons to ignore the aspects of reality and drivers of deforestation in

the Cardamoms, another explanation might lay in the baseline approach of the carbon markets.

While “selling success” (Büscher, 2014), the conservation organizations operating in carbon

markets must equally, if not more intensely, sell the problem. Without the threat to the protected

46

area, no baseline can be determined. Thus, it is theoretically logical for the conservation

organizations not only to emphasize or even exaggerate the threat, but also not to operate too

eagerly to completely erase its source. As the production of the credits is based on the existence

of a threat, the baseline approach offers no incentive for the project developers to work to root

out the actual drivers of deforestation. If the source of the threat disappears the project

developers might start to have a hard time showing the importance of their presence in the area.

4.6. Moving target

A project that can recognize, understand, and intervene with the whole political reality around

a topic is probably a rare one. In the interconnected world, everything links to everything, so

while a holistic approach is vital, it is also difficult to achieve. Li’s (2007a) theory about

rendering technical can be used to analyse the SCRP’s project documentation, that largely

leaves out the political context in Cambodia and Koh Kong province. Commonly the biggest

threats mentioned to the Cardamoms in the project documentation and official communication

are illegal logging, clearing forest for agricultural land, and poaching, all done by people living

in the area (locals or “in-migrants”). In the SCRP, focus is put on capacities of the locals rather

than the wider structures and practices, which then makes planned development into what

Ferguson calls “anti-politics machine”, that reposes questions of land, resources, jobs and so

on as merely technical problems that can be faced with expert knowledge and intervention

(Ferguson, 1994, p. 270; Li, 2007a, p. 7). In the case of SCRP, rendering technical and side-

lining parts of the surrounding context can be seen as shifting the project’s target.

Blaming of the locals and their practices for forest destruction has been seen as almost universal

among offset projects (Leach & Scoones, 2015, pp. 7–8). Vandergeest and Roth (2016) note

that already for many years and several researchers of political ecology in South East Asia have

questioned the tendency of outside observers to blame the forest residents and agriculture for

deforestation, as in reality most of the forest clearing has been done to benefit the export market

and the forest residents in many cases have been able to manage forests in sustainable fashion.

Delabre et al. (2020) explain that in forest governance interventions target the locals, for

example, on logging, but illegal loggers are rarely the source of the problem and arresting them

might not have that big an impact. Behind the individuals there is often what has been described

as “murky political economy” featured with corruption, lack of transparency and clientelist and

patronage networks where businesses driving deforestation are owned by the state officials or

by individuals in position to influence their decisions (ibid. p. 3).

47

In the SCRP project documentation and communication, local people represent the importance

and uniqueness of the area (indigenous groups), cause of deforestation and biodiversity loss

(ignorant and illegal actors) and the solutions (rangers, ecotourism entrepreneurs). In general,

they are represented as a potential threat to the forest that if empowered and educated to take

the right direction, can also become a part of its salvation, but until that must be stopped by

force. The core of intervention is the ranger force:

“The project also leads a unique and effective boots-on-the-ground law enforcement model that focuses

on training, supervising, equipping and mentoring law enforcement rangers. The effective field-level

partnership between staff from the project, the Ministry of Environment, and the Military Police is a

unique ingredient of the project’s success.” – description of the SCRP on Everland’s (n.d.) website.

When discussing law enforcement in public communications, the loggers and poachers that the

rangers target are not described in detail, most likely to avoid going into the topic of why they

are in the situation where they have to break the law in the first place. Wildlife Alliance

employee, informant 3, mentioned that their activities usually relate to larger structures of

illegal logging and land grabbing led by a wealthier individual or organization, and the

individuals that the rangers encounter are just a symptom, not the source of the problem.

However, he still saw targeting them as the core of the SCRP’s work:

“They are just poor people, but this is them just… Just pathetic figures that will make it harder to people

to enforce the law and they are sympathetic figures, poor, very poor people who just want to eat. -- We

have to be ready to be the bad guys sometimes, to the sympathetic people in the forest who are interacting

with the law enforcement team. The core of our work is the law enforcement and it’s difficult to raise

money for them. It’s ultimately the poor people in the forest, who are deprived of livelihood because of

our law enforcement, so people are reluctant to be associated with those activities. Whereas with REDD,

it focuses on our results.” – Informant 3 on opportunities of market-based funding.

Targeting “poor people” who “just want to eat” with armed rangers and military police indeed

sounds like an endeavour that might face difficulties in fundraising operations. In REDD+,

focus can be seen to be more divided than, for example, in projects that rely more on donations.

As mentioned before, Compensate sells its portfolio as a readymade set, which makes it

difficult to the consumer to assess the individual projects and the nature of their interventions.

To legitimize the use of armed force, it appears to be enough to just categorize the locals into

“good guys”, “bad guys” and those “in need of help”. This is not uncommon. Vandergeest and

Roth (2016, p. 82) note that environmental narratives often blame marginalized people for

environmental degradation, or on the other hand, romanticize them as saviours. It is relatively

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easy to see that these categories constantly overlap and are more complex, and the project

developers working with the SCRP are not trying to hide it. For example, they often discuss

the rangers as previous “bad guys” (loggers or poachers) who were helped (given a job) and

are now “good guys” (rangers) and vital in saving the forest. Milne and Adams (2012), who

explore REDD+ and Payments for Environmental Services in the Cardamoms, note that despite

the understanding that people have many identities, roles and approaches to the forest the

communities are often treated as homogenous mass, thus social inequalities, complex

relationships around resources and diverse livelihoods among them are ignored in the projects.

Human drivers of deforestation are emphasized to justify the problematization and the

intervention and the blame is pushed on local communities. However, especially in the

interviews, the informants connected the actions of the individuals to larger societal structures.

For example, locals are said to clear the forest by logging or “slash and burn agriculture” and

according to the project documentation and the interviews, they do this due to poverty and land

rights issues. Land rights issues include land speculation. Some clear land and claim to be

living there only to get rights to it and sell it to speculators later. Forest clearing creates paths

deeper into the forest for further land clearing, and disturbs wildlife, which in turn links to

poaching, which is also done by locals, who need money or employment. In the project

documentation or official communications the reasons why the locals are in the situation where

they need to resort in illegal logging or poaching is however, usually not dealt with in any

detail, and the focus in on stopping the individuals from clearing the forest.

The way of describing certain actions is important in the process of problematization. If the

forest clearing done by the locals was described in the project documentation as a vital

livelihood activity of people who have no other options, intervention of arresting them with

armed rangers would be difficult to justify. Instead, the wordings used are such as “illegal

logging” and “slash and burn agriculture”. For example, the term “slash and burn agriculture”

can be seen institutionalizing the problem by describing it in a way that it sounds critical and

threatening, but it also connects to a longer historical process of problematizing the actions of

the locals in South East Asia. A local activist, informant 1, used the words “rotation farming”

to describe the same process and thought that it was something the locals should not do

anymore. His choice of words could be seen as implying that he saw it as a rather normal, just

perhaps an outdated practice. Another term is swidden agriculture, but essentially, all terms

refer to clearing the land usually by fire and leaving it to regenerate for some years before

farming on it again. Some indigenous organizations use the term “shifting cultivation” and

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argue it to be a traditional indigenous practice, that if practiced freely and by traditional

methods, should not be seen as a driver of deforestation at all (e.g. Mamo et al., 2020, p. 8). To

be ecologically viable, shifting cultivation needs “enough land for long (10–20 years)

restorative fallow, and expectations of crop yield and the attendant standards of living are not

too high” (Lal, 2005, p. 488). Thus, if the areas of shifting cultivation are limited, for example,

by conservation, it begins to put more pressure on the environment and thus framing it as a

problem is not necessarily untrue. However, again the root of the problem is ignored so that

the practice itself can be seen as guilty. Negative attitudes and attempts to curb “slash and burn

agriculture” are rooted in historical attitudes in South East Asia, but have also been amplified

by the views of large international organization, such as the FAO (Vandergeest & Roth, 2016,

p. 86).

In addition to militarized resource enclosing, also softer ways of intervention in the SCRP offer

some contradictions. Looking at the whole chain from Compensate’s end, shows a process that

has emission reduction and climate action as its main goal. Ecotourism in the Cardamoms is

slightly contradictory to this. The SCRP markets the Cardamoms to tourists, who bring money

to the area. Especially foreign tourists are appreciated, as they typically use more local services

such as motorbikes and boats, whereas local tourists arrive with their own vehicles and in

general spend less money. Already in more than ten years ago, The Phnom Penh Post (Murray,

2009) reported about tourists contributing heavily to country’s emissions. Tourism industry in

Cambodia has been continuously growing and has been forecasted to continue on that path

(Vannak, 2020), though how the industry will recover from the Covid-19 pandemic is yet to be

seen. The SCRP’s way of emphasizing ecotourism as a method of intervention shows that

conservation and climate action can contradict each other. If one pays to offset the emissions

of the flights of their holiday trip and part of the money is used to market a Cambodian national

park to international tourists, calculating the actual impact becomes more complicated than just

measuring the average carbon capturing biomass. Ecotourism as an intervention strategy can

be interpreted to mean that the SCRP should not necessarily primarily be seen as a climate

change mitigation project, but more as a project of local forest governance. Similarly to CDM

dams in the area (Käkönen & Thuon, 2019), the goal of the project activities can be seen

elsewhere and carbon credits are a (fortunate and profitable) side product that are born out of

an accreditation scheme of documentation, representation, quantification and simplification.

As a conclusion, it can be said that the interventions in the Cardamom respond to the described

threat of individual people and communities going rogue and destroying the forests and allow

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the project to intervene with the lives of the locals, but do not give the locals tools to fight

against larger national and international forces that harm the area. Military police and logging

bans have been used in Cambodia before to curb “anarchic logging” of small scale loggers to

free space for logging concessions given to larger companies (Milne, 2015, p. 207).

Militarization of forest conservation has also been seen as a larger trend going on globally and

in part being facilitated by REDD+ (Cavanagh et al., 2015). The strategy of the SCRP and

REDD+ in general corresponds mostly to the idea of tragedy of the commons (Hardin, 1968),

which reasons that to avoid destruction, people must be prevented from using the commons.

The SCRP emphasizes the work done with local communities and the power given to them

through community workshops in the project documentation, which can be seen as aiming for

more “Ostromian” (e.g. Ostrom, 1990) approach of community-based work. Though it is clear

that some aspects that worry the locals have been ignored by the project and it is difficult to

see the SCRP as a bottom-up style endeavour. As has been mentioned, rather than targeting

and arresting locals with top-down interventions, recognizing collective land rights and

traditional forms of governing land has been seen as better functioning, more cost-effective

and more just way of reducing deforestation and carbon emissions (e.g. FAO & FILAC, 2021;

Osborne, 2015; Perkins, 2019; Vandergeest & Roth, 2016). It could even be deducted, that the

SCRP might be less about conservation and more about keeping the natural resources under

tight governance and in store for future use. This can be seen as a natural continuum of, the

conservation area pre-existing the REDD+ project, that has facilitated the building of the CDM

dams and the loggings caused by them: “The ability of the state to grant extraction concessions

within the conservation zone proves its superior public authority compared to international co-

governing entities” (Käkönen & Thuon, 2019, p. 1199).

The focus on the locals and their practices, helping them as ecotourism entrepreneurs or in

chasing down the forest criminals, can be seen as quite non-transformative especially if we

want to see the SCRP primarily as a climate change mitigation project: “Carbon mitigation

efforts often focus on the world’s poorest people, dealing with topics such as food and energy

security, and increased emissions potential from projected population, income and

consumption growth. However, more policies are needed that target people at the opposite end

of the social ladder – the super-rich.” (Otto et al., 2019, p. 82). While the countries of the global

North cause more emissions, it has also been found that the tropical deforestation is accelerated

by the consumption in the richer countries (Hoang & Kanemoto, 2021; Wedeux &

Schulmeister-Oldenhove, 2021). Examining the Cardamom-Compensate chain, it appears that

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the people in the Cardamoms have no option but to consent to changes in their lives, so that a

possibility to not change anything, or change as little as possible, can be offered to the people

buying the carbon credits.

4.7. Facing the critique – heated discussions around offsets

As has become clear, the SCRP does not operate in a vacuum. The context of REDD+ in

Cambodia and globally has affected not only the ways the project operates and communicates,

but likely also the ways the informants answered my questions. Thus, at this point it is good to

spend some time to gain understanding of the overall context of REDD+ in Cambodia, where

the whole idea is of carbon offsets is clearly much more familiar, than what it is in Finland.

This shows especially well, when comparing to the media data of the two countries. In Finland

the topic is dealt through bigger, more explanatory pieces and even larger, investigative

reportages (e.g. Haapanen, 2019a; Riikonen, 2019; Sandell, 2020), whereas in Cambodian

media produces day-to-day news discussing concrete topics, such as price and saleability of

the carbon credits and how offset projects impact the lives of the locals (e.g. Amaro & Seangly,

2018; Chevillard, 2016; DW, 2019; Koemsoeun, 2019; Kunthear, 2018; Reddick, 2015). Two

REDD+ projects in particular have affected the Cambodian public discussion around offsets.

From 2014 onwards, a project with VCS and CCB standards in Oddar Meanchey has received

rather negative publicity, as it, despite the respected accreditation, failed to stop deforestation

and to sell carbon credits. According to Cambodian press, what was meant to be the country’s

first forest-based carbon credit trading scheme turned into an illegal logging ground and a place

of border disputes (Kuch & Zsombor, 2014; Phorn & Zsombor, 2014). The project produced

48,000 carbon credits even though forest cover decreased in average from 88 per cent in 2008

to 46 per cent in 2017, and most dramatically in Andong Bor site from 90 to 0 percent (Song,

2019). Due to lack of aid from government and the project’s inability to generate carbon based

revenues even the locals who originally wished to protect the forests turned to logging, as their

conservation efforts seemed hopeless (Ken et al., 2020; Kuch & Zsombor, 2014). The

development was accelerated by Cambodian military, that operated in the area and was already

cutting trees in the community areas and causing other land rights disputes undermining the

project (e.g. Frewer, 2018; Kuch & Zsombor, 2014; Phorn & Zsombor, 2014). The project’s

efforts for local awareness and its benefit sharing mechanisms have been seen as limited which

has resulted in locals consenting to a project and investing their time and money on it without

actual guarantees of return (Takacs, 2014, p. 112).

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In 2017 an international environmental NGO, Fern, published a report on international aviation

and carbon offsetting, describing the difficulties related to offsets and REDD+, using Oddar

Meanchey as an example (Kill, 2017). As a result, an aviation company Virgin Atlantic stopped

buying credits from the project (e.g. Amaro, 2018). Fern’s report raised the Oddar Meanchey

project to international attention. Organizations touched by the critique, Terra Global Capital,

VCS, and Wildlife Works, released public statements criticizing the report and accusing it, for

example, for being ideologically motivated, lacking of credible evidence and including false

information (the letters available in REDD-Monitor, 2018). The letters included heated

statements, such as “Shame on you Fern and others who seek to limit opportunities for

communities that desperately need financial resources to protect forests and make a decent

living without offering any viable alternatives” (ibid.). Wildlife Works’ answer to Fern’s report

begins with a rather personal statement: “We feel it is important for context that we point out

that Jutta Kill is a self-proclaimed enemy of REDD+ who has a history of being a hired gun

for anti-REDD foundations who seek to discredit our work” (ibid.). Terra Global Capital

defended the problems of Oddar Meanchey by noting that the issue was not in creating offsets,

but in the fact that the value of the carbon credits was too small to make sales (ibid.). A

researcher who had over several years carried part of his PhD work in Oddar Meanchey

answered the statements noting that the critique towards Fern was “disingenuous” and that

similar results had also been published in academic journals (Frewer, 2018). He also notes that

at the point of verification by VCS and CCB there was no evidence of livelihood activities

being conducted, but the project still received a gold rating for its outstanding social benefits

(ibid.).

While Oddar Meanchey project received public critique, another Cambodian REDD+ project,

Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary, enjoyed quite an opposite nature of publicity: “The Walt

Disney Company has purchased $2.6 million in carbon credits in the forests of Mondulkuri

province marking the largest carbon credit sale to date in Cambodia and breathing life into a

carbon trading program many had written off as all but dead” (Seangly & Kotoski, 2016). In

public discussion, the Disney deal is praised for being “favorable to Cambodia” price-vice, a

“new turning point for environmental conservation” (Charles, 2016), and for creating good

conditions for more partnerships with private sector (Kotoski, 2016).

While the SCRP itself has mostly remained out of publicity Wildlife Works was a part of the

heated discussion around Fern report, and the SCRP received technical assistance from the

employees of the Keo Seima project. Not surprisingly, many informants mentioned the Keo

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Seima by name and discussed its success and ties to the SCRP. None mentioned Oddar

Meanchey, but when asked why Wildlife Works had participated in the public discussion

around it, informant 10 said that they had absolutely no connection to the project but felt a need

to defend the auditing systems. Informant 6 from Everland on the other hand, spent a good

amount of time talking about how some REDD+ projects in Cambodia have received

unnecessary critique based on false information. He did not mention names, but argued that

recently a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist had participated in the discussion in a shameful way

and was a perpetrator of “reckless journalism”, which I assume referred to a Pro Publica article

by Pulitzer winning Lisa Song, An (Even More) Inconvenient Truth: Why Carbon Credits For

Forest Preservation May Be Worse Than Nothing (2019), that dealt with several offset projects,

Oddar Meanchey included. It is reasonable to assume, that the Oddar Meanchey project’s

negative international publicity raised by the Fern’s report played a part in the carefulness and

defensive attitudes some of the informants interviewed for this thesis had around their

participation.

As has been discussed, will to improve (Li, 2007a) works to justify projects and interventions

in the fields of conservation and development. It also plays a part in explaining why projects

that have faced heavy resistance and critique haven’t been stopped (ibid.). Carbon credits and

their production are quite commonly seen through a critique towards commodification

ecosystem services and the harmful side effects of this process (Cavanagh & Benjaminsen,

2014; Fairhead et al., 2012; Osborne, 2015; Stephan, 2012), but strong negative side-effects,

such as violence or forced dispossession did not arise in this research. Interestingly, however,

it appears that the resistance and critique faced by other projects leaks to the side of the SCRP

forming a part of the discourse of the carbon markets within the people operating in this project

that has faced near to no public critique. While large problems haven’t come into publicity

from the SCRP, and my questions did not refer to the problems I had found on other projects,

careful and even defensive attitude towards critique and strong emphasis on “doing good” was

visible in some of the interviews conducted for this thesis. For example, informant 6 from

Everland opened the interview by asking if I was going to be critical and then before I could

ask any questions, gave a long speech about how REDD+ projects cannot fail and people

claiming such are misinformed and possess some sort of an agenda.

”So here you have a critic, sitting in… where ever they are sitting, in an office somewhere, and the people

that are risking their lives to protect the forest and to protect the wildlife and to bring benefits to world’s

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poorest people, and then you have these misinformed people who are throwing rocks at these people who

are trying to do something good.” – Informant 6.

Informant 6 along with some others I talked with during this research fit into the description of

“The fantasy of carbon offsetting”, by Watt (2021), who interviewed 65 carbon market

practitioners and encountered similar discourses as I did regarding the reluctance to accept the

existence of failures and blaming critics for being irresponsible and misguided. Watt describes

how those around the carbon markets trust the system to work largely because they really want

it to work. This leads to them putting more trust on the auditing schemes than what they

necessarily deserve, and ignoring the problematic projects as “part of the past” or as work of

some bad intentioned outsiders, “carbon cowboys” (ibid. p. 14), a term that also arose in this

research in interview with informant 8 from Wildlife Works. Watt (ibid.) explains how failed

projects and the work of said cowboys, that has included, for example, land grabbing, are

explained by the practitioners as not being REDD+ projects at all, and people who think them

as such, are deemed misguided and irresponsible. This pattern was repeated in this research as

well, at least by the informants 6, 8 and 10, who saw critics of offsetting and REDD+ as ill-

advised bullies who are trying to prevent the good-intentioned people from doing good things.

This research revealed no reasons to doubt the good intentions of the people working around

the Cardamom-Compensate chain. Fischer and Hajdu (2018, p. 329), for example, note that

failures and problems related to offset projects are not necessarily the result of “hidden agendas

or motives for profit”, but the project developers possess a genuine determination to do good.

However, it has already for long been argued that good intentions are not enough to deliver

good results and can, in fact, often cause more harm (e.g. Illich, 1968). People behind the

actions must still keep explaining them to themselves and others in the best way possible,

because often their profession, livelihood or even sense of self depends on the idea that their

actions, projects and interventions are helping others (ibid).

What appears to be at the centre of the conflict is essentially the idea of putting monetary value

on forests or nature in general, and the arguments of it being ineffective, immoral, or at least

somehow suspicious. While some see the commercialization as expanding destructive carbon

capitalism to new frontiers, some think of it as the necessary and the only way to give nature a

fighting chance against other things humans value.

“So that’s one of the philosophical issues when people say, ‘well gee, you know what, it’s just morally

wrong to put commercial value on a forest through a carbon credit’. And, you know, on one hand I don’t

necessarily disagree. We shouldn’t have to do that. But the fact is that we do have to do that, and the

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reason is that there’s many organizations who do place value on forests, but they place a value on forests

that are burned or cut down.” – Informant 6.

“Market-based conservation is necessary, and we believe that attaching market forces to conservation

is the only way to do it at the scale needed. It’s the only way to do it at the scale required to meet the

Paris Agreement goals or even try to meet those goals. I would answer that I’m not sure if it’s a sufficient

option, but I am sure that it’s the best option.” – Informant 8.

Drawing on Li’s will to improve (2007a) Fischer and Hajdu (2018) show how as a side effect

of the project developers’ determination to do good, local, context specific concerns can be

side-lined to prioritise climate change mitigation. This is done by emphasizing the urgency of

climate action, apolitical framing of sustainability and devaluation of local knowledge, which

leads the project developers to believe that they are working to create a win-win situation (ibid).

As has been discussed, reducing sustainability into technical calculations and, for example, a

quantity of carbon capturing biomass, and ignoring concerns of the locals next to the expertise

of western specialists is visible in the SCRP’s project documentation. Urgency of the climate

action comes across in the interviews. People working with carbon markets appear to see

themselves as racing against time to “save the world” by using the only way they see viable,

but still face criticism and attempts to stop them from trying.

“It’s like somebody’s house is on fire and you’re trying to put the fire out but then you have all these

people that are criticizing you because you spilled a little bit of water on the way or they don’t like the

size of your bucket or they don’t like what you are wearing to put the fire out.” – Informant 6.

Interviews with strongest defensive tone were the ones with the middle part of the production

chain, Everland and Wildlife Works. Most informants from Wildlife Alliance and Compensate

recognized that there might be problems in REDD+ projects, in conservation and carbon

markets in general and some were even suggesting improvements to their own organizations’

ways of operating. It can also be interpreted that these organizations have fewer negative

experiences with public conflicts around the topic and thus don’t feel the similar need to be

defensive. Informant 6 also implied that NGOs don’t care about critique because they know

the good work they are doing and just keep on focusing on that despite the people who are

“throwing rocks” at them. Interestingly, the problems that the informants from Everland and

Wildlife Works argued to be non-existent and even impossible to occur, are openly discussed

by Compensate and a part of their strategy of appearing as a responsible actor in their field.

Strong reactions are, however, also visible at Compensate’s end. The legal case with Finnish

gambling administration was met with a strong critique from the foundation’s part. In the

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media, the CEO Antero Vartia appearing as the foundation’s spokesman, calls the case, for

example, “unreasonable” and doubts its legality altogether (e.g. Teittinen, 2020). On Twitter

he argues that the gambling administrations has not heard a single expert and that they “don’t

even know how carbon offsetting works” (Vartia, 2020). As the legal case hinders Compensate

from operating in a way it originally had planned and, in a sense, came out of nowhere (no

previous indication of a possible case had been presented), defensiveness is not surprising. The

strongest feelings seem to have settled over the time of the process, as when Vartia was

formally charged with fundraising offense in June 2021, he only commented that “even though

the change in the legislation is already in process, it is good that the situation becomes clear”

(Mantsinen & STT, 2021).

It can be said that in Finland the argument is different in intensity and the gambling

administration appears to see the idea of selling the forests ability to store carbon mistrustful

and possibly harmful to consumers or open for fraud. Stronger discussions such as one between

Fern the carbon offsetting industry, or more general or normative natured debates on if its right

or wrong to put commercial value on nature, have not been widely present in Finnish

mainstream media in the context of offsetting at least in the past five years. The suspicion

towards the carbon markets focuses mainly on consumers and if they can trust the product.

5. Discussion: Non-transformative carbon markets

The Cardamom-Compensate carbon credits production chain is a complex one. To see the

connections between the production and consumption of carbon credits, it is useful to pay

special attention to some repeating themes and discussions present in all the levels of the chain.

The first recurring theme is the focus on individuals. In the Cambodian forests and among the

consumers in Finland, the focus in on the people, who are bound into the system where their

lives and livelihoods harm the environment, accelerate the climate change, or at least are

presented to do so. The interventions that are offered target the people and their ways of living

– both in Finland and in Cambodia – rather than the structures behind them that lock them into

this situation. Lamb et al. (2020) use the word “non-transformative” to describe solutions that

are overly optimistic about the markets or, for instance, put all trust on voluntary action of

individuals. They note that solutions like these tend to “avoid all options that are most

threatening to existing power structures and practices” (ibid. p. 4). The definition of success in

these solutions is narrow and more than transformative efforts, they provide cover for ongoing

unsustainable action (ibid.).

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Second, the non-transformative interventions fit into the neo-colonial discourse of knowledge

production, where problems and suitable solutions in a certain area are defined from above,

which then affects those involved in different ways. Individuals at both ends of the Cardamom-

Compensate chain are offered options that target merely the symptoms rather than roots of the

problem. However, the level of optionality varies between the two countries. For a western

consumer the solution offered by carbon markets is one that allows them not to change their

way of life, but to create this solution, lives and livelihoods must change in the Cardamoms.

The third overarching theme present in all the levels of the chain is the heated discussion

regarding the suitable way of action. On the ground, Wildlife Alliance and Mother Nature work

towards the goal of protecting the nature, but take a different stand on the nature of action, one

trying to assimilate to the existing system and the other taking a more radical stand and aiming

to challenge those in power and to change the structures. Similar conversation is going on

between international NGOs such as Fern and advocates of the carbon market, who seem to

have exceptionally difficult time finding a peaceful conclusion. Again, the confrontation

appears in negotiation for national and international climate policies where advocates for green

growth place themselves opposing the climate activist groups and seem to ignore academic

research that finds green growth inadequate. Political documents and reports of, for example,

OECD (e.g. 2011, 2017), World Bank (2012a) and European Union (European Commission,

2019) discuss green growth, and carbon markets form the grounds for Paris Agreement, despite

many scholars problematizing the commodification of ecosystems services and the theoretical

decoupling of growth from environmental degradation. For example, Parrique et al. (2019, p.

3) argue that “not only is there no empirical evidence supporting the existence of a decoupling

of economic growth from environmental pressures on anywhere near the scale needed to deal

with environmental breakdown, but also, and perhaps more importantly, such decoupling

appears unlikely to happen in the future.”

5.1. Climate action as a commodity

From the need to ignore large parts of political and social surroundings in Cambodia, to the

mistrust of Finnish legal framework, media and consumers towards the carbon credits, many

aspects of the Cardamom-Compensate chain demonstrate the difficulties of commodifying

ecosystem services and making them into something the consumer feels important to buy. As

Marx (1867/1955) explains in relation to commodity fetishism, some aspects of the production

must be faded for the product to come into existence. With carbon offsets, as some aspects are

faded, others must be overemphasized or as Cavanagh and Benjaminsen (2014) say, performed,

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through images, measurement, certification and accounting technologies, but perhaps even

more visibly, through representations of successes and threats (e.g. Büscher, 2014).

This thesis has shown how the whole Cardamom-Compensate chain and the carbon markets in

general operate in a way that requires rendering technical, or rendering non-political (Ferguson,

1994; Li, 2007a, 2007b). Deforestation in the Cardamoms, but also climate change, are framed

as a clearly bound problems, that are then rendered technical, into something that can be

answered with expertise and strategies at hand. Lohmann (2011, p. 112) argues that to

internalize the environmental externalities, the environmental harm “must be simplified,

reformatted, made abstract, quantifiable, and transferrable in a process that obscures many of

their characteristics while introducing fresh problems”. When ecosystem services are turned

into commodities, they are also turned into something measurable, which separates them from

their original context and potentially complex but vital information is ignored (ibid.). Käkönen

et al. (2014) also discuss how global discourses on climate change work to make the problem

governable, rendering a politicized issue into manageable through technical expertise and

management. They look into policy narratives framing climate change in Cambodia and note,

for example, that most responses to climate change are framed in technical terms, drawn from

expert knowledge, tools and technologies. As a result, climate change mitigation is seen

through carbon offsets, even though the projects producing them often downplay other

ecosystem values and livelihoods, and climate change is used as a tool to justify interventions

and to downplay controversies caused by large projects (ibid. p. 360). These simplifications

create a fantasy of functioning climate action (Watt, 2021), which makes the carbon credits a

desirable product to consumers, who want to acquire a clear conscience with a low price.

Turning nature’s work into value with as low cost as possible is central to capitalism (e.g.

Moore, 2015, 2017a). Bryant (2019, pp. 27–29), referring to, for example, Mies (1986) and

Moore (2015), explains that in “climate changing capitalism”, labour can only be productive

when it exploits non-wage labour, namely production of life and subsistence, meaning that

accumulation of capital leans on devaluation of reproductive labour, capitalisation and

appropriation. In the age of infinite growth but limited resources capitalism is finding new

frontiers to create growth. In the case of the forest-based carbon offsets, new frontiers are

something that are freely supplied by nature, something that has also been argued to be an

unnatural place for creation of capital (e.g. George, 1905). In the light of this understanding

and especially if it is additionally noted that carbon markets are not effective in reducing

emissions (e.g. Aho, 2020; Lohmann, 2020), the process of producing carbon credits appears

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like spreading capitalism to extract value from new forms of reproduction rather than acting to

mitigate climate change.

As people are nudged to offset their personal emissions, the commodification of ecosystem

services also becomes commodification of climate action. Much like other forms of resistance

of “late capitalism” (Jameson, 1991), climate action is also becoming a part of consumer

culture in many levels as can be seen from vegan influencers of social media to Marie Kondo’s

Kon Mari – what she calls a decluttering approach, but what really is just commodifying the

idea of owning less – and indeed to carbon offsets, that and make climate action approachable

to those who would rather increase than decrease their consumption. Discussing the thoughts

of a sociologist Jean Baudrillard, Cherrier and Murray (2004, p. 511) write: “What begins as a

sign of defiance soon becomes a part of consumer culture rather than a criticism of it”. They

refer to Baudrillard’s concept of “mode of signification” (Baudrillard, 1981, p. 5) contrasting

Marxian “mode of production” arguing that in a postmodern society consumption “replaces

production as the central mode of social behavior” (Cherrier & Murray, 2004, p. 512). Humans

grow to be caught up in a world of commodity signs and media spectacles, where “real” is

difficult to get a hold of and people themselves are a part of the commodity markets, where

their value is determined by the signs they are able to convey (ibid. pp. 517–520).

In relation to carbon markets Baudrillard’s ideas can be seen in two ways. First, they imply that

people, especially people of the global North, are in essence reduced to only consumers, whose

only way of being active citizens or to impact their surroundings is through consuming (“ethical

consumption”, or decreasing personal carbon footprint by offsetting, “cleaning after oneself”).

With carbon offsets, people are able to convey signs of ethical, environmentally friendly and

even “good”. Cavanagh and Benjaminsen (2014, p. 55) argue that the “triple win” spectacle,

the idea that offsets are good for climate change mitigation, biodiversity and communities

living around the project areas, is integral to offset projects “as it provides consumers with a

form of ‘ethical’ use value, and greatly enhances the capacity of carbon market brokers to

accumulate exchange value by attracting ‘green’ investors”. Second, as consumption is such

an integral part of the way our society is constructed and how people interact with each other,

changing to consuming less is not only the question of buying less things, but giving up signals

or even pieces of one’s own personality. So, as giving up excessive consumption is difficult,

carbon markets fit into the way of providing people an active role through consuming,

essentially giving them an option to “shop their ways out of the climate crisis” (Andrews, 2020)

and even use this as a part of their persona by communicating it to others. Though,

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simultaneously carbon markets also value all forms of consumption in a similar but perhaps

unjust way – emission caused from life sustaining consumption are offset with equal price to

emissions caused from consuming luxury goods and services (Käkönen et al., 2014, p. 358).

It has been hoped and argued that sustainable actions that are easy to carry out can lead to more

similar actions and even to climate oriented voting behaviour (e.g. Feldman & Hart, 2018; Van

der Werff et al., 2014; White et al., 2019b). Thus, by offering people ways to act for climate

though consumption – something their lives are already tightly intertwined with – offsetting

services can be seen as offering a first and easy step for masses that might later form the public

opinion on stronger climate action and thus accelerate societal change. However, as noted

earlier in chapter 4.1, people don’t necessary act consistently in their sustainability related

choices and the effect can also be opposite (e.g. Dhanda & Hartman, 2011; Kristofferson et al.,

2014; White et al., 2019b). Even though there might be some hope for subtle change going on

under the surface of the ever growing emissions, consumption and disagreements about suitable

climate action, not much points to a direction that it is happening fast enough or can be trusted

to be happening at all. Perhaps more than offering true hope for change, the commodification

of climate action simply explains why showcasing sustainable lifestyles and “ecological” ways

of consumption have become popular. People committing themselves to “climate friendly

consumption” get a feeling of belonging to a socially constructed community of likeminded,

sustainably oriented, responsible global citizens, that is tied together not by face-to-face

interaction, but by an idea (see imagined communities, Anderson, 1983).

In addition to feeling of belonging, carbon markets offer the feeling of safety and stability.

Watt (2021, p. 15) argues that carbon markets have been able to keep their popularity despite

criticism because they offer “illusory promises” of eco-friendly capitalism and way of getting

rid of one’s “carbon sins”. In other words, consumers and the carbon market practitioners really

want to trust the promises of the carbon markets, because if they do, they are better morally

justified to continue their high-carbon lifestyles with only a small cost and no real change.

In conclusion, through a process of simplification, offsets do not only offer individual

consumers new ways to consume and build identities, but also work to spread capitalism into

new frontiers now that extracting value from the old ones is not enough to keep the growth

growing. Lohmann (2011, p. 96) also argues, that “‘internalization’ of the global warming

‘externality’ makes new forms of accumulation possible, and in the process helps to create a

revamped, sustainable ‘capitalism 2.0’ (or 3.0, 4.0 or 5.0)”. They also give the big emitters an

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escape route, where they do not have to make expensive, difficult or even business-threatening

changes (as can be seen, for example, from CORSIA that aims to stop the emissions of

international aviation from growing by offsetting, not by reducing flying) and keep up the

fantasy that no large-scale changes are needed in the name of climate action.

5.2. Saving the world – agency and justice

The basic idea behind the carbon markets can be seen as very similar to the idea of many other

products and their production chains, where the primary production happens somewhere in the

global South and most profit is made somewhere in the global North: Producing is cheaper in

the South. Similarly, the mitigation efforts in the North tend to be costly, so financially it makes

sense to outsource the mitigation obligation to developing countries (Leach & Scoones, 2015).

The outsourcing of climate change mitigation to the global South is supported with the double

or triple-win discourse, an alleged result of decreasing global emissions and support of

sustainable development in developing countries (Carton, 2020; Cavanagh et al., 2015).

As the mitigation efforts move from North to South, so does the demand for change. Together

with the level of change the ways of enforcing the it also varies. As described in chapter 4.1,

for a Finnish – or supposedly any western – consumer there is an effort of making climate

action easily approachable, “sexy and fun”, so that the individuals would commit to it at least

from time to time. The strategy involves gentle nudges and persuasion through different

mechanisms especially dealing with the image of the consumers’ sense of individual self. The

hope is, that this subtle change would at some point bring about larger societal change. This

strategy connects well to the ideas of ecomodernism and green growth, as it avoids stronger

command and control tactics and gives people supposed freedom, central, for example, in the

Ecomodernist manifesto (Asafu-Adjaye et al., 2015). Though perhaps the choice is slightly

perverse in the sense that it is between ruining the environment and ruining the environment

and then giving some money to someone who is supposedly fixing the damage.

The situation is different in Cambodia, where, at least if one happens to live in an area suitable

for REDD+, no such careful individual persuasion is used, but the locals must consent to the

project as a group and then hope it will also be beneficial for them. The community workshops

have a say in the projects’ execution and REDD+ projects require cooperation with the local

communities through “free, prior and informed consent” but genuinely achieving it is difficult

in the context of different languages and REDD+ jargon: “Too often ‘participation’ means local

people attend trainings where communication goes one way. Local people find out what is

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being planned, and either may consent or not: REDD+ is done to them.” (Takacs, 2014, pp.

114–115). In this research it appears that locals’ concerns about larger structural issues can

easily be ignored, while the projects’ interventions focus only on symptoms. It is also difficult

to believe that the community could, for example, prevent the project from happening, as the

community consulting appears to only start when it is already clear that some type of a project

will be brought to the area. Additionally, the community workshops do not necessarily include

locals from all demographic groups, so it is possible that views of, for example, women, youth,

or minorities are ignored (Milne & Adams, 2012). The community benefits also do not

necessarily reach all locals in the area equally. As described by a local activist and ecotourism

provider in chapter 4.5, while Wildlife Alliance does provide entrepreneurial support for some

of the locals, they also make others’ business activities in the area more difficult. Even if the

community has power to impact the ways the project operates, the level of optionality is very

different than, for example, in Finland, where the consumer does not need to make any changes

in their high-carbon lifestyle, but is subtly persuaded to offset the distant damage they do.

A certain set of framings and justifications are needed to create global markets, where some

benefit more than, or on the expense of others. This type of divide between North and South

and the representations that are used to justify it resonates with Edward Said’s (1979) analysis

on orientalism. According to Said the image of the Orient replaced the image of the eastern

civilizations with a mystified and romanticized, but ultimately lesser picture of peoples. This

also included the Occident – the West – being redrawn as more advanced than the Orient (ibid.).

Said’s work on orientalism draws from Foucault’s (1969/1982) idea of discourses, a point that

words we use to describe things also have an impact and create the reality around us, and the

hegemonic discourse has power to define what is possible to think or say about things related

to it. According to Said (1979), an orientalist discourse allows global North to take control over

the global South in physical and in discursive manner and its origins lay in justifying colonial

interventions. While today the control is perhaps far more subtle, similar discourse is in place

in many interactions between North and South, and carbon markets don’t seem to be making

an exception.

Production of knowledge in the Cardamom-Compensate case fits into the orientalist discourse.

While the locals are consulted at least to fulfil the requirements of the auditing and the rangers

are presented as the heroes of the forests (which in the wider context of development aid and

conservation industry could be seen as an exceptional way of showing the agency of the locals),

the western experts are still the ones that make the decisions, define the right kind of knowledge

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and take the centre stage of protecting the forests, helping the locals and “saving the world”.

Arturo Escobar (1995) explains how through the discourse of development western way of

thinking has crushed alternative knowledge systems, taking the possibility of self-definition

and the chance to decide for oneself away from people of the global South. According to him,

development is a cultural concept, a method for controlling global South and a way to maintain

western hegemony. Poverty and hunger are also important parts of development discourse,

created over the years – not physically, but as political issues subject to ideologies, images and

political goals. Referring to Escobar and other post-development scholars, Kallis et al. (2018)

note, that it is essentially the growth paradigm that has made the contemporary global South

separate from “developed” world: starting from Truman’s 1949 inaugural speech and leaning

onto a numeric values of national income, some countries were defined as developed and some

as underdeveloped and the definition has since been used to justify interventions. In the case

of SCRP the project is justified through framing the locals as in need of help, and the project

developers as those with knowledge, skills, and power to help. The SCRP avoids overt

victimization of the target groups (see, for example, Dogra, 2012) and the focus is more on

forests and their wildlife, rather than on the peoples’ lives. However, the project rationale rests

in more implicit ways on the assumption that the local communities have been and still are

incapable of taking care of their forests (and themselves). This representation is necessary to

justify the intervention, as the baseline must be seen as a threat to the forest so that the

production of the credits can start and be as effective as possible.

The Cardamom-Compensate chain represents the marginalized and poor people of the global

South as the accelerators of destruction, while key drivers of logging and the forces of

capitalism that cause deforestation in the form of large-scale industrial projects (economic land

concessions, dams, roads, electricity lines) are omitted from the picture. Same thing happens

to the processes of dispossession and marginalization that often force those now blamed for

forest destructive practices to rely on illegal logging and poaching to survive. Meanwhile,

carbon emissions of the richest 1 per cent are more than double of what the poorest half of

humanity causes (Oxfam, 2020) and consumption in EU is one of the largest causes of tropical

deforestation (Wedeux & Schulmeister-Oldenhove, 2021). Thus, many argue that to create

affective climate policies, they should target the rich rather than the poor (Otto et al., 2019;

Wiedmann et al., 2020). It has been argued that in addition to technological advancements,

reducing consumption of the affluent is vital in avoiding collapse of Earth’s life-sustaining

functions (Wiedmann et al., 2020, p. 1). Currently in mainstream climate policies, offsets

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included, the focus is different. As Moore (2017a, p. 599) puts it, “It’s a trick as old as

modernity – the rich and powerful create problems for all of us, then tell us we’re all to blame.”

Sharing the responsibility for climate action equally sees everyone equally responsible and

groups very different types of emitters into the same category. For example, Bryant (2019, p.

148) notes that “carbon markets use formally equal market transactions to address a

substantively unequal climate problem”. Focusing mainly on Kyoto mechanisms and EU ETS,

Lohmann (2008) argues that carbon markets obscure central issues of climate justice and make

it difficult to act on them. On many possible definitions of climate justice, he notes that “it is

often assumed that it is all about re-energizing or reforming development and investment in the

global South to steer it in a low-carbon direction, harnessing the potential of carefully

constructed green markets, or making capital flow from North to South, instead of from South

to North, as part of a global warming mitigation package” (ibid. p. 364). On the surface, carbon

markets of course state that they make the richer countries and people of the North to pay for

their high emissions and make the money to flow to the global South to even out the economic

disadvantages and to protect the remaining nature in our planet without compromising the

economic growth of these countries that still have nature left. However, as the vital auditing

schemes take a large part of the money and the offset projects are often executed by western

dominated expert organizations that pay other similar organization for their expertise and

consultation, and the change in lifestyles is demanded from the people of the South rather than

from those of the North, it can be seen that the carbon markets have mainly made it easier and

cheaper to achieve calculatory net-zero without changing high-emission practices, and created

a new way to make profit in the global North. The benefit reaching the South can be seen as

questionable, as it at least in the case of Cambodia supports the authoritarian government, does

not question the patronage-based deals that benefit the elite groups, and is not necessarily

beneficial the country’s nature or people. In the end, the people in the Cardamoms and other

similar places must subject to military police and rangers patrolling their home areas, changes

in lives and livelihoods and in worst cases, violence and dispossession (Cavanagh et al., 2015;

Fairhead et al., 2012; Leach & Scoones, 2015; Mousseau & Teare, 2019; Song, 2019) to

accommodate voluntary compensation of unchanged lifestyles elsewhere.

5.3. Contested views on ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ kind of climate action

There are many arguments towards what sort of climate action is “good” or “bad”. A conflict

that arises almost at every level of the Cardamom-Compensate chain can be described as

between trying to act for climate change mitigation in the current system and trying to change

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the system in the name of climate action. The first discourse leans on the ideas of green growth

and ecomodernism (e.g. Asafu-Adjaye et al., 2015) and sees offset as essential in keeping our

society and well-being going while also acting for climate. The second discourse can be seen

rooted in the discussions on climate justice, that addresses, for example, the disproportionate

burden of the climate crisis on the poor and marginalized and takes a more human rights -based

approach on climate change mitigation (Jafry et al., 2018). This approach, in the context of

offsets, tends to point out that the carbon markets treat different groups of people unequally

and lack the capacity to bring any actual change (e.g. Lohmann, 2008).

In the discussion about the right kind of climate action, the ecomodernist discourse holds the

hegemonic position. Climate activists that demand for a larger systemic change or more

binding decision on climate change mitigation are treated with strong suspicion and sometimes

even violence. In Cambodia the government has become known for arresting and mistreating

environmental activist (Amnesty International, 2020) and in Finland, the attitudes towards

activists that radically demand more profound changes, is also reserved. For example, the

Finnish Extinction Rebellion was listed under the title of “Action and crimes related to violent

extra-parliamentary far left” in the Finnish Ministry of Interior’s report on violent extremism

(Sisäministeriö, 2020, pp. 29–30). Despite listing the group under this, rather ominous title, the

report notes that the activists had organized only a few small non-violent street blocks by the

time of the writing (ibid.). A larger (but still non-violent) block in October 2020, where police

tried to break the demonstration by spraying the activists with gas, lead to more public critique

towards the activists and calls for more moderate demands for climate action especially in the

comment sections of the yellow press4 and on social media. Conversations like this shows, that

while at least in Finland the belief that something should be done about climate change is rather

widely shared – four out of five Finns agree that climate change mitigation efforts should

happen sooner rather than later (Ympäristöministeriö, 2019) – a common agreement on suitable

action is still far from being reached. The task is made more difficult by the polarized climate

discussion, that frames activists as crazy and almost each proposed way of action as hysteria,

quickly making them into questions of identity5 (Suominen, 2021; Vuorelma, 2019). Carbon

4 From the comment section of Ilta-Sanomat article (Viljakainen, 2020): Joricee: “Is this helping? At least they

get visibility. Usually will turn against itself.” KuisNytKävikään: “Shouldn’t movements like this be abolished

because of ideological extremisms?” miisa: “Big men, go and plant some trees. I have no sympathy. Some have

their lives on the line, and you are just goofing around!” 5 For example, Finnish National Coalition Party’s campaign before the parliamentary elections of 2019, that read

either as “cars belong to the roads”, or as “cars belong to you”, that was seen as commenting the proposed changes

in, for example, taxes related to private vehicles and gas (e.g. Saavalainen & Hämäläinen, 2019). Or, the campaign

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markets, can easily take their place between the two discourses – idea that something should

be done, but reluctance to change or to do anything too radical – as they offer the consumers

an opportunity for action without a strong demand for change and even create new business

opportunities fitting into the current economic system.

Compensate’s legal case with the Finnish gambling administration is a conflict that is not so

clearly part of the contestation between green growth and climate justice, but more of a

contestation inside the discourse of green growth. The legal case and the media attention show

suspicion towards modifying the existing system into accepting the new type of a commodity.

As mentioned, Compensate’s opposers in Finland are less worried about the efficiency and side

effects of the claimed climate action and more about the consumer and their rights. While

Finland moves into more ecologically modernized direction, contestations such as this one are

likely to appear, but also to be resolved quickly. During the time of this research, in 2020 and

2021, the most critical discussion in the media has quieted and the government has moved to

change the fundraising law in favour of offset services. This could be seen as an example of

Finland’s willingness to create a more ecologically modernized system. While this type of

legislation appears to be moving fast, many activists and activist groups, such as Extinction

Rebellion, communicate that laws that would actually demand and press change are moving

too slow or not happening at all. Midst of the heated discussion, both activist and carbon market

advocates act in a way that communicates that the cause is so important that the end must justify

the means. The activists are willing to give up their own sense of security and even break the

law, while the carbon market supporters either accept or ignore the problems and inefficiencies

of the carbon business and its ways of operating.

In the ongoing argument about suitable form of climate action, it is easy to see some frustration

towards the carbon markets and their failure to deliver any results. For example, Kathleen

McAfee (2016, p. 333) argues that “[t]wo decades of all-but-futile climate negotiations have

shown that global warming cannot be managed by means of technocratic expertise nor dealt

with separately from the politics of inequality and the paradox of economic growth.” Lamb et

al. (2020, p. 1) examine discourses of climate delay that “accept the existence of climate

by peat producers in Finland, that aimed to proclaim peat as a source of renewable energy in the spring of 2021

in response to aiming to ban its energy use to reduce emissions (e.g. Latva-Teikari, 2021) – a conversation that

has been polarized already long before the most recent events (Lilleberg, 2015). Or, the column by head of Finland

Chamber of Commerce on the editorial pages of the largest Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, where he

argues that excessive talk about climate action makes the idea appalling to the middle class and hinders the whole

process of decoupling only because of the identity building project of some (Romakkaniemi, 2021).

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change, but justify inaction or inadequate efforts”. They characterize discourses of delay in

four categories that “‘redirect responsibility’, ‘push non-transformative solutions’, ‘emphasize

the downsides’ of climate policy, or ‘surrender’ to climate change” (ibid. p. 2), noting that in

these discourses, the attention is put on negative social effects of climate policies and on doubt

of plausibility of mitigation. Voluntary offsets sold to individuals could be seen as a part of

two these discourses. They redirect responsibility by centring the individual consumer and the

people of the global South and push non-transformative solutions in belief in that current

economic and technological institutions can solve the problem with high-tech development and

offering incentive for environmentally healthy businesses. Carbon markets as a whole

(including both voluntary markets and mechanisms integrated into policy level) do not differ

much from this picture. Even though they were originally meant to impact the emissions of

carbon heavy industries and the capitalist countries of the global North, they were built in a

way that their impact in emission reduction has been minimal to non-existent (e.g. Lohmann,

2020). Meanwhile, they have managed to become a valuable business, creating more value,

more purchasing power and more possibilities to consume (Environmental Finance, 2020;

Hamrick & Gallant, 2017; Shapiro, 2020).

Many climate activists and scientists in areas of, for example, ecological economics or critical

social sciences emphasize the structural nature of action needed to mitigate climate change,

and criticize capitalism and the focus put on individual consumption (e.g. Gills & Morgan,

2020, pp. 3–4). Meanwhile, as seen, for example, from the colourful arguments by informant

6 presented in chapter 4.7, supporters of the carbon markets seem to feel that focus of the

critique is too much on the downsides, in spilling a little bit of water when the house is on fire.

What can be seen in the heart of the argument concerning carbon offsets as climate action is if

they should be seen as a strategy that gets too much critique over its downsides, or as a non-

transformative solution that redirects the responsibility from larger global policy decision to

individual consumers and poorer countries and hopes that markets and technology will

eventually solve the problem. Discussing economics and climate crisis, Gills and Morgan

(2020, p. 11) point out that the “habit of delay and deferral of action seems set to continue,

despite increasingly alarming scientific reports and widespread recognition of the urgency of

radical action to reduce emissions and arrest ecological destruction”. They call for

abandonment of mainstream economic thought and a construction of a viable radical alternative

drawing from thoughts such as degrowth, postgrowth, social ecological economics and

ecofeminism (ibid. pp. 11-12). Eco-feminists and many indigenous scholars, for example, call

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for collective governance systems, equity and decolonization to be central in building political

institutions to reduce carbon emissions (e.g. Perkins, 2019). A plea like this can be seen almost

as the opposite for militarized conservation enclosures governed from above, that appear to be

common in market-based conservation so central to green growth.

McAfee (2016) as many other researchers, points towards alternative approaches such as Buen

Vivir coming from the South and degrowth from the North, to counter the growth-centred

discourse of green economy. Buen Vivir or Vivir Bien, a term that originates from the context

of Latin America, describes alternatives to development, focusing on good life in a broad sense,

in harmony with community that is not only constructed of other humans, but also Nature (e.g.

Gudynas, 2011, 2014, 2019). Degrowth on the other hand builds around a thought that it is

possible to transition and live well under a system that has smaller resource throughput (Kallis

et al., 2018, p. 292). Higher GDP levels in wealthier countries stop making a difference to

wellbeing at a certain point, but even mid-income countries with lower level resource use do

currently not live sustainably while satisfying social wellbeing standards (ibid. p. 298). Kallis

et al. (ibid.) point out that rather than increasing wealth, it is equality that seems to bring people

happiness, which suggests that redistribution and sharing might form better roads to good life

than infinite pursue for growth. Redistribution and sharing are imperative in the idea of

degrowth economy, as it is visioned to be constructing, for example, from fewer working hours,

basic income, spending or socializing debt interest, green taxes and growth in relational rather

than in material goods (Hickel & Kallis, 2020; Kallis et al., 2018).

6. Conclusion

This thesis has described the journey of carbon credits from a REDD+ conservation project in

the Cardamom Mountains in Cambodia to be sold by the Compensate foundation in Finland.

Carbon offset projects produce credits through accreditation, that works to ensure that the

project is producing additional benefits in contrast to a baseline. To build the baseline, the

forested areas must be defined as important and unique in terms of carbon stocks, biodiversity,

and sometimes even cultural value, and most importantly, under a threat. The threat must be

something that can be intervened with by conservation organizations, thus broader political-

economic relations and forces must be left aside from the problematization and the focus is

instead on targeting and controlling small-scale loggers and poaches. To make the product

more saleable, it is also important for the projects to demonstrate responsibility and community

benefits, and thus not all locals can be defined as the problem. Some are defined as in “need of

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help”, so the project can target them and demonstrate the triple-win discourse, a benefit to

climate change mitigation, biodiversity and local communities. The representations work to

make the conservation area governable and justify interventions, but as they are unable to

include the wider context, they also leave important drivers of deforestation unaddressed.

The SCRP does not sell the credits it produces directly. The money flow is not completely

transparent and even the people in high positions along the chain appear to have different

understanding on how things are arranged. The unclear arrangements make the chain look less

trustworthy and even open for misuse, but such uncertainties are not visible to the consumers,

who in general, at least based on articles in Finnish media, are not even very familiar with the

carbon markets. In Compensate’s end more effort is put on transparency, but the consumer is

still unlikely to be able to comprehensively understand all the projects they support through the

foundation. The consumer’s focus is more on themselves and the identity they are acquiring,

than on the way the carbon credits have been produced. To sell the non-physical carbon credits,

the need for them must be created through representations of importance of individual climate

action and responsibility. Compensate’s sales strategy builds around the idea that if we all just

cleaned up after ourselves, the climate change would be a problem of the past. After buying

Compensate’s product, the consumer gets a sense of being part of a group of responsible,

environmentally conscious (but not too radical) global citizens, who take responsibility of their

actions and see hope in the future. Compensate’s marketing strategy, as carbon markets in a

more wider sense, is in the end based on the hope that they work and are able to bring good

outcomes (e.g. Watt, 2021) and perhaps even larger behavioural changes. The legal case around

Compensate, the media attention given to the markets, and the critical attention from civil

society and academia reflect the difficulties in commodifying carbon capture and ecosystem

services in general and show that the strong hope for success is not necessarily enough to

convince all parties of the ability of the carbon markets in mitigating climate change.

The Cardamom-Compensate chain links to the global climate change mitigation efforts as a

part carbon markets that are at the centre of green economy and therefore the climate action as

it is defined by many countries and international organizations and industries. What arises at

both, seemingly different, ends of the chain, is the focus on individuals and side-lining the

discussions on wider structures. The approach of the carbon markets demands large changes in

lives and lifestyles from the people of the global South, as their areas of living are subjected

under militarized conservation operations, where small scale forest use is prohibited, but large

scale industrial projects can still happen. Consumers of the global North are persuaded to buy

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carbon credits produced under these circumstances to make their high-carbon lifestyles

calculatory net-zero. The carbon markets demand no real change from the consumer at least as

long as offsetting is voluntary. Even mandatory offsetting could be seen as questionable, if the

projects producing the carbon credits keep operating under the same standards they now do,

where finding a trustworthy project that truly produces emission reductions or removals, is

difficult (e.g. Compensate, 2021; Finnwatch, 2021). It can be said that the claims of carbon

neutrality through carbon offsetting should be met with caution by consumers, companies, and

other organizations. Rather than trying to claim calculatory net-zero, the carbon credit

producers and sellers could consider taking Compensate’s (2021) advice and make less

illusory, alternative claims of positive action in regards to climate change mitigation or

biodiversity conservation.

In the light of my case study, it seems that the voluntary carbon markets offer possibilities for

identity building, performing corporate responsibility and even for new capital creation in the

global North while subjecting people of the global South under tighter and tighter control of

authoritarian governments and conservation organizations. On a more positive note, the

offsetting through voluntary carbon markets could simultaneously make the idea of climate

action familiar and safe to the middle class and thus help shifting attitudes into a direction

where some action is better than none. However, as they do not demand real change from

companies or people of the global North, they can also be seen as creating false hope that the

climate crisis can be solved without any large-scale societal changes.

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8. Appendices

Appendix 1

Original interview structures. Questions were also added and modified during the interviews,

as the aim was to keep them relaxed and conversation-like and thus the questions only give an

overall about what was discussed.

Interview 1

Date: 25.8.2020

Length: 42 min

Position of the informant: Cambodian environmental activist who currently works with

ecotourism in the Cardamoms. No direct connection to the SCRP.

1. Can you tell me about yourself?

2. Can you tell me about Mother Nature’s work?

3. How is the situation in Areng Valley today?

4. How has the Covid-19 situation affected the people in the area? How about your work

in ecotourism?

5. Do you know about Wildlife Alliance’s project? Can you tell me how it has impacted

the area? How are people liking their work?

6. Why did the government want to work with American organization rather than a

Cambodian one?

7. What are you doing now that no tourists can’t come in?

Interview 2

Date: 27.8.2020

Length: 46 min

Position of the informant: Used to work at Wildlife Alliance with the SCRP in expert

position. No longer involved with SCRP.

1. Could you describe the Southern Cardamom REDD+ project?

2. What are the biggest threats to the project area?

3. Can you tell me about Areng Valley?

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4. How do you think the pandemic has affected the livelihoods of the people in the area?

(Community based eco-tourism).

5. What are the steps for a successful REDD+ project?

6. Can you tell me about the project’s funding?

7. Can you tell me more about REDD+ and its impacts in Cambodia?

8. Has something changed on the ground? What needed to be shown to previous funders

and now to REDD?

9. The project documentation talks about emission reduction rather than emission

removal. Can you describe the difference?

10. In your opinion, how is a carbon credit produced?

11. Are carbon markets a sufficient option for funding climate change mitigation?

12. What do you think would happen if the project ended?

13. Do developing countries’ own emission targets change the REDD+ situation?

14. Does the project have any problems or need to improve?

15. Are the locals denied of cooperating with other NGO’s?

16. Why is the project developer an American rather Cambodian organization?

Interview 3

Date: 31.8.2020

Length: 37 min

Position of the informant: Manager position, Wildlife Alliance.

1. Could you describe the Southern Cardamom REDD+ project?

2. Has moving to REDD+ changed how Wildlife Alliance operates in the Cardamoms?

3. How do you think the pandemic has affected the livelihoods of the people in the area?

(Community based eco-tourism).

4. What are the biggest threats to the project area?

5. What are the steps for a successful REDD+ project?

6. What happens when people are arrested for illegal logging or poaching?

7. Can you tell me more about REDD+ and its impacts in Cambodia?

8. In your opinion, how is a carbon credit produced?

9. Are carbon markets a sufficient option for funding conservation?

10. What do you think would happen if the project ended?

11. Does the project have any problems or need to improve?

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Interview 4

Date: 21.9.2020

Length: 56 min

Position of the informant: External advisor for the SCRP’s REDD+ process. Expert position

in another Cambodian REDD+ project.

1. Can you describe your connection to Southern Cardamom REDD+ project?

2. Attitude towards REDD+ in Cambodia?

3. Where does the money go in the SCRP?

4. What are the differences between REDD+ projects and conservation projects funded

by donations?

5. In your opinion, how is a carbon credit produced? What is important in that process?

6. Are carbon markets a sufficient option for funding conservation? How about climate

change prevention?

7. Do you think that REDD+ in Cambodia will change with nationally defined

contributions (NDC’s)?

Interview 5

Date: 22.9.2020

Length: 68 min

Position of the informant: Manager position, Compensate.

1. Can you tell me about your work at Compensate?

2. Why is offsetting the solution?

3. Is offsetting a good way of funding forest conservation?

4. Would you answer change if I asked if offsetting was a good way of funding climate

change mitigation?

5. Can you explain how carbon credits are produced?

6. Where does the money go in this process? Who benefits and how the responsibility of

the value chain can be evaluated?

7. What makes people offset their emissions?

8. Compensate talks a lot about individuals’ personal accountability. Is this the best way

to mitigate climate change, or do you see it as just a step towards the right direction?

9. What are Compensate’s long term goals?

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10. Is this working fast enough?

11. What do you think is the most efficient way of avoiding or capturing emissions?

12. How will the NDCs impact Compensate’s portfolio, as it has many projects in the global

South?

13. How did Cardamom become a part of Compensate’s portfolio? Can you tell more about

that process?

Interview 6

Date: 23.9.2020

Length: 48 min

Position of the informant: Manager position, Everland marketing.

1. Could you describe the Southern Cardamom REDD+ project and Everland’s work in

it?

2. What makes a successful REDD+ project? What about what possible problems can they

encounter?

3. What is important in marketing a REDD+ project?

4. Does marketing a REDD+ project differ from marketing a conservation project that

relies on donations?

5. In your opinion, how is a carbon credit produced?

6. How does the money flow from the consumer to the project?

7. Are carbon markets a sufficient option for funding conservation? How about Climate

Change mitigation?

Interview 7

Date: 12.10.2020

Length: 57 min

Position of the informant: Expert position, Compensate.

1. Can you tell me what you do at Compensate?

2. Can you tell me about the advisory panel and their role?

3. How does a project become a part of Compensate’s portfolio?

4. Can you tell me about the Southern Cardamom REDD+ project?

5. How does the money flow from the consumer to the project?

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6. How many points does Cardamom have in Compensate’s scoring system?

7. Do projects such as Cardamom meet any problems? What kind?

8. In your opinion, how is a carbon credit produced?

9. Are carbon markets a sufficient option for funding conservation? How about climate

change mitigation?

10. Why do people compensate?

Interview 8

Date: 12.10.2020

Length: 65 min

Position of the informant: Manager position, Wildlife Works.

1. Can you describe Wildlife Works’ part in the Southern Cardamom REDD+ Project?

2. How and why does a donation-funded project turn into a REDD+ project and what

changes in that process (if anything)?

3. How are carbon credits produced? (Or what makes forest conservation into a

marketable product?)

4. What are carbon credits in the context of forest conservation? A promise of forest

protection for X number of years, a proof of protection that has already happened, or

perhaps something else?

5. What happens in VCS and CCB auditing processes?

6. What kind of challenges do REDD+ projects face in different stages of their life?

7. What makes a successful REDD+ project (in general and specifically in Cardamom)?

8. When someone buys carbon credits, where does the money go?

9. Do the REDD+ projects have restrictions for their money use?

10. Are carbon markets a sufficient option for funding conservation? How about climate

change mitigation?

Interview 9

Date: 23.10.2020

Length: 55 min

Position of the informant: Manager position, Everland marketing.

1. What does Everland do?

95

2. What does it mean that you mean you have exclusive rights to sell the credits from

Cardamom?

3. How are carbon credits produced? Or what makes forest conservation into a marketable

product?

4. Can you explain the certification process for VCS and CCB?

5. How do projects get money before they produce credits?

6. What happens if the project can’t reduce deforestation?

7. How does the money flow from the consumer to the project?

8. What is offset projects’ position in climate change mitigation efforts?

Interview 10

Date: 18.1.2021

Length: 65 min

Position of the informant: Manager position, Wildlife Works

1. How much is a carbon credit form the Cardamoms? Why? Is this public knowledge?

Where could this information be found normally? What impacts the price?

2. What does Everland do?

3. Does the SCRP have its own accounts, or is its budget part of someone else’s? Is the

budget or any numbers from it available somewhere and if not why?

4. How much did the accreditation cost for the SCRP? How was it paid?

5. Can you tell me how big percentages of the revenue go to each party?

6. Is there a chance of misuse as the money flow is not transparent to public?

7. Verra provides the criteria and SCS Global Services conducts the auditing? Are they

completely separate entities? Which is the one that charges for auditing?

8. Do you think government’s land concessions or, for example, large infrastructure

projects are a big threat to the area? Why are they left out of the project documentation?

9. As Wildlife Works and Wildlife Alliance are both project developers, how is the work

divided between the two?

10. What do “global best practices” mean? (e.g. “The project uses global best practices of

forest protection and community development to safeguard the forest and prevent more

than 3,000,000 tons of carbon emissions annually”)

11. Do you want to talk about why you were unsure about participating in this interview?

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