Sophie Pascoe

SOPHIE PASCOE, then a graduate student at University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, was awarded funding in April 2017 to aid research on ‘Storytelling REDD+: Interactions and Inequalities between Global Environmental Governance and Local Lives,’ supervised by Dr. Wolfram H. Dressler. This research is centered on the intersections and inequalities that emerge as global environmental governance initiatives, like Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+), are translated locally in Papua New Guinea (PNG). It focuses on the multiplicity of ‘ontological’ assumptions ‘ that is, assumptions about the nature of existence ‘ that intersect and mingle in the context of climate change and environmental governance. Through ethnography and storytelling, it investigates how people implicated in the Central Suau REDD+ Pilot Project in the Milne Bay Province negotiate heterogeneous assumptions to make sense of complex processes of socio-environmental change. Importantly, this work analyses how the foregrounding of certain assumptions over others enables and constrains particular approaches to environmental governance which may generate and reinscribe inequalities. By using institutional ethnography to trace the ways that actors privilege certain assumptions to stabilize the REDD+ assemblage in PNG, this research also explores the exclusion and marginalization of alternative ways of being and knowing in the world. Drawing attention to the precariousness and instability of the REDD+ assemblage in PNG, this research problematizes these inequalities and attempts to open up a space for different, more equitable, approaches to environmental governance to emerge.