Accountability and transparency in Payment for Environmental Services schemes

A case study of the Clean Development Mechanism project in Albania

Description of the organisation

Connecting Natural Values & People Foundation (CNVP) is a legacy organisation of SNV in the Balkans. Established through a legal demerger, CNVP will continue the SNV forestry and rural development programme in the Balkans and beyond. CNVP envisions:

• Local communities achieving their own development goals;
• Maximising the production and service potential of forests through Sustainable Forest Management and locally controlled Natural Resource Management;
• Forests contributing to equitable local economic development supporting rural livelihoods;
• Forests contributing to wider societal interests and values including biodiversity conservation and wellbeing;
• Connecting natural values and people.

Description of the internship

Albania is playing a leading part in international efforts to stop global warming and limit damaging climate change, which particularly threatens developing countries and the poor and vulnerable. Together, the Government of Albania and UNDP have committed to support the use of renewable energy sources, protect biodiversity, and streamline commitments to international environmental conventions, and specifically those related to Biodiversity, Climate Change and Land Degradation. UNDP supports the Climate Change Unit within the Ministry of Environment Forestry and Water Administration. 

The Climate Change programme, as mentioned above, works with the Ministry through producing the necessary reports to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its Kyoto Protocol. The reports enable the Government to sell its carbon credits to industrialized countries that produce excess carbon emissions through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). This particular type of foreign investment, called ‘Carbon Finance’, also allows Albania to continue reducing its own carbon emissions for further credits to sell on the international market.

The objective of this CDM project is to increase carbon sequestration through afforestation and reforestation of highly degraded land, thereby enhancing sources of livelihood and incomes in poor rural areas, reducing soil degradation, improving water quality, and conservation of biodiversity. This is the first CDM project for Albania and the area projected to be afforested is 6272.36 ha of degraded land; CO2 emission reduction of approximately 280 000 t CO2 (in the period 2002–2017). The BioCarbon Fund, administered by the World Bank, has agreed to purchase emission reductions in communal forests in Albania after a negotiation of an Emission Reduction Purchase Agreement (ERPA) at a price of US$ 4.4 per tonne of CO2. The Carbon Sequestration project is based on Forest and Pasture User Associations (FPUAs).

The primary responsibility for forest and pasture management belongs to the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Water Administration but recently the forest ownership rights have been delegated to communes. Therefore the idea is that an FPUA will make an agreement with a commune to use a part of the communal forest land under the management of the commune for the purposes of the project. FPUAs will be responsible for the planting and tending of the trees. FPUAs will be the recipients of the payments for sequestered carbon received from the World Bank. Research assignment: Demands for greater transparency and accountability form an increasingly prevalent feature of CDM schemes.

These demonstrations take place in complex networks involving particular associations of people, technology and resources. Accounts that make specific claims to transparency and accountability must be mobilized into these assessment and communication networks. This is best studied in a number of case studies, and we are looking for MSc students who would like to carry out these case studies in Albania. The research objectives that are worthy to be addressed are many. What we presented is simple list, but new alternatives within this area can be proposed: Networks of accountability and transparency: Albania currently lacks a strong institutional framework for transferring carbon payments to local communes.

This raises the following questions. How is a network of accountability and transparency constructed in this context? Whom talks to whom and about what? How is the meaning of transparency and accountability constructed in and by this network and vice versa? This research can potentially link up to discussions in the field of informational governance. Carbon sequestration as technology: To calculate the amount of carbon stored, the biological growth of the forest in areas is measured by local evaluators, subject to validation from an independent auditor. This means that forests are translated in biomass, biomass is translated into carbon, carbon is translated into credits and credits are translated into money. This is a representation of a representation of a representation of a representation of forest. Representations create a certain ‘field of visibility’.

In relation to accountability and transparency, this raises questions of what is counted, by whom, through what means for whom? What is made visible, what is made invisible with what kind of consequences? How are scientific knowledge, measurement and indicators used to make things invisible or visible? This research can potentially link up to discussions in the field of science studies. Carbon subjectivities: In theory the carbon payments will be transferred from the Carbon Association to each commune in the FPUA account; the amount of carbon payments will depend on the area in hectares planted or managed by each commune.

If this is indeed going to happen, the FPUA should produce a management plan for the expenditure of the carbon payments for environmental and social improvement (a re-investment fund) within the villages involved in the project, proportionally to the land made available to the project in each village. The FPUA should maintain proper accounts of any expenditure of project-related payments and will permit the Commune, the district forest service and other officers to check on and audit those accounts. But do local villages indeed benefit from the carbon payments? If so, how? What negotiations are going on at the interface between local people and outside officials? What situated agency do local villagers have? This research can potentially link up to discussions in the field of actor oriented sociology or governmentality studies on community based conservation.

Period

To be discussed

Location

Albania

Language requirements

English

Allowance

Unfortunately there is no allowance available