The Khasi Hills Community REDD+ project: “The slow enclosure of the commons”

Focus on the Global South’s Angshuman Sarma recently wrote about the project.

The Enclosure of the Commons | Radical History
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBsNAPJbBzw

Chris Lang || The Khasi Hills Community REDD+ project was India’s first REDD project. It covers an area of 23,507 hectares in the East Khasi Hills district of Meghalaya northeast of India.

In November 2011, REDD-Monitor featured the project in a post based on an article by Soumitra Ghosh in Mausam. At the time, the REDD project was just beginning. Plan Vivo approved a Project Idea Note for the project in July 2011 and the project started selling carbon credits in 2012.

Ghosh spoke to Tambor Lyngdoh, the Secretary of the Mawphlang Indigenous government (hima), and subsequently Project Director of the REDD project.

Lyngdoh told Ghosh that,

“The project is just starting and people don’t know anything about REDD etc yet. All they know is that we need to conserve our forests, and we have been doing that for so many years.”

Ghosh questioned the restrictions that would be place on villagers under the REDD project. He questioned whether the project was additional, whether the project was legal, and whether the community had given their consent to the REDD project.

Mark Poffenberger, the Executive Director of Community Forestry International, wrote a response to REDD-Monitor’s post. He explained that CFI became involved in 2005 at the invitation of the Mawphlang Indigenous government. He wrote that,

Over the next four years, the forests in the project area regenerated rapidly as the community controlled ground fires, adopted fuel efficient stoves, and shifted over to higher value stall fed livestock. The success in the early pilot activities generated requests from neighboring indigenous governments (hima) to extend the project to their areas.

The decision to set up a REDD project, according to Poffenberger came from the hima involved in the project. Yet the Project Design Document states that the project was “Initiated by Community Forestry International (CFI) in 2010”.

Ghosh replied in detail in a comment following Poffenberger’s response. “How much [do] the subsistence-level forest users know about the extremely complex and severely challenged mechanism that results in carbon credits?” Ghosh asked. “Do they know or are aware of what’s been happening in other REDD areas across the world?”

“The slow enclosure of the commons”

Recently, Angshuman Sarma, Policy Officer at Focus on the Global South, wrote about the Khasi Hills Community REDD+ project. Sarma writes that,

In the hills and valleys of Northeast India, where Indigenous worlds are sustained through forests, shifting cultivation, and collectively held commons, these market mechanisms arrive not as allies but as disruptions. They reframe living landscapes into measurable carbon stocks, translating relationships of care into units of trade. What is rendered invisible in this conversion is the deep, historical stewardship of Indigenous Peoples—their knowledge systems, their cyclical practices, and a moral economy rooted in reciprocity.

Sarma argues that instead of supporting Indigenous livelihoods and culture carbon trading mechanisms risk unsettling them. “Ancestral lands, once held in collective ownership and practice, are drawn into circuits of valuation and control,” he writes.

Decision making moves away from the community and toward distant actors such as developers, certifiers, and brokers. “In this quiet reordering, dispossession does not always announce itself loudly,” Sarma writes, “it advances through contracts, metrics, and the slow enclosure of the commons.”

The project aims to reduce fuelwood collecting and has established fast-growing plantations close to villages. The project provides training on the manufacture and installation of efficient cookstoves, and encourages the use of government-subsidised solar cookers.

Villagers are encouraged to stop cattle and goat grazing. The project offers financial support for hybrid chickens called Kuroilers. It also supports stall-fed piggeries and aquaculture ponds. “Where communities once relied on collective fishing practices in rivers and streams, aquaculture represents a more enclosed and individualised mode of production,” Sarma writes.

Where does the money go?

The Project Design Document states that the project has agreements with several international organisations to sell carbon offsets, including ZeroMission (Sweden), COTAP (USA), C-Level (UK), Climate Seed (France), Lund Fund, Ceramica Sant’Agostino (Italy), Anima Impressa, and WeForest (Belgium).

By the end of 2024, the project had generated a total of 532,459 carbon credits, of which 61,145 have not been sold.

Only Carbon Offsets to Alleviate Poverty (COTAP) provides any information about the price of carbon credits from the project. COTAP sells carbon credits from the project for US$22.50 each, of which US$20.25 goes to the project.

But in reality, little of the money reaches communities. COTAP states that by 2024, “the Khasi project has paid US$1,039,487 to approximately 8,005 families and has invested US$414,951 in forest conservation and management”. These figures come from the 2024 project annual report submitted to Plan Vivo.

That may sound like a lot, but it averages only US$86,624 per year, which amounts to less than US$11 per family each year.

Additionality?

In November 2022, Tim Whitley, CEO of COTAP visited the Khasi Hills Community REDD+ project. He spoke to Tambor Lyngdoh, the Project Director of the REDD project. Here’s how part of the conversation went:

Lyngdoh: I am the kind of a man who has been involved running so many things through my community service. Most thing that I love is forestry and tourism. These are two things that I really put myself in. It might be forestry for heritage site, forestry for wildlife conservation, forestry for engaging with Sacred Groves. I have been reviving two Sacred Groves already now.

Whitley: And are these potential additional like separate REDD projects?

Lyngdoh: Yeah, these are separate, yeah.

Whitley: Could they be a carbon project?

Lyngdoh: Yes, it might be in future, why not? Because now when it is depleting means it’s barren so we are starting to grow trees there.

This short exchange reveals a lot. Lyngdoh has set up two initiatives to revive Sacred Groves, outside the REDD project area. He has done so without financing from the sale of carbon credits. Yet Whitley’s only question is whether these could become carbon projects. Both men’s grasp of the concept of additionality appears flimsy, at best.

This was one of the issues that Ghosh raised back in 2011. Given the fact that the project area is community-governed, Ghosh described the additionality of the REDD project as “dubious, if not outright nonsense”.

Sarma concludes his article about the project as follows:

As environmental scientist P. S. Ramakrishnan, who has done extensive research in Northeast India, notes, “traditional societies tend to be much more holistic in their approach towards ecosystem and landscape management, though often at the cost of short-term gains”.1 The Indigenous communities of Northeast India have sustained biodiversity-rich landscapes through such Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), which operates across multiple scales — from species-level interactions to the management of entire landscapes. These systems have enabled long-term ecological stability without reducing forests to extractive assets. Yet, it is precisely these ecologically intact landscapes that are now being drawn into carbon markets, where Global North-based emitters and corporations seek to derive value — appropriating the outcomes of long-standing community stewardship into circuits of carbon finance.