ABSTRACT

Assemblage approaches are increasingly being used to understand new social formations arising in relation to the multiple crises of capitalism, climate change and environmental degradation (Larner, 2013). Through the intensification of the neoliberalisation of ‘nature’ (Castree, 2008) we have seen the rise of prices for carbon emissions, biodiversity offsets in varied contexts, as well as to land and water. Valuation structures and the new socio-natural assemblages that attend them have, however, been most prominent in regard to forestry, with the emergence of ‘global’ transnational projects and initiatives such as carbon forestry offsetting and REDD+. Carbon forestry aim to tackle global CO2 emissions by saving forests for the good of the globe through particularly complex, multi-scalar interventions within the global south (Mwangi and Wardell 2013). This chapter adapts Li’s (2007) explication of practices of assemblage to explain the making of carbon forestry in Uganda. Through this lens it becomes apparent that there are multiple overflows, tensions, and counter-performativities – primarily attendant to unstable social relations – in the forestry assemblage, as a governance form.