ABSTRACT
This conceptual and methodological chapter outlines the main elements of a political ecology of REDD+, combining critical social theory, Marxist and post-modern geography, and legal anthropology, and provides information on the multi-sited qualitative approach used for the empirical research. It introduces concepts of power, the state, space, territory, scale and property, which help to investigate agrarian conflicts in the context of conservation interventions. I argue that REDD+ and broader processes of state transformation have induced significant rescaling processes, transforming the governance of land and forests and producing new forms of territoriality. Power relations in this vein are important constitutive elements of the social production of space, scale and territory. Thus they are important explanatory factors for the differing abilities of actors to access land and property.
