Recent years have seen growing calls for largescale landscape restoration, especially forests, most recently through the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Proponents often argue that restoration has great potential to advance environmental objectives alongside human welfare. Political ecologists have raised concerns about how actual practices of restoration (especially tree plantations) may serve to legitimate land cover changes that further marginalize poorer people, reproduce entrenched power asymmetries in global environmental policy interventions, and neglect underlying drivers of forest loss and poverty. While extensive research has called both for protecting local land rights and ensuring that local stakeholders have power in restoration planning processes, there remains a need for theoretically-grounded research on how more just restoration and tree planting can be achieved in practice. Certainly, dominant policy discussions have lacked social scientific perspectives.

This session aims to contribute to building a foundation for critical social science scholarship on global restoration – its politics, its impacts, and its many varied manifestations on the ground. We do so through a paper session and through a panel discussion between researchers and practitioners who have in-depth experiences with restoration and tree planting in different parts of the world. Our objective is to draw together experiences from across the Global South & North in ways that can help synthesize existing knowledge and identify areas where strong political ecological scholarship is needed. We hope that this can help stimulate a knowledge community of critical restoration scholars that we can continue to engage with in the coming years.

CARBON, COMMUNITIES OR CONSERVATION? ANALYSING TRADE-OFFS IN FIVE ’BEST-CASE’ CARBON FORESTRY PROJECTS IN UGANDA AND TANZANIA
Abstract: Triple-win scenarios are common in carbon forestry - projects are usually presented as beneficial for carbon storage and conservation goals alike at the same time as having positive impacts on local communities. In reality however, there are trade-offs between these three objectives and even projects designed in dialogue with local communities have various shortcomings. This paper analysis five ‘best-case’ projects: three that engage with local farmers to plant trees, one that encourages cheap and simple restoration of trees and one that works with community land use planning to protect existing forest. Through interviews with project designers, implementers and farmers as well as analysis of documents and websites, the underlying core motivations behind each project are identified. We analyse the effects of these core motivations on general project design, on the spirit in which the projects are implemented and on how trade-offs are negotiated. Discussing five examples of concrete trade-offs that took place in these projects, we show how underlying motivations are key for how trade-offs were settled and discuss what effects this has on project outcomes. As part of a larger effort to expand critical social science scholarship on global restoration and carbon forestry initiatives – not least as these are currently being massively scaled up - it is key that we open up the narrative of triple-wins in carbon forestry for critical scrutiny.
Key words: carbon forestry, community, trade-offs

WOWNEN'S AGENCY IN JOINING REDUCED EMISSIONS FROM DEFORESTATION AND DEGRADATION PROGRAMS IN HURUNGWE, ZIMBABWE This paper provides an analysis of a Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) initiative in Hurungwe, Zimbabwe and how it impacts the lives of rural women. This study aims to establish why women engage in the REDD+ project despite multiple case studies from some African and Asian countries showing that as forest enclosures take place to cater for the development of REDD+, women became burdened with labour as they must look for alternative sources for gathered items such as fruit and firewood. The question I aim to understand is why women do not actively resist the systems of power associated with climate mitigation programs but instead engage in programs that are otherwise oppressive in some instances. As new programs like REDD+ emerge in communities, new problems arise regarding how women access land and resources. I focus on how the development narrative pushes women to join REDD+ since it claims to include excluded groups and give them a voice so that they benefit from economic and social development programs. I also focus on women's maternal instinct and how they desire to take care of their children and families by joining climate change initiatives such as REDD+. I conclude that while REDD+ initiatives may seem appealing to different groups of women because they can provide food for their families, the benefits-sharing policy short-changes them because they receive less than they deserve. KEY WORDS: WOMEN, REDD+, AGENCY