Private Sector Investment and the Green Economy: The Local Consequences of Tree Plantations in Southern Tanzania

Increasing interest and investment on privately funded carbon finance and neoliberal conservation sees capital transforming landscapes across the global south. With this transformation and movement of capital are concerns of land grabs, dispossession, exploitation and loss of access to resources. Understanding these concerns requires understanding investments, responding to markets, changing ecologies, changing livelihoods and land-use practices, power dynamics and social structures. This research explores the direct and broader consequences of large-scale private sector investment in carbon forestry on the society, ecologies and economies of two rural communities in Kilombero, Morogoro, Tanzania. These communities have over the last two decades, seen the establishment of large tree plantations by a private-sector company: Green Resources Ltd (GRL). Fieldwork in the two rural villages, Uchindile and Kitete, was undertaken in 2013, and utilised mixed qualitative methods, including focus group discussions, semi-structured interviews, household surveys. The presence and activities of GRL have brought about immediate and more gradual fundamental shifts in the economies and society of Uchindile and Kitete. These impacts have affected all parts of local society, to varying degrees. Some have opened up new opportunities for welcome change, while others have deepened inequalities. The impacts are significant and far reaching but are not straightforward. Nor are they viewed as such by local residents. Findings suggest we should pay more attention to the economic and employment opportunities created by such investments relative to the attention placed in the literature on land alienation. I argue the indirect, broader consequences of private sector investment are as important as the direct consequences because of the changes that it sets in motion. I argue that the degradation and multi-win narratives we see in the literature are sticky locally, and that local people (re) appropriate these narratives and leverage fire as a tool to further their own interests.