Participation dynamics and institutional change in the Scolel Té carbon forestry project, Chiapas, Mexico

Carbon forestry has become a cornerstone of attempted climate change mitigation in developing coun-tries. As such, dozens of projects have been developed to supply carbon offsets to both voluntary and reg-ulated carbon markets. In this paper we shed further light on the effects of such projects on communitiesand households by studying the implementation of a carbon forestry project in four communities in thestate of Chiapas, Mexico. The project pays farmers to carry out a number of tree-planting activitiesdepending on the local agro-ecological systems. We investigate how such activities have been promotedin and adopted by communities and we identify a series of community-based, institutional, resourcemanagement and asset-related factors that explain farmers’ willingness to participate in the projects.Our analysis highlights a number of shared motivations for joining the project but varied levels of under-standing about the project rationale. We also show how community norms, access to land tenure, finan-cial and physical assets differ among participants and non-participants which translates in increasinginequalities in access to income and to other development projects. However, we also demonstrate thatproject activities, as currently designed, motivate some farmers to participate because of the potential ofthe project to act as a mechanism to bridge existing social divides through cooperation in the project andtherefore financially and politically benefit from participation. Overall, the paper demonstrates that theproject contributes to transforming local livelihoods and institutions, unfortunately not always as origi-nally designed.