Adeniyi Asiyanbi

Subject-making and impacts of REDD+ in Cross River Nigeria

Member of the Environment, Politics and Development research group

My PhD research investigates the increasingly important, global scheme that integrates climate change mitigation, forest conservation, rural development, and development aid – Reducing Emission from Deforestation and Forest Degradation plus conservation and sustainable management (REDD+). I combine political ecology and governmentality perspectives to critically examine the conditions of possibility of this project in Nigeria, through a genealogy of conservation (including colonial forestry) and analyses of contemporary state-making, emergent development governmentality, and a variety of negotiations and contestations among state actors, extra-territorial development actors, civil society and forest communities. I ask how REDD+ is assembled as a governmental regime, how it summons various subjectivities among actors and to what effects in terms of resource rights and access of local people, and local forest governance broadly. Continuing from my MSc research and related research assistantship positions, I also pursue investigative research on public engagement with climate change, climate change vulnerability, and adaptation, mainly in the West African context.

Thus, more broadly, my research interests and capabilities sit at the intersection of development studies, critical environmental politics, and human geography. More specifically my work is concerned with the ways that politics (expressed through notions of knowledge, power, identity and resistance) mediate development and environmental interventions, and to what material effects. I have a long-standing interest in social dimensions of climate change, public engagement with the environment, environmental politics, conservation history and development potentials of environmental interventions. I work from both a broad political ecology and post-structuralist perspectives, with the later drawing significantly on the works of Michel Foucault.