Summary
This study aims to explore multilevel governance institutions and shed light on how they affect decision making around land use and interact with low-emissions development (LED) initiatives like REDD+. [The authors] analyze multilevel governance issues including how power is distributed, how information flows, the extent to which decision processes are participatory, whether processes and outcomes are legitimate, and why and how land-use change occurs. [They] ask how actors from multiple levels and sectors interact in a decentralized regime to make land use and land-use change decisions; who is driving deforestation and forest degradation; and who is driving low-emissions development options. [...] This report presents an analysis based on interviews with actors across multiple levels and sectors, including government (mostly regional and local), nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), indigenous organizations, private companies, project developers and implementers, and local communities located in the three departments (referred to in this report as "regions") of Madre de Dios, Ucayali and San Martin. [...] The sites include initiatives aimed at conserving forests, promoting sustainable forest management and reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation, as well as others associated with deforestation. The analysis of the 14 selected case study sites and the regional and local context was based on 295 interviews. By grounding the analysis in these specific cases of land-use change, [the authors] analyze how national-, regional- and local-level actors and policies ultimately shaped land-use decisions on the ground. [...] [The] findings suggest that if change in land-use practices is to occur in practice, initiatives will have to garner support from local communities. Some of the greatest obstacles to alternatives to deforestation in Peru are related to the economics of land-use change, as seen in the State's investment in oil palm and actions taken around mining, as well as the power of the dominant development paradigm and the actors behind it. Hence, though many people in the regions see land-use planning, which is currently non-binding and under the environment sector, as a panacea for solving land-use problems, its current legal weaknesses reflect prevailing power dynamics and the hegemony of a development paradigm that assigns concerns over the environment, forests or carbon emissions a much weaker role. Content in this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/