Page 32 - Governing Congo Basin Forests in a Changing Climate • Olufunso Somorin

Chapter 1
having policy debates within their countries on design and implementation. A number of REDD+ projects are being piloted on the ground through many bilateral and multilateral initiatives.
In making sense of the nexus between forests and climate, it is helpful to understand the convergence of their governance systems in terms of solving policy problems. Both forests and climate change pose many complex governance questions, and have often been labelled to show characteristics of ‘wicked’ problems (Roberts, 2000; Wang, 2002; Jordan et al., 2010) - a term which suggests that either the formulation of the problem is the problem or the problem is a symptom of another problem (Rittel and Webber, 1973; Roberts, 2000; Tameer et al., 2013). It has been argued that a profound understanding of climate change as a global environmental and social challenge is the central requirement of climate governance – that is why adaptation and mitigation can hardly be successful without an understanding of the structure of the problem (Meadowcroft, 2009; Ostrom, 2010; Frohlich and Knieling, 2013). Indeed, the governance of forests and climate change is complex. Several authors have argued that this is because of the diversity of stakeholders (actors) involved, the multiplicity of structural and regulatory bases for decision-making, the multi- layered political and social contexts and coordination processes, as well as the uncertainties associated with policy prescriptions (Betsill and Bulkeley, 2006; Lemos and Agrawal, 2006; Biermann, 2007; Agrawal et al., 2008; Adger et al., 2009; Arts and Visseren-Hamakers, 2012). In this thesis, the governance of the forest-climate nexus is linked to the participation of relevant policy actors and to the institutional structures for shaping adaptation and mitigation outcomes.
1.2 Defining the Research Problem
The starting point for this study is the recognition that at the international level, adaptation and mitigation policies are separated, for a myriad of reasons such as those presented in Table 1-2 (Klein et al., 2005; Ayers and Huq, 2007; Ravindranath, 2007; Jones et al., 2007; Guariguata et al., 2008; Locatelli et al., 2011), with each policy option canvassing for its own distinct national strategies and approaches for policy design and implementation.
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