Third World Quarterly, 2015 Vol. 36, No. 12, 2316–2336
Governments, donors and investors often promote land acquisitions
for forest plantations as global climate change mitigation via carbon
sequestration. Investors’ forestry thereby becomes part of a global
moral economy imaginary. Using examples from Tanzania we criti-
cally examine the global moral economy’s narrative foundation,
which presents trees as axiomatically ‘green’, ‘idle’ land as waste and
economic investments as benefiting the relevant communities. In this
way the traditional supposition of the moral economy as invoked by
the economic underclass to maintain the basis of their subsistence is
inverted and subverted, at a potentially serious cost to the subjects of
such land acquisition.