Ritah Kigonya sets out to investigate biodiversity offsetting as a framework for achieving ‘no net loss of biodiversity’ by compensating for biodiversity loss in one place through enhancing it in another. Offsetting is a highly contested concept and practice, and the thesis is accordingly focused on highlighting the aspirational aspects of such initiatives and the ‘realities’ of their manifestation.
The thesis takes a case study approach to the implementation of biodiversity offsetting in the Gangu Central Forest Reserve in Uganda, but as indicated by its title it speaks to broader social and ecological transformations in the case study site. Because it takes account of the social and ecological history of the reserve itself, as well as that of the Central Region of Uganda, the presented research offers more insightful claims about biodiversity offsetting than the typical narrow technical conservation evaluations routinely do. Paradigmatically, the thesis implicitly takes issue with positivist and technocentric accounts of environmental change and interventions and it adopts an approach that bypasses misleading nature-culture dichotomies. Hence, Kigonya tackles an important and timely topic in human geography and political ecology.
The argument of the thesis is clear and concise: biodiversity offset measures are ‘unable to fully compensate for lost biodiversity with equivalent biodiversity gains [and] … are implemented as ordinary compensation measures with no efforts to attain the no net loss goals required of the measure’ (p. i). To disaggregate this argument, Kigonya is not completely dismissive of offsets, as she presents evidence that shows how ecological conditions – in the form of forest cover – are improved within the Gangu Central Forest Reserve. However, the data show that the displacement of previous resource uses, combined with ‘compensation measures’, exacerbated social inequality and contributed to the conversion of large parts of the reserve outside the offset site and to continued illegal extraction of forest resources within the biodiversity offset site, thus threatening the permanence of the biodiversity offset benefits.
The thesis is organized in two parts. Part I is a comprehensive summary composed of six chapters, whereas Part II presents three articles (one single-authored and two co-authored). The thesis is guided by the following research questions (p. 3):
| 1. | How does the understanding of the concept of biodiversity offsetting influence the implementation of the measure in Uganda? | ||||
| 2. | How do local contexts and resource use affect biodiversity offset implementation? What changes in resource use and control are triggered by biodiversity offsetting in the Gangu Central Forest Reserve? | ||||
| 3. | What are the impacts of biodiversity offsetting on the forest cover, composition and structure of the Gangu Central Forest Reserve? | ||||
On a more somewhat critical note, the conceptual rigor of the thesis, as well as the engagement with Ugandan literature on political ecology and political economy, could have been strengthened in the thesis. In part, this reflects the challenging transition the candidate navigated from more positivist natural sciences to a political ecology approach within geography. Despite this, the thesis and its findings demonstrate the worth of that journey.
Part II contains the three articles:
Article 1: Kigonya, R. 2022. ‘Old wine in a new bottle’: Conceptualization of biodiversity offsets among environmental practitioners in Uganda. Environmental Management 69, 1202–1216.
Article 2: Kigonya, R., Lukas, M.C., Lein, H. & Nakakaawa, C.J. Neglected intricacies of implementing biodiversity offsets on the ground: The social and material transformation of the Gangu Forest Reserve in Uganda. (unpublished manuscript)
Article 3: Kigonya, R., Bayakagaba, P., Ssenyonjo, E. & Nakakaawa, C.J. Biodiversity offsetting in Uganda’s protected areas: A pathway to attaining biodiversity benefits? (unpublished manuscript)
Article 2 is a strong article that considers the complexities of territorialization and transformation in the Gangu Central Forest Reserve directly and indirectly related to offsetting. Both the viewing through the lens of ‘political forests’ and the consideration of state and non-state actor activities are well done. However, these strong concepts could have been productively drawn into the summary and examined more clearly in light of the empirical evidence at hand.
In the article, Kigonya and her co-authors show that de jure protected forest areas more accurately represent a ‘fluid, emerging’ mosaic of forest patches in various states of degradation (but also re-emergence and regrowth). This is very well done and illustrated. This is also the article that focuses most strongly on the justice dimensions of the research. The findings of leakage are further nuanced by the insight that the leakage of the Gangu biodiversity offset project happens not just because poorer residents affected by the offset externalize their extraction issues elsewhere. In fact, collaborative forest management (CFM) arrangements also facilitate the establishment of enclosures for eucalyptus forest stands by wealthier and well-connected external individuals. The findings are well substantiated and echo those of other studies conducted in Uganda.
Article 3 is the evaluative article of the thesis, in which Kigonya and her co-authors make their mark in debates on offsetting. The article is strong for the mixed methods data produced, as it combines data from remote sensing-based forest cover analysis, forest inventories, and community surveys, and compares the situation prior to offsetting and eight years later. However, it would have strengthened the article further to have more insights into how the de facto rezoning took place as extraction was displaced and how officials navigated and justified that decision. This would have provided an interesting angle of discussion on what has been termed in the literature ‘zones of awkward engagement’.
Furthermore, the framing of evaluation in Article 3 is limited to biodiversity benefits, and the political-ecological dimensions highlighted in Article 2 are de-emphasized here. This is understandable in the context of the article, and the focus on permanency is a worthy target, but in the broader context of the thesis it would have been beneficial to see the social justice dimensions interrogated. Here, the political ecology elements, the prominence of which oscillates through the thesis as a whole, recede a little. This more pragmatic vein of the research to some degree explains why political ecology does not appear as a framing approach in Chapter 1, but the thesis would have benefitted from foregrounding political ecology as a framing. In short, there are theoretical/analytical avenues and concepts that appear in the articles (e.g. territorialization, social and material transformation, justice) that are to a limited degree mentioned in the comprehensive summary. This is somewhat of a lost opportunity for showcasing the contributions of the findings to the broader field of studies.
However, as a whole, the thesis represents an independent and valuable contribution to the development of new and relevant knowledge to the field of biodiversity conservation in Uganda, as well as beyond.