The Evolution of Climate and Forestry Policy Networks in the Global South

This paper investigates the unfolding of the relationship between collaborative and information exchange processes and power in climate change policy networks around forest mitigation in the Global South. Policy processes around Reducing Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) has been emerges over a decade ago now and have evolved from policy design and experimentation with pilot projects to implementation. National REDD+ policy domain include international and domestic actors that are engaged in the different sectors around land use and have diverse interests. While the policy network literature has investigated the determinants of collaboration networks (Ingold and Fischer, 2014), we have limited knowledge about the relationship between collaboration, information sharing and power and how it evolves over time, in particular in emerging policy networks. This study utilizes a comparative design to investigate how collaboration and information flows in REDD+ national policy networks in Brazil, Indonesia and Vietnam have evolved over time, and how power shifts has influenced such changes. The paper is based on longitudinal analysis of networks data (Desmarais and Cranmer, 2018; Leifeld and Cranmer, 2015) from 2012 and 2016.