REDD+ policy networks analysis in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)

Forests play a key role in international efforts to mitigate climate change. Reduced deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), a program under the UNFCCC, features as an important part in climate change mitigation efforts in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Since the country’s commitment in 2009, the REDD+ policy domain in the DRC have included local, national, and international governmental and nongovernmental actors interacting with each other in networks structures. These actors are vested with different and sometimes overlapping resources, including competing and in some cases potentially conflicting ideas, interest and information on their respective relevance and policy options to successfully address key drivers of deforestation and forest degradation. Investigating REDD+ actors’ policy networks structures to understand their patterns and the influence of actors’ interactions on policy outcome involves the collection of actors’ stances and relational data on subjective, sensitive and sometimes to be treated as confidential issues. These include among other the perception of influence, finance flows, and the conflict and collaboration regarding not only themselves, but also other actors operating in the same policy domain and the relations among them. The data collection uses survey and semi-structured interviews with organizational key respondents. This contribution seeks to advance our understanding of the best approaches to triangulate and ensure consistency and reliability of our data in the effort to capture REDD+ policy arena in DRC, and the specific structural features that enable or hinder the required policy change. In addition, we will critically discuss our experiences and the struggles we encountered to ensure the validity of the analysis of data collected in a politically charged domain, and in the practicalities of gathering network data in an emerging, rapidly changing and contested policy domain.