In recent years, forest carbon offsetting has been championed as a win-win solution for climate change mitigation, rural development, and sustainability across the Global South. Zimbabwe, in particular, has seen the rise of large-scale carbon offset projects, such as Kariba REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) and Cicada Holdings, which promise to protect forests while generating co-benefits for livelihoods. This article argues that despite these promises, these schemes are reshaping rural Zimbabwe, often entrenching inequalities and raising critical concerns about participation, justice, and long-term sustainability, due to complex and frequently contentious politics of land, governance, and registration.

Carbon Markets and the Promise of Development

The Kariba REDD+ project was launched in 2011 and spans over 1.3 million hectares of communal land in four districts: Nyaminyami, Binga, Mbire, and Hurungwe, located in Mashonaland West province. The Forest Carbon Initiative is marketed as a community-based intervention that aims to reduce emissions by preventing deforestation and promoting sustainable land-use practices. It has funded community gardens, solar-powered boreholes, beekeeping, and conservation farming, improving livelihoods in tangible ways in the communities.1 In contrast, Cicada Holdings is a private carbon developer operating in Honde Valley, Manicaland Province. It represents a more recent entrant into Zimbabwe’s carbon market, offering a new dimension of a private player in the carbon market, which has traditionally been under government control. The Cicada Holdings project focuses on afforestation, distribution of clean cookstoves, and climate-smart agriculture. While on private land, the model also claims co-benefits for surrounding communities and engages in local partnerships.2

At first glance, both projects appear to deliver vital development benefits, boosting household incomes, expanding access to clean energy, and enhancing food security,3 which are essential achievements amid Zimbabwe’s rural climate shocks and energy crises.4 However, this apparent progress conceals deeper, structural tensions. These tensions exist between the community, the state, and REDD+ Project designers regarding access to the forest, registration, and benefit sharing. Carbon markets can foster development, but they also bring new challenges related to land access, registration, decision-making, and community rights. Understanding this dual reality is crucial, as carbon initiatives promise development but also complicate longstanding local issues.

Dispossession Without Displacement

Displacement in the context of carbon markets in Zimbabwe is not always visible. Unlike past state-led development projects, carbon offset projects are resulting in a different form of displacement. Earlier development initiatives, such as the Kariba Dam resettlement of the 1950s, the Tokwe Mukosi Dam in 2014, the Chisumbanje for an ethanol plant, and diamond mining in Marange, resulted in physical displacement.5 In contrast, carbon offset projects are imposing what can be termed “functional” or “structural” displacement. This occurs when communities are restricted from using forests or land they have historically accessed for grazing, gathering firewood, hunting, and other cultural practices.6

In Nyaminyami, some residents of areas under Kariba REDD+ reported being barred from entering forest zones without permits or from collecting wood for domestic use. Though community development projects were introduced, they were not evenly distributed, and access to forest resources was curtailed.7 Similarly, in Honde Valley, participation in Cicada’s afforestation programs often required specific knowledge, land ownership, or access to information, which privileges certain groups over others.8 These exclusions have intersectional differences where they affect women, youth, and indigenous groups more due to their dependence on the forest resources. What emerges is not just a technical project of carbon accounting, but a reconfiguration of land use, authority, and community autonomy. Forests are transformed into carbon assets for global markets, often with limited consultation or meaningful consent from the communities that live closest to them.

The Governance Gap

One of the most striking findings from fieldwork in Nyaminyami and the Honde Valley, as well as key informant interviews, is the mismatch between the rhetoric of community participation and the reality of centralised, top-down governance. Zimbabwe has been implementing decentralisation policies, allowing local governments to run the projects. Interestingly, the role of Rural District Councils (RDCs) in resource management and carbon market schemes is often downplayed, as key decisions about carbon projects, such as registration, revenue allocation, and project design, remain heavily influenced by national ministries and large private investors.9

For example, the tension between local and central authorities was evident when the government halted the Kariba REDD+ project, citing regulatory non-compliances and the need to align with new legal frameworks, such as Statutory Instrument 150 of 2023. Even though the intention was to standardise and register carbon projects, the decision exposed unclear roles and power struggles between local and central authorities. Rural District Councils, which had managed the project for over a decade, were sidelined in favour of central control, also raising important questions about the intentions of the central government in the carbon markets.

Similarly, Cicada Holdings, despite operating on private land, faced delays in registering its project due to unclear and evolving state procedures. Investors cited bureaucratic inefficiencies and a lack of implementation as key deterrents to scaling up projects.10 These governance failures not only stall climate finance, chasing away investors who opt for other countries in the region with clearer registration procedures, but also leave communities facing uncertainty about the future of benefits, project continuity, or land use rights.

The governance concern persists, as evidenced by Zimbabwe’s recent gazetting of Statutory Instrument 48 of 2025. This new regulation repeals the previous rules and establishes a framework for carbon market activities in Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe Carbon Markets Authority (ZiCMA)), mandating that all carbon projects be registered under a central authority.11 While research is essential to understand the uptake of this new law among investors and its implications for existing projects, SI 48 reinforces centralisation by granting the state sweeping control over project approvals, revenue flows, and stakeholder authorisations, highlighting the paradoxes and power asymmetries mentioned above. Communities must now obtain government-approved Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC), and developers are required to invest 20% of the project value in local projects.12 However, questions remain about who monitors these promises and whether community agency is truly embedded. Legacy projects like Kariba REDD+ and Cicada face a 60-day window to comply or be nullified, effectively shifting power away from Rural District Councils and communities.

Everyday Resistance and Silent Contestation

While neither Kariba nor Cicada projects triggered overt conflict, they did produce what James Scott (1985) calls “weapons of the weak”13 and KevinO’Brien (1996; 2013) calls “rightful resistance,”14 everyday acts of resistance that reveal discontent. In Nyaminyami, some community members continued to enter forest areas designated for conservation, citing survival needs. Chiefs and elders in Binga reported learning about new carbon deals through media outlets rather than through formal consultations, which has bred mistrust.15

These acts of quiet defiance and disengagement highlight a growing legitimacy gap. While donors, governments, and developers frame carbon offsetting as a technocratic solution, for many rural residents, it is another iteration of resource extraction, disguised as climate mitigation and sustainability. This issue highlights the point that without trust and genuine inclusion, well-crafted climate initiatives can elicit grievances and contestation, adversely affecting local communities in proximity to these schemes.

Forests as Carbon, Forests as Culture

A critical tension in Zimbabwe’s forest carbon projects is the commodification of nature. Forests that were once seen as sacred, a source of subsistence, or communally owned are increasingly framed as repositories of carbon to be quantified, monetised, and traded.16 This shift reshapes how forests are valued both in symbolic terms and in everyday use. By redefining forests as carbon assets, these projects risk erasing their cultural, ecological, and spiritual significance. For many communities, especially in Binga and Honde Valley, forests are not just trees; they are ancestral homelands, sacred sites, and sources of collective identity. When forests become the domain of offset markets and investors, they are re-territorialised, not through eviction, but through exclusionary rules, contracts, and conservation boundaries.17

This discursive dispossession, where land is redefined in ways that marginalise local understandings, reflects broader critiques of “green grabbing” and “carbon colonialism.”18 It complicates the widely accepted notion of win-win solutions, highlighting how environmental objectives, if pursued without inclusive and context-sensitive planning, can inadvertently harm the very communities they aim to help. 

Toward Just and Inclusive Carbon Governance

The Zimbabwean experience offers important lessons for the future of carbon markets in Africa and beyond. Governance structures must be transparent, inclusive, and decentralised. The new SI 48 of 2025 sidelines local communities, and power is centralised. Meaningful participation of local communities that are most affected can go a long way in ensuring community agency and avoiding issues of symbolic and discursive displacement. Acknowledging this need, in May 2025, the Zimbabwean Cabinet approved the Climate Change Management Bill,19 which marks a critical step toward national institutional reform.

Additionally, on forest carbon projects, land tenure security is critical. In communal areas where customary tenure dominates, carbon projects must recognise and formalise community rights to prevent elite capture, displacements, and exclusion. Without secure land rights, communities are vulnerable to dispossession even under the banner of climate change mitigation.

Carbon projects should also embrace intersectional approaches. This involves taking into cognisance the views of women, youth, and marginalised groups throughout the project cycle, not just as mere project beneficiaries. The positive impacts of cookstoves or gardens are limited if they reinforce existing hierarchies or leave out vulnerable populations.

Finally, policy coherence is crucial in achieving climate justice. Zimbabwe’s regulatory landscape needs to strike a balance between investor confidence and local accountability. When carbon governance is fragmented or too centralised, as seen in the abrupt halt of long-running projects, it weakens trust and drives away climate investors. To ensure carbon markets benefit both the climate and communities, policies must be clear, inclusive, and consistent.

Conclusion

Forest carbon projects in Zimbabwe show the contradictions at the heart of global climate finance. The conundrum is visible where, on one hand, they bring tangible benefits, such as improved livelihoods, energy access, and climate resilience; on the other hand, they also reproduce historical patterns of exclusion, centralised control, and dispossession. Forest carbon schemes are becoming spaces of both hope and contestation, where development aspirations collide with local realities. As carbon markets expand in Africa, Zimbabwe’s case shows the risks and the need for more inclusive and transparent approaches. The socio-political aspects of forest carbon must be as central to our conversations as the science of emissions. Without justice, participation, and local legitimacy, the assurance of carbon offsetting will remain a promise rather than a solution.

Endnotes

  1. Silber, T. The Kariba REDD+ Project CCBS Project Design Document, Climate, Community & Biodiversity Standard, Second Edition. South Pole Carbon Asset Management, 2011.

  2. Cicada Holdings. “Our Operations.” 2024. https://www.cicada.africa.

  3. Fieldwork conducted in Nyaminyami District and Honde Valley, Zimbabwe, October–December 2024. Interviews with community leaders, local government, and community members.

  4. Tirivangasi, Happy M., and Louis Nyahunda. “Challenges Faced by Rural People in Mitigating the Effects of Climate Change in the Mazungunye Communal Lands, Zimbabwe.” Jàmbá: Journal of Disaster Risk Studies 11, no. 1 (2019): 1–9.

  5. Batisai, Kezia, and Fadzai Chipato. “Displacements and Land Conflicts: Implications for Land Tenure Security and Gendered Livelihoods in Zimbabwe Post-2017.” In The Future of Zimbabwe’s Agrarian Sector, 187–207. Routledge, 2022.

  6. Fieldwork conducted in Nyaminyami, Zimbabwe, October–December 2024. Interviews with community leaders, local government, and community members.

  7. Fieldwork conducted in Nyaminyami and Honde Valley, Zimbabwe, October–December 2024. Interviews with community leaders, local government, and community members.

  8. Fieldwork conducted in Nyaminyami and Honde Valley, Zimbabwe, October–December 2024. Interviews with community leaders, local government, and community members.

  9. Zinyama, T., and D. P. Chimanikire. The Nuts and Bolts of Devolution in Zimbabwe: Designing the Provincial and Metropolitan Councils. Sabinet African Journals. https://journals.co.za/doi/pdf/10.10520/EJC-18123D8bbb.

  10. Fieldwork conducted with key informants, Zimbabwe, October–December 2024.

  11. “Carbon Trading (General) Regulations, 2025.” Veritas Zimbabwe. https://www.veritaszim.net/sites/veritas_d/files/SI%202025048%20Carbon%20Trading%20%28General%29%20Regulations%2C%202025.pdf.

  12. “New Regulations for Carbon Credit Trading.” ESG Network Zimbabwe. https://esgnetworkzimbabwe.co.zw/new-regulations-for-carbon-credit-trading/#:~:text=The%20regulations%20also%20address%20the,prioritizing%20environmental%20and%20social%20considerations.

  13. Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985.

  14. O’Brien, Kevin J. “Rightful Resistance.” World Politics 49, no. 1 (1996): 31–55. Cambridge University Press.
      ———. “Rightful Resistance Revisited.” Journal of Peasant Studies 40, no. 6 (2013): 1051–1062. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2013.821466.

  15. Fieldwork conducted in Nyaminyami, Zimbabwe, October–December 2024. Interviews with community leaders, local government, and community members.

  16. Basure, H. S., L. Nhodo, C. Dube, and R. Kanyemba. “Death and the Sociocultural Dimensions of Forced Relocations: Experiences from the Tugwi-Mukosi Displacement in Masvingo Province, Zimbabwe.” Anthropology Southern Africa 44, no. 2 (2021): 80–93.

  17. Functional/structural displacement. [Clarify if this is a source, concept note, or unpublished fieldwork reference.]

  18. Leach, Melissa, James Fairhead, and James Fraser. “Green Grabs and Biochar: Revaluing African Soils and Farming in the New Carbon Economy.” In Green Grabbing: A New Appropriation of Nature, 49–72. Routledge, 2015.

  19. “Zimbabwe Sets Out Climate Ambitions with Climate Change Management Bill.” African Climate Wire, May 2025. https://africanclimatewire.org/2025/05/zimbabwe-sets-out-climate-ambitions-with-climate-change-managementbill/#:~:text=Zimbabwe’s%20Cabinet%20recently%20approved%20the,National%20Climate%20Change%20Adaptation%20Plan

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