Conjuring carbon: Resource materialities in Timor-Leste

Introduction

Carbon emission trading and offsetting have created novel forms of exchangeable property that become commodities when traded (Corbera and Martin, 2015). Carbon offsets are generally commodified into saleable units through the development of specific projects that reduce carbon emissions the outputs of which can be quantified, owned, and traded (Bumpus and Liverman, 2008). Tracing empirical work into the ‘materiality’ of place-based carbon, this paper examines the entangled market and non-market variables of a tree-planting program that produces carbon credits in the Matebian mountain range in eastern Timor-Leste, a program financed by a voluntary carbon offset program, WithOneSeed/CarbonSocial (WOS). Established in 2010, WOS is purported to provide viable and sustainable livelihoods by increasing farmer's income, restoring watersheds, enhancing farm productivity, improving access to cultural resources, and contributing to more diversified local markets. The long-term aim is to assist Timor-Leste to become carbon neutral and hence leverage the on-going sale of the country's carbon credits. In this paper, we examine this tree planting and carbon offset program and explore the fundamental tensions between (1) the ways in which carbon-offsetting is dependent on, and activating of, financialisation and capital accumulation and (2) the kinds of relations people have with their environment in rural areas in Timor-Leste. What, we ask, happens to these relations when carbon-offsetting schemes are introduced?

The paper comprises a narrative account of our interactions with this program through three field visits in 2018, 2019 and 2022. We use narrative to illuminate how processes of resource materiality, the crosscutting phenomenon bound up in the making of resources, enable both object commodification and commodity indigenisation. We define materiality here as ‘the real or imagined physical qualities of a thing or substance in a social historical setting’ (Onneweer, 2014: 96). We show how the processes of commodification and commodity indigenisation (commodities reframed through rural Timorese economic logics) are manifest and entangled with an externally supported tree planting and carbon program, and the ways in which this context is constitutive of the qualities of carbon that local actors seek to understand and value. Deploying the concept of ‘cultural biographies’ of the life cycle of things (Kopytoff, 1986) we pull apart (and reconnect) the various logics and values associated with the social life of carbon (Goodman and Boyd, 2011) and the trees in which it is sequestered. Trees, in this remote rural setting, are simultaneously metaphors for life, commodities, markers of property, objects of intergenerational exchange, and constitutive of complex socio-ecological relations. We ask whether enrolling farmers and trees in the processes of making and selling carbon credits strengthens or diminishes these endogenous relations. We seek to understand what exactly is being transformed, or conserved, through these socially embedded market processes, and where they might be headed.

A sizeable literature analyses the production processes of carbon offsets and their effects on the social and material realities from which they emerge. Much of this literature is focused on structural trends and is concerned with how value arises and to whom it accrues through, for example, changes in access to resources, tenure, or other rights in the Global South, where many offsetting projects are located (Shapiro-Garza et al., 2019). The power relations that determine who sets or influences the conditions under which landscapes in project areas are altered is a particular concern of this critical literature (see, for example, Carton and Andersson, 2018). A key conclusion is that carbon offsetting is implicated in commodification and financialisation processes that represent a form of ‘value abstraction’ (Fletcher and Büscher, 2017) that facilitates capital accumulation and, in places, dispossesses and deterritorialises vulnerable groups from carbon rights, land resources, or both (Carton and Andersson, 2017; Nel, 2017). According to Osborne and Shapiro-Garza (2018: 91), ‘carbon forestry has largely failed to deliver promised local livelihood benefits’.

Consistent with the critique of neoliberal natures, Dunlap and Sullivan (2019) argue that environmental markets, including for carbon, are grounded in an inevitable process of ‘accumulation by alienation’ and caution against the vain and naive hope of highlighting the opportunities for local agency and benefit in carbon offsetting. For them, structure and history have proven their masterful dominance over a more hopeful relationality enrolled to circumvent these oppressive formations. Drawing on a long history of political economic analysis, they see capitalist alienation and accumulation in the global frontiers of environmental markets inextricably linked to poverty, indeed reliant upon it and other forms of difference such as race, and as tied to exploitative practices that take advantage of both cheap labour and nature. In this view, the accumulation of capital is inevitably tied to peripheries and frontiers that provide cheap access to labour and resources to find cheap emissions reductions (Bumpus and Liverman, 2008).

So-called subsistence or semi-subsistence economies, like those found in Timor-Leste, offer the perfect opportunity for capitalism in these contexts, particularly as labour is not reproduced in a fully marketized system and natural resources tend to be governed under customary systems that may not be recognised or protected by states. In this view, commodification, and the objectifications and quantifications upon which it rests, is incapable of responding to socio-ecological crises or countering its breakdowns. In such critiques commodification is itself an alienated response thus we should expect that efforts to make nature more amenable to carbon market imperatives will ‘further naturalize habits, attitudes and perspectives that alienate people from natures-beyond-the-human, as well as from each other’ (Dunlap and Sullivan, 2019: 18).

We argue that this asserted capitalist dominance over, and exploitation of, cheap labour and nature in resource frontiers, as well as the effects on social relations (however defined locally), needs to be investigated contextually and empirically (see also Osborne and Shapiro-Garza, 2018; Purdon, 2018; Shapiro-Garza et al., 2019). The partial autonomy, strength and potential resistance of so-called subsistence or semi-subsistence systems is, we argue, an outcome of the broader moral economies in which these (often) customary systems are embedded (Batterbury et al., 2015). In Timor-Leste such more-than-human moral economies continually engage people in prescribed and dynamic reciprocal relationships of exchange with a wider ecology of significant others, including clan or house-based alliances and their associated ancestral spirit ecologies (Palmer, 2015). We seek to reveal the ways in which such more-than-human practices of caring are woven through this carbon program; how diverse understandings of labour (of farmers and trees) and property are deployed; and the ways in which materials and relations are being recognised and exchanged as they are continuously brought into being through these new arrangements (Gibson et al., 2018; Jackson et al., 2017). Our analytical approach suggests that structuralist political economy readings of commodity processes, privilege alienation through commodification over close investigation of the diverse social worlds and the situated agency of local actors.

In this paper, we prioritise an exploration of the local agencies and logics which emerge from the structural conditions of rural Timorese lifeways and the ways in which they, in turn, create the possibility for alternative readings of commodification processes. We suggest such close investigations are necessary to assess the importance of what such diverse social worlds are doing, how they are responding to and reshaping program design. To not do so, we argue, risks a similar epistemological violence and ontological erasure. Hence, we show in a place-specific way, the ‘interdependent and dialectical relations between structure and agency’ (Carton and Andersson, 2017) and the ways this influences fluid ‘cultural biographies of things’ (Kopytoff 1986) in this carbon program. In doing so, we are attuned as well to the structure and agency of the multiple social orders which lie ‘behind the order of things’ (Damon, 2002: 131). As Kopytoff (1986) argues both ‘persons and things’ have lives (biographies) and as both may be subject to commodification, biographies of things can make salient what might otherwise remain obscure. Similarly, Appadurai (1986), drawing on ethnographic examples (the kula system of the Western Pacific and art auctions), argues that the flow of commodities in any given situation is a shifting compromise between socially regulated paths and competitively inspired diversions; a commodity he writes is not a kind of thing but a phase in the life of some things. As Langton et al. (2006: 309) argue, commodities ‘are adapted and redefined by people who make relationships with them in ever changing circumstances’.

In the semi-subsistence economy of the Baguia administrative post of Timor-Leste, carbon trading has been actively welcomed by over 800 small-holder farmers. In this evolving arrangement, we discern a more flexible and pragmatic economic logic than is acknowledged by critics (Dunlap and Sullivan, 2019), one based as well in an indigenous theory of accumulation, where exploiting and gaining wealth is encouraged and deeply historicized. Baguia's highland forests were decimated during more than two decades of conflict with the country's Indonesian occupiers (1975–1999) and through subsequent post-Independence population return and land-clearing activities. It is in this context that the WOS program asserts that it provides viable and environmentally sustainable livelihoods by restoring watershed services (through the establishment of an interconnected mosaic of forests from the mountains to the coast), enhancing agricultural productivity (via increased soil fertility and crop yields), improving access to cultural resources and wellbeing (through the reforestation of particular trees, including fruit trees, associated forest products, restoration of the forest canopy and locally significant springs, and through forest- and indigenous knowledge-based educational programs), and contributing to more diversified local economic markets, skills and participation. To distribute wealth more evenly the number of trees each farmer could plant (on their own customary lands, or lands where they have community-acknowledged planting rights) ¹ under the program was capped at 1200 trees. The program is distinctive in its approach to remuneration of participation. Since its inception each tree has been geo-located, which provides a method of record keeping for the distribution of annual flat-rate cash benefit accruing to each participating farmer from the carbon-offset sales that are aggregated across all land use classifications. Farmers are not remunerated for an individual tree's carbon performance but for their care for each living tree.

For people in Baguia and across Timor-Leste, the wealth of trees takes a particular social form: they are both relational and valuable property. Alongside their medicinal and other local uses, trees that are planted (and hence owned) are frequently gifted by parents to their children as a part of their inheritance (and, in common with other customary land tenure systems in the country (Fitzpatrick et al., 2012), these rights may or may not be linked to property rights in the land where they are grown). People have also continuously adapted to changing local, colonial and nation-state influences on their sociality, economy and land uses (see Silva et al., in press). Under Baguia's non-codified customary land tenure system, communally and even individually owned land can be at least partially alienated by tree plantings, and people pay close attention to the planting histories and activities on particular lands. While for the most part these claims are social tenures, recognised through local customary processes and activated in-common with other farmers, they are also pathways to wealth accumulation (of valuable timbers and land, and through enhanced social capital in areas where the trees but not the land are owned). Trees have histories and these histories carry the name of their planters (a social fact that is now also reflected in the use of global positioning system (GPS) technology to geo-locate trees), and these processes narrativise and imbricate the bodies of trees and their planters into the creation of wealth through intergenerational alliances and exchanges (cf. Damon, 2002). Trees are tied as well to the spirits that are associated with that land (Palmer, 2015), more-than-human agents that provide both trees and people with the possibilities for life and vitality. Identifying nature, labour, and other social relations as historical and transformative (Dove, 1998; Onneweer, 2014), we ask how this program of making and selling carbon offsets is coming into being and being fashioned as another ‘historical part of the landscape’ (Onneweer, 2014: 112), and with what effects.

Elsewhere in the Indonesian archipelago some have argued that the result of many such environmental conservation projects is an environmental subjectivity or ‘environmentality’ (Li, 2007) through which local actors actively acquiesce to an externally driven environmental governance agenda. Meanwhile, Tsing has explored how short of submitting to imposed conservation ideas, local people interpret those ideas in their own way and act in ‘friction’ with dominant practices (Tsing, 2011). Similarly, Dove (1998) argued that the agro-ecological transformations of introduced smallholder rubber plantations in Borneo have been embraced by Indigenous peoples to both leverage and offset outsider impositions and transgressions. In Timor-Leste, we argue that the resource materiality of carbon-offsetting scheme involving tree planting is creating something else: new openings for local people to shape the biography of emerging environmental commodities.

Our inquiry is informed by three visits to Baguia during which time we have spoken with approximately 250 farmers, ritual leaders, program managers and staff, as well as provincial and local government administrators. ² A fuller analysis of the qualitative data obtained from interviews is forthcoming but here we focus on the visit of 2019. At that time, we closely observed a weeklong program audit conducted in accordance with the procedures of the Gold Standard (GS), an organisation which is prominent amongst carbon market participants for its inclusion of sustainable development criteria (Lehmann, 2019). The audit took place three years after WOS was validated and entered the marketplace. By verifying the carbon reductions that serve to demonstrate to buyers the physical existence and ethical properties of the carbon credits on offer, an audit is considered a crucial moment in life of a carbon-offset program (Milne and Mahanty, 2019). According to Strathern (2000: 2, 1) audit regimes accompany a ‘specific epoch in Western international affairs’: they are ‘a kind of culture on the make’, agentive world-regulating processes aimed at determining the allocation of resources and the credibility of the enterprises. This audit was also significant as an encounter between local and global economies of trees and carbon. It was a crucial moment in the process of commodity indigenisation, one that brought to the fore tensions over what is and is not visible in a commodity's life cycle.

In the remainder of the paper, we elucidate our approach to understanding these commodification processes and narrativize the ethnographic encounter in which carbon is actively conjured. We then discuss what this means for the ways in which identified processes of resource materiality enable both object commodification and commodity indigenisation.

Commodification processes

The chequered history of agroforestry plantations in Timor-Leste is littered with largely failed attempts of colonial control and subjugation of rural Timorese populations (Shepherd and McWilliam, 2013). For the most part, the remote region of Baguia has remained outside large-scale colonial and state-based attempts to regulate land use and agricultural practices and, as a consequence, there is no local history of plantation labour or peasantisation (cf. Peluso, 2017). Likewise, in contrast to the alienation of conventional state-based forestry approaches, carbon agroforestry as it is currently constituted in a small number of cases across the country involves direct cash benefits accruing to smallholder farmers through community-led voluntary reforestation programs. What is also different about carbon agroforestry is the immateriality of the ‘object’ of commodification (Osborne and Shapiro-Garza, 2018). Carbon products are socially constructed and non-tangible (Milne and Mahanty, 2019) and for these significant characteristics they are often referred to as virtual. Bumpus and Liverman (2008: 136) explain that offset projects materially create carbon in sinks or destroy it in reduction activities, but eventually when traded carbon becomes a ‘virtual commodity that is abstracted and transferred across space as a tonne of reduced carbon’.

Osborne and Shapiro-Garza (2018: 91) explain that to sell carbon on a market it must be ‘metaphorically “disembedded”’ from its context through complex and costly techniques of measurement and monitoring. According to Bumpus (2011: 612), commodification of ‘carbon reductions takes place through a socionatural–technical complex that is defined by the material nature of technology's interaction with the atmosphere, local social processes and the evolving governing systems of carbon markets’. The relationship between carbon products and their material and social underpinnings remains relatively unmapped (Milne and Mahanty, 2019; Carton and Andersson, 2017). In this paper, we are interested primarily in the middle part of this tenuous and co-productive complex, the ‘material nature of technology's interaction with … local social processes’. We suggest that paying closer attention to such processes creates openings to explore ways to rethink the evolving governing systems of carbon markets, especially in the context of its validation and verification ‘rituals’ (Nel, 2017: 148).

In thinking about carbon credits and their socionatural–technical complex, we draw as well on historical and anthropological literature that discusses how new things become ‘social currency’, how value is contested, and with what consequences, including for authority and redistribution (Dove, 1998; Hägerdal, 2019; Wellfelt and Hägerdal, 2019; Onneweer, 2014; Richardson and Weszkalnys, 2014; Kaartinen, 2016; Nahun-Claudel, 2018). As described above, we take inspiration from the contention of Appadurai (1986) and Kopytoff (1986) that certain things have a social life which we need to better understand. We also draw inspiration from Sahlins’s (1999) understanding of the process of ‘commodity indigenisation’ wherein foreign objects are assimilated and accorded meaning within pre-existing conceptual worlds.

There are clear universal elements in the carbon commodification process. Offsetting relies on rules, standards, and measurement to abstract the carbon and make the offset legible as a bearer of value (Robertson, 2012; Milne and Mahanty, 2019). There are also economic, environmental, and socio-cultural benefits (differently and unevenly manifest and understood across sites/cultures) which are associated with the offset and can be ‘monetized’ when exchanged in the voluntary carbon market. Yet it is through an analysis of particular moments in these (often uneasy) commodification processes and close observation of the actions and practices of local actors that we also discern a process of commodity indigenisation occurring. There are times when making the invisible carbon-offset commodity visible, or at least palpable, is a highly sought-after process, one that is laden with power. Within the intersections of these processes, we provide a highly localized account of the social life of carbon and commodity indigenisation in Timor-Leste – a life which is not without tension and which hinges on acknowledging processes in which carbon commodities are at once fictitious and therefore partial or incomplete.

We begin briefly with the concept of fictitious commodities, which several scholars have invoked to describe the dynamics of carbon offsets (Osborne and Shapiro-Garza, 2018; Bumpus and Liverman, 2008). According to Polanyi (1944), land (or what is today synonymous with ‘nature’) and labour are special categories of commodities that exist and are produced prior to coordination by the market. As their commodification is tied to other biophysical and social processes they can only ever be partially embedded in markets, and hence they are pseudo or fictitious commodities. As Peluso (2012: 82) writes, ‘Polanyi made this important point in order to explain what was transformative and new about capitalism as an encompassing market society’. A tree can now be imagined as a commodity with an exchange value because it sequesters or reduces carbon, yet this is only a very minor or trivial component of its broader biophysical metabolism. As Osborne and Shapiro-Garza (2018: 91) write, because carbon is sequestered in trees they can ‘never fully be divorced from the place of production or the people who produce them’ yet nonetheless this carbon can be abstracted for exchange on the market, making them quintessential fictitious commodities. In short, the ‘commodification of “nature's products, places and processes” produces new sorts of socio-natures’ (Peluso 2012: 79). At the same time, as we argue in this paper, carbon is also only a minor part of a tree's social metabolism and the construction of its cultural biography (and vice versa). By social metabolism we mean the more-than-human social relations of trees and the role of these relations in producing carbon offsets. By cultural biography we mean examining a thing (a tree or carbon in this case) as a ‘culturally constructed entity, with culturally constructed meanings, and classified and reclassified into culturally constitutive categories’ which move fluidly in and out of stages and convergences of commodification and decommodification (Koptyoff, 1986: 68).

Wherever they are found, fictitious commodities have particular and complicated socio-naturally embedded histories. In this paper, we are interested in the historical processes of socio-natural mobilisation that enable people to give presence to and embed the carbon-offset commodity (cf. Osborne and Shapiro-Garza, 2018). Following Onneweer (2014: 114), we argue that it is ‘projects [which] make the materiality of resources’. In new resource frontiers these historical projects involve varied expressions of sociality and value not just alienation and impoverishment (Onneweer, 2014: 104). By elucidating these expressions and the varied agencies at work within these socio-natural spaces, including the agency of trees, we consider the moral economic orders which underpin the how and what of ‘bringing nature into commodity-form’ (Prudham, 2009: 129). While we understand these capitalist, state-based and locally driven moral economic orders to be potentially diverse, here we highlight the local agencies binding processes of commodity indigenisation to a more-than-human moral order. In this inevitable ‘social struggle over the allocation of biophysical nature’ (Prudham, 2009: 128), we pay attention to the stages in the life cycle of things and the political and ethical drivers of their commodification. We argue that locally complex socio-natural relations and moral economies both allow and reveal the cultural biographies which are an essential part of the fluid movements involved in conjuring carbon.

Below we trace the work of this socio-natural mobilisation and the ‘presencing’ of a commodity during the audit. The literature says that such procedures are key to value creation, which occurs through observances of bureaucratic and technical rituals and routines (Robertson, 2012), as well as spectacle (Milne and Mahanty, 2019). It is also often the moment in which violence is enacted in these schemes. For instance, Milne and Mahanty (2019: 133) observed in Cambodian projects an ‘“audit culture” that is both apolitical and indifferent to local realities’ and responsible for significant environmental and social injustices.

In this encounter, we observed several moments that told a different story: moments wherein spectacle merged with the customary realm to enable a cross-over between rituals of measurement and other rituals which convinced people of authenticity, and which sought to make visible both the otherwise invisible commodity and the networked relations in which they were embedded (in other words, to both reveal and embrace cultural biographies of trees and carbon). We also observed the ways in which program managers sought to conserve the legitimacy of locally designed rules of carbon production and to shape at least some of the complex socio-ecological conditions under which the program will generate saleable carbon to underwrite forest repair.

What is this thing called carbon? Notes from a 2019 carbon audit

In 2019, at the invitation of WOS, we joined staff and program management in attending the program's second external carbon performance audit, an encounter that was all at once amazing and, at times, seemingly ridiculous. What is this thing called carbon? What is its social world and how is it being brought to presence here in these few days in the mountains of Baguia?

The auditor ³ , from an Australian company accredited by the international organisation, Gold Standard Foundation, was conforming to the procedures of Afforestation/Reforestation Requirements of GS carbon offsets and guided by the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs). The aim of this audit was to verify carbon reductions achieved through sequestration, whereas program outcomes relating to the SDGs are to be assessed in 2024. For the auditor, this meant verifying the program's estimates of the number, types, and size of trees. They had in hand documents that outlined the community's CarbonSocial program and governance processes, particularly the implementation of Free and Prior Informed Consent (FPIC) by participating farmers that is a requirement of the GS. Verification of the existence of these documents was sufficient for compliance. The auditor therefore did not meet with farmers to understand the region's social complexity, property rights to land (or trees) or other resource management institutions, or how well the program was governed; he needed only to validate the existence of the claimed carbon reductions. This entailed inspecting and measuring a cross sample of the program's trees to confirm the estimated change in biomass since the previous audit. That was the reality that needed to be verified. Everything else was – at least at some level – extraneous.

As we walked in through the re-established canopy deep in a valley filled with ‘growth’ and heat, we were struck by the strangeness of this bunch of people (local Timorese and foreigners who had flown in from afar) gathering around trees with measuring tapes and GPS devices to make carbon legible. The auditor asked Sue to help verify the measurements being taken by the WOS staff. In moving quickly to fulfil the demands of a long day measuring trees, we were stepping on the community's food crops – underfoot there were pineapples growing, and no doubt, other things – but no-one seemed to mind. The exercise this day was all about the trees and carbon.

‘Oh, yes’, said two old men with whom we had stopped to chat on the mountain roadside, ‘of course you’re going to look at trees. That is what foreigners do.’ For some years now WOS local staff member Emilio had been measuring trees by running a measuring tape 1.3 metres up their trunk. This was his adaptation to establishing the DBH (diameter at breast height) developed in the 1920s by foresters in North America. But the auditor intervened on this occasion to say that the process was taking up too much time. ‘Use your body as a proxy’, he said. For Emilio, 1.3 m was level with his nose. He spent the next few hours pressing his nose against trees to mark the spot. Then he would extend his tape, now wrapped about his neck, around the crop of mahogany trees planted in 2010. The diameter measurements came in: 52 cm, 53 cm, 54 cm, 39 cm and 43 cm (see Figure 1). So it went on.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Measuring tree diameter during audit with tape and recording tree location with data logger, July 2019.

How, Emilio later asked Marnie (the Australian ‘carbon engineer’ from WOS), does this measurement process enable us to know the amount of dirty air the tree is sucking up? Supa ar foer (suck in the dirty air) is the way carbon offsets are explained locally. Lisa had volunteered to help translate for the program team, including the auditor, but the translations soon became stilted. Marnie explained about equations for calculating a generic rate of carbon sequestration for each tree species, their mass and diameter and circumferences; endogenous and exogenous formulas for calculating biomass accumulation; and vegetation classification schemes for estimating carbon baselines (e.g., cropland, grassland). Lisa struggled to translate into Tetum, a lingua franca which lacks a detailed scientific vocabulary. We soon realised that Marnie spoke good Portuguese. This was much more useful. Emilio took it all in with great interest and, from the questions he asked in response, he clearly got the principles, or at least understood the power the principles contained.

In this valley, the farmer hosting us and whose trees we had come to measure was an early adopter. He was one of the first farmers to be convinced about the potential of the program and to set aside community fears that the program was a Trojan horse for a foreign land take-over. The now-deceased local program leader had worked on him for months to convince him of the benefits of the program. The old man was now fully enrolled and a great supporter.

When Lisa had visited the year before, she had also been there to see the trees. But on that first visit in 2018, the food crops growing in the fields and in the understorey were just as much the focus of attention. Program staff had pointed out each food source in careful detail, taking great pride in the ones that had slipped out of local diets, but which the WOS program was working to bring back into dietary ‘fashion’. One was kontas, a red lily like plant with a long white tuber growing seemingly wild through the valley. ‘This was something that kept us alive when we were hiding out in the jungle during the early years of the Indonesian invasion. It is good food. We need to keep using it’, said Leopoldina the local program leader.

The year before we had visited the sacred clan origin houses perched on its ridges. This year we did not visit the origin houses. They were not even mentioned. There was no need, it seemed, to make these cultural aspects, so integral to the valley and its livelihoods, visible. Yet later as we struggled slowly back up the steep muddy mountain path, Leo called out for us to step to the side and make way for some ‘friends’ coming up hillside behind us. They were two young boys carrying on their shoulders half a large dead pig which was tethered to a stick. ‘Someone has died’, Leo told us. What she did not say was that this pig was a gift being taken to the mortuary ceremony to honour affinal alliances between origin house communities. While on this day, the most real and pressing business of the valley would be carried out there, for outsiders the ways in which tree planting and carbon credits were now a part of that lifeworld would remain opaque.

The next day we were down on the plains, the so-called grasslands, which is a landscape that has a different rate of carbon sequestration to that of the forest valley. There we measured more trees. This time Emilio and other staff used newly fashioned standardized measuring sticks, not their bodies. Yet on this day tensions in the process became evident. It turned out that the auditor needed to see only specific tree samples, selections of those which had been previously geo-located and for which there was existing data. Others, such as the 2018 seedlings that had been planted, but not yet mapped, could not count towards the total carbon reduction from the program this year. Their own existence could not verify them, and they were left out of the audit.

On that day we had also been scheduled to visit another farmer elsewhere and measure his trees. Yet when the auditor learnt that this farmer's trees were planted in 2010, the visit was aborted because his trees were considered redundant to the audit's sampling methodology. We had already verified a 2010 cohort earlier that day. The farmer and the WOS staff member who worked with him were devastated. For them our visit was a highly anticipated encounter, one which would bring the farmer and his family a range of co-benefits – social standing and acknowledgement of their role in the program vis-a-vis his neighbours, for example. Yet for the purpose of the carbon audit, such benefits did not count.

Earlier we had sat under the ficus tree by a school, near an area of planted mahogany trees. The senior teacher at the tiny Catholic school was the farmer of the trees we were measuring. He explained that right now he and other tree farmers were ‘planting money; in the future their children will pick it’. Already, he said, a freshwater spring had come back to life just down below the school and the reforested area. Nonetheless, he made clear the community expectation that at the end of the 30-year carbon farming period, such trees would be felled by their owners for their valuable timber resources.

We were joined at the school by the administrator of the Baguia area. Talk turned to the many years of armed resistance to Indonesian rule. These were tough times, he said. The repression was so great. But the struggle and sacrifice of those who had lost their lives fighting in the jungle was, he said, becoming worth it. We sat below the same craggy peaks and forest which had sheltered the Timorese resistance for more than two decades. The emotion of the conversation and the memories that it kept alive clearly choked him up. He paused for a while, then continued. ‘The reason I support this program is that it is making Baguia alive again, growing new forest and shoots. It's also taking our economy, small and remote as it is, forward.’ ‘Besides’, he added, ‘we need help, any we can get. Our state and government processes are new, they are not yet an adult.’

We asked him if he thought the community needed to know about the details of the carbon-offset market with which they were now engaging. ‘In the beginning, not so much’, he said. ‘Then the aim was forest restoration. But now our aim is to keep growing and to build an economy out of this. For that, people need access to this knowledge and access to the power associated with that knowledge. They need to understand the process and engage with these new markets.’

Holding together these aspirations for new life, forest restoration, for timber and for carbon sales is a complex undertaking. They must be variously held together and pulled apart. During this audit, we were prioritising carbon, measuring individual trees for their distinctive contributions to offsets – making or conjuring valuable credits to sell. It was a risky process. There was going to be a need to re-embed the trees and the farmers with the forest and a wider more-than-human community. In the longer term, to valorize the forest (not individual trees) as the carbon producer, and the farmers as an integral part of this regenerating community, the program would need to creatively manage the risks of relying on requirements stipulated by the demands of a global carbon market.

Along with the administrator, we visited another sacred origin house community under the peaks of another part of the mountain range. After a steep walk we arrived at forested terraced fields cascading below a classically thatched timber origin house structure. The roof beams of the house were carved and decorated with the symbols of deep cultural power – birds, sun, moon, stars. The area below the house was brimming with activities. There were 30 active farmers here, all in their 70s. Their children had moved to the towns for work and education, leaving the grandchildren behind in their care. They were all busy preparing lunch to welcome our group into their space. After a formal gift-giving ceremony of woven scarves (tais) to honour the visitors, we sat and ate together under the shade of the house. It was then time for formal presentations and Leo, as program leader, asked the auditor to say a few words. ‘Tell them about carbon’, she said. ‘They want to know.’

‘Well’, the auditor began, ‘carbon is something that makes up a tree. A tree is carbon and water. Carbon dioxide is a polluter in the world. Growing trees helps to address this as trees draw carbon dioxide down from the air. People on the other side of the world are willing to pay for you to grow trees so that they can keep polluting.’ Again, Lisa struggled with the translation, not just for its technical content, but also the principles under discussion.

It is much easier to talk in such contexts about the repair of planetary health – a planet we all live in together. To repair it, one gloss on the process is that some can afford to pay more than others. Repair is a concept with which people in Baguia have long been engaged. Following more than two decades of war and conflict, people in the region live daily with the need to repair and reconstruct their more-than-human communities. Their own sacred origin house at this site had only been rebuilt in 2003. During the Indonesian occupation it, like most others, had been burnt down. Then people were forced to move closer to the town and live along roadsides. Now their house was rebuilt, and some had moved back. Periodically the whole house community comes together there to enable the material and ritual life of the community to flourish once more. Tree planting plays a role in this.

Next Marnie, the self-described ‘carbon engineer’, was asked to speak. Leo wanted her to explain to the gathered community how she calculates the carbon, how it was she could see and measure the carbon. Before she spoke the foreign program leader, Andrew, intervened from the side, murmuring: ‘Make sure you highlight the forest’ He didn’t want her to dwell in the counting and measuring of individual trees or their carbon value. Some trees are worth more than others under the carbon storage calculus recognised by the Gold Standard, rewarding the biological productivity of certain trees and habitats for their ecologically contingent growth rates. Locally, farmers also recognise these differential growth rates as an outcome of their practices of care. Some are concerned about the fact that the labour costs of this care are not recognised in equal ‘per tree’ payments to farmers. The idea of diverse forest communities is also a way to counter these concerns.

Clearly, we were at a tipping point, a program holding together was in danger of being pulled apart. Something was needed to restore the balance. Marnie spoke about how her calculations were done by averaging out carbon measurements across large areas of forest ‘Every tree plays a role’, she said. That's why all the participating farmers get paid 50 cents per tree per year, no matter the material conditions of their contribution to carbon reduction – what species, where located, or their size or age. While carbon is materialized in trees in unruly ways (Carton and Andersson, 2018), a major aim of the program has always been forest regeneration. In resisting the logic to maximize carbon sequestration (and reward farmers solely for the value of their carbon ‘property’), the program managers are shaping the conditions under which the forest (no matter how defined by external parties) is altered, and the distribution of benefits of many kinds. Hence Andrew's request is to keep sight of the forest, not the trees.

Translating this attempt to make carbon visible beneath the origin house was unnerving for Lisa. The making of the invisible visible is the speciality of the customary knowledge holders and diviners of such houses. The rituals and auguries that happen here are ones that people come together for frequently to witness, perform, reveal and translate the suite of more-than-human social relations embedded in any event (a sickness or death, a harvest, or a marriage alliance). On this day we were gathered in the same place to witness, perform, reveal, and translate the making of carbon offsets. The house members gathered were intent on the process and listened carefully.

Afterwards when we spoke with our host, she seemed very happy with the event. Yet when we asked her about the ‘carbon talk’, she told us straight up ‘we still can’t see it’. We took her to mean that they could not yet make visible the carbon commodity. They could see its power, though, and it was something with which they wanted to engage. Put another way they understood the power of the invisible – intangible materiality, the social relations necessary to bring ‘resources’ into being. They knew too that making the invisible visible required power and sensory awareness, in particular a palpable engagement with the more-than-human. They wanted access to this power in the context of carbon commodification.

Discussion

In their discussion of the anthropology of resource materialities, Richardson and Weszkalnys (2014) consider three crosscutting processes in the making of resources: sociality, signification, and value. They are interested in the social changes tied up in a resource becoming a commodity (or other valued object), the signification of that resource for the imagined futures of the resource producers, and the value schemas through which the resource is brought into being and/or its commodity form.

In this account of the carbon auditing process, we can understand the social relations tied up in carbon-offset resource as cross-scalar and embedded in historically generated experiences, including suspicions of foreign appropriation of local resources. In terms of their signification, carbon-offset qualities are elusive and their presencing must be performed to bring them into being. Nonetheless their value at the time of the audit remains both mysterious and lucrative. Hence, while we can see local producers approaching the measurement of carbon reductions with scepticism towards the suite of power relations which mobilize the commodity (and generate wealth), there is also a clear desire to access methods that will reveal that power. For the producer community, the commodity fiction of the carbon credit (that carbon sequestration has a tradeable monetary value) is embraced as a necessary fiction which nonetheless requires that its cultural biography of largely absented social relations be revealed.

While there are obvious resonances in these encounters with the history of plantations in Timor-Leste, it is also generative to think here about how the indigenous methodologies being employed to render carbon's materiality visible resonate with the ways in which other foreign objects have become objects of social currency (Hägerdal, 2019). For instance, as with the historical emergence of other commodities in the region, we can see in this encounter carbon offsets being measured by the proxy of body. Likewise, in the past, when cloth was introduced into the Timor region and traded its worth was measured literally and symbolically against the body and imbricated in the exchange of people as a part of the global slave trade (Hägerdal, 2019: 8, on guns and bullets see Barnes, 2017: 24, 38).

It is not only human bodies that are imbricated in these processes. The bodies or elements of the non-human world are equally important actors. For example, in the reproduction of a range of commodities from cloth to bullets to carbon – mordants used in dying cloth, the firing and fashioning of metals and the ar foer (dirty air) sequestration of the carbon offset – air or atmospheres are understood to be the transformative agents. As we see etched into the eaves of the sacred origin house above, ‘natural’ forces (sun, moon, stars) and other elements of the air and atmospheres (rain, wind, clouds, heat, coolness) are central to indigenous communicative processes when accounting for socio-natural events. All these substances, elements and processes are understood to bring the world into being through the continual communicative potential and need to cross socio-natural boundaries. All are powerful shape-shifters coming together (and importantly at times being held apart) to produce something new (Palmer, 2015, 2018; Bovensiepen, 2015).

By holding fast the body to the tree and recognising the metabolism of trees as embedded in a broader socio-natural complex of food production and social repair, these carbon commodities, like land and labour commodities, are able to be understood as proxies which reveal more-than-human social relations. Carbon's socio-natural technical complex is thus understood to encompass the flows of all sorts of atmospheres, social relations, and markets. For local producers, the spirit custodians of the land, forest and atmosphere are inextricably linked to the carbon offsets, as well as their own bodies, through immanent and socially embedded value fields.

In their associations with trees and people, spirit beings and carbon offsets share an invisible presence which can only be made visible to people through both ritual and a careful attunement to the history of social relations. The more-than-human sociality of the landscape depends on these ritual performances of communication between humans and others. It is the coming together (and holding apart) of these agencies which mobilizes and gives possibility to the commodification process.

Of course, the carbon is understood as well as being actively socialized and mobilized by the power of foreigners (cf. Kaartinen, 2016). Foreigners are understood to have a particular power in that socio-technical complex and local producers want access to that power. Hence the elusiveness of the carbon offset's physical presence requires performances which act to both counter and confirm the rumour of the resources’ external control and elusiveness. In short, these understandings of capitalism revolve around ideas of a hidden social logic and fiction which must be worked through via palpable (sensory) methods of measurement. Thus, given its elusive physical presence and its links to a ‘moral economy of post-capitalist accumulations’ (Onneweer, 2014: 96), carbon can tell us quite a bit about expressions of sociality and value in this setting.

It is in the performance of palpability which people see as both creating a necessary (commodity) ‘fiction’ and offering a way into carbon's cultural biography and the social logics of capitalism (a starting point to evidence a networked world). In the verification encounter we can see this performance of palpability carefully curated at multiple levels: these include the relations between foreigners and community members, community and community leaders, and farmers vying for ascendency among each other. They include moments of spectacular display, photo opportunities, ritual gifting, and revelation. The technical explanation of the carbon offset is understood in this moment of its cultural biography to be a necessary fiction (and it is, after all, a socially and materially abstracted algorithm) which must be delivered through embodied and spectacular performances of social relations. While carbon commodities are refashioning the materiality of social relations, there is also a determination to make these relations visible. Abstraction is occurring through particular kinds of social relationships.

What then is striking about the WOS is the quiet insistence of staff and participants that their customary worlds and their more-than-human participants not only matter but have agency. While the audit culture tends to exclude and or alienate a range of participants, the customary world is as inclusive as possible, necessarily attuning to a range of participations that are necessary to understand the social orders behind the order of things (Damon, 2002: 13) and the diverse cultural biographies of those very things. The possibility for this methodological inclusivity hinges on the diplomacy of local program staff and community leaders. While we did not explicitly engage with customary lifeworlds during this verification visit to the fields and plantings, on day two we found ourselves gathered at one of its ritual hearths. While we were ostensibly there for a program discussion on auditing and carbon accounting, by shifting sideways both our gazes and sensory perceptions, a range of problematic absences were being brought out of the shadows. New openings and understandings were being sought. In these encounters, uncertainties, ambiguities, and invisibility are acknowledged as matters that must be continually performed and brought into being (cf. Nahum Claudel, 2018; Keane, 1995; Bovensiepen, 2021).

While others see emerging carbon economies as predominantly disembedding relations (see Osborne and Shapiro-Garza, 2018), we argue that we need to pay attention to the political, ethical, and methodological commitments that are also embedded in these diverse commodification processes. In the context of the customary economy of the Baguia region this means attuning to the ways through which these relations are revealed by the attention paid to their relational absences. Through deeply social interventions into the inevitable and insidious retreats of the verification process towards technical and apolitical renderings (Li, 2007), farmers and program leaders in Baguia are actively resisting the anti-politics of tree counting ‘rituals’ which seek to ‘normalise carbon practices’ (Nel, 2017: 148). They seek instead to build into the process their own ‘occult’ and everyday methodologies (Smith et al., 2017) to both reveal and observe otherwise invisible contradictions. Through these processes they become at once actors in such projects and a part of a sustained critique of them (Smith et al., 2017).

In this and other nature-based offsetting processes, what is often absent in accounting exercises is a ‘multi-layered and relational perspective’ (Hillman and Instone, 2010). Yet in Baguia, this is exactly what people strive to make visible. Just as ritual makes invisible (social relations) visible, our reading of this event was that an aim of this particular performative carbon-accounting exercise was to make social relations visible. How, people wanted to know, is the measurement made and given value – through what sets of social relations? Hence while the commodity fiction was allowed or even embraced, a refusal to allow for complete alienation was also evident in the need to make cultural biographies visible. In the moment of the audit, what we witnessed was a steadfast determination to reveal and foreground the social relations and embrace their more-than-human affordances.

Three years later

We returned to Baguia in 2022 to see that the program has survived the most acute phase of the global Covid-19 pandemic, indeed it has continued to expand across the nation with access to funding from the European Union.

It was evident that with the passage of time and this program expansion the need to creatively manage the risks of relying on requirements stipulated by the demands of a global carbon market is even more acute. Larger trees are generating more shade, making it harder in places to grow food, a key objective of the program. Yet the most pressing concern relates to the payment or incentive system to care for the trees and by extrapolation their changing value. Now that many of the trees have seeded and grown to maturity, farmers are more actively and vociferously criticising the fairness of the flat rate of 50c per tree per annum. In voicing this grievance some farmers are now directing their questions to the exchange value of the carbon, not the fact of its existence: ‘they don’t tell us how much carbon it's got, how much value it has’. One farmer said we ‘know that the trees are worth more than 50c’ and another, having recently found out that carbon is worth different amounts in different parts of the world said ‘we want to see the prices’.

The flat rate of payment doesn’t square with the annual measurement of tree dimensions, or the preoccupation of international carbon experts, such as auditors, when they visit. A participant asks ‘why measure the diameter’? Nor does the flat rate square with how farmers see trees accumulating value over their life course - a mature, seeding tree is now an adult, doing its own work. As in local marriage exchange practices, at this transition point (from childhood to reproduction) the parents (carers) need to have their labour explicitly recognised and appropriately compensated. Hence farmers speculate that a grown tree sequesters more carbon and want to be compensated for its labour as well as theirs in bringing it to maturity. In response, program staff explain that the payment represents an average that seeks to balance out fluctuations in the international carbon price.

It is at this emerging calculative juncture that we clearly observe local agency seeking to shape the ‘commodity indigenisation’ of carbon. While local people understand carbon as a commodity that helps mitigate and overcome subsistence risks and limitations in an ever dynamic social, economic, and environmental milleu (cf. Dove, 1998), they also see the ‘project’ as a potentially affirming contribution to the moral economy of their own society. The swidden gardens of Baguia, where trees are planted, remain firmly placed within Baguia's moral economy and the customary cycle of local negotiations around exchange and value. The life cycle of these trees (their planting, care, seeding and eventual felling) are a relatively new part of these calculations and the biography of these trees are continually foregrounded as a necessary focus of discussion and negotiation.

That these individual trees and the individual farmers that plant them are paid for their care is seen as part of, not separate to, a more-than-human moral economy in which exchange and value is continually negotiated and vitalising. Put another way, what is being negotiated and exchanged here is not a product but a commodity process through which it is understood that value must be negotiated, authenticity proven, and exertion compensated. These calculations are not dis-similar to those made within the context of the voluntary global carbon market of which the WOS program is a part. As Dalsgaard (2013) writes, voluntary offsets might be seen as transitioning from altruistic gifts to the climate and to one's conscience, through to commodities where the gift is taken out of the offset by authenticity proven by middlemen and the technologies of accounting, and back to gifts of development to the Global South. Value is made unstably through these exchanges premised as it is on the vital immateriality of carbon and its associated market mechanisms. In their demands for great attention to the calculative dimensions and temporal assumptions over a flat rate payment, local actors are also recognising the vitality of the trade in carbon itself. They are demanding the right to negotiate their own version of vitalism and exchange. As Appadurai (1986) argues, exchanges are the source of value and not vice versa. It is politics and negotiation that links value and exchange in the social life of commodities.

Conclusion

In this paper we set out to think about how the ‘material nature of technology's interaction … with local social processes’ (Bumpus, 2011: 612) might enable us to rethink the evolving governing systems of carbon markets, especially as these relate to place-specific validation and verification ‘rituals’. The carbon audit is a technical undertaking, seeking legibility, control, and abstraction. It is also integral to a ‘culture in the making’ (Strathern, 2000: 1). In this encounter, the assertion of external control was ‘resisted’ both actively and passively. Then program leaders resisted by foregrounding the forest, reflecting a commitment to establishing structural conditions that temper the techno-economic focus on carbon production. Program rules ensure that benefits are distributed across different landscape types (rather than rewarding farmers with rights to the most carbon productive ones), and across villages and families (through placing limits on how many trees a single farmer can grow within the program). Meanwhile, throughout the audit, the community was welcoming but wary and suspicious. They and Timorese program staff wanted to know more about the process and to harness its power, and still do. In short, they wanted to be able to embed the carbon expertise in local acts of observation and, from there, within a wider set of governance practices, such as interactions with other communities and potentially government parties interested in a nation-scale responses to climate change. They also wanted to negotiate the exchange of value bound up in individual trees.

Clearly making carbon, and producing offsets, in this program is about making visible certain bodies – for the audit process, this meant the bodies of trees and, as we discovered three years later, these very bodies are now part of the tension over the right to assert (rather than appropriate) value. These ongoing tensions over the value of a tree's body will be the subject of a subsequent paper. Here we draw attention to the fact that the program is also meant to benefit other bodies – those of the forest and gardens which comprise the carbon environment, and the bodies of those people who tend, count and benefit from a reforested social world, and those of the atmospheric spaces who give (or take) life to all. The program invests in creating and promoting ‘social carbon’, but its operation within the current socio-natural technical complex requires it to count trees and virtual carbon in metrics verified by people independent of local social relations. In so counting, it must be careful not to valorize individual trees and farmers more than forests and more-than-human social networks. Yet, as this paper makes clear, the agency of all these actors is critical to the program's calculative dimensions.

After the audit questions remained about who has the power to ‘see’ and to make visible this carbon production, and by default suspicions arise within the community about what is being hidden from their view. To be truer to the program aims, it is likely that revised auditing processes are needed to better acknowledge the full array of more-than-human ‘bodies’ that the program participants know are caught up in the creative process of bringing carbon to market. What form the processes producing these ‘fictitious commodities’ and recognising their specific cultural biographies should ultimately take is a matter the local communities are still discussing. As has long been the case in these place-based resource contexts, history is being made and relations transformed, yet as the unruliness of carbon's elusive materiality combines with processes of commodity indigenisation, for the time being at least accumulation by alienation is being resisted.

Highlights