Contested mappings in a dynamic space: emerging socio-spatial relationships in the context of REDD+. A case from the Democratic Republic of Congo

This paper adopts a processual understanding of mapping to empirically explore the workings of satellite-based forest visualisations and maps within the REDD+ process in DR Congo. Our analysis approaches maps as ongoing contingent practices and highlights the recursive interplay between maps and the socio-natural world. We first show how REDD+ (mapping) assemblages enact a uniform portrayal of community-induced threats to nature, which in turn legitimises a monoculture of abstract space often to the detriment of communities’ authority over land and their particular socio-ecological relationships. However, these mapping attempts at reordering forest landscapes are locally met with and reshaped by ever-emergent socio-spatial practices, ways of seeing and appropriating landscape. Complexity, fluidity, and ambiguity are indeed rendered absent by these seemingly immutable and complete representations although they are essential for understanding struggles over resources. We conclude that adopting a processual understanding of maps opens up ways of enacting socio-environmental justice.