LSE Africa Dissertation Prize 2026 co-winner Patrick McVeigh reflects on how a fascination with carbon markets, land rights and REDD+ in East Africa shaped both his award-winning dissertation and his career with the United Nations.
Receiving the LSE Africa Dissertation Prize for my MSc thesis has felt like something of a full-circle moment.
A little over a year ago, I was spending long days in the LSE library immersed in debates around climate finance, carbon markets and REDD+ in Africa. At its core, REDD+, or Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, seeks to create financial incentives for keeping forests standing. By attaching economic value to reductions in forest-related emissions, it aims to bring climate mitigation, conservation and development finance together as a “triple win”.
What struck me was how polarised the discussion had become. On one side, carbon markets were presented as a potentially transformative source of conservation and development finance. On the other, critical scholarship argued that they risk reproducing older patterns of dispossession, inequality and external control, often captured through the idea of “carbon colonialism”.
Both raised important questions, but I was drawn to the space between them. The more cases I read, the harder it became to accept that REDD+ produced one uniform outcome. Some projects appeared to reinforce existing inequalities; others seemed to give communities greater control over land, resources and revenues. Understanding that variation became the central focus of the paper.
Before I had even graduated from my MSc in Development Studies, I moved to Nairobi to join UNEP’s Climate Finance Unit as an intern.
Today, somewhat unexpectedly, I live in Kenya and work on many of those same questions at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Before I had even graduated from my MSc in Development Studies, I moved to Nairobi to join UNEP’s Climate Finance Unit as an intern. Conversations about my dissertation led me to begin collaborating with colleagues working on REDD+ in Africa, and that collaboration gradually became my current work with UN-REDD, where land rights, benefit-sharing and inclusive participation are now questions that arise in my day-to-day work with countries across the continent.
How do land tenure regimes shape who gains and who loses from carbon finance?
To answer that question, I had to start with the land itself. Carbon finance enters landscapes already shaped by histories of ownership, customary authority, state intervention and long-running struggles over who is recognised as having rights to land and natural resources.
My dissertation therefore asked how different historical legacies and land tenure regimes influence REDD+ outcomes in Africa, seeking to contribute a more nuanced account of how carbon finance interacts with locally embedded institutions. Using Catherine Boone’s distinction between “statist” and “neo-customary” land tenure regimes as a conceptual framework, I compared the Kasigau Corridor REDD+ project in Kenya with the Yaeda Valley REDD+ project in Tanzania. The two cases share broadly similar colonial histories, post-independence struggles over land, and engagement with REDD+, but differ significantly in land tenure regimes. Kenya’s system has historically been characterised by individualised statutory title, while Tanzania’s combines statutory law with formal recognition of collective customary tenure.
In Kasigau, formal statutory title strongly shaped who could negotiate and who could claim benefits. Around 95% of ranch shareholders were absentee owners, while many people living on or depending upon the land lacked equivalent legally recognised claims. These differences consequently shaped how carbon revenues were distributed. Absentee landowners retained a guaranteed one-third share, while local communities received what remained after project costs, falling to under 8 per cent by 2019.
The point was that the REDD+ mechanism did not create these inequalities but reinforced them by operating through a tenure system already shaped by colonial dispossession and later struggles over land. The argument was structural in that access to power, participation and carbon revenues was determined by the underlying legal and institutional arrangements governing land. Those with formally recognised rights were better positioned to benefit, while those without them remained marginalised.
The Yaeda Valley project offered a markedly different context. The Hadza, one of East Africa’s oldest Indigenous hunter-gatherer communities, had lived through a long history of land insecurity and pressure on their territory. Yet in contrast to Kenya, collective customary rights in Tanzania were formally recognised through Certificates of Customary Right of Occupancy, giving Hadza and Datooga communities a much clearer legal basis over the land on which the project operated.
This changed the terms on which communities engaged with REDD+. Communities entered as recognised rights-holders and custodians of the land, better placed to negotiate and shape decisions. They took part through village assemblies and kept substantial control over how revenues were used. About 60 per cent of carbon revenues were directed straight to communities, who could decide themselves decide how to spend them.
The significance here lies in how secure, recognised tenure shifted the balance of power, enabling local communities to engage with REDD+ as rights-holders with greater influence over decision-making, rather than simply as beneficiaries of an externally designed intervention.
Land tenure is climate policy
Whether carbon finance reinforces existing inequalities or strengthens community agency depends significantly on the institutions through which it operates.
My central conclusion was that “carbon colonialism” should not be treated as an inevitable outcome of REDD+. Whether carbon finance reinforces existing inequalities or strengthens community agency depends significantly on the institutions through which it operates.
Land tenure can sound like a technical matter at the margins of climate policy, but in practice it decides some of its most political questions. Who can give meaningful consent? Who sits at the negotiating table? Who receives the benefits? And who ultimately holds authority over the forest whose carbon is being valued?
Working on REDD+ across Africa has made those questions far more tangible. My dissertation examined them largely at project level; today I work at the national scale, advising African governments on REDD+ safeguards, participation and land tenure. What has become even clearer in practice is that tenure variation exists not only between countries, but within them. In a single REDD+ jurisdiction, statutory, customary and communal claims may overlap, shaping who is recognised, who participates and how benefits are shared. Tenure clarity is therefore not a fixed condition, but something built patiently, through mapping, documentation, coordination and inclusive decision-making.
Ultimately, there is something slightly surreal about now living in Nairobi, working with great colleagues across UN-REDD and travelling across the continent to engage with many of the same questions I once studied in the LSE library. For what began as an academic interest has become the field in which I now work, making the LSE Africa Dissertation Prize feel all the more meaningful.
Disclaimer: "Turning an interest in climate finance into an award-winning dissertation and a UN career" by Patrick McVeigh, originally published on LSE Blogs, licensed under CC BY 4.0. No changes made.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the UN-REDD Programme, FAO, UNDP or UNEP..
