 Progress with Red Plus is much more slower than we anticipated and we means as a research community from 2006-2007 onwards we thought Red would just move on because at that time it was sort of something quick, cheap, easy, the perfect mechanism to tackle a global problem which is deforestation and degradeation and the resulting emissions. But then Red Plus was not that quick, it was for sure not that easy and it is not that easy and it's also not cheap as we thought of. There is the idea of Red Plus moving through three phases. So the first phase would be Red Plus readiness, the second phase would be Red Plus policies and measures implementation and learning from demonstration sites. And the third phase was basically the market element or the performance element where it comes to results-based payments because of performance. And everybody thought this move of countries through these three phases, from readiness through policies, implementation and into results-based payments was much faster but unfortunately countries as we find are stuck in phase one readiness. And there are many reasons for that, so why countries are stuck in this readiness phase but it's also in our studies what we recently found in 12 out of Red Plus countries. So our global comparative study just to mention that so I'm responsible there for the policy research and we look at 14 countries and try to understand how Red Plus is in these countries as lessons from all these 14 countries and the studies we are doing there. What we realized was that in fact all these countries as I mentioned before all these countries are stuck in this readiness phase and what we saw was that at the very beginning where Red Plus was thought of as cheap, quick, easy that you had a lot of different actors and actor coalitions happily joining under this canopy of the Red Plus idea and they were sitting there, they shared the same vision, the same idea but for very different reasons. So for very different interests however they could all join under this big idea of Red Plus. Then countries work together to manage to get this Red Plus idea designed as a Red Plus strategy and then with follow-up implementing policies but that's the moment where this honeymoon phase of what a wonderful idea is really over and we see now that countries don't really manage to establish policies to really learn from existing demonstration sites to actually realize a Red Plus that would lead to performance-based payments and to results and this honeymoon phase is over I think becomes quite obvious because now you have really political struggles. You have actors that no longer happily agree on the broad idea but that strongly disagree on the how to realize that idea. The way we try to understand that with our research the perspective we are taking is a political economy perspective because there are a number of reasons and ways how you can explain that something, not something, but a political process, a policy process is not moving as fast as anticipated and the perspective we are taking is a political economy one and that is related to the fact that the first question you have to ask is what makes deforestation and forest degradation and you can talk in some countries you find a lot of discourse it's the shifting cultivator, the small holder, the illegal logging but what is overlooked in or not overlooked but what is not really made explicit is and that's a central finding from all our studies it's the large scale drivers, the large scale conversion of land, it's the agribusiness that in most countries drives strongly deforestation and it seems to be for all countries very complicated or delicate or difficult to actually tackle these underlying causes so the political economy of deforestation and forest degradation. The way we are trying to understand that is by providing a framework which we call the four eyes so in fact what we are doing is we are seeing red plus through this four eye lens and for eye lens means that something I mentioned earlier as well is you have to imagine a policy process where you have a policy arena yeah so you have this kind of global policy arena you have this national policy arena subnational policy arenas which are all there where actors come together to design a mechanism that is called red plus and obviously these actors don't operate in something totally new this policy arena is created by existing institutions means existing norms, values, procedures, regulations, behaviors so you have an institutional set up there in which all these actors operate and try to realize or maybe even to not realize red plus and not realize comes from not everybody has an interest in red plus so if I benefit if I have really huge profits from deforestation and forest degradation as an individual as a corporate body as an organization if I benefit from that why should I have an interest in realizing red plus so then obviously my interest is to make sure that my my benefits my profit my revenues also come in in the future without red plus so here you see a little bit why this term policy arena is so nice because you have to imagine really actors struggling some actors do join they build coalitions policy coalitions but other actors are really opposing those coalitions from the very beginning I said folks were kind of gathering together under this canopy of that idea and you have very vocal environmental international and national NGOs you have a much less vocal civil society in these countries especially from the bottom up so from the project level but you also have actors that are very vocal and that voice an agency that voice their interests which are which are you which are kind of gathering together and trying to build an alliance a coalition against those actors that they think would be either not realizing red plus or not realizing this idea as a very as a carbon effective cost efficient but also equitable idea and so what you see in this policy arena is you see these different actors getting together and trying to voice their interests and not only voicing them but your voice because you want to realize in this political process so you have this institutional environment that creates this policy arena then you have your multitude of diverse actors obviously countries are different you have a country like Cameroon where for example only a very small group of state actors and a larger group of environmental NGOs with a little bit of research is talking about red plus business is completely absent there and we find that business is very absent in most policy arena so they don't really speak and if I say business then I talk about large scale large scale business that drives deforestation and forest degradation so I don't talk here about this nice beautiful green business the carbon investors the consultancy services that come with every new policy initiative I'm really talking about this established business as usual driving deforestation private sector and other thing that drives actors and that explains why there is very little progress now in this very complicated phase of political negotiations in the different countries is beside the institutional environment and actors interest it's also the ideas actors have and that's where ideas means so what kind of belief do you have what forest should be how an economy should be so the entire mindset that drives an actor in his decision making and is engaging and it's not only what drives yourself as an idea or ideology but this is also about what enables others to join you so where you have shared ideas then you move forward and that's a little bit the story also about the business sector and the state they have pretty much the same discourse they speak the same language and that means they are very yeah very close and they share common idea you find the same with we find a lot of coalitions around environmental NGOs with a little bit of civil society and international research organizations as well we have already three eyes now institutions interests as well as ideas and there is and that is very specific for red plus there's a fourth eye that's central and that's information and we integrated information in our framework how to understand progress and non-progress with red plus we integrated information here because red plus as a mechanism has an architecture where you have your financial systems and you have your information system which means here you have so your locality where the emissions are reduced where deforestation first degradation is avoided or reduced and now this has to be observed measured monitored reported then also verified in one way so you have this in this national architecture what you have to imagine is a huge part is this whole reporting information sharing and based on the information that is given then there will be a financial action so this technical information about a carbon unit has to be translated into a financial transaction and here again we have this kind of global funds global markets carbon markets regional markets whatever and then your very specific national subnational down to the very local place where the result was achieved that emissions or the performance was done and that's where you want to reward so it's very complex and what you can see is that information is a very crucial element here in this whole process of realizing red plus and information is interesting because information is also a resource and some actors do have information other actors would need information and other actors don't get access to information or have access to information so in fact what one could say is that information is a currency in our in today's world where it's it's really also about power and if i'm the ministry xyz that has the full data states of deforestation maybe i don't want to share that information because also information is not something totally objective as we all would like to believe but facts get selected facts get interpreted facts get reinterpreted facts get reselected and sometimes you just get a few facts that give a very different picture of a reality that if you would have full information would look very different so information can be used as something very political and that's the reason why it is in our political economy framework also because if we think about power and power is very central in these policies struggles so who has the power to realize his or her own idea of what red plus should be or should not be that's the big question so power is central in this arena and then you can think about information also as a source of power because it you can't ignore an organization even though you know maybe this ministry has reported very dubious numbers for decades you still cannot ignore it if it is the ministry with the numbers so like it or not you have to deal with it the big question is really how to move from this kind of business as usual the current way of how deforestation for degradation is done and is motivated and is possible so the political economy of the how to change that to move to a situation where you have actually this transformational change that would be required to make a red plus happening and when I talk about transformational change then I mean for example removal of perverse subsidies that would really kick off and we see that in countries like for example in Peru you see this conflict between new ministry regulations from the agricultural ministry that are completely contradicting what the whole red plus idea would like to want so you have Indonesia is the same so you have this conflict of the development discourse we need land to develop our country to ensure food security two two two but in all cases we need land for that so forest is seen as a source of land for development purposes that's the how it is framed and obviously that clashes very much with the idea of oh there's so much value midterm long term if we really would think about this there is so much value in standing forests so let's keep it there not only the removal of perverse subsidies it's not only this kind of broader changes in regulatory frameworks governance frameworks such as tenure which is considered very crucial but it's also implementing actual red plus policies like a moratorium and I think we all know there's a huge debate about Indonesian moratorium beautiful idea but as a colleague called it once it's all about the politics of the possible and the moratorium got incredibly weak over time so it's really the question what is possible in this context of clashing ideas clashing interests with different access to information and in an institutional setup that is very sticky and this move from business as usual to this transformational change scenario where you would have in place major changes in governance structures in regulatory frameworks in terms of subsidies perverse subsidies in terms of forest industry reforms I think that's really crucial and because red plus is not a policy problem in the forest sector but you really have to change everything around it it's why red plus progress is hard to achieve when we see that