 What I'm hoping to do during this talk on multi-level governance and benefit sharing is make the case that subnational governments and what they're doing with Red Plus and also subnational initiatives for Red Plus are important. They're a key place where sort of the rubber meets the road for Red Plus benefit sharing and that there are important lessons that we can learn from what's happening at these scales. So when I say multi-level governance, this infographic that my friend Jim O'Neill developed kind of shows some of the complexities of governance that I'm talking about. This kind of spaghetti mess right here on the right side shows something about who makes decisions and how decisions are made about land use in general, which has implications for benefit sharing related to Red Plus in particular, across a landscape with multiple land uses. And you're not you're not going to be able to extract all the information from this right now just by looking at it because it's so complicated, but you can find it online and it's actually interactive at our website forestsclimatechange.org. But the main takeaway here is that different actors from different divisions of government at the various levels of government have different powers and responsibilities over different parts of the landscape. And this matters for benefit sharing because when we're trying to make trying to engage with policy making around benefit sharing for Red Plus, there's a huge variety of actors just from the government here, but also from other sectors that need to be involved in the process. And that's kind of some of what I'm going to speak to right now. So first just to give a break a brief overview of our study design on multi-level governance, we are actually working in five countries, Peru, Indonesia, Tanzania, Vietnam and Mexico. Given where we're currently in the project, I'm primarily going to talk about Peru and Indonesia right now and give some preliminary findings on what we've seen on the ground with respect to multi-level governance in these places. So in each country, we've selected five sites in two or three regions for a total of about 25 sites. And you'll notice that we've selected sites of land use change in general. And you'll also notice that there are some sites that we've selected that are not Red Plus sites. However what I would argue is that the sites that we've selected that have land use change initiatives in place that are not Red Plus still have really important lessons with respect to benefit sharing for us for Red Plus policy and for Red Plus initiatives in general. And I'll get into a little bit more of why that is in a minute, but basically what we've done is selected some sites where there are Red Plus projects or other conservation initiatives that lead to reduced emissions from land use. And other sites that are actually moving towards increasing emissions, things like agribusiness ventures, oil palm plantations that involve deforestation, other activities like that. So how did we collect the data? Well basically we employed two main methods that I'm going to be drawing from today. One involves legal studies examining the laws in place in these countries that might have a bearing on benefit sharing and on payments for environmental services. And then for each of the sites that we selected, we conducted field interviews or rather my colleagues conducted most of these interviews on the ground. And so far in Peru and Indonesia we've conducted over 200 interviews with key informants linked to land use initiatives at these specific sites and also at the national and subnational levels. So really trying to get kind of a picture of who's involved in these decision processes at multiple levels. So what are some of our results? Well to give you a quick overview, first we see variation in terms of what kinds of policies are in place at the national and subnational levels across countries. I'll talk about that briefly. Second, as both countries, Peru and Indonesia have not yet developed harmonized multi-level systems for benefit sharing, subnational initiatives for Red Plus in particular have gone ahead and developed ad hoc solutions for benefit sharing. In the absence of policy guidance, they've developed their own strategies on the ground and that's going to be a main focus of our findings. They're going to come from those kind of ad hoc initiatives on the ground. Non-monetary benefits in these ad hoc initiatives have been really, really key so far. It's not just about money transfers, that's actually been rather elusive especially in the absence of sort of robust international carbon markets. So these non-monetary incentives, non-monetary benefits are really key for these systems. And finally, the legitimacy of the systems that are in place to distribute these benefits varies quite a bit between sites. And I want to make the argument that the legitimacy of the process for designing these benefit sharing arrangements matters, not just for the equity of these arrangements, but also for their potential effectiveness at reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. Okay, so what we have in place in Indonesia and Peru is a series of policies and initiatives at the subnational and national levels that varies. So in each country, I'm not going to get into the details of these policies right now, but we have some sort of framework at the national level that has a bearing on benefit sharing. There's different initiatives that might eventually target funding from international mechanisms in each country, and they vary to some extent. I'm not going to go through these bullets right now just because we're short on time. I can talk about it later if you'd like more information on it. But in practice, these initiatives have been slow to determine precisely how benefits will be distributed to projects and actors on the ground. At the subnational government level, in Indonesia, we've seen a rather slow development of red plus strategies that have been poorly defined and have been rather weak in terms of their specific reference to benefit sharing. And in Peru, we've also not had specific regional or lower levels of policy about benefit sharing, but we do interestingly, and I'll come back to this, have spaces for dialogue that are bringing actors from multiple sectors and multiple kind of stakeholder interest groups together to discuss and deliberate about red plus policy in general and benefit sharing is of course a part of that. Anyway, the linkages between these levels are kind of denoted by big question marks there because it's not really clear how these national policies that might eventually direct international funding to projects on the ground that might determine how payments for environmental services programs work linked to these provincial programs. And it's not clear how these provincial strategies that are emerging in these conversations that are happening would determine what happens on the ground. So again, in the absence of a harmonized framework for benefit sharing at multiple levels from the national and subnational level, projects and subnational initiatives have gone ahead with ad hoc benefit sharing arrangements. And I'm going to talk about that right now. So like I mentioned before, one of our key findings from these many sites that we've worked at is that non monetary benefits are hugely important right now with red plus and also with land use in general. You have capacity building across the board. We found almost universally at these sites that capacity building activities are key. We found technical assistance for, for example, agroforestry systems to be hugely important in a lot of cases, especially in some of the red plus projects here in Peru. Jobs occasionally come up, things like doing forest monitoring and being involved in projects in other ways have benefited local people. And infrastructure occasionally is actually provided as a fun as part of these land use change initiatives, not only red plus, but other initiatives as well. At the same time, some of the potential benefits of red plus, like land tenure security, access to environmental services can manifest instead of as benefits as burdens. And what we see is that in some cases, including in some red plus projects on the ground, local communities feel that they have lost access to natural resource, to environmental services, that they may have lost access to land that they could use before. And what I want to do now is by way of example, show why it is that sometimes these potential benefits, like land tenure security that people talk about instead manifest as burdens. And what I argue is that what it really comes down to is the legitimacy of the process by which these arrangements are developed. When processes are not legitimate, that is when broad actor, a broad group of actors is not brought to the table, given a voice at the table, and ultimately able to have influence and power at the table, the effectiveness of these arrangements can suffer and burdens can be borne instead of benefits enjoyed. So first, the type of benefits that we see is not necessarily dependent on the type of initiative. We see a mix of levels of legitimacy, let's say, with respect to the process in both red plus initiatives, other conservation initiatives, and even, believe it or not, oil palm cases and places where plantations and agribusinesses are acting. Broad consultation, we find, is really key and that using, relying on representatives from communities and other local groups is no substitute for broad consultation. Community control access is found to be key. The extent to which actors on the ground and communities have control over their resources and alternative livelihoods options influences their negotiating power in these arrangements with proponents of these subnational initiatives. And finally, information flows really matter, so I'm going to go through the, I think I'm short on time, so I'm going to go through a couple examples of how these, how we found these things. So the first example that I want to talk about comes from West Kalimantan Indonesia. There's an expanding natural, national park, natural protected area in this region that has been rather conflictual. This is not a red plus project, but many red plus projects operate in protected areas and their buffer zones, so what we've seen here has important implications for red plus. In this particular case, according, what happened is the Ministry of Forestry got the approval of community leaders about 20 years ago to start this national park. And it's recently expanded. However, talking to people on the ground, what we found is that not everyone is really on board with the establishment and expansion of this park. And what's happened with respect to benefit sharing specifically is that the government and an NGO involved in this park have offered to pay people for their loss of access due to the expanding park boundary, but the local people actually are not interested in being paid. They're not interested in these monetary benefits. They don't want money, they want their customary claims recognized. So in the absence of broad consultation, in the absence of understanding what benefits people are actually interested in, the legitimacy of the process has suffered and the potential for conservation and the effectiveness of the program has potentially been compromised. Here in Peru, in Madre de Dios, there's a red plus project that has worked with a association of Brazil nut concessionaires. And what they've done is come to an arrangement where they've invested in a Brazil nut processing plant to sort of move the people that are collecting Brazil nuts up the value chain, so to speak. And 70% of carbon credit revenues goes to this private firm that's initiating this arrangement and 30% goes to the concessionaires. And this deliberation was largely done by representatives and it was considered to be sort of okay in terms of legitimacy. Many people did not feel like they understood everything that was going on, but at the same time, there was efforts in place. I think I'm actually out of time, so I'm going to really briefly say a couple words on oil palm. In Ucayali, here in Peru, we have an example of a problematic case where the regional government has sold land to an oil palm company for expansion and this has been considered rather not legitimate by local communities. Conversely, though, in West Cali, Montaigne, Indonesia, again, we have an example of an oil palm company that's actually been very committed to conservation and also benefit sharing under the NT plasma scheme in Indonesia with local people. So the point is that the particulars of the initiative don't actually tell you that much about what the legitimacy of the benefit sharing arrangement will look like and it can vary even within sectors like oil palm. So finally, in the absence of policies to really guide benefit sharing, there are some opportunities here. Here in Peru, we have red plus roundtables that have emerged to discuss issues around red in general and benefit sharing as well at the subnational level and these spaces have been very effective at bringing together actors from the environment sector from multiple levels the national, provincial level, sorry, regional level and also environmental NGOs. Indigenous communities have been involved to some extent but there's key actors missing from these spaces. Local governments basically don't participate in all in these spaces. The agricultural sector has been largely missing from these discussions and private firms that are actually involved in agricultural and other projects have not been involved. And furthermore, producer groups, civil society, people have not been involved in these spaces. And this is problematic because both of these sectors that are involved or not involved are oftentimes implementing projects including activities that have varying on red plus with these local people. So while not all relevant actors are included in these spaces, the fact that they exist I think presents an opportunity to develop what we what might look like harmonized systems to guide benefit sharing across multiple levels.