Baseline Construction and Additionality in Brazilian REDD+ Projects: Institutional Incentives and Structures of Authority

Abstract

REDD+ projects in the Brazilian Amazon continue to face credibility challenges related to additionality—whether credited emissions reductions would have occurred in the absence of the intervention. These claims depend on counterfactual deforestation baselines that are inherently unobservable, creating scope for systematic inflation. This article examines how institutional incentives and structures of authority shape the construction of deforestation baselines, and thereby additionality, in voluntary carbon market (VCM) REDD+ projects. It argues that baseline inflation is not primarily a technical modelling failure, but an institutional outcome produced by a decentralised governance architecture characterised by performance-based rents, delegated private authority, information asymmetries, and weak public oversight. Integrating political economic analysis with performativity-based accounts of valuation, the article conceptualises baselines as institutional scripts that translate uncertain futures into economically actionable claims. The argument is illustrated through the Suruí Indigenous REDD+ project, where optimistic threat narratives and limited integration with Brazil’s public forest governance contributed to fragile additionality claims. The article concludes by identifying institutional reforms aimed at reallocating epistemic authority, constraining methodological discretion, and aligning baseline construction more closely with national policy trajectories and enforcement dynamics.