This chapter illustrates how a potential for goods substitution may foment a strategy of playing the big powers against one another. Client states are using the threat of exit to gain leverage, and to renegotiate deals. There are signs of decline of US hegemony in the North Atlantic, and an increased potential for goods substitution by Russia and China. However, goods substitution has not been initiated by Russia and China offering what the USA or the West have ceased to offer. Rather, alternative goods provision has been sought out from below, by polities with complex post-colonial and hegemonic relationships with a variety of states. These polities are experimenting with new ways of playing the USA, Russia and China against each other. Greenland, Iceland and the Faroes exploit their strategic positions to push great powers to compete in offering a variety of public and private goods. Client states may be using the threat of substitution as strategic leverage, which drive the hegemon to renegotiate. Client leverage will be at the highest when the client can easily switch goods provider, but where the hegemon cannot easily find an alternative client.

The conclusion rearticulates the book's analysis and critique of how REDD+ brings forests within international financial flows by commodifying the sequestered carbon emissions saved from avoided deforestation or other forms of forest degradation in the Global South; and by potentially allowing ‘saved’ emissions to be used as an ‘offset’ towards the GHG reduction targets of the Global North. In these processes, new claims to international authority have been authorised and articulated, although these remain in many ways provisional and aspirational. It describes forests both materially and metaphorically as productive sites for the examination of questions of authority and the process of authorisation, because they have physically and symbolically been sites of contested authority. In closing, it gestures towards other possible ways we could live in and with nature, how we could live in relation with one another and how we could form worlds and our place in them.

China has begun to take a more active and assertive role in international public goods provision and the results of this are more varied than the duality of revisionism versus status quo orientations would have it. As a goods supplier, China is increasingly identifying gaps in the existing international order and filling them without necessarily challenging the USA directly. In this chapter, Julia Bader shows how China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) became a successful example of asset substitution. The AIIB was initiated as a counter-hegemonic attempt, targeted at the architecture of international finance and at US dominance therein. Yet, as ever more European democracies somewhat unexpectedly joined the Bank – against the wishes of the USA – the institution gradually transformed into an integrated part of the existing international financial architecture. The case of the AIIB illustrates how opportunistic hedging and uncoordinated herding by third states may inadvertently undermine the existing order. Bader shows how the framework of international goods provision, involving producers and consumers alike, directs our attention to non-hegemonic actors as crucial but overlooked players.

In this concluding chapter, Ole Jacob Sending and Iver B. Neumann sum up the volume’s contribution to the discipline of international relations and the study of international order, and suggest how the goods substitution framework may be extended in future research. Moving beyond a contractual view of goods substitution, they emphasize how identity could play a central role in goods ecologies, particularly in instances where a goods recipient uses its own resources to coproduce the goods with the provider as a means of gaining recognition and relevance. In turn, the quality and perceptions of goods and assets are also likely to play a part in a global goods ecology.

This chapter examines the fraught terrain of REDD+ implementation ‘on the ground’, with a specific focus on three strategies that have been central to efforts towards social safeguards: benefit sharing, tenure reform, and rights to consultation and to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC). It reads these three strategies as mechanisms for mediating the potential tensions between different – and potentially competing – demands: those ‘from below’, for rights and recognition, and imperatives ‘from above’, for ensuring that specific obligations are enforceable through the responsibilisation of local actors. This chapter examines how these competing demands play out in REDD+ implementation and suggests that these three strategies might not necessarily be emancipatory for people living in and around forested areas, but rather they may operate to facilitate the greater disciplinary inclusion of forest peoples in the ‘green economy’ and thereby further consolidate the actualisation of new forms of global authority through REDD+.

This chapter introduces REDD+ as an ambitious project that is reorganising how forested land in the Global South becomes an object for international and transnational regulation. It argues that REDD+ operates to reorganise social relations and to establish new forms of global authority over forests in the Global South in ways that benefit the interests of some actors while further marginalising others. This chapter also sets out a unique conceptual apparatus to understand how REDD+ establishes and actualises new forms of authority over forested land and the peoples who live in and around forested areas. It adopts a configuration of four concepts – organised as two pairs – through which to understand REDD+. The first pair of concepts – climate justice and the green economy – provides a means of situating and conceptualising REDD+. The second pair – power and authority – speaks to the amalgamation and consolidation of global authority over forested areas, but also simultaneously the plural and diffuse means by which authority is exercised in REDD+.

In this chapter, Cooley and Nexon argue that instead of operating with a continuum from “revisionist” to “status quo” powers, we should rather focus on the broader strategic environment in which power political maneuvers take place. This is an international goods ecology, comprising types of goods and their distribution. The key advantage of studying power politics as operating within such an asset ecology is how order itself then becomes something different from polarity or hegemony. This makes it possible to distinguish between challenges to the power position of the hegemon and challenges to the architecture of the international order itself. Cooley and Nexon therefore develop an alternate typology of how international orders are challenged to show how acts of substitution are themselves potentially order transforming. They argue that US-led hegemonic order may be undermined before any overt challenge to the power position of the United States emerges. The main benefit of studying the logic of asset substitution is that it gives us a tool to assess how seemingly unimportant acts of substitution, bit by bit and regardless of a lack of revisionist intent, can shape and transform the international order.

This chapter explores how a global claim to authority over forested land has been materialised or made real through an examination of the private law mechanisms that structure the REDD+ scheme, namely the creation of new quasi-property rights in carbon and the establishment of new contractual relations. It examines REDD+ through the lens of contract to show the key norm-production role played by actors involved in developing template or standard form contracts, focusing on the role of the World Bank carbon funds. It also examines REDD+ through the lens of property in order to highlight how the initial unequal distribution of carbon rights through the UNFCCC processes has shaped the political economy of carbon markets. By doing so, it shows why it is necessary to disrupt the constructed public–private dichotomy to provide a more comprehensive account that shows how REDD+ is co-constituted by both public and private law.