Respecting tenure and the bundle of rights in blue carbon guidance: data record

Brief description

Background and aims:

‘Blue carbon’ is a label for carbon stored in mangrove, seagrass, and tidal marsh ecosystems. These ecosystems are located in the territories of coastal communities, small-scale fishers, and Indigenous Peoples. Blue carbon projects are gaining popularity as an opportunity to meet national climate targets through habitat conservation and restoration, and the formation of blue carbon markets are claimed to generate billions of dollars of future investment potential globally. Without careful attention, blue carbon projects risk being the latest wave of dispossession, eroding local rights to access, use and govern these areas (known as ‘tenure’). It is timely to critically examine the treatment of rights in blue carbon guidance, and specifically ask how, and by whom, will the rights of Indigenous Peoples, local communities and small-scale fishers be respected and upheld as a prior obligation in the design and governance of blue carbon, not as a condition for project success?

Method:

We reviewed 122 blue carbon guidance documents (60 peer-reviewed articles and 62 policy and technical documents with sensitivity toward tenure, Table 1) to determine the claims, treatment, and obligations associated with tenure rights. We purposively investigated the guidance materials shaping the blue carbon policy landscape, including scholarly perspectives, blue carbon standards, implementation and investment guides, and practitioner handbooks. We used search engines Web of Science for sourcing the peer-reviewed literature, and Google for the policy and technical literature in English-language. Our search was undertaken in December 2024. Search parameters included: “blue carbon” AND “tenure” OR “property rights” OR “land rights” OR “user rights”.

Once our sample was finalized, we collated the literature into two overarching literature sets based on whether they were peer-reviewed or policy and technical literature. We then grouped the literature into 10 sub-sets based on who they were produced by (Table 2). For both the peer-reviewed literature and the policy and technical literature, we examined each for relevance, and excluded those that did not specifically address issues of tenure and blue carbon. We used discourse analysis to examine tenure claims, frames analysis to investigate the treatment of tenure rights, and content analysis to identify which tenure rights were invoked in guidance. Our study design allowed us to determine who was presenting certain perspectives and areas where rights were neglect or underemphasized.

This dataset includes:

• Sample list of blue carbon guidance (n=122) including both scientific peer-reviewed scholarly literature and policy and technical literature with sensitivity toward tenure.
• Nvivo project file containing qualitative coding structure and document analysis.
• Table with full source list and details of the literature sets used for analysis.
• Summary of analysis results by literature set.
• Exported codebook describing parent nodes used in qualitative analysis.

Software/equipment used to create/collect the data:
Sourcing guidance materials:
Search engines: Web of Science for sourcing the peer-reviewed literature, and Google for the policy and technical literature in English-language.

Software/equipment used to manipulate/analyse the data:
NVivo 15