From trees to carbon assets: anticipatory governance in Ethiopia’s forest landscape restoration

Forest landscape restoration is increasingly linked to global carbon markets as governments seek to mobilize climate finance. The article analyses how the management of restoration is restructured around the possibility of future carbon credits before these incomes are realized. Drawing on comparative fieldwork in two restoration contexts in Ethiopia, Tigray’s land use systems that build upon exclosures and the Yayo Coffee Biosphere Reserve (YCBR), the paper advances a conceptual distinction between two modes of anticipatory governance. In Tigray, where previous carbon payments have occurred through the EthioTrees Plan Vivo project, expectations are grounded in tangible experience, leading to bureaucratic layering onto existing communal institutions. In the YCBR, where no verified credits exist, restoration is shaped by speculative anticipation, sustained through project narratives and institutional preparations for markets that have yet to materialize, resulting in deeper institutional replacement and the dissolution of existing multi-purpose cooperative structures. By demonstrating how carbon futures reorganize restoration governance through these distinct pathways, the paper refines debates on anticipation, carbon financialization, and restoration governance, arguing that the political–ecological effects of carbon markets depend critically on local histories of engagement.