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Pro-poor benefit distribution in REDD+: who gets what and why does it matter?

Ensuring that the poor or the most vulnerable sections of society benefit from REDD+ projects is crucial to building both national and international legitimacy and to fostering successful delivery of conservation and social objectives. In both academic and non-academic literature, issues of the equity of benefit-sharing at a community or household level are overlooked compared with distributional issues at the national and international level. Therefore, this paper aims to look at some of the issues related to benefit distribution at village and household level. Two very important factors that are likely to affect benefit distribution from REDD+ at a village level are whether payments are made directly to households or to communities as a whole; and whether payments are made in cash or in kind.