Forest carbon offsetting schemes, including Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+), have attracted criticism from the outset, for building upon former colonial international relations to justify continued fossil fuel emissions and industrialized profit.

Typically, implementation contexts in tropical forests feature entrenched inequities of power, wealth and social status. Worryingly, numerous implemented REDD+ projects have adversely impacted marginalized local communities. Impacts include contestation over rights and benefits, violence, and human rights abuses.

This manuscript mobilizes misframing as an environmental justice lens to understand a failed REDD+ project in Western Tanzania, with contested land tenure status, boundary conflict and forced evictions. Empirical analysis draws upon 72 individual and 5 group stakeholder interviews, extensive document analysis, and eight months of ethnographic fieldwork, including extensive participant observation, during 2014–2022. Using an interactionist social science approach, we elucidate perspectives of marginalized groups and project practitioners’ justifications for their treatment.

We show how misframing works through this REDD+ intervention, shifting the burdens of global climate concerns while injustices and inequities are socially reproduced. To safeguard against misframing and these attendant risks, we argue for mandatory attention to human rights protections in REDD+ projects, and for forest governance to explicitly address marginalized groups’ justice concerns.