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Selling Nature to Save It? Biodiversity and Green Developmentalism

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Abstract

New supranational environmental institutions, including the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the 'green' World Bank, reflect attempts to regulate international flows of 'natural capital' by means of an approach I call 'green developmentalism: These institutions are sources of eco-development dollars and of a new 'global' discourse, a postneoliberal environmental-economic paradigm. By the logic of this paradigm, nature is constructed as a world currency and ecosystems are recoded as warehouses of genetic resources for biotechnology industries. Nature would earn its own right to survive through international trade in ecosystem services and permits to pollute, access to tourism and research sites, and exports of timber, minerals, and intellectual property rights to traditional crop varieties and shamans' recipes. I contend that green developmentalism, with its promise of market solutions to environmental problems, is blunting the North-South disputes that have embroiled international environmental institutions. But by valuing local nature in relation to international markets-denominating diversity in dollars, euros, or yen-green developmentalism abstracts nature from its spatial and social contexts and reinforces the claims of global elites to the greatest share of the earth's biomass and all it contains. Meanwhile, the CBD has become a gathering ground for transnational coalitions of indigenous, peasant, and NGO opponents of 'biopiracy' and the patenting of living things, and advocates of international environmental justice. They have begun to put forward counterdiscourses and alternative practices to those of green developmentalism.
... Tourism practices within the framework of environmental justice have been explored in pioneering studies. McAfee (1999) examines the relationship between biodiversity, environmental protection, and economic development, emphasizing the need for inclusive approaches that prioritize local communities' rights and sustainability over commodifying nature. Lee and Jamal (2008) advocate for integrating sustainable tourism with environmental justice, focusing on the rights of disadvantaged communities. ...
... Global citation status, on the other hand, refers to the cumulative citations garnered from various publications in sources such as Scopus, WOS, and Google Scholar (Batsita-Caninon et al., 2023). The visual representation of the global citation status of the publications shows that the most cited study is by McAfee (1999), with a total of 478 citations. Büscher & Fletcher (2019) and Floyd & Johnson (2002) rank second and third, respectively, each having received over 100 citations (Figure 15(b)). ...
... Büscher & Fletcher (2019) and Floyd & Johnson (2002) rank second and third, respectively, each having received over 100 citations (Figure 15(b)). McAfee (1999) examines the impact of an approach known as "green developmentalism" on environmental management, biodiversity, and global environmental issues. Büscher and Fletcher (2019) and Floyd and Johnson (2002) rank second and third, respectively, each having received over 100 citations (Figure 15(b)). ...
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Tourism plays a significant role in economic development and job creation; however, it also causes environmental changes and impacts local communities. Research conducted from an environmental justice perspective is crucial to promote resource conservation and protect the rights of local populations. The study aims to review the literature on environmental justice in the tourism sector, contribute to the knowledge base, and examine the social and academic implications of the findings. A bibliometric analysis of 86 studies indexed in the WoS database (1999–2024) is conducted to identify leading journals, authors, countries, keywords, and themes. The findings reveal a substantial increase in research in this field, with the United States emerging as a key contributing country. Prominent themes include social and environmental justice, equity, ecotourism, urban contexts, ethics, conservation studies, and ethnographic research. The study underscores the importance of environmental justice in tourism and offers valuable insights to guide future research and policymaking processes.
... Technocracy becomes a barrier to transformative change through this emphasis on various dimensions of the prevailing relations of domination that legitimize and enable specific kinds of control, management and extraction of biodiversity and nature to the exclusion of alternatives (Bryant, 2002;De Santo et al., 2011;German et al., 2006;Goldman, 2003). This is particularly true where technocratic framings of environmental management align with efforts to simplify the value of natural resources to forms of capital that can be circulated in markets (Dempsey & Suarez, 2016;Hansen, 2013;McAfee, 1999;Mei-Singh, 2016;Münster & Münster, 2012;Toly, 2004), a process that reinforces state constructions of territory, resources, ownership and legitimate knowledge. ...
... Third, the TIP-System allows for contextual adaptation by recognizing and embedding local cultural and ecological contexts. The TIP-System prioritizes context-sensitive solutions, ensuring that interventions are responsive to local needs and resilient across diverse settings, and avoiding over-simplistic or isolated interventions that originate from narrow institutional processes and transient cultural representations (e.g., [165][166][167][168]. For example, the Green Revolution, while successful in increasing agricultural yields, is often criticized for its overreliance on technology-driven solutions and for overlooking their broader social and ecological implications [169]. ...
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This paper introduces the Transition Intervention Point System (TIP-System), a Taoist-inspired theoretical framework aimed at supporting sustainability transitions by integrating multidimensional sustainability research by leveraging point theory. The TIP-System consists of 21 Transition Intervention Points (TIPs), each defined by the intersection of five sustainability dimensions (ecological, social, economic, cultural, and inner) with distinct intervention levels (deep and shallow). The TIP-System endeavors to bridge qualitative and quantitative approaches by drawing on cross-cultural insights. It integrates deep interventions—Taoist-inspired meta-coordination, core values, and spiritual-ethical leverage points—with shallow interventions and technical transition pathways, underpinned by continuous adaptive feedback and systemic interdependencies. Preliminary empirical evidence from eight social innovation initiatives and an ongoing EU-funded rural transition project in Southern Europe suggests that the dynamic interplay among the 21 TIPs may facilitate the identification of transition states and support targeted sustainability change. However, the conceptual complexity of the TIP-System also indicates the need for further refinement to improve its practical accessibility. Future research should aim to develop more user-friendly evaluation tools and assess the framework’s performance across diverse contexts. Overall, the TIP-System provides a promising foundation for guiding transformative change across diverse contexts. Although further empirical validation is warranted, the framework’s novel perspective enriches both theoretical inquiry on and the practical application of sustainability transitions.
... For example, monetary valuation has been widely criticized because it commodifies nature. Scholars claim that this process further extends the influence of markets over nature and weakens the intrinsic value of the environment and the justice arguments for conservation (Büscher et al., 2012;Dunlap and Sullivan, 2019;McAfee, 1999). Such studies assert that monetary valuation does not solve the harmful extraction and degradation of natural ecosystems, and that through a simplification of complex values to monetary metrics, the process erroneously reduces ES to a value that is substitutable by a competing good or service (Kosoy and Corbera, 2010;Matulis, 2014). ...
... The concept of how nature contributes to people 35,39 reinforces the sustainable development narrative that predicts a positive relationship between biodiversity and general prosperity, but often specifically economic prosperity 40 . While this narrative has stimulated considerable critical debate 38,[41][42][43][44][45][46] , empirical studies that quantitatively link natural wealth to economic prosperity across the globe remain rare 19 . ...
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Biodiversity is declining globally, and poverty rates are not improving, so sustainable development initiatives aim to jointly reduce biodiversity loss and alleviate poverty. These initiatives expect biodiverse ecosystems to benefit people if nature were adequately valued in financial terms: thereby countries can use their natural wealth to reduce poverty. This logic predicts an eventual negative relationship between biodiversity and poverty, to be reached through conservation-minded economic development. We show that, paradoxically, the opposite pattern prevails, countries with highest poverty reside in the world's most biodiverse regions but the most financially prosperous countries reside in low biodiversity regions. We quantitatively resolve this paradox, by modelling biodiversity influences on poverty through historical pathways of colonialism that led to export economies with weak governance and increased poverty rates. This finding supports the proposed "systemic bio-inequity" hypothesis. In attempting to solve poverty through conservation, a second paradox emerges: conservation investments align neither with the economic capacity to protect nature nor with the global distribution of biodiversity. Overall, our findings better link systemic, historical and institutional drivers of modern poverty with biodiversity and, unfortunately, undermine the narrative that biodiversity, and its conservation, can underpin future economic prosperity of countries.
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Chapter
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Chapter
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Living organisms produce chemicals for repelling pests and resisting infections. Some of these chemicals have considerable commercial value. The demonstration of commercial value might motivate increased conservation of tropical biodiversity. Successful commercialization requires countries with genetic resources either to transfer these resources to foreign research organizations that can develop them or to acquire the capacity to develop them commercially. This paper discusses factors in contracting for such transfers and investing in such capacity. Copyright 1994 by Oxford University Press.
Biodiversity and the politics of local control of resources with a case study of Cameroon”, paper read at the March 1995 meeting of the Association of American Geographers
  • P Blaikie