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Selling Nature to Save It? Biodiversity and Green Developmentalism
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.
... McCauley (2006) decried the development of markets for ecosystem services and suggested instead that "we will make more progress in the long run by appealing to people's hearts rather than to their wallets" (ibid.: 28). Others linked PES to the expansion of capitalism into new spheres of social life and they argued that PES would inevitably imply different transacting parties operating under unequal terms of exchange (McAfee, 1999;Büscher, 2012). Similarly, voices critical of environmental markets have used Harvey's (2003) concept of "accumulation by dispossession" and Martínez-Alier's (2002) notion that "the poor sell cheap" to emphasize how marketbased policies might entail virtual and actual "green grabs" (Fairhead et al., 2012) and involve "conservation rents for renouncing development" (Karsenty, 2007). ...
In this chapter, we draw on existing varieties of environmentalism, and particularly on Martínez-Alier’s powerful concept of the environmentalism of the poor, to bring forward the idea of “the environmentalism of the paid” as a rising though unexpected consequence of the emergence of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) as a conservation policy. The environmentalism of the paid emphasizes the positive role that conservation payments can bring to local livelihoods; connects very different types of stakeholders from local to global contexts through a single exchange value that nonetheless acquires different local meanings and values; and counts with strong allies who promote and make PES possible through cross-scale institutionalization processes. In bringing forward the notion of the environmentalism of the paid, we reflect on how it aligns with or contradicts old and new forms of environmental thought and practice.
... McCauley (2006) decried the development of markets for ecosystem services and suggested instead that "we will make more progress in the long run by appealing to people's hearts rather than to their wallets" (ibid.: 28). Others linked PES to the expansion of capitalism into new spheres of social life and they argued that PES would inevitably imply different transacting parties operating under unequal terms of exchange (McAfee, 1999;Büscher, 2012). Similarly, voices critical of environmental markets have used Harvey's (2003) concept of "accumulation by dispossession" and notion that "the poor sell cheap" to emphasize how marketbased policies might entail virtual and actual "green grabs" (Fairhead et al., 2012) and involve "conservation rents for renouncing development" (Karsenty, 2007). ...
Joan Martínez Alier has made relevant contributions to the agrarian question by treating the southwestern Spanish latifundio and Latin American hacienda systems as capitalist ways of exploiting land and labour, not as backward feudal remnants. He has also invoked the resistance of Latin American tenant-labourers and other smallholder peasants as an explanation for the limited extent of wage labour. To that end, he helped rescue Alexander Chayanov and the former Narodnik movement from oblivion. With José Manuel Naredo, he paid tribute to Sergei Podolinsky, another member of this peasant neo-populist current, for pioneering the first calculation of energy balances and returns from agricultural systems. As agricultural and environmental historians, we have followed both paths to develop new proposals for a form of agrarian metabolism that, while contributing to ecological economics, is also aligned with agroecology. We summarize our contributions to these topics, developed together with Eduardo Sevilla Guzmán, Victor Toledo and Gloria Guzmán, as well as some of the researchers at the Institute of Social Ecology in Vienna and many other participants in the international project on Sustainable Farm Systems (SFS). Our teams have also started using these socio-metabolic accounts to take up the agrarian question of labour and gender exploitation through the unequal appropriation of natural resources from a historical point of view, as well as contribute to the next agroecology transition to a fairer food regime within planetary boundaries.
... Critics of ESV reject its reduction of intrinsic environmental values into monetary exchange-based values (Allen, 2018). They also denigrate market-based approaches like ESV for peddling Adam Smith's (1776) invisible hand solutions to solve global environmental problems (Castree, 2008;McAfee, 1999;Redford & Adams, 2009;Skroch & Lopez-Hoffman, 2010). This article adds to one dimension of these debates by examining the digital commodification of Indigenous forests (i.e., forests inhabited by Indigenous peoples) into carbon sequestering commodities which are projected in carbon maps by ESV programs like InVEST. ...
The growing datafication of the world continues to be a pressing concern for critical geographers. Indigenous scholars are also challenging western research paradigms for under-representing the social effects that datafication imposes on Indigenous communities. This paper adds to these conversations by closely examining the problematic of carbon datafication in Indigenous places using the author's positionality as an Indigenous-Naga geographer. The author simulated carbon maps of Nagaland (northeastern India) to demonstrate the datafication of Indigenous places into carbon commodities, and then used the maps and his emic perspectives to interview Naga tribesmen and tribeswomen about carbon datafication. Selected interviews are highlighted in this paper to contextualize the social effects of carbon datafication on Naga epistemologies of forests, material reorganization of space, and carbon enclosures for global marketization. The paper also examines the limitations of alternative non-digital mapping, as well as the opportunities for locally repurposing GIS applications to involve and benefit Indigenous communities. Elements of local agency and the speculative effects of carbon markets are also discussed in the inter-tribal sociopolitical context of Nagaland.
... Following this rationale, nature is fragmented into differentiated environmental goods and services that need to be marketized to their (potential) clientele in new international environmental markets (Büscher & Whande, 2007). In this way, nature's very existence depends on market demand and financialisation (McAfee, 1999;Sullivan, 2013b). Nature needs to earn its own right to survive by producing new commodities (e.g., carbon credits, natural resources, environmental services and touristic attraction). ...
This article synthesizes critiques of ‘carbon‐fix’ strategies in the forestry sector to clarify key concerns about reductionist treatments of forests and carbon and to facilitate further debate. It begins by asserting that since climate change mitigation has been placed at the centre of forest governance, forests have been deemed to serve as ‘carbon‐fixing’ devices in ways that can be discerned across three distinct but inter‐related categories: (i) carbon storage devices, (ii) carbon removal devices and (iii) net‐zero bioenergy devices. A transdisciplinary literature review is used to shed light on key concerns relating to the instrumentalisation of forests within each of these categories. By doing so, this article contributes to a deeper understanding of why relegating forests to a ‘carbon‐fix’ function is insufficient to tackle climate change and, rather, poses threats to forest ecosystems and forest‐dependent communities. This review ultimately calls into question the use of forests to delay crucial systemic changes, without diminishing the importance of forest conservation, restoration, governance, as well as technological innovation, in mitigating the ongoing harmful effects of climate change. This article synthesizes the main critiques of ‘carbon‐fix’ strategies in the forestry sector from social, natural and engineering disciplines. It shows that climate policies have compelled forests to function as 'carbon‐fixing' devices that store, remove and neutralize CO2. However, these strategies have been ineffective in reducing atmospheric CO2 concentrations and exacerbated other social and environmental issues.
... The combined strategy of enforcing protected areas and promoting market engagement simultaneously strengthens separation between people and nature and promotes the latter's economic value as the primary motive for its conservation (B€ uscher and Fletcher 2020; McAfee 2012a). The approach is criticized for maintaining colonial power relations and reinforcing social inequalities from a local to global scale (Adams and Hutton 2007;Apostolopoulou et al. 2021;Duffy 2006;McAfee 1999McAfee , 2012b. ...
Private engagement has always been central to biodiversity conservation. Recently, the role of private enterprises in (eco)tourism have increased, and private lands play a pivotal role in expanding protected areas within societies throughout the world. This paper contributes to discussions of private engagement in conservation and its relation to tourism (recreation generally), with novel insight on how the conservation-tourism nexus on private land is approached in different geographical contexts. We present a systematic literature review that results in five thematic clusters characterized by different conservation approaches to tourism in Global North and South. Research concerning Global South tends to emphasize (eco)tourism as a main inducement for conservation, while research concerning Global North emphasizes expansion of private protected areas where access for tourist-recreational use has to be compensated. We propose a future research agenda to exploring environmentally and socially just approaches to conservation and recreation in both Global North and South.
... Evidently, between the two, contradictions are extreme and arguments overlap each other. In water studies, such contradictions are classified and studied as neoliberalism (Cleaver and Elson, 1995;Spiertz and Wiber, 1996;Lipschutz and Crawford, 1998;Barlow and Clarke 2002;McAfee, 1999;Bond, 2000) vs. Post-neoliberalism (Bakker, 2010). In water policy studies, this is further framed and analysed as Washington Consensus and Post Washington Consensus (SandBrook, 2005). ...
This pair of papers examines and describes the state action necessary to make markets function as environmental policy instruments and as strategies of governance. They do this through a detailed look at the mechanics of environmental credit compliance markets in the US states of Oregon, Ohio, and North Carolina in which stream credits are privately created and sold to developers who have impacted protected stream systems. In this paper, we examine the tools, techniques, and people involved in the creation of a value-bearing stream credit out of a physical stream or river site. These observations reveal important principles of how science functions within governance, as well as where gaps and resistances appear that create unforeseen outcomes in market-led policy. We examine the construction and use of instruments that define natural processes as objects with value; these techniques and tools include databases and spreadsheets, algorithms, and field scoring tools that have been scavenged from a wide range of scientific and governance practices and are not themselves inherently capitalist or developed for capitalist purposes. In three different state settings, the move from measure to value is made in different ways that depend on the local institutional and social context. However, they all act to render a network of interacting ecological forces as a field of discrete ecosystem objects amenable to governance with markets.
This chapter considers the case of the Sundarbans in Bangladesh—the largest mangrove ecosystem in the world and a hotspot of biodiversity resources—to explore the underlying causes behind the continuous and unabated loss of those resources. The chapter also seeks viable means or measures for halting the degradation process, revitalising the conservation process and ensuring the sustainability of the resources. By challenging the mainstream approaches, the chapter presents an alternative analysis to the sustainability of biodiversity resource management by means of a harmonious human–nature relationship. The findings exhibit that the fragile institutions, lax regulatory regime, nature of political settlement, unequal power sharing arrangements and the exclusion of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) in the conservation framework cause the degradation of biodiversity resources of the Sundarbans. The chapter, at its core, argues that the well-being of the biodiverse ecosystem essentially depends on human sociality constructed by norms, values and other formal and informal institutions.
The introduction of fire suppression policies and expansion of exclusionary protected areas (PAs) in East and Southern African (ESA) savannas have engendered a wildfire paradox. Outside PAs, livestock have replaced fire as the dominant fuel consumer. While inside PAs, wildfire intensity has increased due to accumulating flammable biomass. Community-Based Fire Management (CBFiM) is recognised as an alternative bottom-up management strategy to address the wildfire paradox and promote equitable fire governance across conservation landscapes. Yet, there has been little investigation into the implementation and effectiveness of CBFiM across ESA’s savanna-PAs. Here we employ a social-ecological systems framework to develop a systematic map of the published literature on the framing and features of CBFiM across ESA savanna-PAs. We characterise the challenges and opportunities for their design and implementation, focusing on the relationship between governance systems and community participation in fire management. We find that CBFiM projects are commonly governed by the State and international NGOs retaining decision-making power and determining access to savanna resources and fire use. Existing CBFiM projects are limited to communal rangelands and are developed within existing Community-Based Natural Resource Management programmes prioritising fire prevention and suppression. Planned CBFiM projects propose an exclusive early-dry season patch mosaic burning regime to incorporate indigenous fire knowledge into modern scientific management frameworks, but evidence of indigenous and local peoples’ involvement is scarce. To provide equitable fire management, CBFiM projects need to address inequalities embedded in PA governance, persisting anti-fire wisdoms, centralised suppression policies, and account for changing state-society relations in the region.
Since the publication of the influential text, An African Miracle, much scholarship has focused on Botswana's supposed “exceptionality” anchored in the country's economic growth and sustained democracy. Botswana's success story has proved enduring and versatile, being deployed in numerous contexts including in relation to Botswana’s status as a conservation “safe haven” in southern Africa. Many green plaudits are associated with the tenure of former president Ian Khama (2008–2018), who broke with longstanding tradition and actively campaigned against his own vice president and successor, President Mokgweetsi Masisi. Their acrimonious relationship is multifaceted but in this article, we refer to disputes over wildlife conservation policy wherein Masisi rolled back his predecessor's signature conservation policies, focusing specifically on the reversal of the hunting ban, the disarming of some anti-poaching officers, and changes in Botswana's stance in international environmental diplomacy regarding ivory and the CITES regime. We contend that Khama's conservation decisions—underpinned by lack of consultation and green violence—made Botswana a “green miracle” to outside observers while contravening the central principles of local democratic practice such as therisanyo (consultation) cherished in the country. We argue that Masisi's reversal of Khama-era positions that were unpopular with conservation-adjacent communities represents not a “fall from grace,” but rather the bringing back down to earth of policies that had alienated the local population, thus indicating the potential to pursue inclusive governance that domestically Botswana acclaims.
Science has a central role in shaping what count as environmental problems. This has been evident most recently in the success of planetary science and environmental activism in stimulating awareness and discussion of global environmental problems. We advance three propositions about the special relationship between environmental science and politics: (1) in the formulation of science, not just in its application, certain courses of action are facilitated over others; (2) in global environmental discourse, moral and technocratic views of social action have been privileged; and (3) global environmental change, as science and movement ideology, is vulnerable to deconstructive pressures. These stem from different nations and differentiated social groups within nations having different interests in causing and alleviating environmental problems. We develop these propositions through a reconstruction of The Limits to Growth study of the early 1970s, make extensions to current studies of the human/social impacts of climate change, and review current sources of opposition to global and political formulations of environmental issues.
The Uruguay Round of trade negotiations took until December 1993 to be completed. Its conclusion has been heralded as a significant step on the part of countries belonging to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). However, further cooperation by these countries is still required, as is the need to go further. The globalization of the world’s economies is paralleled by the increasingly global nature of environmental problems. This is true in terms of the effects of these problems (e.g., climate change and ozone depletion), and also because dealing with these problems will require international cooperation. In view of the significant role it will play in the world economy, this global response will, in part, include reforming the rules of the international trading system.
This article analyses the controversy around the Global Environment Facility established by the World Bank, the United Nations Environment Programme and the United Nations Development Programme. The criticisms of representatives of non‐governmental organisations and diplomats from developing countries have been studied and appear to relate to three different levels: at the lowest level, they relate to the interpretation of the different issues in the GEF documents; at the next level, to the institutional context in which the GEF is based; and, at the highest level they concern the deeper problems of North‐South relations and power asymmetries. All three levels influence each other, and the basic reluctance of the developing countries to accept the role of the GEF as the operating entity for the financial mechanism to implement Agenda 21 and the different environmental conventions stems from the middle and higher levels. This article analyses the criticisms and draws some inferences about how the power asymmetries can be dealt with.
This article expounds the traditional Marxist theory of the contradiction between forces and relations of production, over production of capital and economic crisis, and the process of crisis-induced restructuring of productive forces and production relations into more transparently social, hence potentially socialist, forms. This exposition provides a point of departure for an “ecological Marxist” theory of the contradiction between capitalist production relations and forces and the conditions of production, underproduction of capital and economic crisis, and the process of crisis-induced restructuring of production conditions and the social relations thereof also into more transparently social, hence potentially socialist, forms. In short, there may be not one but two paths to socialism in late capitalist society. While the two processes of capital overproduction and underproduction are by no means mutually exclusive, they may offset or compensate for one another in ways which create the appearance of relatively stable processes of capitalist development. Study of the combination of the two processes in the contemporary world may throw light on the decline of traditional labor and socialist movements and the rise of “new social movements” as agencies of social transformation. In similar ways that traditional Marxism illuminates the practises of traditional labor movements, it may be that “ecological Marxism” throws light on the practices of new social movements. Although ecology and nature; the politics of the body, feminism, and the family; and urban movements and related topics are usually discussed in post-Marxist terms, the rhetoric deployed in this article is self-consciously Marxist and designed to appeal to Marxist theorists and fellow travelers whose work remains within a “scientific” discourse hence those who are least likely to be convinced by post-Marxist discussions of the problem of capital’s use and abuse of nature (including human nature) in the modem world. However, the emphasis in this article on a political economic “scientific” discourse is tactical, not strategic. In reality, more or less autonomous social relationships, often non-capitalist or anti-capitalist, constitute “civil society,” which needs to be addressed on its own practical and theoretical terms. In other words, social and collective action is not meant to be construed merely as derivative of systemic forces, as the last section of the article hopefully will make clear.
The Kayap Indians of Brazil's Amazon Basin are described as effective managers of tropical forest, utilizing an extensive inventory of useful native plants that are concentrated by human activity in special forest areas (resource islands, forest fields, forest openings, tuber gardens, agricultural plots, old fields, and trailsides). Long-term transplanting and selection of plants suggest semi-domestication of many species. The overall management strategies of forest also includes many manipulated animal species (birds, fish, bees, mammals) utilized as food and game. Forest patches (apt) are created by Indians from campo/cerrado using planting zones made from termite and ant nests mixed with mulch: formation and development of these is briefly discussed, including the implications for new ideas concerning reforestation and campo management. Finally an integrative cognitive model is presented showing the relationships between variants of forest and savanna recognized by the Kayap. Indigenous knowledge of subtle similarities between conceptually distinct ecological units in the model allows for the interchange of botanical material between microclimates to increase biological diversity in managed areas. It is suggested that indigenous knowledge is extremely important in developing new strategies for forest and campo/cerrado conservation, while improving productiveness of these ecological systems. Such knowledge is not only applicable for Amaznian Indians, but also has far-reaching implications for human populations throughout the humid tropics.
The economic values which nontraded and traded environmental goods and services, or negative externalities, might be given, depend (in different ways) on the distribution of income. Income-elasticity (in actual or surrogate markets) might be greater for environmental “amenities” than for environmental “necessities.” Therefore, a redistribution of income would have effects on the demand of environmental goods and services. But this is not the main line of this paper, which is more focused on the “supply side.” From the “supply side,” the distribution of income (and of property rights) will determine (in a Sraffian-like manner) the value (or rather, the “production prices”) of traded “natural capital.” However, most environmental goods and services are not in the market. In this respect, the paper introduces the concept of “ecological distribution,” i.e. the social, spatial, and temporal asymmetries in the access to natural resources or in the burdens of pollution (whether traded or not), and it considers the relations between economic distribution and ecological distribution. In other words, the paper discusses the relations between Political Economy and Political Ecology. The paper also includes a section on the appropriate discount rate which would be that determined by the “sustainable” productivity of capital; but the measure of sustainability depends on the measure of depreciation of “natural capital,” and the measure of “natural capital” depends on the allocation of property rights, and on the distribution of income. The final section explores the links between distributional issues and economic incommensurability.
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.