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Selling Nature to Save It? Biodiversity and Green Developmentalism

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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). ...
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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). ...
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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. ...
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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). ...
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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. ...
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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). ...
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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.
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