Contesting the market-based nature of Mexico’s national payments for ecosystem services programs: Four sites of articulation and hybridization

Silencing Agency in Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) by Essentializing a Neoliberal ‘Monster’ Into Being: A Response to Fletcher & Büscher's ‘PES Conceit’

“…An overly-simplistic understanding of neoliberalism, they say, has led to redirected and unhelpful attention to the variegated and seemingly non-neoliberal processes and outcomes of PES implementation in specific places (e.g. McAfee and Shapiro, 2010;McElwee, 2012;Shapiro-Garza, 2013a;Van Hecken et al, 2015a,b), while minimizing or neglecting the consequences of an "overarching effort to advance a more general programme of neoliberal environmental governance" (p.228). According to F & B, conceptualizing PES in more explicitly defined neoliberal terms would look beyond modes of implementation and outcomes, and refocus the discussion on how PES should "be considered an important element of a global program to spread neoliberalism as a particular rationality and mode of capital accumulation" (p.224).…”

Embedding Carbon Markets: Complicating Commodification of Ecosystem Services in Mexico's Forests

“…The National Forestry Commission (CONAFOR) administers a national-level PES program, which included a forest-based carbon offset component from 2004 to 2010 that provided significant financial and technical support to participating rural communities (Shapiro-Garza 2013b). The spread of carbon forestry in Mexico has more recently been driven by Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDDC) discourse and policies, with eleven pilot REDDC projects underway and more than thirty REDD readiness initiatives (REDD Desk 2016).…”

“…The impetus for and impacts of forest-based carbon offsetting in Mexico, and of PES more generally, must therefore be understood in the broader political and historical context of rural communities impacted by neoliberal reforms and with varying levels of experience with the concept and practice of PES (Osborne 2011;Shapiro-Garza 2013a).…”

“…Neoliberalism has been described as a hybrid project based on the myth of the self-regulating market in which everything, including nature, becomes commodified (Peck and Tickell 2002;Larner 2003;McCarthy and Prudham 2004). Scholars of the commodification of carbon have addressed a range of issues associated with neoliberal natures, including the role of the state (McAfee and Shapiro 2010;McElwee 2012;Shapiro-Garza 2013b), materiality and problems of measurement and calculation (Robertson 2006;Lansing 2010), questions of access and land control (Corbera and Brown 2010;Osborne 2011;Lansing 2014), and equity broadly defined in the form of sustainable development and livelihood outcomes (Brown and Corbera 2003;Milne 2012;Osborne 2015). Although supporters claim that carbon offsetting programs generate a "development dividend" for local communities (Forsyth 2007), carbon forestry has largely failed to deliver promised local livelihood benefits.…”

“…Through these cases, we explore the ways in which local agrarian contexts have intersected with the differing structures and orientations of sources of carbon finance to in turn produce varying degrees of carbon commodification and the embedding of carbon markets, the processes through which these intersections occurred and the local outcomes. The two case studies were developed through multiple research projects and long-term engagement by the researchers (2005-present) with the organizations and communities involved (McAfee and Shapiro 2010;Osborne 2011Osborne , 2013Osborne , 2015Shapiro-Garza 2013a, 2013bSims et al 2014; Shapiro-Garza and Sandford forthcoming). Through these cases, we investigate the role of local institutions and governance and of social and cultural values as key factors of embeddeddness.…”