Developing an offsetting programme: tensions, dilemmas and difficulties in biodiversity market-making in England

Abstract

SUMMARYIn 2011, the UK government set in motion a process to establish a formal biodiversity offsetting programme in England, as an attempt to tackle biodiversity loss as a result of development. Drawing on critical approaches to the commodification of nature, this article traces the dilemmas encountered by the UK government in its endeavours to roll out a biodiversity offsetting programme in the English planning system. Based on 34 in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, documentary analysis and participant observation at policy-focused events, the paper aims to show how the promise of reconciling development and conservation proved difficult to deliver. In government attempts to enrol sympathetic actors, disputes emerged over the purpose and fine detail of the proposals. Deeper tensions were revealed in clashes between governmental emphasis on deregulation and advocates’ calls for strong mandatory rules and well-resourced oversight, while efforts to balance complex ecology with market demands for simplicity and certainty undermined the promise of objective biodiversity metrics delivering uncontroversial hard numbers. Though the English case is in many ways context-specific, the problems experienced raise wider political questions around establishing meaningful offsetting schemes in any part of the world.

Urban Political Ecology Beyond Methodological Cityism

“…This is an inherently relational understanding of the city, which contrasts with the fixed view of the city that is imagined in the critiques of methodological cityism. As Lockhart (2015) reminds us, this understanding of cities originates in Marx and Engels' initial conceptualization of the dialectic between town This is also powerfully demonstrated in Mike Davis's work on Los Angeles (Davis, 1998) and Las Vegas (Davis, 2002), which has been highly influential in urban political ecology. Thanks to an IJURR reviewer for highlighting this point.…”

“…This is an inherently relational understanding of the city, which contrasts with the fixed view of the city that is imagined in the critiques of methodological cityism. As Lockhart () reminds us, this understanding of cities originates in Marx and Engels’ initial conceptualization of the dialectic between town and country and by extension, the nature–society dialectic. Yet, Swyngedouw's work has been equally influenced by poststructural metaphors and heuristic devices such as Haraway's ‘cyborgs’ (Haraway, ) and Latour's ‘quasi‐objects’ (Latour, )—terms that are now commonplace in the literature on urban political ecology, and in the social‐sciences more broadly.…”

Theorizing command-and-commodify regulation: the case of species conservation banking in the United States

“…Flagship examples of these institutions, however, like the EU Emissions Trading Scheme and, more recently, the California Cap and Trade program, have struggled when prices for carbon credits collapsed in the face of oversupply, and have also faced problems with perverse incentives, cheating, and non-compliance (Ellerman and Buchner 2007;Meckling 2011). Outside of climate, so-called biodiversity offsetting schemes in the United Kingdom have so far failed to develop beyond pilot programs because of resistance from both the political right and the left (Lockhart 2015). My own data makes clear that species conservation banking in the United States was itself initially viewed with skepticism by many environmental groups and environmental regulators.…”

The rise and fall of biodiversity offsetting in the Lodge Hill large-scale housing development, South East England

“…It is rather a constellation of factors in all their historical and geographical variegation, including the UK housing crisis, the increasingly contested discourse of 'hyper-regeneration 23 ', the London 2012 summer Olympics, the Thames Gateway, the ecological, social and cultural importance of nightingales, as well as the chronic dissatisfaction of local inhabitants with the ecological and social impacts of neoliberal urbanization that the wider area was suffering due to its links to the Thames Gateway, along with an archipelago of often invisible actors, that have been (and still are) at play. It is also the above constellation of factors that can explain why Lodge Hill not only has not been the success story that the UK government was aiming for, but it became a case of a successfully 'contested neoliberalism' (Leitner et al, 2007), contributing at that time to the decreasing popularity of biodiversity offsetting in the UK (Lockhart, 2015).…”

“…The environmental controversy over the new housing development eventually centred on the use of biodiversity offsetting for providing the necessary compensation for the loss of nightingale habitat. Biodiversity offsetting had been introduced in the UK in 2013 (Defra, 2013) and was seen by the government as a policy that had the potential to reconcile nature conservation and economic development (Apostolopoulou andAdams, 2017, 2019;Hannis and Sullivan, 2012;Lockhart, 2015).…”