Neoliberal policy refugia: The death and life of biodiversity offsetting in the European Union and its member states

Abstract

The past decade has been a dynamic one for biodiversity offsetting policy. Efforts to incorporate offsetting into the Convention on Biological Diversity as a compliance mechanism did not succeed. The expansion of offsetting outside of the Natura 2000 network in the European Union (EU), which looked all but inevitable in the early 2010s, was withdrawn in the face of unexpectedly strong opposition from environmental groups and the business sector. Highly publicised offsetting programmes in some EU countries have had mixed outcomes, and many observers describe offsetting as a failed policy. And yet four years of interviews and policy analysis in Brussels, Spain, and England suggest that reports of offsetting's death may be exaggerated. While the possibility of an overarching EU Directive aimed at harmonising offsetting policy and practice across the region's countries seems unlikely, in Spain, offsetting has returned to the national policy arena via adoption as an implementation tool within the national Green Infrastructure Strategy. Offsetting in England persists in a handful of counties as a locally situated development strategy, and seems to have returned at the national level despite its spectacular flame-out in 2014. This is not, after all, a high-profile failure of neoliberal environmental policy. Rather, we see offsetting's persistence as a result of policy refugia: the retreat to small but amenable jurisdictions where offsetting policies can wait out inclement policy conditions and then emerge to recolonise the policy landscape when conditions improve.

Biodiversity Offsetting: Ethical Views within Environmental Organisations in the European Union

“…Compared to the image that is commonly given both in the debate and in the literature [33,44,45], namely that environmental organizations are largely critical to biodiversity offsetting in general and commodification of nature values in particular, the respondents were comparatively positive when it came to actually using the instrument. The general ethical view can be summarized as a non-anthropocentric consequentialism, coupled with a criticism primarily focused on the challenges to achieve in practice what biodiversity offsetting is aiming for in theory and policy [6,11,12,46].…”

Considering the role of negotiated developer contributions in financing ecological mitigation and protection programs in England: A cultural perspective

“…There was a series of difficulties in its operation including a lack of ecological expertise within LPAs, an immature offsetting market and the challenges of integrating the tool into existing planning process in a 2-year timescale, although stakeholders believed the tool was successful in accounting for the impacts of development on habitats. Despite this potential, there were major concerns within the Government that the costs imposed by offsetting would slow housing delivery, a key political priority (Corbera et al, 2021;Baker et al, 2014).…”

“…Despite this, and to the surprise of many observers (Corbera et al, 2021), the policy was revived with a requirement for all major development to result in a 10% net increase in biodiversity units, calculated through habitat type, size and quality (see DEFRA, 2020 for details). Forthcoming legislation (DEFRA, 2020) will mandate its use, though a number of LPAs have already implemented biodiversity offsetting policies, as part of their non-statutory local planning frameworks (Corbera et al, 2021).…”

“…Despite this, and to the surprise of many observers (Corbera et al, 2021), the policy was revived with a requirement for all major development to result in a 10% net increase in biodiversity units, calculated through habitat type, size and quality (see DEFRA, 2020 for details). Forthcoming legislation (DEFRA, 2020) will mandate its use, though a number of LPAs have already implemented biodiversity offsetting policies, as part of their non-statutory local planning frameworks (Corbera et al, 2021). However, as raised by Baker et al (2018), given the limited value which can be extracted through LVC, this approach introduces trade-offs between biodiversity offsetting funds, and other priorities traditionally delivered through DCs, a theme which this paper focuses upon.…”