The Contradictory Logic of Global Ecosystem Services Markets

Abstract

Commodification and transnational trading of ecosystem services is the most ambitious iteration yet of the strategy of ‘selling nature to save it’. The World Bank and UN agencies contend that global carbon markets can slow climate change while generating resources for development. Consonant with ‘inclusionary’ versions of neoliberal development policy, advocates assert that international payment for ecosystem services (PES) projects, financed by carbon-offset sales and biodiversity banking, can benefit the poor. However, the World Bank also warns that a focus on poverty reduction can undermine efficiency in conservation spending. The experience of ten years of PES illustrates how, in practice, market-efficiency criteria clash directly with poverty-reduction priorities. Nevertheless, the premises of market-based PES are being extrapolated as a model for global REDD programmes financed by carbon-offset trading. This article argues that the contradiction between development and conservation observed in PES is inevitable in projects framed by the asocial logic of neoclassical economics. Application in international conservation policy of the market model, in which profit incentives depend upon differential opportunity costs, will entail a net upward redistribution of wealth from poorer to wealthier classes and from rural regions to distant centres of capital accumulation, mainly in the global North.

Our common future? Cross-scalar scenario analysis for social–ecological sustainability of the Guiana Shield, South America

“…The GEO4 Scenarios, for example, play out the situation between economic development and the environment, and government and the market, as policy priorities. At the core of the GEO Amazonia scenarios is the role of public policies, particularly in the realm of sustainable development and nature marketisation (McAfee, 2012;Murat Arsel and Büscher, 2012). This focus on markets and privatisation is reflected in the current emphasis on the 'green economy' for nurturing sustainability through the transfer of technology, ideas, practices, and investment.…”

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

“…We also recognize that the framing of mainstream PES as "paradigmatic of a more general neoliberal environmental governance approach writ large" (Fletcher and Büscher, 2017:227) can serve as a heuristic to situate PES, connect it to more structural dynamics, and draw attention to the inequities these initiatives might trigger (Büscher, 2012;Fairhead et al, 2012;McAfee, 2012). F & B's approach also looks beyond the material outcomes of PES by stressing that, irrespective of actual commodification or marketization processes taking place, PES could still promote more nuanced forms of neoliberalization, for example by sensitising communities and conservation practitioners to neoliberal ideals, and by side-lining social concerns.…”

Blue growth: savior or ocean grabbing?

“…This remains the case, and consequently a myriad of studies that document it as a 'sink' and attempt to put a price on that service are being produced. This push for valuation follows the reasoning behind market-based environmentalism of environmental degradation and climate crisis resulting from a market failure (McAfee 2012). The only way forward, then, is a deepening of market relations, facilitated through new and ever more numerous modes of valuation and mechanisms that ensure that the identified values of the ecosystem services are commensurable.…”

“…As a result, they will by necessity fail to target the large-scale drivers of environmental destruction, as the 'buying out' of these actors (e.g. transnational logging companies) would be too expensive (McAfee 2012). This logic is confirmed in a recent report by a range of ENGOs on how to support blue carbon projects through financial mechanisms (Herr et al 2015), where they stress that considerations around opportunity costs will dominate and be decisive in terms of which types of projects can be initiated, automatically directing investments toward projects that can be achieved at the lowest costs.…”