Abstract:

     A new generation of international conservation programs is designed to address weaknesses of protected-areas plans that ignored local resource users and their roles in reshaping and maintaining ecosystems. The earlier preservationist paradigm privileged the authority of conservation biology, an epistemic community constructed largely for this purpose. This was supplemented in the 1990s by another discourse, environmental economics, to estimate the “global” values of landscapes, species, and genes and thus justify their conservation.

     Many current-generation projects are framed by new discursive practices that attempt to reward local “stakeholders” for environmentally benign behavior and cooperation in the re-regulation of landscapes targeted for “sustainable use”. Examples include payment for environmental services (PES) schemes to compensate communities for maintaining wildlife habitats and watershed functions, and formulae for “genetic-resources benefit sharing”, such as the guidelines recently adopted by the Convention on Biological Diversity.

     These newer versions of the strategy of “selling nature to save it” recognize livelihood needs and certain local resource-rights claims, largely in response to resistances by local actors. However, like their predecessors, these discourses and conservation practices reproduce structural inequalities by construing local needs and rights within a framework of “globally” commensurable market values, property rights, and “externalities”. These methods for measuring and managing biodiversity obscure the power asymmetries that cause markets in nature to redistribute environmental assets upward. Nevertheless, dynamics of local mobilization and transnational networking, along with the widened recognition of environmental justice concerns, are creating spaces for renegotiation, in which much depends upon how countries and communities conceptualize their own development goals.

Keywords: biodiversity, protected areas, development, genetic resources, ecosystem services, biotechnology, environmental economics

Paper for the Association of American Geographers, Philadelphia, March 17, 2004