Framework Convention on Climate Change

Across the world, ‘green grabbing’ – the appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends – is an emerging process of deep and growing significance. The vigorous debate on ‘land grabbing’ already highlights instances where ‘green’ credentials are called upon to justify appropriations of land for food or fuel – as where large tracts of land are acquired not just for ‘more efficient farming’ or ‘food security’, but also to ‘alleviate pressure on forests’. In other cases, however, environmental green agendas are the core drivers and goals of grabs – whether linked to biodiversity conservation, biocarbon sequestration, biofuels, ecosystem services, ecotourism or ‘offsets’ related to any and all of these. In some cases these involve the wholesale alienation of land, and in others the restructuring of rules and authority in the access, use and management of resources that may have profoundly alienating effects. Green grabbing builds on well-known histories of colonial and neo-colonial resource alienation in the name of the environment – whether for parks, forest reserves or to halt assumed destructive local practices. Yet it involves novel forms of valuation, commodification and markets for pieces and aspects of nature, and an extraordinary new range of actors and alliances – as pension funds and venture capitalists, commodity traders and consultants, GIS service providers and business entrepreneurs, ecotourism companies and the military, green activists and anxious consumers among others find once-unlikely common interests. This collection draws new theorisation together with cases from African, Asian and Latin American settings, and links critical studies of nature with critical agrarian studies, to ask: To what extent and in what ways do ‘green grabs’ constitute new forms of appropriation of nature? How and when do circulations of green capital become manifest in actual appropriations on the ground – through what political and discursive dynamics? What are the implications for ecologies, landscapes and livelihoods? And who is gaining and who is losing – how are agrarian social relations, rights and authority being restructured, and in whose interests?

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Green Grabbing: a new appropriation of nature?

List of Boxes. List of Tables and Figure. Preface. Abbreviations. Introduction. 1. Capitalism and the Capitalist Type of State. 2. The Keynesian Welfare National State. 3. The Schumpeterian Competition State. 4. Social Reproduction and the Workfare State. 5. The Political Economy of State Rescaling. 6. From Mixed Economy to Metagovernance. 7. Towards Schumpeterian Workfare Postnational Regimes?. Notes. References. Index.

The Future of the Capitalist State.

Neoliberal nature and the nature of neoliberalism

https://www.uvm.edu/~jfarley/EEseminar/readings/ES%20metaphor.pdf

Ecosystem services: From eye-opening metaphor to complexity blinder

New supranational environmental institutions, including the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the ‘green’ World Bank, reflect attempts to regulate international flows of ‘natural capital’ by means of an approach I call ‘green developmentalism’. These institutions are sources of eco-development dollars and of a new ‘global’ discourse, a postneoliberal environmental-economic paradigm. By the logic of this paradigm, nature is constructed as a world currency and ecosystems arc recoded as warehouses of genetic resources for biotechnology industries. Nature would earn its own right to survive through international trade in ecosystem services and permits to pollute, access to tourism and research sites, and exports of timber, minerals, and intellectual property rights to traditional crop varieties and shamans' recipes. I contend that green developmentalism, with its promise of market solutions to environmental problems, is blunting the North-South disputes that have embroiled international environment...

Selling Nature to save It? Biodiversity and Green Developmentalism

Prominent advocates of payments for ecosystem services (PES) contend that markets in biodiversity, carbon storage, and hydrological services can produce both conservation and sustainable development. In Mexico's national PES programs, however, conceived as models of market-based management, efficiency criteria have clashed with antipoverty goals and an enduring developmental-state legacy. Like other projects for commodification of nature, Mexico's PES is a hybrid of market-like mechanisms, state regulations, and subsidies. It has been further reshaped by social movements mobilized in opposition to neoliberal restructuring. These activists see ecosystem services as coproduced by nature and campesino communities. Rejecting the position of World Bank economists, they insist that the values of ecosystems derive less from the market prices of their services than from their contributions to peasant livelihoods, biodiversity, and social benefits that cannot be quantified or sold. These divergent conceptualizatio...

/pdf/payments-for-ecosystem-services-in-mexico-nature-8k2hfsxgnx.pdf

Payments for Ecosystem Services in Mexico: Nature, Neoliberalism, Social Movements, and the State

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

The contradictory logic of global ecosystem services markets.

https://teoriaevolutiva.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/mcafee-k-_neoliberalism-on-the-molecular-scale.pdf

Neoliberalism on the molecular scale. Economic and genetic reductionism in biotechnology battles

Green economy aims to use economic rationality and market mechanisms to mute the most ecologically damaging effects of globalized capitalism while reviving economic growth in the global North, fostering development in the South, and decoupling economic growth from environmental decline. An archetypal application of green economy is transnational trade in ecosystem services, including reduced emissions for deforestation and degradation (REDD+). By compensating developing countries for maintaining forests as carbon sinks, this approach is meant to transcend politics and circumvent conflicts over the responsibilities of industrialized and ‘less-developed’ countries that have stymied global climate policy. However, carbon-offset trading is unlikely to result in lower greenhouse gas emissions, much less combined conservation and development gains. The troubled record of payment for environmental services and other schemes or commodification of nature illustrates that living ecosocial systems do not fit the requirements of market contracts. Disputes over proto-REDD+ projects point to the dangers that REDD+ will disadvantage or dispossess rural communities and distract attention from underlying causes of forest and livelihood loss. Two decades of all-but-futile climate negotiations have shown that global warming cannot be managed by means of technocratic expertise nor dealt with separately from the politics of inequality and the paradox of economic growth. The deceptive promise of greening with growth can blind us to these realities. Counter-hegemonic discourses to growth-centered green economy under the headings of buen vivir, mainly in the global South, and degrowth, mainly in the global North, therefore merit attention.

Kathleen McAfee

Papers

Selling Nature to save It? Biodiversity and Green Developmentalism

Payments for Ecosystem Services in Mexico: Nature, Neoliberalism, Social Movements, and the State

The contradictory logic of global ecosystem services markets.

Neoliberalism on the molecular scale. Economic and genetic reductionism in biotechnology battles

Green economy and carbon markets for conservation and development: a critical view