Nature™ Inc? Questioning the Market Panacea in Environmental Policy and Conservation
Conference held at ISS from 30 June to 2 July 2011
Nature is dead! Long live Nature™ Inc.! This adagio inspires many environmental policies today. In order to respond to the many environmental problems the world is facing, new and innovative methods are necessary, or so it is argued, and markets are posited the ideal vehicle to supply these. Indeed, market forces have been finding their way into environmental policy and conservation to a degree that seemed unimaginable only a decade ago. Payments for ecosystem services, biodiversity derivatives and new conservation finance mechanisms, species banking, carbon trade and conservation 2.0 are just some of the market mechanisms that have taken a massive flight in popularity in recent years, despite, or perhaps because of the recent "Great Financial Crisis".
The Nature™ Inc. conference seeks to critically engage with the market panacea in environmental policy and conservation in the context of histories and recent developments in neoliberal capitalism. The conference is steeped in traditions of political economy and political ecology, in order to arrive at a deeper understanding of where environmental policies and conservation in an age of late capitalism come from, are going and what effects they have on natures and peoples. "Nature™ Inc" follows a successful recent conference in Lund, Sweden, in May 2010 and several earlier similar initiatives that have shown the topic to be of great interest to academics, policy-makers and civil society. The present conference is thus meant not only to deepen and share critical knowledge on market-based environmental policies and practices and nature-society relations more generally, but also to strengthen and widen the networks enabling this objective.
Conference papers
Note that the papers are work in progress and should not be quoted or used in any form without the permission of the author. Please contact the authors if you have specific queries.
Ashish Aggarwal - Implementation of Forest Rights Act, changing forest landscape and "politics of REDD+" in India
Yuti Ariani Fatimah - Human-Mediated World: Understanding Jatropha Development in Indonesia
Georgina Barrett - Markets of Routine Exceptionalism: Peace Parks in Southern Africa
Tor Benjaminsen, Maya Minwary, Mara Goldman and Faustin Maganga - Wildlife Management in Tanzania: Recentralization, Rent Seeking and Resistance
Patrick Bond - The Durban Climate Summit (Conference of the Parties 17): Climate justice versus market narratives
Renee van den Bremer and Bram Buscher - The Ecotourism Script: investigating the politics of sustainable community tourism in Ghana
Gareth Bryant - Displacing ecological crisis: the Clean Development Mechanism as a Spatial Fix
Lynne Chester and Stuart Rosewarne - What is the relationship between derivative markets and carbon prices?
Peter Custers - Record Emissions of Carbon Dioxide: The Bells are Ringing for Humanity
Michel Daccache, Celine Granjou and Isabelle Mauz - Compensating for Biodiversity Loss? An ethnographical approach
Ugo D'Ambrosio - Foodways transitions in Ngabe households of Costa Rica. Linking foodplants, conservationist markets and worldviews in Conte-Burica
Nicholas Dommett - Living the Israeli Dream: the Political Ecology of Place-making in the West Bank
Suraya Fazel-Ellahi - Examining processes of commodification of the South African waterscape
Carlos Ferreira - Multiple Exchanges and Multiple Nature(s): what gets traded in biodiversity offsets?
Adam Harmes - The Limits of Carbon Disclosure: Theorizing the Business Case for Investor Environmentalism
Sourish Jha - The Green India Mission (GIM): A Roadmap for Neoliberal Exploitation in Forest
Somjita Laha - Transboundary Toxic E-waste Flow: Environmental Injustice through Neo-ecological Imperialism
Toby Lovat, Nicola Clewer and Doug Elsey - Neoliberalism, Capitalist Realism and the Material Basis of Political Alternatives
Victoria Marin-Burgos - Marketing Sustainability. Are voluntary certification schemes of sustainability suited to tackle local effects rooted in incommensurability of values?
Frank Matose - Nature, villagers and the state or capital: quotidian politics from protected areas in Zimbabwe
Kathleen McAfee - Selling Nature to Finance Development? The Contradictory Logic of International Environmental-Services Markets
Joao Meirelles and Maria Jose Barney Gonzalez - Specialty of the Day: Small-scale Cattle Ranching in the Amazon is contributing to Climate Change
Kamala Muhovic-Dorsner - Kyoto Protocol Flexibility Mechanisms: Promise or Perdition for Environmental Sustainability and Equity?
Jacob Nordangard - The role of transnational companies in the formation of a European Biofuels Policy
Knut Gunnar Nustad - Conservation and Land Claims in St. Lucia, South Africa
Tracey Osborne - Interrogating the Tradeoffs: Carbon Commodification and Community Forest Governance in Chiapas, Mexico
Graeme Reniers - Imperial Governance and the Future of Forest Communities
Jean Carlo Rodriguez and Rutgerd Boelens - Revisiting the Successes of Payment for Environmental Services in the Andes: Evidences from Water Management Practice in Pimampiro, Ecuador
Andreas Scheba - Reducing Emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD): the costs and benefits of neoliberal forest-carbon conservation
Yda Schreuder - Unintended Consequences and Contrary Outcomes: Climate Change Policy in a Globalizing World
Ricardo Sequeiros Coelho - Carbon emissions commensuration as a source of social conflict
Katrina Schwartz - The devil in the details: voluntary growth management in Southwest Florida
Milagros Sosa and Margreet Zwarteveen - Negotiating and controlling water: the case of large mining industry in the Peruvian Andes
Jan Veenstra - Policy on Nature in a Nation of Regents and Merchants
Lieske Voget-Kleschin - "Landgrab" as a rebuttal of market-based environmental policy measures?
Peter Wilshusen - Capitalizing Conservation/Development: Misrecognition and the Erasure of Power
Verina Ingram - Forest-poverty-commodity Links in the Congo Basin: a Value Chain Perspective
News coverage of the conference
Interview with Bram Buscher by IPS News Agencey:Selling Nature to Save Nature, and Ourselves
Blogs in 'The Broker':
Nature™ Inc off to a good start byBram Buscher
The mean bees in the Oostvaardersplassen by Bram Buscher
Taming capitalism through constitutional action by Murat Arsel
Live interview on opening day with conference organizer Bram Buscher on Premtime (in Dutch)
Interview with Bram Buscher in Nederlands Dagblad (in Dutch)
