Arrested development? The promises and paradoxes of "selling nature to save it"

Abstract

arrested development? the promises and paradoxes of “selling nature to save it” jessica dempsey* and daniel chiu suarezy *department of geography, university of british columbia ydepartment of environmental science, policy, & management, university of california, berkeley mainstream environmentalism and critical scholarship are abuzz with the promise and perils (respectively) of what we call for-profit biodiversity conservation: attempts to make conserving biodiverse ecosystems profitable to large-scale investment. but to what extent has private capital been harnessed and market forces been enrolled in a thoroughly remade conservation? in this article we examine the size, scope, and character of international for-profit biodiversity conservation. despite exploding rhetoric around environmental markets over the last two decades, the capital flowing into market-based conservation remains small, illiquid, and geographically constrained and typically seeks little to no profit. this marginal character of for-profit conservation suggests that this project continues to underperform as a site of accumulation and as a conservation financing strategy. such evidence is at odds with the way this sector is commonly portrayed in mainstream environmental conservation literature but also with some critical geographical scholarship. we present a more puzzling situation: although for-profit conservation has long been promoted as a logical, easy fix to ecological degradation, it remains negligible to …

Source: pdf_first_chars